Droughts developing more rapidly says global study
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | April 16, 2023
For the first time a new study has confirmed droughts across the world are developing more rapidly as a result of climate change.
The international study identifies flash droughts – which intensify in a matter of weeks – have become more frequent since the late 1950s over 74% of the world’s 33 global regions, especially those over North and East Asia, the Sahara and Europe.
The Met Office’s Dr Peili Wu is one of the paper’s authors. He said: “The transition to more flash droughts is being driven by a combination of rainfall deficit along with amplified rates of soil moisture loss.”
The paper highlights that the transition from slower-onset droughts to flash droughts is projected to expand to most land areas. This transition will become most pronounced with higher rates of global greenhouse emissions.
Obviously, a drought begins with a period with a relative absence of rain or snow. However, increased temperatures and sometimes stronger winds can rapidly amplify the loss of moisture in the soil, exacerbating the speed of the drought’s onset and impacts. This rapidity can lead to the creation of a flash drought. Droughts in their many forms can last for different time periods, from weeks to decades.
This has all the trappings of a study written purposely to “prove” a preconceived agenda.
It is of course predicated on a half degree rise in temperatures, the sort of difference between temperatures in Sheffield and Birmingham. Does Birmingham have flash droughts and Sheffield none? Silly question really.
As Dr Wu admits, “flash droughts” do not actually exist, he himself had to invent the term a few years ago, no doubt to pin them on global warming.
The level of moisture in soils is governed by all sorts of factors, but particularly agricultural practices. To attempt to tease out a climate influence is to all intents and purposes impossible, as it would be undetectable.
But there are other serious issues about this study. The first is that global warming has made the world wetter on the whole.
The second is that extra CO2 in the atmosphere has helped to green the planet. In particular, higher concentrations of CO2 mean that plants lose less water to the air. In other words, transpiration is reduced.
Thirdly global cooling in the 1960s, 70s and 80s led directly to massively severe droughts across a wide swathe of the world, from the Sahel across to India and China. The cause was the expansion of the polar air mass which pushed the rainbelts towards the tropics.
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000074891
Global warming does not lead to more severe droughts, whether flash or not – global cooling does.
Indeed, the world during the ice age was a very dry one, as cold air can hold less moisture. And it is dry air which sucks the moisture out of the ground like a sponge. That is why cold deserts like the Gobi are every bit as dry as the Sahara.
There is very little global data with which to analyse droughts, but there is plenty in the US.
And NOAA’s data is quite explicit. Droughts are now much less severe than they were in the past.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/national/time-series/110/pdsi/all/3/1895-2023
I am quite sure that Dr Wu and his colleagues are perfectly aware of all of this. That is why they have invented flash droughts, which with some dodgy computer modelling has enabled them to claim something which does not exist.
The Indoctrinators, Part 3: Bill Gates
This is the third in our series about four well-known men whose purposeful social engineering over the years has undermined national democracies and economies, and created fertile ground for the final realisation of their post democracy dream of a global socialist/fascist world, controlled by supranational organisations such as the United Nations (UN), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and of course, themselves. They are George Soros (you can read Tuesday’s article here), Klaus Schwab (yesterday’s article is here), Bill Gates (today) and David Attenborough.
By Karen Harradine | TCW Defending Freedom | April 13, 2023
BILL Gates has a messiah complex. His obsession with ‘climate change’, vaccines and people control is proving dangerous for the world. Only a few weeks ago he gave voice to his latest megalomaniac plan for a global pandemic prison state. And as the past proves, what Gates wants he usually gets.
Together with his fellow Indoctrinators, George Soros and Klaus Schwab, 67-year-old Gates has not missed the opportunity provided by the Covid-19 crisis (which he helped to engineer) to further his revolutionist ‘global development’ green agenda. Following their precedent, he too created a foundation through which to impose his ghastly visions on an unfortunate world.
Since its inception in 2000, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), under its philanthropic guise, has found plenty of useful idiots across world governments willing to fund and support it. Successive witless British Prime Ministers, up to and including Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, have fallen under his spell with Gates hugely benefiting from this priceless endorsement and publicity. Given his malign agenda, Western taxpayers have literally been paying for their own demise.
Gates is an enthusiastic partner of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and attendee at their gatherings in Davos, which he typically uses to announce his latest plans to drain the West of its resources to fund his vaccine and climate change lunacy. In 1999, he formed the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), which he cleverly partnered with the United Nations (UN), BMGF, foreign aid agencies and pharmaceutical companies. It was to become, together with the BMGF, the second biggest source of funding to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
More than 80 per cent of the WHO’s budget comes from voluntary contributions by member states and donors. In 2021, the BMGF was the second largest contributor with $375million, and GAVI the fourth with $245million. Both have a long history of influencing the WHO (the BMGF’s first donation was in1998). Uniquely the BMGF became its official partner in 2017, further focusing the WHO’s public health priorities on to vaccines. An enabler of and publicist for the toxic Covid-19 vaccine, his close connection with the WHO has reaped him huge profits.
The WHO’s deeply disturbing proposed Pandemic Treaty effectively puts into action Gates’s planned grasp for global control as he detailed in his 2022 book, ‘How to Prevent the Next Pandemic’. It has been long in the planning.
In 2003, on a Davos panel called ‘Science for the Global Good’, Gates announced his foundation’s gift of $200million to the US National Institutes of Health to set up the Grand Challenges in Global Health, a vehicle for shifting US tax money into the developing world in pursuit of Gates’s own interests.
In 2010, Gates and his wife heralded a ‘decade of vaccines’ at Davos, pledging $10billion to fund vaccines in ‘poor countries’, a vaccine zealotry which has had some appalling outcomes for which Gates has expressed no remorse. In one example, nearly half a million children in India were paralysed after taking BMGF-funded polio vaccine. Despite such appalling consequences, Gates, with an honorary knighthood in the bag from the Queen, is still widely regarded as a benign philanthropist. There’s no doubt that money buys reputation.
Like Soros, Gates has a prominent platform on the WEF website to promote green investments worth billions of dollars. A devotee of the UN’s Agenda 2030, Gates is co-chair of the Global Commission on Adaptation.
Today, thanks to our unprincipled politicians, Gates has a hotline to Downing Street and Britain finds itself in the clutches of a megalomaniac. His tentacles reach far and wide, from shaping energy policies and dominating scientific organisations and academic research, to financing the mainstream media.
In 1997, Tony Blair invited him into Downing Street to sell his flawed computer system, going on to host him several times, implementing policies based on his dictates and in his financial interests. It was an association Blair was to prosper from, later getting $3.2million for his Global Africa initiative and more than $25.2million for his Institute of Global Change.
In 2010, Gates and his wife visited the Department for International Development (DFID) to hector ministers on supporting foreign aid while promoting his Living Proof project, funded also by Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Billionaires persuading politicians to plunder public resources to fund their own megalomaniac ambitions is not just deeply distasteful but wrong. Yet between 2011 and 2019, Gates got DFID to give over £60million for BMGF development projects.
In 2016, George Osborne pledged £2.5billion to another BMGF association, the Ross Fund. Three years later, the BMGF and World Bank ‘partnered’ with DFID to shovel more taxpayers’ money to foreign despots in the name of ‘education systems’.
In November 2020, after Johnson played his part in the hysteria over Covid-19, Gates met him and pharmaceutical companies and plotted how to prevent ‘pandemics’. Johnson then gave £800million to the BMGF’s vaccine initiative, COVAX.
A year later, Johnson reunited with Gates and promised a further £400million to fund his green investments.
In Sunak Gates has a willing apprentice. In February, the pair met to discuss wasting more money on Gates’s terrifying ‘climate change’ goals.
The BMGF and its subsidiaries like the Global Fund, which promotes the ominous sounding ‘health security’, has, since its inception in 2002, managed to extract an astonishing £4.5billion from the UK government, with another £1billion earmarked for the next two years. When did British taxpayers vote for that?
Millions today in this country can no longer afford both food and energy costs, they are medically neglected and live in substandard housing. Questions must be asked why politicians are funding this Indoctrinator to dictate policies that are provenly detrimental to British citizens and are only to the benefit of one man. The multi- billionaire land owner, Bill Gates. If a vampire is invited into a home, best be prepared for a bloodbath.
The last in this series will focus on green evangelist Sir David Attenborough.
Doubled Pregnancy Loss Rate, Raised Foetal Abnormality Rate and Concentration of Lipid Nanoparticles in Ovaries – How Could They Call This Vaccine ‘Safe’?
BY ALEX KRIEL AND DR DAVID BELL | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | APRIL 14, 2023
The mRNA vaccines were released globally in early 2021 with the slogan ‘safe and effective’. Unusually for a new class of medicine, they were soon recommended by public health authorities for pregnant women. By late 2021, working age women, including those who were pregnant, were being thrown out of employment for not agreeing to be injected. Those who took the mRNA vaccines did so based on trust in health authorities – the assumption being that they would not have been approved if the evidence was not absolutely clear. The role of regulatory agencies was to protect the public and, therefore, if they were approved, the drugs were safe.
Recently, a lengthy vaccine evaluation report sponsored by Pfizer and submitted to the Australian regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) dated January 2021 was released under a Freedom of Information request. The report contains significant new information that had been supressed by the TGA and by Pfizer itself. Much of this relates directly to the issues of safety in pregnancy and impacts on the fertility of women of child-bearing age. The whole report is important, but four key data points stand out:
- The rapid decline in antibody and T cells in monkeys following a second dose;
- Biodistribution studies (previously released in 2021 through an FOI request in Japan);
- Data on the impact of fertility outcomes for rats;
- Data on foetal abnormalities in rats.
We focus on the last three items as, for the first point, it is enough to quote the report itself: “Antibodies and T cells in monkeys declined quickly over five weeks after the second dose of [Pfizer Covid vaccine] BNT162b2 (V9), raising concerns over long term immunity.” This point indicates that the regulators should have anticipated the rapid decline in efficacy and must have known at the outset that the initial two dose course was unlikely to confer lasting immunity and would, therefore, require multiple repeat doses. This expectation of failure was recently highlighted by Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director at the U.S. NIH.
The three remaining items should be a major cause for concern with the pharmaceutical regulatory system. The first, as revealed in 2021, involved biodistribution studies of the lipid nanoparticle carrier in rats, using a luciferase enzyme to substitute for the mRNA vaccine. The study demonstrated that the vaccine will travel throughout the body after injection and is found not only at the injection site but in all organs tested, with high concentration in the ovaries, liver, adrenal glands and spleen. Authorities who assured vaccinated people in early 2021 that the vaccine stays in the arm were, as we have known for two years, not being honest.
Lipid concentration per gram, recalculated as percentage of injection site.
In terms of the impact on fertility and foetal abnormalities, the report includes a study of 44 rats and describes two main metrics, the pre-implantation loss rate and the number of abnormalities per foetus (also expressed per litter). In both cases the metrics were significantly higher for vaccinated rats than for unvaccinated rats.
Roughly speaking, the pre-implantation loss ratio compares the estimated number of fertilised ova and the ova implanted in the uterus. The table below is taken from the report itself and clearly shows the loss rate for vaccinated (BNT162b2) is more than double the unvaccinated control group.
In a case control study, a doubling of pregnancy loss in the intervention group would represent a serious safety signal. Rather than take this seriously, the authors of the report then compared the outcomes to historical data on other rat populations – 27 studies of 568 rats – and ignored the outcome because other populations had recorded higher overall losses. This range is shown in the right hand column as 2.6% to 13.8%. This analysis is alarming as remaining below the highest previously recorded pregnancy loss levels in populations elsewhere is not a safe outcome when the intervention is also associated with double the harm of the control group.
A similar pattern is observed for foetal malformations with higher abnormality rate in each of the 12 categories studied. Of the 11 categories where Pfizer confirmed the data are correct, there are only two total abnormalities in the control group, versus 28 with the mRNA vaccine (BNT162b2). In the category which Pfizer labelled as unreliable (supernumerary lumbar ribs), there were three abnormalities in the control group and 12 in the vaccinated group.
As with the increased pregnancy losses, Pfizer simply ignored the trend and compared the results with historical data from other rat populations. This is very significant as it is seen across every malformation category. The case control nature of the study design is again ignored, in order to apparently hide the negative outcomes demonstrated.
These data indicate that there is no basis for saying the vaccine is safe in pregnancy. Concentration of lipid nanoparticles in ovaries, a doubled pregnancy loss rate and raised foetal abnormality rate across all measured categories indicates that designating a safe-in-pregnancy label (B1 category in Australia) was contrary to available evidence. The data imply that not only was the Government’s ‘safe and effective’ sloganeering not accurate, it was totally misleading with respect to the safety data available.
Despite the negative nature of these outcomes, the classification of this medicine as a ‘vaccine’ appears to have precluded further animal trials. Historically, new medicines, especially in classes never used in humans before, would require a very rigorous assessment. Vaccines, however, have a lower burden of proof requirement than ordinary medicines. By classifying mRNA injections as ‘vaccines’, this ensured regulatory approval with significantly less stringent safety requirements, as the TGA itself notes. In fact, these mRNA gene therapy products (to use the proper term) function more like medicines than vaccines in that they modify the internal functioning of cells, rather than stimulating an immune response to presence of an antigen. Labelling these gene therapy products as ‘vaccines’ means that, as far as we are aware, even today no genotoxicity or carcinogenicity studies have been carried out.
This report, which was only released after a FOI request, is extremely disturbing as it shows that authorities knew of major risks with mRNA COVID-19 vaccination while simultaneously assuring populations that it was safe. The fact that mainstream media have (as far as we are aware) completely ignored the newly released data should reinforce the need for caution when listening to the advice of public health messaging regarding COVID-19 vaccination.
Firstly, it is clear that regulators, drug companies and the Government would have known that vaccine induced immunity tails off very rapidly, with this being subsequently observed in real world data with efficacy against infection falling to zero. Accordingly, the single point in time figures of 95% and 62% efficacy against symptomatic PCR-positive infection quoted for Pfizer and AstraZeneca respectively meant almost nothing since a rapid decline was to be expected. Similarly, the concept of a two dose course was inaccurate as endless boosters would likely have been required given the rapid decline in antibodies and T-cells observed in the monkeys.
Most importantly, the data do not in any way support the ‘safe’ conclusion with respect to pregnancy; ‘dangerous’ would be much more accurate. The assurances of safety were, therefore, completely misleading given the data disclosures in the recent freedom of information release. Regulatory authorities knew that animal studies showed major red flags regarding both pregnancy loss and foetal abnormalities, consistent with the systemic distribution of the mRNA they had been hiding from the public. Even in March 2023, it is impossible to give these assurances, given the fact that important studies have not, to the best of our knowledge, been done. Pfizer elected not to follow up the vast majority of pregnancies in the original human trials, despite high miscarriage rates in the minority they did follow. Given all of the problems with efficacy and safety, the administration of these products to women of childbearing age and administration to healthy pregnant women is high risk and not justified.
Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial Covid model; he is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about Government overreach. David Bell is a public health physician with a PhD in population health and formerly worked as a scientific and medical officer at the World Health Organisation.
Fear of a Microbial Planet
BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | APRIL 13, 2023
Fear of a Microbial Planet, by Dr. Steve Templeton, is a wonderfully accessible book on the Covid era now published by Brownstone institute, offers desperately needed clarity and science on the organization and management of individual social life in the presence of pathogenic infection. It can be read as a definitive answer to expert arrogance, political overreach, and population panic.
For three years following the arrival of the virus that causes Covid, the dominant response from governments and the public has been to be afraid and stay far away through any means possible. This has further mutated into a population-wide germophobia that is actually being promoted by elite opinion.
Steve Templeton, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute and Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine – Terre Haute, argues that this response is primitive, unscientific, and ultimately contrary to individual and public health. The most unhealthy populations are those which preserve immunological naivete in the presence of a virus that is otherwise going to circulate widely.
Dr. Templeton’s story is both scientific and highly personal, taking the reader through the basics of immune response and public health even while relaying his personal frustrations with trying to talk sense to others in senseless times.
If a public health response is like an immune response, then consider this book as immunization against germophobia, politicized science, a self-defeating safety culture, and misplaced faith in experts. Dr. Templeton is our guide to helping us gain a new and more robust understanding of the relationship between the microbial kingdom and our own lives.
The pandemic forecasts in the United States were very grim. Experts were predicting that 60-70 percent of the population would ultimately be infected resulting in over 1.5 million deaths in just a few months. People on social media were in an absolute panic. Stories about empty shelves and runs on toilet paper were everywhere. Those who tried to refute these doomsday predictions were shouted down and eventually silenced.
And yet, the science on the virus was very clear. Disease severity was age-stratified. Extreme measures would not drive it away and would cause a tremendous amount of collateral damage. Even if the worse-case scenarios were true, it was extremely important that we take measures based on evidence.
But eventually, the cry to “do something” became overwhelming, and the costs no longer mattered. Trying to calm people with wisdom about infectious disease became nearly pointless. Germophobia swept through society and political culture.
Hardly anyone wanted to hear the truth that microbes are everywhere, and they cannot be avoided. There are an estimated 6×10^30 bacterial cells on Earth at any given time. By any standard, this is a huge amount of biomass, second only to plants, and exceeding that of all animals by more than 30-fold.
To live at peace with the microbial kingdom requires trained immune systems, as George Carlin said years ago. That means exposure and the protection of normal social functioning even under pandemic conditions with a new virus.
Many books have been and will be written about pandemic response mistakes, and that’s a good thing. There can’t possibly be enough reflection on what went wrong, otherwise we will be doomed to follow the same path, or an even worse one, next time. This book argues that the safety-at-all-costs culture will continue to result in counterproductive policies until it is challenged at its root.
How did people in our communities and around the world get to the point of hysteria over a pandemic with a clear age-stratified and comorbidity-amplified mortality? Why were young and healthy people with very little risk for disease and death treated as if they were a grave danger to others?
It was always pointless to try to stop much less eradicate this virus. We’ve evolved with pathogens and need to learn to live with them without imposing mass psychological, social, economic, and public-health damage.
Everyone who panicked to the point of meltdown needs this book as a corrective. And even if you did not, everyone knows someone who did, public-health officials above all else.
Biden Administration is sued, accused of pressuring Twitter to censor journalist Alex Berenson
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | April 13, 2023
Independent journalist Alex Berenson has filed a lawsuit against President Joe Biden, a Pfizer board member, and others for pressuring Twitter to ban his account.
His account was banned after posting a tweet questioning COVID-19 vaccines.
Initially, Twitter resisted the calls to ban Berenson. However, eventually the social media platform caved to the pressure.
Berenson sued Twitter in a federal court in California, accusing the company of violating its contract with him. The lawsuit resulted in a settlement and Twitter admitting it should not have banned him.
The defendants in the new lawsuit, filed on April 12, are President Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former White House COVID-19 official Dr. Andrew Slavitt, Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, and the White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty.
In a meeting with Twitter, Slavitt and other White House officials asked why Berenson had not been “kicked off” Twitter. Slavitt has previously called Berenson a conspiracy theorist.
Flaherty recently said that he remembered Slavitt “expressing his view that Twitter was not enforcing its content guidelines with respect to Alex Berenson’s tweets, and that employees from Twitter disagreed with that view.”
Gottlieb also asked Twitter to suspend Berenson. He has also previously called for the suspension of other people, including former acting FDA commissioner Dr. Brett Girior.
In the offending tweet, Berenson wrote, “It doesn’t stop infection. Or Transmission. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.”
According to his lawsuit, the defendants violated his First Amendment rights.
We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.
“The government Defendants specifically targeted Mr. Berenson’s constitutionally protected speech and journalism,” the suit states.
“Members of [the Biden] administration engaged in a nearly unprecedented conspiracy to suppress Mr. Berenson’s First Amendment rights.
“Through 2021, they—and a senior board member at Pfizer, Inc. which has made more than $70 billion selling COVID-19 vaccines—worked together to pressure Twitter to suspend Mr. Berenson’s account and mute his voice as a leading COVID-19 vaccine skeptic. The White House and the Biden Administration did this at the same time government officials promoted their views on the necessity of COVID19 vaccination on Twitter, effectively blocking Mr. Berenson from commenting on their own statements or making his own.”
It adds that the permanent suspension “harmed both Mr. Berenson and a clearly identifiable class of nearly 100 million Americans whose interests he helped represent—Americans who either had questions about the vaccine or did not want to be forced to take a shot that they feared had been rushed through development and lost its ability to prevent COVID-19 infections within months.”
The suit is asking the court to stop the government from targeting the journalist and to award him damages.
Bad Pfizer Vaccine Batches Account for 4.2% of doses but 71% of Serious Adverse Events
Explains Why Some Have Severe Side Effects and Others Do Not
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | April 13, 2023
I am routinely asked: why are so many people who took the COVID-19 vaccines apparently fine while others are suffering heart damage, strokes, blood clots and are ending up disabled or dead? It has been suspected for many months that there may be variations in vaccine lots or batches that could partially explain these observations. In other words, not everyone is getting the same dose of mRNA.
Under Emergency Use Authorization, the vaccine companies and their subcontractors do not have any inspections of the final filled and finished vials. This is unprecedented for a widely used product of any type. It is possible that lipid nanoparticles aggregate in suspension and so some batches may contain more mRNA than others. Likewise, since lot size has varied over time, it is possible that contaminants from the manufacturing process may be concentrated in some smaller lots compared to larger ones. Finally, there may be product transport, storage, and use factors that denature mRNA including heating, air injected into vials, and multiple needles dipped into the suspension.
The contaminant issue came to light as Japan returned millions of doses when visible debris was seen in the bottom of the vials. Additionally, since metallic beads are used by the biodefense contactors, it is possible that smaller initial lots could have had magnetic debris that explained “magnetism” in the arm where the shot was given as reported early in the vaccine campaign.
A report from Schmeling and coworkers using Pfizer BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine found that 71% of serious adverse events came from 4.2% of doses (high risk batches) conversely <1% of these events came from 32.1% of doses (low risk batches). The variation explained for the high and moderate risk batches was 78 and 89%, respectively. Thus as more doses were given out of those vials, the greater the number of side effects were reported. This means that the majority of risk is in the shot and not the person who received it.
Schmeling, M, Manniche, V, Hansen, PR. Batch-dependent safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. Eur J Clin Invest. 2023; 00:e13998. doi:10.1111/eci.13998
These are critically important results. They imply the COVID-19 vaccine debacle is indeed a product problem and not due to patient susceptibility in most circumstances. Additionally, the lack of inspections has led to a safety disaster. Some unfortunate patients are getting too much mRNA, contaminants, or both and thus are exposed to damaging and in some cases, lethal injections.
Reuters Aug 2021, Japan suspends 1.6 mln doses of Moderna shot after contamination reports
FDA Commissioner says regulation is needed to target “misinformation” which harms life expectancy
Speech regulation
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | April 12, 2023
In an interview with CNBC, FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said that online misinformation was harming the life expectancy of people, there is a need for “better regulation” on how to handle health misinformation and that “specific authorities at FDA, FTC, and other areas are going to be needed.”
“We know more and more about misinformation. It relates back to this life expectancy,” Califf said. Why aren’t we using knowledge of diet? It’s not that people don’t know about it. Why aren’t we using medical products as effectively and efficiently as our peer countries? A lot of it has to do with choices that people make because of the things that influence their thinking. The COVID vaccines and the antivirals give us an easy way to talk about it, but this is not limited to those areas. In heart disease, so many people don’t take their medicines, even though they’re now generic and very low-cost, often [they’re] deluded into taking things that are sold over the Internet that aren’t effective.”
According to the FDA commissioner, one of the solutions is telling the “truth is a louder volume.”
“In the good old days, when I was a practicing cardiologist, for the most part, people developed products, they got through the FDA, the label determined what was talked about, the Internet didn’t exist, you advertised in medical meetings and journals. There was sort of a hierarchy of information that went through the prescriber or the implanter in the case of devices to the patient. Of course, the problem in that system is it left a lot of people out. We now know about that. Now, everyone’s included because everyone’s connected to the Internet. But we can put out a statement about what we’ve determined based on the highest level of evidence, within ten minutes, someone who’s thought ten minutes about it can reach a billion people. And there’s nothing that restricts them from telling things that are not true. This has always existed. … But they couldn’t reach so many people,” he explained.
He added that there isn’t enough regulation on health information and that is “impacting our health in very detrimental ways.” As such, he thinks “there is a real need for better regulation of how to deal with this complex information.”
Califf noted that the FDA already has regulatory authority over advertisements content on tech platforms. But he feels the agency could do it better.
“And there are so many avenues now by which that information goes around that we have to think hard about what the right regulation is,” he added.
Using COVID-19 vaccination to explain his point, he said: “I’m highly aware that, in our society, people don’t want the government to have too much power, but I think specific authorities at FDA, FTC, other areas are going to be needed. I’m not saying what they are, because I don’t really know, but I do believe we’re going to need to, when we see people being harmed — like, let’s look at vaccination again, very few people are dying from COVID who are up to date on their vaccination. And if – beyond that, even if they get infected, almost no one is dying if they’ve been vaccinated up to date and they’ve gotten an antiviral that’s approved by or cleared by the FDA. So, why is this not happening? We need to work on this.”
Reiterating that misinformation should be countered with truthful information, he said that those who are succumbing to COVID “are the people that are not up to date on their vaccination and don’t encounter clinicians who are up-to-date on the advantages of antivirals. But they’re also people who have been heavily influenced by people on the Internet telling untruthful things about the vaccination. And I’m not arguing here that we should suppress free speech, that’s not — the First Amendment is the First Amendment. But we have to counter that information with truthful information and reach many, many more people.”
Biden to Spend $5 Billion on New Coronavirus Vaccine Initiative Supported by Gates, Fauci and Republican Lawmakers
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 123, 2023
The U.S. government will spend $5 billion on a program to accelerate the development of new coronavirus vaccines and therapeutics, White House officials announced this week in an interview with The Washington Post.
Dubbed “Project NextGen,” the new initiative will serve as the successor to the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed,” launched in March 2020 to expedite the development of COVID-19 vaccines.
Similar to Operation Warp Speed, Project NextGen — with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation — will encourage public-private partnerships.
According to Reuters, the project will be managed out of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which will coordinate across various government agencies and private-sector actors, covering “all phases of development from lab research and clinical trials to delivery.”
“Scientists, public heath [sic] experts and politicians have called for the initiative, warning that existing therapies have steadily lost their effectiveness and that new ones are needed,” the Post reported.
The new initiative is based on a “roadmap” for the development of new coronavirus vaccines, formulated by the University of Minnesota and led by a former Biden administration official.
A ‘roadmap’ for ‘better’ coronavirus vaccines
Operation Warp Speed invested approximately $30 billion in the development, manufacturing and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, according to USA Today, with six drugmakers each receiving more than $1 billion, along with a promise of a “guaranteed market” if they successfully developed a vaccine.
Project NextGen was originally to be named “Project COVID Shield,” after some Republican lawmakers called for the launch of an “Operation Warp Speed 2.0” to build on the Trump administration’s legacy.
However, “White House officials wanted some distance from the Trump effort as well as from COVID-focused branding, when much of the country had moved on from the pandemic,” the Post reported, quoting two anonymous Biden administration officials.
The new initiative also will be “more modest,” and have a “more open-ended mission,” unlike Operation Warp Speed, which focused exclusively on COVID-19.
According to USA Today, the initial $5 billion in funding “will be financed through money saved from contracts costing less than originally estimated.”
Ashish Jha, White House coronavirus coordinator, said the new initiative has three primary goals: creating longer-lasting vaccines, accelerating the development of nasal vaccines and bolstering efforts to create “broader” pan-coronavirus vaccines.
The project also includes funding for more durable monoclonal antibodies.
The name “Project NextGen,” made more sense, Jha said, as it is “a different time” with “a different set of goals.” The new name “much more accurately captures what it is that we are trying to do,” he said.
Michael Osterholm, Ph.D., M.P.H., director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, is helping lead the effort.
In February, CIDRAP developed a “roadmap” for the development of “better” coronavirus vaccines. This “roadmap” serves as the basis for Project NextGen.
Osterholm was a member of the COVID-19 advisory board convened by then-president-elect Joe Biden’s transition team. The board was dissolved when Biden took office in January 2021.
Jha told the Post, “It’s been very clear to us that the market on this is moving very slowly. There’s a lot that government can do, the administration can do, to speed up those tools … for the American people.”
Previously, during a July 2022 White House coronavirus vaccine summit, Jha said:
“We need vaccines that are more durable. Vaccines that offer broader and longer-lasting protection. Vaccines that can stand up to multiple variants. Vaccines that can handle whatever Mother Nature throws at us.”
Osterholm characterized existing COVID-19 vaccines as “really good” but “not great.”
“There is a substantial amount of work [to be done] to take these good vaccines and hopefully achieve better vaccines,” Osterholm said.
Osterholm noted that SARS-CoV-2 is the third new coronavirus to appear in the past two decades — Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) were the other two. According to Osterholm, it would be “great” to be prepared for a fourth new coronavirus when and if it appears.
Reuters quoted an unnamed HHS spokesperson, who stated:
“While our vaccines are still very effective at preventing serious illness and death, they are less capable of reducing infections and transmission over time. New variants and loss of immunity over time could continue to challenge our healthcare systems in the coming years.
“Project NextGen will accelerate and streamline the rapid development of the next generation of vaccines and treatments through public-private collaborations. The infusion of a $5 billion investment, at minimum, will help catalyze scientific advancement in areas that have large public health benefits for the American people, with the goal of developing safe and effective tools for the American people.”
The Post noted, however, that while the outbreak of new coronaviruses in recent decades has “spurred worries about the potential for future health crises,” it might take years to develop a universal coronavirus vaccine, noting that such efforts have been unsuccessful for influenza despite decades of efforts.
Speaking to USA Today, Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, expressed skepticism about Project NextGen’s goals, noting that similar efforts to develop flu and HIV vaccines have been in progress for more than 40 years, without result.
Offit said that the effectiveness of nasal vaccines remains unclear, as they remain in the clinical trial stage at this time. Dr. John Moore, an immunologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, expressed a similar view, saying “it’s seriously naïve to believe that it will be easy to make [a nasal vaccine].”
He added that the emphasis on improving existing COVID-19 vaccines, which he described as “amazing,” would likely undermine public trust in those vaccines.
Moore told USA Today that “an initiative like this is much needed and should have been put in place much sooner,” adding that “Anyone familiar with vaccine development knows that translation into a practical product is a much harder and more expensive process” than the creation of a basic vaccine.
“A lot of designs that look good in the early stages fizzle out because they cannot be manufactured efficiently under the conditions required for human trials,” Moore said.
According to Jha though, the new project and its investment in a new generation of coronavirus vaccines “will have very large benefits for other respiratory pathogens we deal with all the time, like flu and RSV.”
Gates, Rockefeller Foundations behind Project NextGen
On Feb. 21, CIDRAP published its “roadmap for advancing better coronavirus vaccines” — with $1 million in support from the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, “To help jump-start the search for better vaccines [and] develop broadly protective vaccines.”
According to the project description, the funding was used to assemble “an international collaboration of 50 scientists who mapped out a strategy to make the new vaccines a reality.”
Osterholm stated at the time, “If we wait for the next event to happen before we act, it will be too late.”
Bruce Gellin, M.D., M.P.H., chief of Global Public Health Strategy at The Rockefeller Foundation, said that there is an “urgency” to take the next steps, calling for an “equivalent” to Operation Warp Speed.
According to CIDRAP, Gellin “has led several federal vaccine initiatives and has been a technical advisor for groups including Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, COVAX, and the World Health Organization.”
The Gates Foundation is a partner of Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, which, in turn, closely collaborates with the ID2020 Alliance, which promoted the development of digital ID. Microsoft is a founding member of the ID2020 Alliance, as well as Gavi, the BMGF, the World Bank, Accenture and the Rockefeller Foundation.
CIDRAP received the $1 million grant in April 2022, and by October 2022, had developed a draft version of its “roadmap.” According to Osterholm, it draws on a similar “roadmap strategy” employed by CIDRAP for previous projects, including the improvement of seasonal flu vaccines and the development of a universal flu vaccine.
For the new “roadmap,” these efforts culminated in a 92-page report, and accompanying summary, published in Vaccine journal. The project is divided into five core areas: virology, immunology, vaccinology, animal and human models for vaccine research, and policy and funding.
In an accompanying commentary published in the same issue of Vaccine, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, a former FDA commissioner who is co-president of the InterAcademy Partnership, and Dr. Greg Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group, said that COVID-19 vaccines have been effective in preventing serious disease.
Hamburg was a participant in the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s (NTI) monkeypox pandemic simulation in March 2021, based on a remarkably prescient “fictional” monkeypox outbreak in May 2022. She is a board member of the Nature Conservancy and vice president of NTI’s Global Biological Policy and Programs and is on the board of Gavi.
However, according to Hamburg and Poland, there are some problems with the current vaccines, including “notable reactogenicity” in certain individuals, a short duration of protection, and technical requirements that make them difficult to store and administer in remote locations and areas with low resources.
They said the next-generation vaccines may offer additional benefits such as “new methods of delivery — transdermal patches, oral or intranasal vaccines — which are easy to distribute and apply, stimulate mucosal immunity, and potentially block transmission,” adding that this is superior to the current strategy of “chasing” new variants and developing boosters.
Hamburg and Poland said that a universal coronavirus would be easy to stockpile, but the road to the development of such a vaccine could take a “tiered approach,” starting with the creation of a “variant-proof” COVID-19 vaccine, followed by developing vaccines that offer broader protection against various coronavirus families.
Members of CIDRAP said in February that funding would be a challenge for the initiatives set forth in their “roadmap,” due to “shrinking support for large-scale vaccine investments, now that the emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic has mainly passed.”
The federal funding earmarked for Project NextGen would, however, appear to address this issue.
Other challenges the CIDRAP team identified included the “lack of corporate incentives, uncertainty around public demand for a broadly protective vaccine, and the feasibility of expanding vaccine production capacity.”
Gellin, however, said in a Feb. 21 University of Minnesota press release that: “Time and time again, we have seen that investment in science brings solutions. The COVID-19 pandemic galvanized the research community and advanced vaccine R&D efficiently and through broad collaborations,” essentially previewing Project NextGen.
On April 20, CIDRAP will hold a one-hour “scientific webinar,” open to the public, presenting their “roadmap.”
Republican lawmakers, Fauci pressed for ‘Warp Speed 2.0’
Political wrangling delayed the funding of Project NextGen, according to the Post, which reported that Republicans insisted that funds were left over from prior COVID-19 aid packages.
Ultimately, HHS “shifted funds intended for coronavirus testing and other priorities” into the new initiative.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was one of the voices who “spent months pressing Congress for billions of dollars that could be used to develop next-generation vaccines and treatments,” the Post reported, adding that these arguments “largely fell flat” in the face of Republican opposition.
However, according to the Post, “Even some of the Republicans who blocked the White House’s coronavirus funding requests last year said they wanted a ‘Warp Speed 2.0’ to rush updated vaccines and treatments that would better fight the virus.”
In August 2022, former Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and James Inhofe (R-Okla.) wrote to President Biden, stating “Operation Warp Speed was the most successful public health program since small pox. It saved millions of lives, and it should be resurrected as soon as possible.”
Dawn O’Connell, assistant secretary for Preparedness and Response at HHS, told the Post that the Biden administration learned lessons from Operation Warp Speed, including how to speed up vaccine development, and that these lessons would be applied to Project NextGen.
“We’ve learned a lot in these three years,” O’Connell said. She added that some of the lab work related to Project NextGen has begun, and that the government has launched efforts to identify potential partners in the private sector.
“We’ve begun surveying the landscape out there — assessing what vaccine candidates are available, [and] moving through what exciting technologies are there,” she said.
According to the Post, O’Connell and her team informed companies working on the development of monoclonal antibodies that the government may soon make new investments in the technology.
Jha, however, refused to set a timetable for when new products developed under the aegis of Project NextGen would be available to the public, the Post reported.
“The timelines are really going to be predicated on how quickly the scientific advancements continue, and how quickly we can study and measure the efficacy and safety of these products,” Jha said.
Project NextGen is also still without a leader, with the White House “still considering candidates,” according to the Post, which noted that the process is slowed down by “Democrats’ desire to avoid questions of conflicts of interest that dogged Operation Warp Speed, after Trump officials selected Moncef Slaoui, a pharmaceutical industry executive with significant stock holdings, to lead that program.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
US professor quits after allegedly faking racism stats – media
RT | April 12, 2023
Florida State University criminology professor Eric Stewart has quietly resigned after a month-long absence amid an inquiry into whether he faked data in multiple studies to inflate the prevalence of racism in the US, the Florida Standard reported last week.
A fellow of the American Society of Criminology, Stewart was first publicly accused of falsifying data in 2019 by the co-author of one of his studies, University of Albany criminology professor Justin Pickett, who claimed Stewart had made several misleading changes to the numbers in their 2011 paper ‘Ethnic threat and social control: Examining public support for judicial use of ethnicity in punishment’ immediately before publication.
The published study claimed that public desire for harsher sentences for black and Hispanic offenders increased in proportion with the size of the minority populations in a community. However, the study data showed no such relationship existed, and that the opposite might even be true. Pickett revealed that his colleague had doubled the sample size while leaving out nearly three quarters of the counties polled, mangling the data to the point of incoherence, and said Stewart refused to turn over the raw data so that Pickett could re-run the calculations himself.
That study and four more were subsequently retracted, but when Pickett tried to bring the matter to the university’s attention, he claims he was met with four months of stonewalling. When the school did eventually mount an inquiry, the three-person panel in charge included two people who had co-authored studies with Stewart, violating Florida State’s conflict of interest policy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that inquiry claimed it had not found enough evidence for fraud and advised against continuing the investigation.
Pickett told the Florida Standard that coverups by colleagues are common in the field, explaining “there’s a huge monetary incentive to falsify data and there’s no accountability. If you do this, the probability you’ll get caught is so, so low.”
Stewart, who is black, complained to the university that Pickett – who is white – had “essentially lynched [him] and [his] academic career.”
In 2020, a sixth paper authored by Stewart was retracted – though not before being cited by 186 other papers. Another investigation found enough merit in the fraud claims to pursue them, apparently imperiling Stewart’s $190,000 per year position. Florida State declined to discuss the matter with the Florida Standard, and Stewart’s profile is still live on the university’s website.
World Vaccine Congress: A Report From the Belly of the Beast
Photo credit: @vaccinenation/Twitter
By Madhava Setty, M.D. | The Defender | April 11, 2023
Last week I attended the 23rd World Vaccine Congress in Washington, D.C. — which bills itself as “The Most Important Vaccine Event of the Year”:
“Our event format allows for whole-sector topics, giving an opportunity for people to find out more about their specific area of research and their job-function. By running parallel niche conference channels over the 3 days, it increases the relevance of the whole event for everyone who attends.
“During the sessions you will learn how cutting-edge research efforts can be integrated with
-
- Pharma
- Biotech
- Academia
- Government
“to produce more and better vaccines to the market.”
More than 3,100 people, largely from the pharma and biotech industries and regulatory affairs, attended the event.
Keynote speakers included prominent figures from public health agencies, including Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA); various directors of research at BioNTech and Moderna; and academic bigwigs like Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D., dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and co-director of Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine (my own alma mater).
During the three full days of the conference, neither I nor Dr. Elizabeth Mumper encountered another physician presently in clinical practice.
The event was open to anyone willing to pay the entry fee, which started at $495 for students and went up to $1,000+. But from what I could tell, this was largely a gathering of big and small pharma, biotech and leaders in regulatory affairs.
General impressions
- The majority of attendees truly believe they are doing the right thing.
- The majority of attendees look no further than recommendations from agencies of public health to guide their opinions. In other words, they fully believe COVID-19 mRNA (and other) vaccines are exceedingly safe and have saved millions of lives.
- Beyond members of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) and officers from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), few, if any, are aware of vaccine trial and post-marketing observational data around COVID-19 vaccine safety and efficacy.
- The keynote speakers and expert panel moderators who raised the topic of “vaccine hesitancy” were dismissive of those who managed to avoid vaccination and were openly contemptuous of those who encouraged others to do the same.
- Except for a few instances, the tone of the presentations and round table discussions were collegial. Aside from the pointed questions that Mumper and I were able to pose, there were no open hints that any of the attendees questioned the conventional narratives around the COVID-19 pandemic response.
- One-on-one exchanges revealed encouraging signs that not everyone there has bought the conventional narratives around the pandemic.
- Calls for public-private “partnerships” were a common theme.
I was able to attend only a fraction of the hundreds of presentations and panel discussions during the conference. Below I summarize the most important points from the sessions I attended and key conversations I had with the presenters.
Note: Throughout this article I have quoted myself and others. I do not have access to any audio or video recordings from the sessions, if there are any. Quotations are paraphrased from my own recollection and are not to be taken verbatim.
Introduction to the conference: Anti-vaxxers are dangerous, expect annual COVID vaccinations
Dr. Gregory Poland, director of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic, delivered the opening remarks. He then moderated a panel discussion with Marks; Paul Burton, chief medical officer at Moderna; Isabel Oliver, chief scientific advisor transition lead at UKHSA; and Dr. Penny Heaton, vaccines global therapeutic area head, Johnson & Johnson.
This first session was possibly the most fascinating 90 minutes of the entire week. Poland, I learned in a brief conversation with him after the conference, is also a pastor. His oratory skills were on full display during his opening and closing remarks. He also is vaccine-injured.
In February 2022, Poland reported suffering from significant tinnitus after receiving the second dose of “an mRNA vaccine.” At the time, Poland described his symptoms as “extraordinarily bothersome.” Nevertheless, he chose to receive a third dose (monovalent booster).
Poland’s commentary on the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines was extremely positive. He said the rapid deployment of the new therapy saved millions of lives and would have saved millions more if it weren’t for the disturbing trend of growing vaccine hesitancy.
I assumed that his vaccine-induced tinnitus had resolved over the last year. It was only at the end of the conference, several days later, when he told me personally that his symptoms were still debilitating, making his unmitigated support of these products even more astonishing.
Poland set the tone for the four-day conference in the first 10 minutes. In his mind, the COVID-19 pandemic was halted through the hard work of our regulatory agencies and the remarkable products borne of the mRNA platform.
The only failure came in the form of “inexplicable” vaccine hesitancy, a phenomenon driven by anti-vax pseudoscientists who are profiting from spreading baseless, fear-driven propaganda.
Combatting vaccine hesitancy is as big a challenge as protecting the world from the next deadly pathogen. Indeed, a significant portion of the events focused on strategies to dismantle the troubling “anti-vaxxers.”
Marks supported Poland’s position that the vaccine-hesitant are irrational, “It’s crazy that they don’t get how great vaccines are,” he said. “I am past trying to argue with people who think that vaccines are not safe.”
I found this remark to be particularly disquieting. What is it going to take for the director of the FDA’s CBER to reassess the safety profile of the mRNA shots?
The panelists expressed shock that some states (Idaho and North Dakota) are considering bills making the administration of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines illegal.
“How can we get the public to understand that science is iterative?” Heaton asked. “COVID vaccines save lives!”
Poland responded: “Can we get an amen?!!”
Marks, flanked by his partners — I mean counterparts — in industry let the audience know what the future would look like. “I am not going to hold my breath waiting for a sterilizing vaccine, protecting against severe disease is enough,” he said.
Marks predicted COVID-19 vaccines would be administered annually or even biannually.
He noted that the challenge will be to identify the strain of interest in June so that we can have a vaccine by September. A 100-day turnaround is possible as long as we have manufacturing ready to go, he said. Heaton (J&J) and Burton (Moderna) nodded in response.
To summarize, leaders of the vaccine industry and the regulatory agencies are, in my impression, convinced that they have offered the world an amazing product and are frustrated that it is not being readily and universally accepted.
They cited the fact that although 70% of Americans received the primary series, only 15% have chosen to receive the bivalent booster that became available in September 2022.
The reluctance of the public to accept the shot, they think, is due to the perceived reduction of threat of the disease, which can be overcome by “proper messaging.”
Of course, the public is correct. The pathogenicity of the strains now circulating is less than the original ancestral strain from 2020. The possibility that reduced uptake could be linked to a poor safety profile was never mentioned.
In their minds, vaccine injuries and serious adverse events are extremely rare. Their incidence has been exaggerated by anti-vax rumor mills. Poland joked that “maybe we should start a rumor that microchips are in ivermectin!”
His rejoinder was met with only sparse, nervous laughter.
Roundtable discussion: ‘Insights and tools to counter vaccine hesitancy’
Though the speakers at the introductory session were clearly entrenched in the “safe and effective” position, they acknowledged that there was a strong and growing swath of the population that was vaccine-hesitant.
More importantly, they were interested in dismantling this movement and not ignoring it. It was an opportunity to engage with them, perhaps in smaller groups or individually. I made my first attempt at a roundtable discussion where people could offer ways to convince the “anti-vaxxers” that they were wrong.
I found myself sitting next to Dame Jennifer Margaret Harries, a British public health physician and chief executive of the UKHSA. The UKHSA has been publishing U.K. health surveillance data with more granularity and frequency than our own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
I let her know that I appreciated the data coming from her agency and that I began following the agency’s regular surveillance reports two years ago. She was grateful for the acknowledgment and appreciated my interest in her work.
It was the UKHSA that offered the first glimpse of negative efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines in a public dataset in September 2021.
I asked Harries about that and her tone immediately shifted. She said she was aware of no such thing and that she would have to look into it before commenting.
I was surprised by her response. The report from September 2021 wasn’t an aberration. Subsequent reports from the agency over which she presides indicated there was a large and growing incidence of COVID-19 among the vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated.
The UKHSA stopped making that data available several months later. I wanted to know why, but she was unwilling to answer.
I changed tactics and asked her about Tess Lawrie, Ph.D., of the Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy who notably saw safety signals in the U.K.’s Yellow Card system and, in an open letter in June 2021, urged the director of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency to halt the British vaccination campaign.
Harries looked at me sternly and said, “There are a number of prominent physicians in my country who are gaining fame for their unfounded positions around vaccine dangers, most recently a cardiologist.”
“Do you mean Dr. Aseem Malhotra?”
“Yes. He has gotten a lot of attention of late.”
Harries didn’t think Malhotra or Lawrie held credible opinions, or at least that’s what she told me. It wasn’t easy for me to accept this. We didn’t have a chance to speak about this further. I had another brief interaction with Harries later in the week (see below).
An American pediatrician chaired the roundtable. He opened the discussion with a request for ideas on how to counter vaccine hesitancy.
I had one:
“It’s obvious that the Krispy Kreme doughnuts and travel restrictions are carrots and sticks that have only partially worked. Those that remain hesitant are steadfast in their position because they have looked harder than most.
“They aren’t believing rumors. They are listening to credentialed physicians and scientists who have authored numerous peer-reviewed papers and who happen to be COVID-19 vaccine critics. Why don’t we engage them openly and see what they have to say?”
Katie Attwell, Ph.D., a professor from the University of Western Australia whose interest is in vaccine policy and uptake, shot down that idea. I didn’t know who she was at the time. I did manage to speak with her personally later in the week. Her rebuke was curt and to the point, “We cannot give any voice to the critic,” she told me. “Once the public sees them on equal footing with us they may believe what they are saying.”
Implicit in her strategy is the idea that the public cannot separate information from misinformation. Truth, in her mind, cannot stand on its own. It needs to be identified by those who know better.
Of course, there is another possibility. Perhaps she knows what the truth is and wants to hide it. My initial impressions were that she was earnestly doing her duty to protect the public through whatever means necessary. It would all come down to assessing her breadth of knowledge on the topic.
Chris Graves, the founder of Ogilvy Center for Behavioral Science, supported Attwell’s position. He was a smiling, gregarious fellow, who, I found out later, was hired by Merck to analyze different personality types and value/belief systems among the “anti-vax” camp.
Once a person is properly categorized, “personalized messaging” can be used to bring them back to “reality.” According to the abstract of his study:
“Just as precision medicine treats individuals, this study of 3000 parents (inclusive of all demographics) in the USA sought to identify the most effective personalized messaging to address vaccine hesitancy among parents. First, it sought correlations between: demographics; stated specific reasons for vaccine hesitancy; cognitive biases; cognitive styles; identity-linked worldviews; and personality traits.
“Second, it tested 16 messages in the form of mini-narratives, each embodied with a behavioral science principle, to find if certain messages resonated better than others depending on the many factors above.”
I later asked him how he would respond to someone who looked at the trial and observational data and found that it told a different story about the vaccines’ safety. He smiled, “Oh, those are the ones that have a higher need for cognitive closure. Yes. They are stuck because they cannot move forward if there is any uncertainty.”
Graves couldn’t describe what the “personalized messaging” would look like for this group specifically, only that it existed and had been proven to be more effective than the other types of messaging
I asked him if he was aware of how many reports of adverse events had been registered in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. “No,” he said, still smiling.
Panel discussion: ‘What vaccines and COVID have taught us about the science of immunology’
The panel included Ofer Levy, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital and VRBPAC member.
This discussion centered around the lack of good biological markers for vaccine efficacy. According to the consensus position of the VRBPAC, antibody levels are not a surrogate for protection.
In other words, an immune response to the vaccine in the form of antibodies should not be used to judge whether the vaccine will do anything useful. Nevertheless, pediatric trials of the original formulation used them as proof of efficacy.
One of the expert panel members was Sharon Benzeno, Ph.D., chief commercial officer of Immune Medicine at Adaptive Biotechnologies, who offered encouraging information. She felt that our approach was too centered on antibody responses and that it would be possible to identify biochemical markers of vaccine-induced cellular immunity in the future.
Levy agreed that this would be an important addition to our fund of knowledge moving forward.
When it came time for questions, I asked the panel:
“As we all know, uptake of the bivalent booster is very low. People are unwilling to subject themselves to another shot because there are no trials that look at outcomes, only immunogenicity, which you yourself are saying is insufficient. Why not insist on trials that can prove an outcome benefit?”
Levy responded that the advisory panel had no say in what kind of studies were required. His advisory committee could only vote yes, no or abstain with regard to approval/authorization.
Another panel member, Alessandro Sette, doctor of biological science, head of Sette Lab and professor at La Jolla Institute for Immunology, piped in, “It wouldn’t be practical. The signal is too small because we are no longer dealing with a non-naive population.”
Sette had taken the bait. He was saying that most people have either been vaccinated or exposed to the virus already. The booster would have little benefit, if any, on a population that was already protected.
I asked the obvious follow-up: “So why then are we insisting that everyone get boosted?”
Harries, the moderator, immediately stepped in, “Okay, we have veered off topic. Next question.”
I was beginning to understand how this conference was being managed. I don’t believe the sponsors of this meeting expected to encounter many probing questions about the quality of the COVID-19 vaccines from the audience who paid for their expensive tickets. When and if they arose, moderators were quick to intervene.
Was it possible that others in the audience saw what was happening? I believe it to be so. Every time I asked a question, people seated near me told me that they appreciated the question and wondered why it went unanswered.
Even a non-scientist from Moderna approached me several times throughout the conference to let me know she agreed that responding to these issues would be the best way to “increase uptake” and that she was planning on forwarding my questions to her scientific staff.
Panel discussion: How does vaccine law impact uptake and access?
This group was moderated by a lawyer, Brian Dean Abramson, “a leading expert on vaccine law, teaching the subject as adjunct professor of vaccine law at the Florida International University College of Law.”
His opening remarks demonstrated his contempt of the vaccine-hesitant:
“We didn’t get to herd immunity because of these anti-vaxxers.
“They are dangerous. In 2021, they received $4 million in donations. It is estimated that in 2022, more than $20 million have been funneled to their movement.”
The panel included Attwell, whose position was clear from her flat response to my suggestion earlier. Her public page indicates that she has received approximately $2 million in funding for her research into increasing vaccine access and uptake.
Attwell is not a physician or a medical scientist. However, also on this panel was a public health physician from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Chizoba Wonodi, Ph.D., who has 27 years of experience in Africa, Asia and America.
I was encouraged by the flexibility in the audience from my prior challenges and when offered the microphone, I opened with a more aggressive salvo directed at the moderator:
“‘Anti-vax’ is pejorative and reflects ignorance about who the vaccine-hesitant are and why they believe what they believe. This is further reflected when you insert terms like ‘herd immunity’ with regard to this pandemic. Without a sterilizing vaccine, or even one that can prevent infection, herd immunity is an impossibility.
“Rather than inflaming the situation, why don’t we engage with the doctors and scientists who are vaccine-cautionary and hear their arguments in a fair, open and public discussion?”
Once again, Attwell politely but sternly warned the audience that this would be too dangerous in her opinion. I expected that. And I also was again encouraged that the three people sitting around me acknowledged that my point was valid and that it was puzzling that the panelists would not address the merits of my position.
Afterward, Chizoba approached me and let me know she appreciated my question. In her work, she has found that education is the most important thing. She was kind; she believed that many of the vaccine-hesitant physicians could be reached by providing them with the proper information.
I asked her how she would address a physician who simply felt that authorizing a therapy where the double-blinded trial demonstrated a greater all-cause mortality than the placebo was not only unprecedented but illogical.
She stared at me blankly. “Is this from a new study?” she asked.
I told her that this was from the published interim results from the Pfizer/BioNTech trial, the trial that launched the worldwide vaccination campaign. She was not aware of the results.
To her credit, she admitted that she hadn’t looked at the paper but planned on doing so.
The final day
I attended a session titled “Let’s Talk Shots” where Daniel Salmon, Ph.D., presented the work being done at Johns Hopkins Institute for Vaccine Safety.
“LetsTalkShots is designed to support vaccine decision-making. It shares engaging animated content based on a person’s questions or concerns.”
Suffice it to say that there is a lot of thought, money and energy behind the campaign to vaccinate the public. The approach once again is around targeted messaging, which acknowledges that different people need to hear different types of information.
Attwell also presented to the same audience. In this forum, she pointed out that the U.S. government was more tolerant of the vaccine-hesitant than in her country. She suggested that our religious and philosophical exemptions should be eliminated entirely. Only the strictest medical exemptions should be permitted. This will lead to better outcomes.
After her talk, I approached her. She looked up as if she was expecting me to ask her some questions. I asked her if she would be willing to have a more open conversation about her research and opinions. She was.
I let her know that I thought she was smart enough to realize that I was, in fact, a vaccine skeptic. She nodded her head.
“So,” I said, “the number one disinformation spreader may be running for President of the United States. What do you think should be done?”
She smiled uncomfortably and said, “Yes, it’s going to be hard to keep him from getting oxygen.”
In other words, her proposed approach to suffocate the anti-vax spokespersons becomes much harder when they are running for the highest office in the land. I thought she might be willing to reconsider her strategy. She wasn’t.
I tried a different approach. I explained that in my investigation, I haven’t found enough evidence that the COVID-19 mRNA shots were safe or effective, however, I was open to the possibility that the mRNA platform may eventually prove to be a powerful way to create therapies that are safe and effective in the future.
What good would it be to have this technology if half of the public no longer trusts it or the people who are shoving it down their throats while denying them an opportunity to debate them?
“Yes. That’s a good point.”
I told her that in this country, doctors are unwilling to write religious or philosophical exemptions to COVID-19 vaccines for fear of backlash. Many employers won’t accept them anyway, so her position is moot.
“Yes. That’s true.”
I asked her what would be a cause for a medical exemption. She didn’t know. I explained that medical exemptions are considered valid ONLY if the person has evidence of a prior reaction to an mRNA vaccine or to one or more of the ingredients in them. Nobody but a handful of people on the planet knows what exactly is in these things.
How would a doctor (or anyone else) know whether a given person was at an increased risk for an untoward event?
“I don’t know.”
I asked her if she was aware of the evidence of medical fraud around the Pfizer vaccine trials. She said she read something about it a while ago but didn’t think it was important.
Finally, I asked her why she thought vaccinating everyone was the right thing to do.
“Vaccination rates in my country are higher than in yours and we fared better.”
But there are countries whose vaccination rates are much lower than both countries and mortality rates are even lower. How could she explain that? She couldn’t.
Observations from Dr. Elizabeth Mumper
Mumper attended “Partnering for Vaccine Equity Program,” chaired by Joe Smyser, Ph.D., CEO of The Public Good Projects.
She shared this with me:
“This lecture was about vaccine acceptance and demand, specifically social and behavioral drivers, and how to link action and policy through the use of the social sciences.
“The strategy was to empower community leaders to take public health messages to communities. The research showed that disparities in vaccine acceptance decreased in black and brown communities which had the program. Research shows that now the most vaccine-hesitant are white, rural and right-wing.
“In the program described, they worked with social media influencers (like young women who did beauty blogs) to repeat public health messages to their audiences. They identified 212,700,000 disinformation messages about vaccines, most of which came from the United States.
“In this project, they worked closely with Twitter and facilitated the removal of what they deemed misinformation. They recruited 495 influencers who would share information voluntarily with their followers. As a result, they reached 60 million people.
“They know that so-called ‘anti-vaxxers will not come after social media influencers.’ The program provided training and webinars to educate how to compose effective public health messages.
“This public health social scientist called anti-vaxxers ‘idiots and jerks.’
“During the question and answer period, I said that in my experience, many parents who were vaccine-hesitant were very smart and had advanced degrees. People like doctors and lawyers and engineers knew someone in their family who had an adverse vaccine reaction. I suggested it would be more effective to engage with the vaccine-hesitant and discover what data they are relying on rather than using vitriolic name-calling.
“I am paraphrasing the speaker’s response below. He said, ‘We work upstream. We want to know where they are getting their misinformation. I can call people idiots and jerks if they are giving out misinformation. If you even raise questions like about the HPV vaccine, you will get speaker invitation and book deals. People are getting rich from spreading misinformation. We know what the right information is.’”
Mumper summarized:
“It was profoundly disturbing for me to hear details about how social scientists and public health officials worked directly with Twitter to remove content they deemed to be misinformation. Their assertion ‘that we know what is true’ did not ring true. Their efforts were directed at increasing vaccine uptake in all age groups for which emergency use authorization had been granted.
“The speaker did not seem to take into account the First Amendment rights for free speech of those who posted data questioning the effectiveness of COVID vaccines.
“I was surprised by the vitriolic rhetoric directed at those who reported side effects from the vaccine or who questioned the risk-benefit ratio.
“It was unsettling to hear how public health officials courted social media influencers to spread messages for their followers to get vaccinated. Yet they scrubbed messages from doctors and scientists who posted inconvenient data about COVID-19 vaccines.”
The last question of the symposium
The final day wound down with another plenary session. Once again, Poland moderated a panel of vaccine researchers who discussed how to quickly manufacture more durable vaccines, i.e., ones that would have longer-lasting protection.
One of the researchers made a remarkable observation. Early in the pandemic, prior to vaccine availability, young infants who contracted COVID-19 were found to have robust and enduring immunity by every measure even three years later. Perhaps some clues lay within this interesting cohort.
Mumper saw a great opportunity to pull the rug from under their feet. She said:
“I am a pediatrician in Virginia. I have been shocked at how well my infant patients did with COVID-19. The CDC has told us that the survival rate from COVID-19 is 99.997% in these infants. Now you, too, are telling us that we know these kids have great protection two years after infection.
“I am wondering why I should be pushing these vaccines on a 6-month-old when I don’t have any long-term data on what things like lipid nanoparticles do to babies. So convince me!”
(Laughter from audience.)
Poland to the panelist: “You have 30 seconds to answer.”
(More laughter.)
Panelist: “That would require more time and a bottle of wine.”
(Laughter.)
Panelist: “I don’t think I can answer that question.”
Mumper: “OK, Anybody else?”
Panelist Andrea Carfi, Ph.D., chief scientific officer at Moderna, took a shot at it, pointing out that Mumper is under the “misconception” that long-term effects of COVID-19 are less than that of the vaccines while admitting that he didn’t know what the long-term sequelae of infection were either.
Poland accepted Carfi’s response as sufficient and closed the discussion.
Those sitting next to us once again noted the merits of Mumper’s concern. Moreover, Carfi’s response didn’t resolve the issue at all. If the long-term effects of both the vaccine and the infection are unknown, on what grounds are we pushing the jab on these children?
Final thoughts
This was a rare opportunity to engage with vaccine proponents in their own house on their own terms. In my assessment, their foundation is crumbling and their structure will eventually collapse.
The big players must see this, which is why they are quick to squelch any lines of inquiry that will expose the hypocrisy.
This wasn’t lost on the audience. As I mentioned, some of them were able to realize that simple questions were not met with clear answers.
It is clear to me that the “pro-vaccine” camp is not as monolithic as we often think. There is a spectrum of skepticism amongst them. They also recognize that the vaccine-hesitant range the full continuum from “SARS-CoV-2 virus deniers” to the “wait and seers.”
They have the means to construct sophisticated “information” campaigns that target the vaccine-cautionary with specific messaging.
I suggest we use their model to at least acknowledge that we can be more precise in how we bring them to their senses.
In my first open comment in a roundtable discussion, I summarized the situation as follows:
“There are many people who are vaccine-hesitant that do not have the capacity to read scientific papers and analyze data. They see two groups who are mirror images of each other. Both sides think the other side is incredibly gullible, that they are listening to misinformation spreaders and are endangering the rest of us for their own personal gain.
“They can also see the one big difference between the two. One side is asking for an open discussion around this important issue. The other believes that only their side should have the right to express themselves while the other needs to be silenced.
“How do you think this is going to play out? Why would the undecided ever choose to follow the group that advocates censorship over open debate?”
By refusing to engage us in any meaningful exchange they may be able to bring over a few of the vaccine-hesitant to their side by what can be best described as “conversion therapy.”
However, in the end, their tower will topple because it is not based on logic, the scientific method or the unassailable facts. It relies on censorship of the voices of those who are qualified to speak on the matter to manufacture “consensus.”
It is incumbent on us to decide what should be done to hasten the inevitable emergence of sensibility around this matter.
I am quite certain there are people who know vaccines are causing incalculable harm but advocate their widespread use anyway. A few of them were likely at the conference. They won’t be swayed by open debate, however, they represent only a tiny minority of all vaccine advocates.
I suggest that we begin by not regarding every vaccine proponent as an engineer of mass murder. Most are woefully uninformed. In attempting to achieve herd immunity they have succumbed to herd mentality. They need to be reached.
In my recent experience, I see that it is possible through open dialogue. This is precisely why the engineers of this pandemic and its response want to make sure this never happens. Despite what they say publicly, I don’t think they are worried about the vaccine skeptics remaining hesitant — they are worried about losing members of their own herd to the truth.
Madhava Setty, M.D. is senior science editor for The Defender.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Tornadoes, Climate Change, and the Media
By Anthony Watts | American Thinker | April 7, 2023
After the recent devasting tornadoes in the Midwest and South, some media outlets scrambled to try to link the weather events to climate change, when in fact there is no hard data to support this. In fact, tornado data refute claims that tornadoes are increasing in number, range, or severity. However, Salon, Axios, and the Washington Post among others ran articles suggesting climate change is expanding the length of tornado season and area over which tornadoes commonly form, as well as adding ingredients to the atmosphere to make more and bigger tornadoes.
The Salon article, “How climate change made the Mississippi tornadoes more likely,” (actually a reprint from Grist) claimed, “That added ingredient of more heat and moisture is going to be the big thing that will influence what happens and we can expect potentially worse tornado outbreaks,” said William Gallus, a professor of meteorology at Iowa State University.
Axios piled on with “What we know about how climate change affects tornado outbreaks,” which claims, “We also have expectations that the number of severe thunderstorms (hail, wind, tornado) will probably increase in the U.S.”
The Washington Post article, “Here’s what we know about how climate change is influencing tornadoes,” asserts, “Average global temperatures have risen more than 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s, and the impact is clear: Warmer air provides more energy for storms to develop and intensify, and holds more moisture, which can also fuel storms. Warm, moist air is a key ingredient for developing severe tornadic storms.”
These claims of increased storms due to more heat and moisture are misleading at best and demonstrate a clear lack of understanding of how weather fronts collide to form tornadoes. As Climate at a Glance: Tornadoes points out: “Tornadoes typically form when very cold, dry air clashes with warm, humid air. Climate change warms the Arctic more than the tropics and subtropics, resulting in less of a clash between cold Arctic air masses and warm Gulf of Mexico air masses. As a result, fewer and less violent tornadoes are occurring today than in previous periods, despite media claims that tornadoes are getting more frequent, stronger, or both.”
Plus, all of these articles miss one very important and immutable fact: decades of hard data on tornado activity don’t support these claims.
Despite modest warming of the climate over the past 50 years, data show no trend in increasing tornadoes linked to climate change. Indeed, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its most recent report, “There is low confidence in observed trends in small spatial-scale phenomena such as tornadoes.”
These articles all focused on the recent severe storms that caused many deaths and widespread destruction. Yet, looking at the actual data for the trend in strong to violent tornadoes suggest no cause for alarm. Violent tornadoes, those rated EF3 to EF5 on the enhanced Fujita tornado scale, have declined in recent decades, based on actual data supplied by the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center.
The hard data on tornado numbers and intensity refute any assertions that tornadoes are worsening due to climate change. The number of strong to violent tornadoes, F3 or higher, has dramatically declined for nearly half a century. Additional evidence shows attempts to tie tornadoes to climate change falls flat. For instance, 2018 was a record-low year for tornadoes in the United States. Even the Washington Post wrote that 2018 was the first year with no violent tornadoes in the United States.
Also flying in the face of climate change attribution during the so-called “hottest decade in recorded history” from 2010 to 2019, two record-low years for tornado strikes in the United States occurred, in 2014 and 2018.
Finally, it is important to note that severe tornado outbreaks are not a global (as in global warming) phenomenon, but mostly limited to the United States with its unique topography and weather patterns.
All of these omissions lead one to ask if the media are aware of hard data and previous articles on the topics of tornados and climate change, or did these outlets simply not wish to consider what those articles and data implied, because they presented inconvenient truths that are counter to their attempts to link climate change and tornado behavior?
Even the scientist quoted in the Post article would not commit to the narrative that climate change was changing tornado behavior.
Per the Post, “That suggests more tornadoes may be likely, too. But scientists aren’t ready to declare that yet.”
Also, according to the Post, “There is nothing concrete to say, ‘Yes, we’re going to see more tornadoes,’ Allen said,” as Dance reported.
The willful choice to ignore these facts is indicative of the shoddy state of what passes for journalism today. The Washington Post’s banner reads, “democracy dies in darkness.” Evidently, science dies in darkness, too.
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‘Israel sees Iran as obstacle to its policies’
Press TV – August 25, 2017
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israel felt threatened by Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East. Netanyahu expressed his Iranophobic view in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi on Wednesday. Press TV has asked Scott Rickard, former American intelligence linguist from Tampa, Florida, and Brent Budowsky, a columnist at The Hill from Washington, to give their thoughts on the issue.
Rickard said Tel Aviv is concerned about the fact that the regime could not carry out its old project to spread sectarian divisions and pave the way for dismemberment of the countries in the Middle East region because of the Iranian-led resistance against Israeli policies, not only in the occupied territories of Palestine but also in the whole region.
“Iran is not a threat to Israel whatsoever. The threat that Israel sees is the fact that their Oded Yinon Plan is being put to a hold by Iran,” the intelligence linguist said on Thursday night.
“They (the Israelis) look at Iran as a threat only because they have no influence on their governments and Iran is autonomous and is not under the Zionist influence,” he added.
Since the victory of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, Tehran has been critical of Israel’s policies in the region, whereas “no leaders [of other states] even dared to speak out against Zionism,” Rickard argued. … continue
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