There has been renewed discussion of the origin of Covid in the media. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the US Department of Energy has come down firmly on the side of a laboratory origin of Covid-19 from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. On Fox News, the former director of US National Intelligence John Ratcliffe commented: ‘The idea that Covid-19 has a natural origin has always been at odds with our intelligence . . . it is due to a lab leak. From the beginning scientists have not been able to explain why there is a furin cleavage site within the genetic make up of Covid-19 . . . This is something that happens when scientists insert a snippet of manipulated material into viruses.’
UK commentator Piers Morgan responded: ‘I think that the truth is that science, by its very nature, will evolve with facts. And so you have to give them some leeway for that . . . So I do think in the future, we’ve got to examine the science. You’ve got to listen to all ranges of opinions, and people have got to stop being cancelled on social media for raising concerns, which now look like they were absolutely right.’
US Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson went further in a 20-minute excoriation of the Biden administration’s Covid policy. Carlson wanted to know: has the administration’s policy to fund biotechnology research in China changed? (Watch Carlson here, begins at 3 minutes).
Some, including late-night talk-show host Stephen Colbert, have accused the DoE of lacking sufficient qualifications to decide on the lab leak theory, saying: ‘Stay in your lane’. (Is Colbert even vaguely qualified himself?) In fact as the authoritative Washington Post reports the DoE employed highly qualified and skilled scientists (including members of the Energy Department’s Z-Division, which since the 1960s has been involved in secretive investigations of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons threats by U.S. adversaries, including China and Russia), who undertook detailed scientific assessment of genetic evidence and classified information. After the dust of misinformation had cleared the DoE’s conclusion that there was a lab leak was inevitable.
It was the job of the FBI to investigate how the truth was being manipulated and they have also come out firmly and publicly on the side of the lab leak theory (it’s not a theory, there is overwhelming evidence). Early in 2021, a highly qualified geneticist friend wrote to me that he and many of his colleagues were sure that Covid was engineered in a lab because of its highly unusual genetic structure, but he added the codicil: please don’t mention my name. This was going on all over the world in differing forms. Some of them were verging on the corrupt.
All this information is in the public domain, but still the BBC published two dismissive articles on its home page on Wednesday. One covered the FBI announcement, but said the FBI conclusion was not backed by any evidence. The other was an explainer article entitled ‘Covid origin: Why the Wuhan lab-leak theory is so disputed‘. A more blatant attempt to muddy the waters of truth could not be imagined. The article forgot to discuss the genetic evidence which clearly points to gene-edited inserts in the virus genome.
But you might ask, why would anyone in government or science seek to hide the truth from the public? Good question. The answer possibly lies in the murky history of military involvement in genetics and the pandemic. You might recall conspiracy theories circulating since the discovery of DNA and gene editing in the 20th century. According to these ideas, military powers were supposedly going to invent weapons that would target specific ethnic groups and win wars because their genetically different opponents were all going to fall down dead, felled by a man-made virus.
In truth, all humans share so much DNA that any genetic weapon is going to affect everyone worldwide including you and me. Remember that military planners are not geneticists, but like almost everyone else on the planet, they are very susceptible to genetic fantasies. They believed wrongly that anything might be possible for genetic science. Whether their motivations were offensive or defensive was irrelevant. To counter any potential offensive weapon from the other side, they were going to have to first create possible offensive weapons, before trying to design a defensive counter. Sound familiar? Gain of function research to weaponise viruses in order to design a vaccine?
The problem we now know is that, as reported in this study, no lab is ever going to be secure. The history of recombinant DNA biotech labs contains a long list of unintended leaks and accidents. The result has been a pandemic whose final outcome still remains unknown. The military, governments, pharmaceutical companies, and scientists from a number of countries are very busy trying to hide their involvement, telling us that all this is just a natural disaster. This amounts to a giant geopolitical cover-up. The US, China, Britain and France, all of whom were involved in the creation and funding of the Wuhan Virology Laboratory, are paying for favourable comments from their media and anyone else who is corrupt enough to shill for them.
As a last resort, some people are arguing that the origin of Covid is irrelevant. It isn’t. The lab origin of Covid should bring us all together. Whether we think Covid is the main threat or the vaccine is, they both came from a biotech lab carrying out genetic experiments. We can safely forget about the geopolitical arguments explaining who was to blame: China or the USA, and instead shout loudly from the rooftops that biotech experiments have got to stop.
Research shows biotech interventions are inherently mutagenic, they have led to permanent degradation of genetic function and consequently health, as this alarming recent assessment of the Pfizer and Moderna bivalent vaccine shows (the same vaccine our government has announced it will give to everyone over 30 in New Zealand). So don’t think that by taking the latest vaccine you are helping society. The mRNA vaccines pose a danger to everyone in the world, all cultures, all races, religious or agnostic, left or right. We share DNA and we have a common interest to protect ourselves from scientists, media, and governments who are putting financial interests and political objectives ahead of the safety of the entire 8billion population of the world.
We are going through an unprecedented societal upheaval. It increasingly appears to be man-made. The repeated political mantra ‘Trust the Science’ has proven to be mere political demagoguery, devoid of real scientific content. Keeping a steady head, carefully shifting through the evidence, and applying caution are needed now. The evidence is out: with confidence we know that Covid and Covid vaccines came from laboratories whose operation is inherently dangerous. They have already killed millions, and want to be given carte blanche to do whatever they wish. Time to call a halt. For more information go to https://GLOBE.GLOBAL
March 3, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | BBC, China, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, France, UK, United States |
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As glasses help people focus their eyes to see,” medical experts from the American Academy of Pediatrics rule, “medications help children with ADHD focus their thoughts better and ignore distractions.” In their view, as well as in the view of multiple other expert consortiums, the most appropriate way to treat the “lifelong impairing condition” of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is by taking stimulant medications on a daily basis.
Although stimulants, as suggested by their name, are frequently abused for stimulating (potentially addictive) sensations of high energy, euphoria, and potency, they are often compared to harmless medical aids, such as eyeglasses or walking crutches. Numerous studies, we are told, support their efficacy and safety, and evidence-based medicine dictates that these substances will be administered to children with ADHD as the first-line treatment.
There is only one, huge problem. ADHD is currently the most common childhood disorder in Western-oriented countries. Its ever-increasing rates are now skyrocketing. The documented prevalence of ADHD is not about 3 percent, as it used to be when the disorder was first introduced in 1980. In 2014, a survey by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that over 20 percent of 12-year-old boys were diagnosed with this “lifelong condition.”
In 2020, thousands of real-life medical records from Israel suggested that over 20 percent of all children and young adults (5-20 years) received a formal diagnosis of ADHD. This means that hundreds of millions of children around the world are eligible for this diagnosis and that most of them (about 80 percent), including very young, preschool children, will be prescribed with its treatment-of-choice, as if regular use of stimulants is indeed comparable to eyeglasses.
Stimulant brands for ADHD, such as Ritalin, Concerta, Adderall, or Vyvanse rank at the top of the best-selling lists of medications for children. Indeed, the American dream may play a significant role in the proliferation of such cognitive enhancers in the US, but the rush for the magic pills crosses national borders. In fact, the ‘semi-final’ countries that are currently ‘winning’ the Ritalin Olympics, according to the International Narcotics Control Board, are: Iceland, Israel, Canada, and Holland.
But what if the scientific consensus is wrong? What if the medications for ADHD are not as effective and as safe as we are told? After all, stimulant medications are powerful psychoactive substances, which are prohibited to use without medical prescriptions, under federal drug laws. Like all psychoactive drugs, which affect the central nervous system, stimulant medications are designed to penetrate the blood-brain barrier – the specialized tissue and blood vessels that normally prevent harmful substances from reaching the brain. In this way, stimulant medications are essentially impacting the biochemical processes of our brain – that miraculous organ that makes us who we are.
In my new book ADHD is Not an Illness and Ritalin is Not a Cure: A Comprehensive Rebuttal of the (alleged) Scientific Consensus, I do my best to answer these disturbing questions. The first part of the book offers a step-by-step refutation of the notion that ADHD meets the required criteria for a neuropsychiatric condition. In fact, a close reading of the available science suggests that the vast majority of the diagnoses simply reflects common and pretty normative childhood behaviors that underwent unjustified medicalization. The second part of the book uncovers the massive evidence that exists against the efficacy and safety of the treatment-of-choice for ADHD.
Hundreds of studies, published in well-recognized, mainstream academic journals tell a totally different story than the one told by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Stimulant medications are nothing like eyeglasses. Of course, it is impossible to summarize an entire book here, but I do wish to outline three principal failures in the common comparison between stimulant medications and eyeglasses – or any other daily used, harmless medical aids for that matter, such as walking crutches.
- Even without considering the specific criticism about the validity of ADHD, the very comparison between organic/bodily conditions, which are typically measured through objective tools, to amorphic psychiatric labels that rely exclusively on subjective assessments of behaviors, is inappropriate and misleading. The ‘brain deficit’ and the ‘chemical imbalance’ that have been associated with ADHD are unproven myths. Stimulants do not ‘fix’ biochemical imbalances and they can easily be used also by non-ADHD individuals to enhance cognitive performance (even though these individuals are not assumed to have this alleged ‘brain deficit’).
- As opposed to visual impairments that restrict the individual’s everyday functioning, regardless of school demands, the primary impairment in ADHD is manifested in school settings. Eyeglasses and walking crutches are needed outside of school premises as well, even during weekends and holidays. ADHD, in contrast, seems to be a ‘seasonal disease’ (despite endless efforts to exaggerate and extend its negative outcomes to non-school-related settings). When schools are closed, its daily medical management is often no longer needed. This simple real-life fact is even acknowledged, to some extent, in the official Ritalin leaflet, which states that: “During the course of treatment for ADHD, the doctor may tell you to stop taking Ritalin for certain periods of time (e.g., every weekend or school vacations) to see if it is still necessary to take it.” Incidentally, these ‘treatment breaks,’ according to the leaflet, “also help prevent a slow-down in growth that sometimes occurs when children take this medicine for a long time” – a noteworthy point that brings us to the third, and most important error in the comparison between stimulant medications and other daily, physical/medical aids, such as eyeglasses.
- The benign examples used by proponents of the medications, such as eyeglasses or walking crutches are not regulated by the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance. Typically, these medical aids do not cause serious physiological and emotional adverse reactions. If stimulant drugs are as safe as experts say, like “Tylenol and aspirin,” why do we insist that they will be medically prescribed by licensed physicians? This question has philosophical and societal implications. After all, if the medications are safe and helpful to various populations (i.e., not only to people with ADHD), what is the moral justification to prohibit their usage among non-diagnosed individuals? This is unjustified discrimination. Moreover, why are we condemning (non-diagnosed) students who use these medications to improve their grades? If regular use of Ritalin and alike is so safe, why not place them on the pharmacies’ shelves, next to the non-prescription pain relievers, moisturizers, and chocolate energy bars?
The last rhetorical questions illustrate how far the eyeglasses metaphor is from the clinical reality and the scientific evidence regarding ADHD and stimulant medications. ADHD medications are not fundamentally different from other psychoactive drugs that cross the blood-brain barrier. At first usage, they may trigger intense sensations of potency or euphoria, but when used for prolonged periods, their desired effects subside, and their unwanted negative effects start to emerge. The brain recognizes these psychoactive substances as neurotoxins and activates a compensatory mechanism in an attempt to fight the harmful invaders. It is this activation of the compensatory mechanism, not the ADHD, that might cause the biochemical imbalance in the brain.
I realize that these last sentences may sound provocative. I therefore encourage readers not to ‘trust’ this short article blindly, but to dive with me into the deep (and sometimes dirty) water of the scientific literature. Despite the academic orientation of my book, I made sure to make the science available to most readers through plain language, illustrative stories, and real-life examples. And even if you disagree with some of its content, I am positive that, by the end of the reading, you will ask yourself, like I did: How is it possible that such critical information about ADHD and stimulant medications is being hidden from us? Does it really make sense to compare these drugs to eyeglasses? Are we medicating millions of ADHD children without proper scientific justification?
March 2, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Canada, Human rights, Iceland, Israel, United States |
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Convening for the first time on Tuesday, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic presented the testimony of four public health experts, as part of a roundtable: “Preparing For the Future By Learning From the Past: Examining COVID Policy Decisions.”
The agenda for the subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), focused on government policy pertaining to COVID-19, including vaccine mandates and other public health guidance.
In his opening remarks, Wenstrup said the subcommittee will examine the origins of COVID-19, policies surrounding gain-of-function, research, the impacts of lockdowns and other government policies, including school closures, and “vaccine and therapeutic development and the subsequent mandates.”
“We are here to deliver an after-action review of the past three years,” said Wenstrup. “To learn from the past, not just what went wrong, but what was done right, and to prepare for the future. This is work that must be done, must be done thoroughly, and must be done with reverence with an eye toward the truth and based on facts.”
The experts who testified included Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., professor of medicine at Stanford University; Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Marty Makary, M.D., M.P.H., chief of islet transplant surgery and professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University; and Georges C. Benjamin, M.D., M.A.C.P., executive director of the American Public Health Association.
In introducing the experts, Wenstrup said they can “help us chart a path forward; to help us understand what policies went wrong and how we, as a country, can improve.”
Wenstrup cited examples like the vaccine mandates imposed by the Biden administration, ignoring natural immunity, the harm caused to elders forced into nursing homes, and the consequences of stopping in-person learning and implementing remote work, particularly in the public sector.
“The American people deserve to know and understand how and why these impactful decisions were made,” said Wenstrup. “Did we create unnecessary fear in some, and dangerous ambivalence in others?”
“At the end of this process, our goal is to produce a product, hopefully bipartisan, based on knowledge and lessons learned,” he stated.
Ranking member Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) focused on American lives lost during the pandemic, stating that it “was real and not a hoax” and “laid bare vulnerabilities and inequities in our public health infrastructure and our economy.”
“We need to understand the lessons, learn all the barriers of misinformation, disinformation, the politicization of this and avoid those for the fake of our nation, in order to save more lives,” Ruiz said.
Most of the witnesses shared critical words about the overall public health response to COVID-19, which Kulldorff described as “the worst public health mistakes in history.”
Makary said “public health officials have made many tragic mistakes during the pandemic,” including:
“Ignoring natural immunity, dismissing the lab leak as a conspiracy, closing schools, masking toddlers … pushing boosters for young people, bypassing FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] expert panel customary votes that we’ve been using for decades, telling people to wash their hands like crazy.”
Bhattacharya said:
“The American people deserve answers to fundamental questions about the pandemic. On what empirical basis were schools closed? Did public health decision-makers consider the harms of their policies as thoroughly as their putative benefits? Why did authorities ignore recovered immunity or failure of the vaccine to prevent disease transmission?”
“Scientists and people vehemently disagreed about the wisdom of lockdowns, school closures, vaccine mandates and discrimination and so much else,” he added. “There’s near-universal agreement that what we did failed.”
Benjamin, the only expert who was generally supportive of the overall public health response, said, “We must remember the limited information we had when we made those decisions … and also the fact that our knowledge base and science continues to evolve over time.”
He added, “We created a safe and effective vaccine by every standard that we understand safety and efficacy today, in record time.”
Wenstrup praised the quick development of vaccines, describing it as “amazing,” but added, “but we knew from the trials that even people that were vaccinated got COVID” and “we also knew that vaccines produce variants and we should be expecting that.”
Citing the early public health response focusing on COVID-19 at the expense of other patients and health issues, he said one of his constituents, an elderly man, had an operation for “a painful hernia” canceled, ultimately resulting in his death.
Several experts addressed this type of inflexibility. Makary said that while “public health officials are not wrong for making recommendations based on the knowledge that they had at the time … that’s not actually what happened.”
“They were wrong because they refused to evolve their positions as the data became abundantly clear,” he said.
Nursing home policies, hospital visitation restrictions ‘a human rights violation’
Kulldorff said one of the two “major failures” of the public health response was “the failure to properly and optimally protect older Americans,” including “nursing home residents.” He described “sending sick people to nursing homes” as “criminal.”
“We also didn’t protect older working-age Americans in their 60s and 70s, while the ‘laptop class’ was often working from home, whether they were in their 20s or 30s or 40s,” he said. “The way we dealt with the pandemic was the worst assault on poor people, working Americans, the middle class [since] segregation and the Vietnam War.”
Kulldorff, who along with Bhattacharya helped draft the “Great Barrington Declaration” on “the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies,” said that when the group “proposed very concrete things for how to better protect older Americans” they were “slandered.”
Bhattacharya, in turn, said “the public health establishment … abandoned an essential commitment to science” in “sending COVID-19-infected patients back to nursing homes.”
Experts also addressed broader restrictions on hospital visitation during the pandemic. “To date, no randomized controlled trial has been conducted … against the cruel and inhumane hospital visitation policies that prevented people from seeing their dying loved ones,” said Makary, who described this failure as “a human rights violation.”
‘A house of cards that’s now falling apart’
Several of Tuesday’s witnesses focused on pandemic lockdown policies.
According to Bhattacharya, “By early 2022, about 95% of Americans had contracted COVID, despite the harsh countermeasures in most states.”
Bhattacharya described the policies as a “widespread violation of civil liberties.” He referenced a “Johns Hopkins University meta-analysis [finding] that lockdowns had failed to contain the spread of COVID.”
“At best, [lockdowns] temporarily protected the ‘laptop class’ who could work from home without losing their jobs, perhaps 30% of the population, while being served by the working class,” he added.
Kulldorff said such measures were themselves responsible for many deaths.
“Lockdown harms, school closures, people not going to medical visits … has killed many Americans and will continue to do so in the next few years,” he said, adding that “the lockdowns had enormously negative consequences on public health.”
For example, screening and treatment on cardiovascular disease and other ailments “plummeted,” Kulldorff said.
“The pandemic response is a house of cards that’s now falling apart,” he added.
Several of the experts focused on school closures, with Kulldorff stating, “I don’t think there’s anybody left who thinks that school closures were a good idea.”
Bhattacharya said school closures helped create “tremendous collateral harm” and “have set kids behind in ways that will lead them to worse outcomes as adults, including shorter, poorer lives.”
Mandates ‘ignored clear scientific data’
Bhattacharya questioned why “public health authorities ignore[d] clear scientific data that COVID infection [and] acquired immunity is as strong or stronger than vaccine-acquired immunity.”
“Vaccine mandates forced many frontline workers … to choose between their careers and a vaccine that provides less protection than the natural immunity they already had,” he said.
According to Makary, “Young healthy people were essentially spared from this pandemic,” with “an infection fatality rate no worse than influenza.” However, he said, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) denied knowledge of studies confirming these findings.
Benjamin said, “We were all kind of surprised the kids did kind of well,” although “there were some children that got … multisystem inflammatory syndrome.”
Defending the COVID-19 vaccines, Benjamin said:
“We have learned that if you do get native infection — meaning you aren’t immunized [and get infected], and then if you get vaccinated — you have a really, really, really robust response, and that’s great science and I’m glad we’re learning about that.”
Makary took a different view, saying, “The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government” when it claimed “vaccinated immunity was far greater than natural immunity” and that “masks were effective.”
Makary referred to the recently published Cochrane meta-analysis showing that masks did not prevent the spread of COVID-19 while pointing out that myocarditis is “four to 28 times more common after the vaccine” but that the government has said “young people benefit from a booster.”
Kulldorff referred to the example of Sweden, describing it as the “one Western country who did very well during the pandemic” and that had “mostly voluntary measures” and a “very light approach,” instead of lockdowns and mandates.
“Sweden, together with other Scandinavian countries, [had] the least excess death in the world,” said Kulldorff.
Prompted by Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, M.D. (R-Iowa), who said, “It wasn’t until I came to Congress that I found out infection-acquired immunity was a novel concept,” Kulldorff stated, “I guess we knew about it since 430 B.C., the Athenian Plague, until 2020, and then we didn’t know about it for three years, and now we know about it again.”
Makary said that since the time of the Athenian Plague, natural immunity had been observed, “and yet it was considered a conspiracy theory or something we couldn’t trust or believe in because we didn’t know the long-term protection. Well, we didn’t know the long-term protection of the vaccines either.”
“There has not been recognition that there is immunity after having had an infection,” said Kulldorff. There “was never a reason to mandate that vaccine for people that all had COVID. There was recently a study of mass vaccinations that shows [they] had zero or very little benefit.”
Benjamin, however, argued that in terms of natural immunity, “We generally don’t do that in medicine, particularly when we have a therapeutic option that will prevent it.”
“Many faced with these anti-scientific choices will never trust public health authorities again,” Bhattacharya said. “Public health bureaucrats operated more like dictators than scientists during the pandemic, sealing themselves off from credible outside criticism.”
As a result, said Bhattacharya, “I’ve seen a rise in vaccine hesitancy for essential vaccines like measles [and] DPT,” describing this as “quite alarming.”
Kuldorff concurred. “By forcing children to have a vaccine that they don’t need because they’ve already had the disease, that undermines the trust in other vaccines,” he said, characterizing this as “very, very serious.”
“It’ll take decades to restore some of this damaged trust” in public health authorities, added Makary.
Kulldorff said, “These failures are due to abandonment of basic principles of public health,” including an exclusive focus on one disease at the expense of all others, and “trying to suppress or eradicate COVID, which was impossible.”
Makary asked, “Why do we have the same policies for everybody?” He noted the “biases” of COVID-19 policy decision-makers, whom he described as “a small, non-diverse, like-minded group making all the decisions, and they were HIV researchers” even though “in HIV, there’s no natural immunity.”
“CDC and the FDA and people at the NIH [National Institutes of Health] made up their mind before the trials were completed,” said Makary. “They decided babies were going to get vaccines before the study was done. And then [they] found no statistically significant difference in efficacy between the two groups and they just authorized it anyway.”
“Why are we even doing trials? Why do we even have an FDA?” asked Makary.
Where do scientists whose careers were destroyed go to get their reputations back?
Ruiz said, “We are still dealing with the long-term implications of this public health crisis,” citing “the spread of misinformation or disinformation” as having “undermined the American people’s trust in our nation’s public health institutions and in each other.”
Ruiz said “misinformation” and “disinformation” may “lead to non-compliance or failure of therapeutics where people are making decisions that put themselves and their families in harm’s way.” But most of the experts took a different view.
Bhattacharya said that “under the banner of combating misinformation, government health agencies use their power to collaborate with social media companies to control the public conversation about COVID science and policy,” noting that he was put on a “trends blacklist” by Twitter as a result, leading to his participation in a lawsuit against the Biden administration based on censorship claims.
“I personally have faced censorship,” Bhattacharya said, “from government sources during the pandemic, including … slander and denigration. You need to involve outside voices respectfully in order to get the full set of people … or else bad decisions will get made, just as they were during this pandemic,” he added.
Kulldorff referred to the Great Barrington Declaration, saying that when it was presented, he and its authors were “slandered instead of taking it seriously,” while Bhattacharya said there was “a media campaign to take down our proposal, which tens of thousands of doctors, epidemiologists and scientists endorsed.”
“Where do the scientists whose careers were destroyed … go to get their reputations back?” he asked.
While Benjamin claimed, “There are many people out there who have a large bullhorn who have made it worse,” he conceded that “nobody should be censored.”
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.
March 2, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, Human rights, United States |
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In the past few weeks, a series of analyses published by highly respected researchers have exposed a truth about public health officials during Covid: that much of the time, they were wrong – writes Dr. Marty Makary in the New York Post. He sets out “10 myths told by Covid experts — and now debunked”. Here are the first four.
Misinformation #1: Natural immunity offers little protection compared to vaccinated immunity
A Lancet study looked at 65 major studies in 19 countries on natural immunity. The researchers concluded that natural immunity was at least as effective as the primary Covid vaccine series.
In fact, the scientific data was there all along — from 160 studies, despite the findings of these studies violating Facebook’s ‘misinformation’ policy.
Since the Athenian plague of 430 BC, it has been observed that those who recovered after infection were protected against severe disease if reinfected.
That was also the observation of nearly every practicing physician during the first 18 months of the Covid pandemic.
Most Americans who were fired for not having the Covid vaccine already had antibodies that effectively neutralised the virus, but they were antibodies that the Government did not recognise.
Misinformation #2: Masks prevent Covid transmission
Cochrane Reviews are considered the most authoritative and independent assessment of the evidence in medicine.
And one published last month by a highly respected Oxford research team found that masks had no significant impact on Covid transmission.
When asked about this definitive review, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky downplayed it, arguing that it was flawed because it focused on randomised controlled studies.
But that was the greatest strength of the review! Randomised studies are considered the gold standard of medical evidence.
If all the energy used by public health officials to mask toddlers could have been channelled to reduce child obesity by encouraging outdoor activities, we would be better off.
Misinformation #3: School closures reduce Covid transmission
The CDC ignored the European experience of keeping schools open, most without mask mandates.
Transmission rates were no different, evidenced by studies conducted in Spain and Sweden.
Misinformation #4: Myocarditis from the vaccine is less common than from the infection
Public health officials downplayed concerns about vaccine-induced myocarditis — or inflammation of the heart muscle.
They cited poorly designed studies that under-captured complication rates.
A flurry of well-designed studies said the opposite.
We now know that myocarditis is six to 28 times more common after the Covid vaccine than after the infection among 16- to 24-year-old males.
Tens of thousands of children likely got myocarditis, mostly subclinical, from a Covid vaccine they did not need because they were entirely healthy or because they already had Covid.
Dr. Makary blasts the CDC for weaponising research by “putting out its own flawed studies in its own non-peer-reviewed medical journal, MMWR“.
“In the final analysis, public health officials actively propagated misinformation that ruined lives and forever damaged public trust in the medical profession,” he adds.
Worth reading in full.
March 1, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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Back in August of 2022, I wrote a piece on Pfizer’s Paxlovid approval. I talked about how the White House awarded Pfizer billions of taxpayer dollars before producing conclusive findings of safety or efficacy to the FDA.
In approving Paxlovid, the Biden White House and the FDA also seemed to deliberately ignore hundreds of clinical trials conducted on hundreds of thousands of patients detailing the established safety and efficacy of IVM and HCQ.
Like many other things the Biden White House implements, they force through a multitude of ideas, concepts and public health mandates which “seem” like they could work, but without the requisite conclusive scientifically obtained evidence that they will work.
On top of that, the White House doesn’t seem interested in learning. They repeat their mistakes in establishing America’s policies time and time again. Emergencies or not; there is no excuse for foregoing the scientific method (or using poor testing methodologies) thereby placing the Americans at risk – especially when it comes to public health.
Paxlovid is just one of dozens of examples of public health mendacity (too many to list here) pushed by the chaotic Biden White House and its ethically pliant partisan marionettes at the FDA. In the case of Paxlovid, not only was evidence of failure deliberately ignored; prospective testing methodologies were altered mid-trial to favor a positive outcome when it became apparent that the Paxlovid trial results would not meet their original endpoints. In fact, Pfizer had already opted to stop its Paxlovid trial, but then changed their minds after the FDA intervened via the White House.
Even worse: Its not the first time the FDA has forsaken science under Biden (I warned this would be a repeating theme in early 2021). Paxlovid was a failure, but the White House had foolishly already paid Pfizer $5.3 Billion in advance. Rather than admit failure and epic waste, the FDA then stepped in and with zero transparency, altered the established clinical trial parameters mid-trial to make Paxlovid’s findings seem better than they were. Pfizer then completed the trial, declared Paxlovid a success and the White House doubled-down on its $5.3 Billion investment, spending a sickening total of $10.6 Billion on Paxlovid.
That moral and scientific decision was approved by America’s insufferable, self-righteous taxpayer-funded civil servants who proclaim the left is “the party of science” and celebrated that when Biden was elected, “the adults are back in charge.”
“Following the science” is their tired jingle, but not their actual policy.
Even more outrageous were the number of nurses, pharmacists and physicians who witnessed – and fully recognized the scientific misconduct – but remained (and continue to remain) silent, inexplicably choosing to follow clinical recommendations from politicians, bureaucratic hospital administrators, mainstream news or social media. It is impossible to overstate the cowardliness, conformism and malpractice of these professionals in betraying their oaths to protect patients.
In reality, Americans still don’t have answers form the White House, FDA or any other HHS officials on:
1) The White House’s logic of purchasing $10.6 Billion of Paxlovid, and without concrete evidence of safety and effectiveness;
2) How many unused Paxlovid doses remain that will ultimately expire and be thrown away due to non-use, milder disease making it epidemiologically unnecessary;
3) Disclosure of the real-world incidence of “rebound” Paxlovid infections (which would be hard for drug safety epidemiologists to uncover because the White House, Pfizer and FDA have every reason in the world to under-report it, plus “rebound” is not an official [MedDRA] adverse event reporting term);
4) The current/historical prescribing and rates and other Paxlovid adverse event updates;
5) A full disclosure of communications with Pfizer, the White House and FDA officials with a scientifically legitimate explanation of why altered critical parameters of the Paxlovid were made mid-trial and in lieu of starting a completely new trial;
6) An official pharmacologic, mechanistic explanation of “Paxlovid rebound” ;
7) Why the Paxlovid trial was compared to placebo only, and had no IVM / HCQ / other comparator arms.
February 28, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | FDA, Joe Biden, United States |
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An interesting story was reported on Feb.26, 2023 by News 8 WTNH, New Haven, CT. They took the story down about 24 hours later but it is still available on EIN Presswire (click here).
“Nearly 500 people from Washington, Oregon and Idaho gathered at the Wenatchee Convention Center in Washington State on Saturday, January 28 to hear and share stories of…injuries and deaths from COVID shots and hospital protocols; careers upended and families torn apart by mandates; and numerous harms from closures of schools, businesses and churches.”
“Heart screening was available and conducted using multifunction cardiogram technology, or MCG, provided by HeartCARE Corp”
“we had the opportunity to perform Multifunction Cardiogram™ screens on a variety of participants…over half of those tested (16 of 30 people) (53%) had positive markers for myocarditis. Two of these were active duty US Military pilots.”
The rates of post COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis are much, much higher than what Public Health Authorities have admitted to (most will admit to about 1:5000).
There are two key studies on what the real rates of post COVID-19 vaccine heart damage may actually be:
- Prospective Thailand study of 202 boys showed 1:30 (7/202) boys ages 13-17 developed myocarditis or pericarditis within a week after 2nd dose of Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA (click here).
- Professor Christian Mueller, University Hospital Basel Switzerland conducted testing on 777 healthcare workers within a week after COVID-19 booster shot, and found increased troponinemia in 22/777 (1:35) that had no other cause other than the COVID-19 booster shot (click here)
“The actual incidence of post-vaccination myocardial lesions is 2.8% vs 0.0035% of myocarditis in retrospective studies (unvaccinated)”
“The incidence of myocardial lesions is 2.8% (1:35), or 800 times higher than the usual incidence of myocarditis (in unvaccinated)” the researchers add.
I believe myocarditis (heart inflammation) is responsible for vast majority of post COVID-19 sudden deaths that we are seeing now, and health authorities have intentionally downplayed the risk of myocarditis post COVID-19 vaccination.
They don’t want to conduct autopsies on sudden deaths now, because they don’t want us to know that the risk of post-vaccine myocarditis and sudden cardiac death was always much higher than what they admitted to publicly.
Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health admitted to a myocarditis risk of 1 in 5000 and he was lambasted by pharma-captured Ontario doctors who didn’t want any truth to be known (click here)
But both the Thailand study and Swiss study suggest a myocarditis risk of 1:30 or 1:35 per vaccine dose. That means 3% of all COVID-19 vaccinated people could be walking around with heart inflammation (myocarditis) they don’t know they have, which puts them at increased risk for sudden cardiac death, during exercise or in the early morning hours (the trigger for sudden cardiac death is a surge of stress hormones).
The Washington event cardiac testing was not scientific and 53% of people walking around with myocarditis seems very unlikely. But it raises a crucial question.
WHAT IF the risk of post COVID vaccine myocarditis actually increases with time?
As reported by Dr.Peter McCullough, we know that spike protein circulates at least 28 days after injection, and gets delivered to the heart during that time (click here).
The Thailand and Swiss studies tested people only within the 1st week after COVID-19 vaccination and 3% had heart inflammation or heart damage.
What if this gets worse as time goes by? What if the risk of myocarditis actually increases from 3% because the spike protein which inflames the heart continues to circulate for 28 days after injection and probably even longer?
That is what this Washington public cardiac testing is suggesting.
I am also concerned about those 2 pilots with inflamed hearts.
February 28, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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Data continues to emerge according to which not only were the mRNA shots ineffective at preventing infection and transmission of COVID-19, but they may have caused widespread harm to persons cajoled or coerced into undergoing vaccination, despite their own relative invulnerability to the worst effects of the virus. Anecdotal cases abound, but diehard regime narrative devotees continue to dismiss such “incidents”—thousands of which are recorded in the government’s own VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System) database—as purely coincidental. It is more difficult to downplay reports involving entire cohorts, such as the increased incidence of myocarditis among young males, which the CDC itself has acknowledged. Some critics have suggested that a disproportionately high percentage of pregnant women in Pfizer’s initial trial of the shots suffered miscarriages.
Back in November 2021, in the midst of the widespread and aggressive “Vaccinate everyone!” campaign, I spoke with a woman in Oregon who matter-of-factly mentioned that her (vaccinated) daughter had suffered three recent miscarriages. Recognizing that it was too late to do anything anyway, given that the daughter had already been vaccinated, I did not dare to suggest that her troubles may have been caused by the shots she had no doubt been exhorted by her doctor to take. At that time, following the lead of CDC director Rochelle Walensky, health officials everywhere were in the midst of a marketing blitz according to which COVID-19 vaccination would protect mothers and their babies alike.
I said nothing to the woman in Oregon about the dangers of introducing foreign substances into pregnant women (although I had written about it), but I did naturally wonder at the time whether there might be a causal connection between the poor daughter’s miscarriages and the shots, given the biological activity of the spike protein already known to induce blood clotting and heart troubles. The mother of the young woman—who was pregnant again, for a fourth time—seemed optimistic that somehow there was nothing to worry about, even after three failed attempts to bring a baby into the world. It is possible, I realized then and continue to own, as I must, that the woman was simply unable, for unrelated reasons, to carry a child to term. But given that the biologically active spike protein is what the original virus used to access cells, and production of lots of it was induced by the injected mRNA, it would not take a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist to surmise that the pregnancies may have been sabotaged by the shots.
Critics such as feminist scholar Naomi Wolf, who early on in the pandemic raised questions about the shot’s safety, given many reports of irregular menstrual cycles in women who under went vaccination, were denounced as purveyors of misinformation and immediately deplatformed by the social media giants. Only recently have such “conspiracy theorists” been permitted to articulate their concerns in the public sphere once again—and only on some platforms, including Twitter, which to Elon Musk’s credit reinstated thousands of accounts shut down for the crime of deviating from the narrative favored by the pharma-government alliance. If the shots are indeed dangerous to fetuses, it is needless to say too late for all of the pregnant women tricked into believing that because the CDC insisted that there was no evidence of risk to them and their offspring, they should therefore roll up their sleeves.
That Pfizer knew all along that their mRNA shots had effects upon women’s hormonal systems was corroborated through Project Veritas’ sting operation involving a Pfizer research director, Jordon Triston Walker. In the recorded interview thought by him to be a friendly conversation with a date, Walker observed that the shots seemed somehow to be affecting the endocrine systems of women. The delicate hormonal balance needed to maintain a pregnancy suggests an immediate connection between the widely reported menstruation irregularities of women and the incidence of miscarriages in some of the initial trial subjects.
The data interpreted by some critics to imply that miscarriage was one of the many possible side effects of the Pfizer shot were made public only recently, with the release of a large trove of court-ordered documents which the company is now required by law to provide, despite its initial insistence that it would take seventy-five years to do so. Setting aside the question of whether miscarriage is in fact a side effect of the shots, the very idea that it would take so many years to make public the documents said to have served as the basis for the FDA’s (Food and Drug Administration’s) decision to grant the Pfizer product Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), so that it could forego the customarily stringent multi-year testing program required of pharmaceutical products more generally, struck many people as absurd.
To my mind, the situation constituted a classic Charybdis and Scylla. If it was humanly impossible to process and assess all of the data (all 451,000 pages of it) in the short period between the creation of the vaccines and December 11, 2020, when the EUA was granted, this could be taken to imply that the persons on the committee incompetently executed their role and indeed based their decision to approve the shots primarily on Pfizer’s obvious wish that they do so. Alternatively, it was always possible to process the documents for publication, and the company’s resistance to doing so was due to the content of the documents themselves, which might harm the ambitious sales program to vaccinate everyone on the planet with the new product.
The director of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, encouraged pregnant women from the beginning to get the shots, quite deceptively claiming that there was no cause for worry about possible health risks to fetuses. The safety information provided with the original shots itself indicated that pregnant women had been excluded from the initial trials, as they are for most pharmaceutical products. The reason why pregnant women are not included in early stage clinical trials of products intended for the general population is because they represent a special case, given the fragile chemical environment enveloping the fetus. It is a matter of common knowledge that developing human beings are highly sensitive to and often endangered by foreign substances—alcohol and nicotine being two well-documented examples. The vulnerability of fetuses was most notoriously and unforgettably demonstrated when pregnant women were prescribed Thalidomide on the basis of clinical trials which, again, excluded pregnant women. As in the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, Thalidomide was distributed by doctors under the misleading marketing line that there was no evidence that it would harm fetuses. Thalidomide killed thousands of babies and deformed thousands more before it was finally withdrawn from the market.
We now know from Pfizer safety data recently released that some of the women in the initial trial were in fact pregnant—apparently without having known that this was the case at the time, which was why they were not excluded from the trial. The vaccines may or may not have caused their reported miscarriages, but the fact that the CDC would encourage pregnant women, on the basis of nearly no data, to undergo vaccination betrays a reckless disregard and their true goals in injecting everyone everywhere, even members of low risk cohorts, with the mRNA treatment. Ignorance is bliss for pharmaceutical companies, which can continue to market and sell products for years, reaping billions of dollars of profits, before finally halting sales on the basis of widely reported and what come eventually to be undeniable post-launch problems, as in the cases of Vioxx, Belviq, Baycol, etc.
Above and beyond the profit motive was plausibly the desire to test the newfangled mRNA technology on the largest sample of human beings possible—whether or not they actually needed any treatment whatsoever in contending with COVID-19. Of course, if the desire on the part of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla and Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel was to make strides ahead in the research and development of other lucrative medications, then the quest for data, too, was ultimately driven by the profit motive—albeit looking forward, to future possible blockbuster drugs.
Certainly, the steadfast resistance, indeed, the outright refusal on the part of public health authorities such as Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, for more than a year after the launch of the COVID-19 vaccines, to acknowledge the relevance of natural immunity in those persons previously infected, and to recommend appropriate adjustments to the U.S. government’s mandates—for both health care workers and military personnel—supports the hypothesis that one of the overarching aims of the aggressive, relentless vaccine campaign was not to save the lives of the small percentage of human beings vulnerable to the virus, but to amass data.
Corroborating this interpretation, according to which the companies hoped not only to reap a windfall of profits but also to collect a huge amount of data, is the explanation by many critics (including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dr. Peter McCullough) of the assiduous suppression of any and every other therapeutic which the vaccine salespersons recognized would compete with and diminish the uptake of the newly patented products. Most importantly of all, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were dismissed and denounced by public health authorities, and ridiculed by parroting pundits throughout the media, because EUA cannot be granted to products when alternative therapies are available.
In his conversation with a Project Veritas reporter, Dr. Jordon Triston Walker also shared the potentially explosive piece of information that Pfizer executives had floated ideas such as mutating the COVID-19 virus so as to be able to develop vaccines preemptively. It was not entirely clear from Walker’s remarks whether the intention would be to release those mutated viruses so as to direct the course of the disease in populations, or simply to predict which variants would pop up on the scene naturally, through mutations of the virus in its effort to self-propagate by evading the antibodies induced by the latest shots.
Pfizer responded to the bombshell revelation by effectively minimizing the story through suggesting that the process described by their (now former, I presume) employee was essentially part of the normal, necessary research conducted in producing, for example, the flu shot each year. Nearly everyone by now is more or less aware that the flu shot is a gamble, involving researchers predicting which strains will be most prevalent and virulent. People who undergo inoculation against those versions may still fall ill because they may or may not come in contact with the predicted dominant strains. Some individuals report anecdotally that they were never more ill than during a year when they opted for the “free” flu shot, which clearly indicates that they encountered versions of the pathogen not expected by the researchers who determined the ingredients for the products distributed during that particular flu season. Unsurprisingly, neither anecdotal reports, nor adverse effects, nor even consistently poor efficacy rates have deterred pharmaceutical firms from pushing for widespread uptake of their mediocre flu shot products in very public and misleading advertising campaigns fronted by government health authorities.
Needless to say, if the intention of Pfizer in mutating the COVID-19 virus was to release it into the human population in order to induce countless numbers of persons to seek protection by purchasing (or obtaining from their government) the “vaccine” developed in order to stop that strain, then that would constitute a flagrant violation of any decent person’s basic sense of ethics. Such a possibility would moreover, and disconcertingly, be taken by some to accrue a degree of plausibility to the conspiratorial notion according to which the original COVID-19 virus was not only a gain-of-function product, created by researchers in a lab, but also intentionally released into the world in order to initiate The Great Reset being promoted by members of the World Economic Forum (WEF), led by Klaus Schwab.
More plausible, I believe, is that Pfizer and Moderna, et al., are primarily focused on the future of their other new mRNA products in the works. It is not at all far-fetched to surmise that the relentless, divisive push to vaccinate everyone everywhere with the first mRNA treatment ever tested on a population of human beings, made possible only by the FDA’s EUA, was spearheaded by companies with much broader goals in mind. The CEOs of these companies have publicly vaunted their plans to use mRNA to cure cancer and other intractable diseases, which in fact best explains their manifest fervor to acquire as much data as possible, by all means necessary. Such a program, albeit less explicitly heinous than creating illnesses in order to be able to sell patented cures for the symptoms caused by them, nonetheless involved using all of the people coerced into undergoing treatments for which they had no need as the means to the companies’ mercenary ends.
Further evidence for this admittedly unsavory interpretation can be seen in the push to vaccinate children, even infants, despite the minimal danger posed to them by the COVID-19 virus. If, in reality, the chances of a child dying from COVID-19 is less than the chance of their being hit by a bolt of lightning, then it is hard to see why anyone would push for uptake under a public health pretext. Yet those who wish to foist the product on young persons, including infants, have continued to press the line according to which the virus poses a serious health risk to everyone, and the vaccine will help to protect children along with their parents, this despite data according to which the protection provided by the shots, even to the vulnerable persons who might be said to benefit, plummets to nothing after only a few months. (Preposterously enough, according to one recent study at the Cleveland Clinic, in the longterm, the more shots one has received, the greater become one’s chances of contracting COVID-19!)
A second reason why children have been important for the product companies is peculiar to the United States, where the PREP Act (Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act) protecting companies from liability in the event of adverse effects covers any product approved as a part of the child immunization schedule. Demonstrating their complete capture by pharmaceutical industry forces, on February 9, 2023, the CDC added the COVID-19 shots to the long list of those recommended in the childhood vaccination schedule (which now includes dozens of shots), thus ensuring the product companies massive profits for years to come through the inoculation of persons not at significant risk from the virus, using a product whose already nearly negligible protective capacity for invulnerable persons (a risk reduction of ~1%—or less) spans less than a few months.
Unbelievably enough, the new CDC recommendation for children (beginning at six months) includes the original COVID-19 vaccine, though the wild strain of the virus may no longer exist, along with booster shots, for which the only clinical trial on human beings is currently underway—on the millions of persons who rolled up their sleeves on the basis of safety data gathered from only animal trials. The results are trickling in on the first-round of “bivalent” booster shots, which have so far been demonstrated to have only middling (30%) efficacy in preventing infection by the variant they are attended to address. But the virus will continue to mutate, thus serving as the pretext for producing new booster formulas. This implies that, under the CDC’s immunization guidelines, each new booster shot will of necessity constitute yet another experimental trial, to be conducted, shockingly enough, upon children throughout the years of their development into adults. In other words, children have been set up to serve as test subjects (i.e., human guinea pigs) for each newly developed “booster” to follow in the future as the virus continues to mutate, despite the fact that they make up the least vulnerable cohort of them all.
Why should “vaccines” which do not offer longterm immunity to anyone and are not even necessary for children—the CDC itself explicitly claims that most children will experience only mild symptoms from COVID-19—be included in the battery of time-tested vaccines such as those against polio, measles, etc.? Along with the desire to sell products, and to be able to test new products on children, is, again, scandalously enough, the fact that the CDC’s addition of the mRNA shots to the children’s immunization schedule protects the manufacturers in perpetuity from lawsuits, even after the State of Emergency has ended. President Biden has announced that the State of Emergency will be lifted on May 11, 2023, two months after the CDC added the COVID-19 shots to the children’s immunization schedule.
Because state and local officials follow the cues of the CDC, we can expect to see its recommendation for childhood inoculation by the COVID-19 shots swiftly transformed into mandates for public school children in states throughout the country. This will likely happen in places such as Massachusetts, California, and New York, where health authorities have persisted in retaining laws which restrict the behavior of residents even as new data continues to refute the erroneous premises widely embraced by officials in the spring of 2020 regarding masks, social distancing, etc. Although states such as Florida rescinded the COVID-19 emergency laws, and have passed legislation to protect children, the fact remains: with the federal level CDC recommendation in place, the product companies will retain their protection from future litigation arising from adverse effects, even if the data currently being collected and analyzed eventually demonstrate widespread harm to either children or adults.
It would be a mistake to judge corporations by the moral standards appropriate to individual persons. Corporations are beholden only to their stockholders, and their sole goal is to maximize profit. But the spokespersons for such companies are themselves individual human beings, as are all of the authorities representing public health organizations whose ostensible raison d’être is to protect members of society, not to maximize the profits of their sponsors. When institutions such as the FDA are coopted by mercenary forces, they cease to perform the function which citizens are depending upon them to execute. Because this already happened in the case of the opioid crisis, the fact that people fell for the trick once again in the case of the COVID-19 “vaccines” is best and perhaps only explained by the fearmongering campaign used to psychologically traumatize them to the point where they lost all critical bearings and agreed to undergo an experimental treatment of which most of them had no need.
Every healthy, nonobese person under the age of seventy who underwent COVID-19 vaccination was deceived into serving as a pro bono experimental subject in a pharmaceutical product trial. That millions of well-meaning parents, believing that they are doing the right thing, will on the basis of the CDC’s addition of the COVID-19 shots to the children’s immunization schedule, enroll their progeny in an entire series of such experimental trials, using substances never before tested on human beings, is nothing less than tragic.
Laurie Calhoun is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique, in addition to many essays and book chapters.
February 27, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, Moderna, Pfizer, United States, WEF |
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It can be difficult to keep up with the CDC’s ever-changing COVID-19 booster recommendations, but what is consistent is that the number and frequency of boosters are continually increasing and data supporting these recommendations keeps decreasing. At one point, even mainstream media called out the CDC for the lack of data for these recommendations.
To pin down the CDC on one of its recommendations, in April 2022, ICAN asked the CDC to produce its data that support the efficacy of COVID-19 boosters for 12-49 year olds. The response? Shocking.
The CDC admitted that “A search of our records failed to reveal any documents pertaining to your request.” None. Not one record. Not one study. This means the CDC did not have any data to back up its claims or recommendations for boosters in this age group.
For anyone that has looked at the data regarding boosters, the CDC’s response is unsurprising because study after study shows that repeated boosters increase the chances of contracting COVID-19 disease. For example, as a recent Cleveland Clinic study showed (see Figure 2 in the study), the chances of contracting COVID-19 increase with each additional dose of COVID-19 vaccine.
The above is another piece of evidence in ICAN’s snowballing work to hold our “health” agencies accountable for every unsupported recommendation and false claim made to the public.
See below for more instances where ICAN uncovered “health” agencies making unsupported claims to the public:
February 27, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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The agency must have told some truths, but it’s hard to identify those statements.
Substack All-Star Igor Chudov just published another important article. This article asks if the CDC was lying all along about “vaccine effectiveness?”
My question (and it’s a serious one) is this: Can someone name ONE pronouncement of CDC officials that either wasn’t a lie or of highly-dubious veracity?
Per my assessment, the CDC and other national public health agencies and their key experts …
Lied about there being no evidence of early cases in America.
Lied when they said there was no possibility this virus leaked from a lab.
Lied about the effectiveness of masks.
Lied when they said the virus could be spread on physical surfaces.
Lied when they said it would take only two weeks to “flatten the curve.”
Lied when they said that virus transmission could easily happen outside.
Lied about the stats of “cases” and “deaths.”
Lied about the mortality risk to children and healthy young adults.
Lied about ivermectin and HCQ being worthless drugs for treatment.
Lied about remdesivir being a safe drug.
Lied about the vaccines being “safe and effective.”
Lied when they labeled these shots as “vaccines.”
Lied about the “vaccines” and boosters preventing “severe” cases and deaths.
Lied about the necessity or importance of testing people (including the asymptomatic) over and over.
Lied when they attacked and sought to censor people who were telling the truth.
Lied when they “adjusted” estimates of ILI in the Flu Season of 2019-2020 … to make it seem this flu season did not produce “widespread” and “severe” ILI (Covid?) outbreaks.
Before Covid, lied about the effectiveness of the flu vaccines.
Do liars continue to lie? Will liars lie again?
Do liars often try to cover-up their lies?
Do liars in positions of great power often attack people who try to expose their lies?
Is it smart to continue to trust proven or known liars?
How many lies does some person or agency have to tell before people start to realize they are listening to a liar?
February 27, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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The Global Warming Policy Foundation has today published its periodic review of hurricane activity around the world. The author, climate writer Paul Homewood, says that official data is absolutely clear: they are not getting worse. Indeed, there is some evidence that they are less active in recent years.
Homewood says:
“2021 and 2022 recorded the lowest number of both hurricanes and major hurricanes globally for any two year period since 1980, and this comes against long-term hurricane activity trends that are essentially flat.”
And Homewood calls on journalists to start reporting these undisputed facts to the public:
“While scientists are quite clear that we are not seeing a dramatic increase in hurricanes, or even any increase at all, the public have been conned into thinking that tropical storms are getting worse. It’s high time the mainstream media came clean and told people what is really going on.”
Executive summary
It is widely believed that hurricanes are getting worse as a consequence of climate change. This belief is fuelled by the media and some politicians, particularly when a bad storm occurs. This belief is reinforced because the damage caused by hurricanes is much greater nowadays, thanks to increasing populations in vulnerable coastal areas and greater wealth more generally.
But is this belief correct, or is it a misconception? This study has carefully analysed official data and assessments by hurricane scientists, and finds:
• 2021 and 2022 recorded the lowest number of both hurricanes and major hurricanes globally for any two year period since 1980.
• The apparent long-term increase in the number of hurricanes since the 19th century has been due to changes in observational practices over the years, rather than a real increase.
• Data show no long-term trends in US landfalling hurricanes since the mid-19th century, when systematic records began, either in terms of frequency or intensity.
• Similarly, after allowing for the fact that many hurricanes were not spotted prior to the satellite era, there are no such trends in Atlantic hurricanes either.
• Globally there are also no trends in hurricanes since reliable records began in the 1970s.
• Evidence is also presented that wind speeds of the most powerful hurricanes may now be overestimated in comparison to pre-satellite era ones, because of changing methods of measurement.
• The increase in Atlantic hurricanes in the last fifty years is not part of a long-term trend, but is simply a recovery from a deep minimum in hurricane activity in the 1970s, associated with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.
These findings are in line with those of hurricane scientists generally, as well as official bodies such as NOAA and the IPCC.
Paul Homewood: The 2022 Hurricane Season (pdf)
February 27, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science |
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The catastrophisation of natural events and weather is relentless across the mainstream media as populations continue to be nudged towards an elitist command-and-control Net Zero future. The BBC recently copied a headline from the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) claiming Antarctica sea ice had hit a “new record low”. Inexplicably missing from the story was the later observation from the NSIDC that since accurate satellite records began in 1979, the trend in the minimum ice extent is “near zero”. Any loss was said to be “not statistically significant”.
To be fair to the writer, BBC science correspondent Jonathan Amos, he did report later in the story that scientists consider the behaviour of Antarctica sea ice to be a “complicated phenomenon which cannot simply be ascribed to climate change”. Of course, as regular Daily Sceptic readers are aware, the Antarctic is a difficult hunting ground for climate catastrophists since over the last seven decades there has been little or no warming over large areas of the continent.
According to a recent paper (Singh and Polvani), the Antarctica sea ice has “modestly expanded”, and warming has been “nearly non-existent” over much of the ice sheet. According to NASA figures, the ice loss is 0.0005% per year. Down at the South Pole, even the most inventive climate alarmists are defeated. In 2021 it recorded its coldest six-month winter since records began, and last year the temperature was 0.4°C colder than the average over the last 30 years. In addition, the Pole recorded no less than seven new daily temperature lows.
The map above shows some warming in the western part of Antarctica, and it is to this area that climate warriors return – again and again. The day before his sea ice story was published, Amos ran with a routine BBC house scare about the Thwaites glacier, often known in green circles as the ‘Doomsday Glacier’. Amos states that glaciers such as Thwaites located in the west may be more sensitive to changes in sea temperature than was thought. “Its susceptibility to climate change is a major concern to scientists because if it melted completely, it would raise global sea levels by half a metre,” he said.
Many of the problems surrounding the unproven hypothesis of human-caused global warming is that it often fails to correlate with observable reality. Why would well-mixed atmospheric carbon dioxide produce a relative warm spot in Antarctica, but leave the rest of the vast continent in a static deep freeze? In 2017, scientists discovered 91 volcanoes in the West Antarctica Rift System. It brought the number of volcanoes discovered in the area to 138. Their heights ranged from 300 to 12,600 feet, with the tallest as high as Mount Fuji in Japan. The scientists noted that even dormant volcanoes can melt ice because of the high temperature they generate. “Volcanic activity may increase and this, in turn, may lead to enhanced water production and contribute to further potential ice-dynamical instability,” the scientists stated.
Again, to be fair to Amos, he does consider other causes of Antarctica ice stability, although the article is headlined “climate change”. His reporting is mercifully free of the emotional gushings produced by the BBC’s green activist-in-residence Justin Rowlatt. When Rowlatt flew to the area, he witnessed “an epic vision of shattered ice”. To him, the Antarctic is the “frontline of climate change”. Amos does note that Thwaites, a glacier the size of Florida, has retreated in some places by 14 km since the late 1990s. But such movement does not seem unusual. Recently a group of oceanographers discovered that parts of Thwaites had retreated at twice the rate in the past, when human-caused CO2 could not have been a factor. The retreat could have occurred centuries ago, and is said to have been “exceptionally fast”.
Meanwhile, research has just been published that indicates Antarctica could have been warmer in the recent past from 7,000 to 500 years ago. This type of research is always interesting since it helps debunks a common claim made by alarmists that current temperatures are the highest over the last three million years. But numerous scientific studies have shown that temperatures across the planet have been much warmer for recent periods in the Holocene. This latest study in Antarctica found remains of elephant seals along the Victoria Land Coast of the Ross Embayment, which borders both the West and East Antarctic ice sheets. These days, the area is largely free of elephant seals because of shelves of permanent sea ice frozen to the beaches. It is suggested that seals were able to occupy the beaches in a period of warmth before extensive sea ice pushed them off the present day coast.
“Our work shows that for much of the Holocene, the Ross Sea was less icy and presumably warmer than it is today, and this warmth may have driven retreat of the West Antarctica ice sheet from the Ross Sea during the last 8,000 years, and future warming could continue to push ice retreat,” conclude the researchers.
For climate alarmists, the ice is the gift that keeps on giving – every day is a “new record low”.
February 27, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | BBC |
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Today’s climate disinformation from the BBC:
Scotland is one of the first countries in the world to stump up cash for “loss and damage” caused by climate change in poorer countries.
When torrential rains came to the village of Mambundungu in Malawi, people’s homes were washed away but that was not the worst of it.
The flood waters were infested with crocodiles. Children were carried away by them. It was terrifying.
Eventually, in 2015, the villagers couldn’t take any more and moved their entire community to higher ground.
Then the new village began to flood too.
Malawi in southern Africa has been hard hit by the effects of climate change
But it is one of the poorest countries in the world and struggles to pay for the measures needed repair the damage.
That’s where the Scottish government has stepped in, promoting the notion that rich nations should help pay for the damage from climate change in less developed countries.
There is naturally no evidence provided of just how these floods are caused by climate change. (Well this is the BBC – what do you expect?)
And if you look at the three long running weather stations in Malawi, no evidence exists that daily rainfall extremes are increasing:
So why do these floods appear to be getting worse? There is a very simple reason – deforestation.
According to the BBC themselves:
As we know, deforestation leads to increased rainfall runoff, siltation and floods down valley.
The World Resources Institute studied the problem in 2017, writing:
Nearly a year ago, the New York Times ran a devastating story about the deforestation crisis in Malawi and its impact on residents of Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital city. Illegal cutting of nearby forests was causing water shortages and disrupting the city’s hydroelectric power supply, forcing the government to deploy soldiers to protect the forests. The root of this problem was Malawi’s dependence on wood for meeting energy needs―more specifically, charcoal. Nearly 97 percent of Malawian households depend on wood or charcoal for cooking or heating. Even in urban areas, 54 percent of households use charcoal (a product of wood) for cooking. But there are only so many trees.
Malawi is one of the poorest countries in Africa, where electricity is an uncommon luxury and subsistence farming is the norm. With seemingly few options and climate change adding uncertainty, the situation depicted in the New York Times article seemed hopeless.
Instead of blubbering on about climate change, maybe the Scottish government should be helping Malawi to build a reliable electricity grid, based on fossil fuels.
February 27, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science |
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