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Major German Newspaper Reports Pfizer-BioNTech Fraud

eugyppius: a plague chronicle | February 18, 2023

Pfizer enrolled 44,000 people across 270 clinical sites in the phase 3 clinical trials for the Pfizer/BioNTech Comirnaty vaccine. The largest of these sites by far was number 1231 in Buenos Aires, under the direction of the pediatric infectious diseases specialist Fernando Polack. The Argentine operation appears to have been plagued by substantial irregularities and is the subject of an ongoing inquiry by the Argentinian parliament.

Yesterday, Welt reporter Elke Bodderas published a report shedding further light on what appear to be systematic efforts to cover up or reclassify adverse events among trial participants.

The centrepiece of their reporting is patient number 12312982, a 36 year-old Buenos Aires resident named Augusto Roux, who participated in the vaccine arm of the trial and experienced significant adverse reactions following both doses of the vaccine. His most severe symptoms followed the second jab; they included shortness of breath, nausea, fever and darkened urine, and required hospitalisation. Throughout both sets of reactions, he tested negative for Covid. A trial doctor judged his symptoms very likely to be an adverse reaction to vaccination, and there are compelling reasons to think he suffered pericarditis. Roux promptly dropped out of the trial, and his lawyers succeeded in gaining access to internal Pfizer records his case. These reveal that Buenos Aires researchers recorded Roux as testing positive for Covid following dose 1, despite multiple negative PCR tests. To cover for his September hospitalisation, meanwhile, they listed him as suffering from a “severe anxiety attack.”

Welt finds other irregularities in data from the the Argentine clinical site as well. Following the first dose at the end of August, they removed 53 trial participants; internal documents give nothing but vague, contradictory excuses for the purge. Following the second dose, Buenos Aires researchers removed a further 200 participants – two-thirds of all removals across the entire trial.

Irregularities appear to extend beyond the shady Buenos Aires operation. As a friend notes on Twitter, the fact that there were more deaths in the vaccine than the placebo arm of the Pfizer trial has always been considered an awkward coincidence by the fact checkers. Upon closer examination, though, it begins to look like deaths from severe vaccine injuries were actually what put the vaccine arm over the top:

[Pharmacology expert and head of the “Data Based Medicine” network and the vaccine injury support organisation React-19] David Healy has … questions about the trial beyond the Augusto Roux case and other events at Buenos Aires. He wonders about a total of 21 vaccine group deaths that are said to be “not due to vaccination.” In at least two of these deaths, this conclusion doesn’t seem to be fully justified. WELT has documents showing that patient No. 11621327 was found dead in his home three days after the second dose, apparently a stroke. Patient No. 11521497 died 20 days after vaccination, diagnosed with cardiac arrest. “According to the current understandings, these two cases would be attributed to vaccination,” says Berlin-based pharmaceutical specialist Susanne Wagner, “especially since the US health authority CDC is currently investigating strokes in vaccinated people and it is known that blood clots can trigger sudden deaths following vaccination.”

In response to Welt inquiries, Pfizer responded that “Regulatory authorities around the world have approved our Covid-19 vaccine. These approvals are based on a robust and independent assessment of the scientific data on quality, safety, and efficacy, including the phase 3 clinical trial.” Thomas Mertens, head of the German vaccine regulator STIKO, demanded clarification from Pfizer, while the Berlin Charité immunologist Andreas Radbruch suggested the pharmaceutical should be sanctioned to preserve faith in vaccination and trust in regulators.

I doubt very much that will happen.

February 18, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Mainstream Media Continues To Push False ‘COVID Heart’ Narrative To Explain Excess Deaths

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | February 17, 2023

CBS joins the chorus of mainstream media outlets promoting the false narrative that covid is the cause of a sharp increase in excess heart failure deaths around the world. The concept of “covid heart” has been thoroughly debunked by multiple studies, yet the lie continues to persist because of media disinformation.

An early report that set in motion fears of a Covid-heart disease connection was published in JAMA Cardiology on July 27, 2020. German researchers claimed that 78% of recently recovered Covid-19 patients had “abnormal” signs on their cardiac magnetic resonance scans and 60% showed signs of inflamed heart muscle, a condition known as myocarditis. Those astonishing numbers were covered in nearly 400 news outlets. The report has so far been viewed more than 900,000 times — a rarity for academic papers.

Soon after its publication, however, the paper was criticized for statistical and methodologic errors. It eventually underwent a long but much quieter correction that indicated that many of the abnormalities were only marginally more common among those recovering from Covid-19 than among similar control individuals who had not had Covid-19.

The assertion of the existence of covid heart serves a useful purpose, however, as it conveniently helps to distract from the very real threat of myocarditis caused by mRNA vaccines.  Studies show a direct connection between covid vaccination, boosters, and risk of heart failure, specifically in younger people. The corporate media continues to ignore these studies in favor of the covid heart claim.

The CBS report presents a correlation as proof of causation: The explosion in heart failure happened in parallel with the pandemic, therefore, they say it “must be covid” that is causing the damage. But there was one other event that also happened in parallel with the heart failure spike – The introduction of experimental mRNA vaccines which have never been used before.

In reality, there is no evidence of a significant increase in risk of heart problems from contraction of covid, and there are no studies yet that use unvaccinated people as a control group to determine if vaccines help or hurt a patient’s chances. Medical officials simply assume that the deaths of younger people are due to them being “less likely” to have been vaccinated. The complete absence of objective scientific analysis has contributed to a lack of understanding surrounding covid risks versus vaccine risks. Mainstream outlets have consistently proven they are only interested in repeating establishment positions and protecting the status quo.

Why don’t medical authorities use unvaccinated people as a control group for their observations? Why do they continue to promote assumptions rather than definitive evidence?  One can only theorize, but this behavior suggests a desire to hide certain findings and mislead the public rather than uncover the facts.

 

February 18, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , | Leave a comment

The MSM Never Was Objective—and It Never Questioned Power, Either

BY IAIN DAVIS | THE DISILLUSIONED BLOGGER | FEBRUARY 18, 2023

In his excellent exposé of the recent decision by the Knight-Cronkite News Lab (KCNL) to advocate journalism that goes beyond objectivity, and in light of the report from the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) confirming that RussiaGate was fabricated nonsense, genuinely independent researcher, writer and filmmaker James Corbett made a number of very salient points.

As Corbett points out:

As a moment’s sober reflection will immediately reveal, the mouthpiece mockingbirds of the controlled establishment media have never been objective and they have no credibility to damage.

But there is far more to this particular psyop than merely covering up the inconvenient history of media. The new narrative, sold to us in this instance by both KCNL and the CJR, is laying the foundations for a transformation of the media landscape.

The establishment wants us to believe that our “trust” in journalism is a vital component of our democracy—and, moreover, that the state can determine which news media organisation is deserving of our “trust.”

In truth, if democratic principles really matter to us, it is essential that we never trust any “news reports” from any journalist or news provider. Democracy places a duty upon us to be fierce critical thinkers. We should never unquestioningly accept anything we are told.

Journalism Is Story Telling

Every mainstream media (MSM) and “alternative media” outlet presents narratives. They are in the business of telling stories, not simply presenting “objective” facts.

Good journalism expresses an opinion and then cites the evidence that informs it. Well written journalism does this within the engaging and intriguing narratives it weaves. But no journalism is free from the journalist’s own conformation bias, and the tenor of the story is often directed by the editorial policy and allegiances of the publisher.

Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh’s recent investigation, in which he exposes the likelihood that the US government was behind the destruction of the Nord Stream II pipeline, is only available via independent outlets and on his own Substack. Despite this apparently being a story of enormous magnitude, the MSM seems extremely reluctant to bring it to wider attention. You can read about it only in the so-called “alternative media.”

While some MSM outlets report the official denial of Hersh’s piece, none have lent it much credibility, and many have been quick to cast aspersions on Hersh himself. Yes, the old game of attacking the messenger while avoiding the content of the message.

It is fair to say, based on the Hersh article alone, that no one can really verify his revelations in specific regard to Nord Stream II. He presents no evidence other than anecdotal accounts from unnamed sources. But nowhere in the MSM does there appear to be any interest in pursuing the needed investigation that Hersh’s piece demands.

Thus, it remains a piece of fantastic journalism, most notably because the very specific references it makes to orders given and operations undertaken during the BALTOPS22 exercise can be investigated. Detailed questions can be asked of officials. The blanket denials of Hersh’s story and his precise allegations are nowhere near enough to discredit it.

Given all the circumstantial evidence that also points towards US and NATO aligned culpability, his journalism—a great story—adds real fuel to the fire. This is real investigative journalism. That the story he presents in part reflects his own perspective is irrelevant.

The MSM Was Never Objective

One of the MSM’s main criticisms of the so-called “alternative media” is that it can often be described as activist journalism. This allegation implies that the perspective of the alternative news journalist biases their reporting. But such a criticism is itself a deception, because all journalism reports from a perspective.

There are basic commercial reasons why objectivity doesn’t suit journalism. Consumers of “news” don’t want to simply know what the facts are. They also want a steer on the broader implications of those facts. If that reaffirms their existing world view, all the better for sales. We all want to believe we are right and not be constantly reminded that we are probably wrong.

This is why very few Guardian readers also read the Daily Telegraph or Sun readers the Mirror, even when the presented “facts” are essentially the same. We pay for the perspective we agree with, not simply an objective reporting of the facts.

It is science, not journalism, that strives to achieve absolute objectivity in its pursuit of empirical facts. But the problem with scientific objectivity, beyond its corruption, is that it tends to introduce immense complexity and can be extremely boring to read. It doesn’t lend itself well to stirring up emotions or selling media content.

Other than a few obsessive researchers and the scientists themselves, few of us actually want to read highly technical and sterile scientific papers. We rely upon the journals and the MSM to tell us what the science says, wrongly assuming that their reporting of it is “objective.”

Our faith in the MSM places us in a vulnerable position, especially when it comes to the reporting of hard facts, such as those supposedly revealed by science. If those same alleged “facts” then become the basis for justifying government policy and/or our own decisions, then we had better be damn sure that our belief in the veracity of the story is well-placed.

The evidence that the MSM doesn’t even report the facts accurately is overwhelming. The CJR has exposed RussiaGate as the politically motivated nonsense it was. But this rubbish was relentlessly spewed out on both sides of the Atlantic for more than a year—alongside the equally baseless Skripal yarn—by a majority of MSM outlets. The obvious propaganda was designed to illegitimately demonise the Russian government.

Video link

The CJR report demonstrates that today’s Western MSM is a mass purveyor of mis- and disinformation. We are presently regaled with highly spurious Ukraine war propaganda. This is the culmination of the Russophobic Western MSM agenda that has been building for many years.

The scene has seemingly been set, and we have all been psychologically prepared for the current conflict. This makes it easier for us to imagine that the Russians are our enemy.

State propaganda partnerships with the MSM are nothing new. Three examples quickly come to mind:

— British military intelligence were feeding senior broadsheet correspondents “stories” for decades, long before the MSM made up tales about WMD in Iraq to convince the public to accept a fake casus belli for the Iraq War.

— The Church Committee formally exposed the “Operation Mockingbird” network in the US in 1975. The CIA had been manipulating the reporting of the US MSM for many years, feeding selected operative journalists intel that they then reported as “objective journalism.”

— The Mockingbird Operation PBSuccess employed public relations guru Edward Bernays to use the media to overthrow the Guatemalan government on behalf of the United Fruit Company in 1954.

While proven MSM disinformation operations and campaigns, such as these, have purportedly been assigned to the annals of history, disinfo activity is manifestly ongoing. If anything, state control of the MSM narrative for propaganda purposes has reached heights that even Bernays couldn’t have imagined.

State propaganda has been privatised. Governments channel taxpayers’ money to their global corporate partners, which in turn pay the MSM to produce the desired disinformation. During the pseudopandemic we saw whole teams of behavioural scientists at the World Health Organisation global governance level and in various nations states “use” the MSM to unethically deploy applied psychology and disinformation to tackle what the establishment and its MSM hypocritically called “the infodemic.”

When Spi-B—the team of behavioural change experts within the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE)—recommended that the UK government should “use the media” to increase “the perceived level of personal threat” to convince British people that they were living through a pandemic, contrary to the evidence of their own eyes, the MSM dutifully obliged. They launched numerous corporate backed terror campaigns upon an unsuspecting public.

We are constantly told by the political class that “press freedom” is an essential part of our democracy. If the MSM really were a pluralistic and free media, it wouldn’t be possible to “use” it for propaganda. There would be too many dissenting articles by investigative MSM journalists to maintain a single, uniform narrative across all outlets simultaneously. But it isn’t a pluralistic and free media and never was, so it is entirely possible for the MSM to be co-opted. What does this say about our alleged democracy?

The so-called “infodemic,” identified by the World Health Organisation as being “just as dangerous” as an alleged global pandemic, included any and all information that questioned the diktats of our “democratic” policymakers. The MSM attacked all dissent—literally without question—on the behalf of governments and intergovernmental authorities and their corporate partners.

The infodemic, according to the establishment, was prompted by the public’s questions about government policy, about “science” as reported by the MSM, and about data that revealed statistical manipulation. The infodemic was also prompted by the MSM looking askance at sceptical scientific papers shared by people who dared question the reported “science” as well as at the millions of people who raised their voices in mass protests. These protests were either ignored by the MSM or the protestors views were distorted and their peaceful demonstrations labelled “extremist.”

There was nothing remotely “objective” about any of this mainstream “news coverage.” Rather, in total obedience to the state, the Western MSM attacked informed opinion, ridiculed all questions and demonised individuals who did not comply. Not because there was any justification for doing so, but because that is the role of the MSM. Objectivity is nowhere in sight, nor has it ever been.

The MSM Has Never Questioned Power

The Knight-Cronkite News Lab (KCNL) objective is to create a “set of standards for trustworthy news.” Indeed, maintaining the public’s “trust” is the overwhelming fixation of the MSM and its government partners. We are urged to place our faith in those who evidently lie to us and suppress facts all the time.

At one point the KCNL noted:

As early as the turbulent 1960s, some younger journalists, especially investigative reporters, began to question what objectivity really meant if it did not challenge power, privilege and inequality.

Similarly, the CJR report on RussiaGate states that “primary missions” of journalism include “informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable.”

We are told that “holding power to account,” or watchdog journalism, is the core principle of journalism. Yet nowhere in the International Federation of Journalists Charter of Ethics or in the UK National Union of Journalists Code of Conduct is there any mention of this alleged principle.

The American Press Association’s (APA) Principles of Journalism does say that journalism must serve as an independent monitor of power. But this “principle” speaks more about defending journalists’ alleged “rights” than it does about exposing any wrongdoing:

Journalism has an unusual capacity to serve as watchdog over those whose power and position most affect citizens. The Founders recognized this to be a rampart against despotism when they ensured an independent press; courts have affirmed it; citizens rely on it. As journalists, we have an obligation to protect this watchdog freedom by not demeaning it in frivolous use or exploiting it for commercial gain.

The APA’s watchdog principle is supposedly protected by the government and its courts. Yet it is not a “right,” but rather a permit bestowed upon American journalists by the establishment. This permit can be rescinded. The extent to which journalists in the US can question “power” is based solely on the protection that legacy journalism receives from the institutions it allegedly questions.

Demeaning something as frivolous is precisely what the MSM does when it labels people as conspiracy theorists, as science deniers or as COVID deniers. These attacks are rarely, if ever, based upon any exploration of the evidence. In fact, the labelling system itself is used to omit, obscure or “deny” the evidence.

All the APA’s principles mean is that certain subjects and certain kinds of evidence, characterised as “frivolous,” must not be reported by its members. What is or is not considered “frivolous” is entirely subjective. Given journalism’s legislative “protections,” it seems pretty clear what will be considered “frivolous.” A high degree of subjectivity, not objectivity, is the full extent of the APA members’ ethical commitment to “watchdog” journalism.

We only need look at the history we’ve discussed to understand that the news media barely and rarely holds power to account. Instead, the MSM is more frequently an extension of state and corporate power and is used to control the people through disinformation, omission and misdirection rather than to inform them and question power on their behalf.

This is not to say that good MSM journalism doesn’t exist. But, on those few occasions when MSM journalists do expose state crimes, they pay a terrible price for doing so. Julian Assange is among the small band of journalists who have dared to question power. He currently languishes in a British high-security prison precisely because he did so.

The MSM doesn’t question power when it deceives the public about chemical weapon attacks on behalf of the state. It isn’t holding power to account with its refusal to investigate, or even report, evidence of malfeasance in office. Its ignoring of state crimes can in no way be considered “watchdog freedom.” And it certainly does not act as any kind of watchdog when it simply reports whatever it is ordered to report by a centrally controlled global propaganda network.

We Are the Problem and the Solution

Social media has been lambasted for corralling its users into self-affirming information silos. While this is somewhat concerning, it isn’t anything new. The technological capability of social media to control opinion is an added dimension, to be sure, but the MSM has been doing exactly the same thing for more than a century.

Unfortunately, the MSM is able to propagandise us with relative ease. It does this partly by exploiting our own misconceptions. While we all seem to agree that the Russian and Chinese MSM are state propaganda, we Westerners, for some unknown reason, apparently imagine that our own mainstream media isn’t.

There is, however, a caveat with regard to this apparent gullibility. Research statistics show that there is a remarkable lack of trust in the MSM in the West. Notably, in the US “trust” in the news is as low as 26%. The UK fares little better, at just 34%. “Trust” in the news is higher in Scandinavian countries.

We only need have brief conversations with friends and family to realise that the propaganda does, in fact, work. But what explains this disconnect between our lack of trust in the MSM with our continuing willingness to believe what it tells us?

The answer lies in the greatest achievement of the Western MSM and the parasite class it serves: They have convinced us that our media is free and is pluralistic—this despite it never being true.

Consequently, it seems that while we are wary of spin and propaganda, we refuse to contemplate the likelihood that the MSM is out-and-out lying to us. Perhaps that is because we perceive the MSM as basically serving the public interest—even if we admit to ourselves that it bends the truth a little. In other words, our scepticism does not extend as far as disbelief.

We therefore remain unable to reconcile our credulous acceptance of MSM claims about itself with the reality that we are being misled en masse by that same institution. Cognitive dissonance—the uncomfortable psychological sensation we experience when we hold two or more contradictory thoughts at the same time—may account for our irreconcilable beliefs.

In other words, we are caught between not “trusting” the MSM, on the one hand, and, on the other, our inability to accept the fact that virtually nothing the MSM tells us is true. The implications of this dichotomy are beyond anything we want to contemplate. As a result, we still believe that “the news” is our window on the world.

If you think about it, the idea that all the important global events of the day can be condensed into a single “newspaper” or a 30-minute “evening news” broadcast is quite ridiculous. Even if it were composed of honest, unbiased reports, which it seldom is, “the news” cannot provide us with anything approaching a reasonable understanding of what is actually going on.

Therefore, if we genuinely want to know what’s happening, we have to actively seek information and critically evaluate it ourselves. As James Corbett wrote:

Granted, the realization that all media is constructed for us by someone with an interest in making us believe something is not a happy one for most people. Instead, it is a deeply unpopular realization, because it means we can’t just switch on the evening news, switch off our brain, and expect some totally neutral journalistic saviour to come along and hand us “the news” from on high.

Like it or not, it is our responsibility to think critically about all information, no matter who relays it. This responsibility applies equally to the stories we are fed by the “alternative media.” This article should be read critically! It is, after all, just information that’s being passed along to you.

The Knight-Cronkite News Lab suggests that journalists should give their “readers, viewers, listeners and users valuable information that helps them make better decisions and lead better lives.”

Here, the new breed of MSM journalists, no more nor less objective than their predecessors, has been given the task of reporting “the news” from a value-driven perspective. The aim is to change us by making us “better” people. So what are the values the new breed of journalists are being taught to advocate?

KCNL tell us:

There is broad consensus today about the reality of climate change and the threats that it poses. That may well inform how many resources a newsroom devotes to reporting on the issue as well as any point of view its stories reflect. The same might go for opposition to systemic racism, say, or support for LGBTQ rights. [. . .] One value we believe is worth stating out loud is support for democratic institutions, which are under attack on multiple fronts. Trustworthy news is essential to sustaining a healthy democracy.

Herein lies the problem. Every one of these “values” serves global political agendas and dovetails neatly with government policy and, perhaps most notably, with global governance policy. That is to say, the MSM’s new values are exactly the same as their old values. Their “new” objective, just like the old objective, is to advocate for power, not question it.

Contrary to the KCNL’s claims, democracy is not founded upon our acceptance of whatever we are told by government “institutions.” Rather, it is predicated upon our ability not just to question the state but to limit it. Thus, KCNL’s contention that a “healthy democracy” is one where “democratic institutions” assert sovereignty over us is entirely false.

To point out that these institutions have no authority over us whatsoever is not to attack “democracy.” On the contrary, doing so defends “democracy.” But you will never hear that from the MSM. The MSM’s continuing mission is to maintain the lies that ensure we never realise this “truth.”

It is ironic that the MSM attacks their alternative counterparts for advocacy journalism and yet the MSM’s own apparent solution to the trust issue that preoccupies it is to itself emulate advocacy journalism. The difference? The alternative media is far more likely to advocate the questioning of power, while the MSM looks set to continue advocating for power.

Seeing as how the concept of “news” is, in and of itself, absurd, the suggestion that news should be “trusted” simply adds another layer of misdirection to this new MSM advocacy journalism. So, if our “faith” in the stories we are told is part of the problem, a solution is self-evident. We should abandon any notion of “trust.” We should invest our efforts in being “better” critical thinkers.

The “alternative” media outlet UK Column sums up this point nicely. It asks:

Why should I trust the UK Column ? Put simply, you shouldn’t. The question of whether or not to trust a news organisation is a false choice. Making such a choice is promoted by government, the old media, and two new organisation types: the fact checker and the trust provider.

It disenfranchises readers, viewers and listeners. It is based on the principle that if you trust the media organisation you are visiting, there is no need for you to check the information they present. So we ask you not to trust us. Instead, view everything published here with a critical eye. Where possible, primary source material is made available for everything we publish: check it; make up your own mind.

In his previously referenced article, James Corbett provides a list of questions we should all ask ourselves whenever we encounter information offered by any source. We don’t need government or any other “democratic institution” to control information for us, nor we do need to be told what to think about it. We just need to think critically and answer these simple questions to our own satisfaction:

  • Why is this media outlet showing us this report?
  • What interest do they have in making us think a particular way about the issue presented?
  • Can the information in the report be independently confirmed or triangulated from other sources?
  • Whose viewpoint is being shown, and how is that viewpoint portrayed? Whose viewpoint is being excluded? Why?
  • What language is being used to frame the issue?
  • What does the report make us believe about the world?
  • Are we in agreement with the report? Why or why not?

Ultimately, as ever, the choice is yours. You can gather information from any source you wish. If you want to know what the state wants you to believe and what behaviour it expects of you, then go to the MSM. If you want to explore broader criticism of government and its policies, then the more independent “alternative media” provides richer pickings.

Treat these two impostors just the same. There is honest, high-quality journalism in both. There is also propaganda to be found in both. Fortunately, if you answer James Corbett’s suggested questions, you’ll be able to spot the difference more often than not.

February 18, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

WITNESS ONE OF THE MOST EVIL MRNA LIARS IN THE WORLD!

Ivor Cummins | The Fat Emperor | February 3, 2023

Title says it all. And this liar is apparently gonna replace Fauci in NIH!

Isn’t elemental evil so obvious – I mean WOW!

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February 18, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Florida Issues Health Alert on mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine Safety

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | FEBRUARY 17, 2023

The Florida Department of Health has issued a “Health Alert on mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine Safety“, which is reproduced in full below.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought many challenges that the health and medical field have never encountered. Although the initial response was led by a sense of urgency and crisis management, the State Surgeon General believes it is critical that as public health professionals, responses are adapted to the present to chart a future guided by data.

The State Surgeon General is notifying the health care sector and public of a substantial increase in Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports from Florida after the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

Figure 1: Overall reports submitted to VAERS, Florida 2006–2022

In Florida alone, there was a 1,700% increase in VAERS reports after the release of the COVID-19 vaccine, compared to an increase of 400% in overall vaccine administration for the same time period (Figure 1).

The reporting of life-threatening conditions increased over 4,400%. This is a novel increase and was not seen during the 2009 H1N1 vaccination campaign. There is a need for additional unbiased research to better understand the COVID-19 vaccines’ short- and long-term effects.

The findings in Florida are consistent with various studies that continue to uncover such risks. To further evaluate this, the Surgeon General wrote a letter to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) illustrating the risk factors associated with the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and emphasising the need for additional transparency.

According to a study, Fraiman J et al. (Vaccine. 2022), mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were associated with an excess risk of serious adverse events, including coagulation disorders, acute cardiac injuries, Bell’s palsy, and encephalitis. This risk was one in 550 individuals, which is much higher than other vaccines.

A second study, Sun CLF et al. (Sci Rep. 2022), found increased acute cardiac arrests and other acute cardiac events following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination.

Additionally, Dag Berild J et al. (JAMA Netw Open. 2022), assessed the risk of thromboembolic and thrombocytopenic events related to COVID-19 vaccines and found preliminary evidence of increased risk of both coronary disease and cardiovascular disease.

While the CDC has identified safety signals for stroke among individuals 65 and older following the bivalent booster administration, there is a need for additional assessments and research regarding safety of all mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

To support transparency, the State of Florida reminds health care providers to accurately communicate the risks and benefits of all clinical interventions to their patients, including those associated with the COVID-19 vaccine as additional risks continue to be identified and disclosed to the public.

The State of Florida remains dedicated to protecting communities from the risks of COVID-19 and other public health concerns, specifically by promoting the importance of treatment and promoting prevention through healthy habits. We encourage our health care partners and providers to do the same.

About the Florida Department of Health

The department, nationally accredited by the Public Health Accreditation Board, works to protect, promote and improve the health of all people in Florida through integrated state, county and community efforts.

Follow us on Twitter at @HealthyFla and on Facebook. For more information about the Florida Department of Health please visit www.FloridaHealth.gov.

This is a welcome intervention. But the thing I don’t understand is that the Florida Department of Health surely has access to all the data needed to settle this question definitively. Rather than just writing letters of warning, then, why doesn’t it release the data of all-cause deaths by vaccination status so that researchers can analyse them to see what they show us? It could also commission some early spread studies while it’s at it, so we can try to make progress on that question as well. It’s great to have a state Government with us in the sceptical corner on vaccines and restrictions, but why isn’t it doing more with the vast data and resources it has at its disposal to answer some of the key outstanding questions of the pandemic?

February 17, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Critics of failed COVID policies call for pandemic reckoning

By Daniel Nuccio | Washington Examiner | February 15, 2023

Eight leading critics of the United States’s COVID-19 response have called for an investigation of the many failures of policy architects and key decision makers —  at institutions ranging from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration to universities and hospitals — over their repeated mishandling of the pandemic.

Given the immense harm inflicted on our society by the follies of a ruling class and their expert advisers who never failed to make a wrong decision when presented with the opportunity, as well as the fact that lives are still being destroyed by their lingering policies, we can only hope this blueprint does not go ignored.

Dubbing themselves the “Norfolk Group,” the association of scholars includes such prominent names as Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya, Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, UCSF physician Tracy Beth Høeg, Johns Hopkins University surgeon Marty Makary, and Indiana University School of Medicine immunologist Steven Templeton.

According to the Norfolk Group’s website, although initially organized by the Brownstone Institute in May 2022, the eight members of the group have since worked free from outside influence to draft the 80-page document they published earlier this year, “Questions for a COVID-19 Commission.”

Presented as a series of summaries and questions pertaining to key elements of U.S. COVID policy, the document, in effect, lays out a thorough indictment of the consistent incompetence of our ruling class while also raising concerns over the possible influence on policy by special interests such as teachers unions and drug companies.

Regarding natural immunity, the authors ask, “Why did the CDC downplay infection-acquired immunity, despite robust evidence for it?”

In respect to school closures, they ask, “Why were schools and universities closed despite early evidence about the enormous age-gradient in COVID-19 mortality … and early evidence that school closures would cause enormous collateral damage to the education and mental health of children and young adults?”

On that matter, they also wonder, “Why did the CDC incorporate policy language proposed by leaders of teachers unions on the scientific and public health aspects of school reopening without soliciting expertise of outside scientists in public health, infectious diseases, or other related fields?”

When discussing lockdowns, they inquire, “Why was so much influence on public health policy accorded to Drs. [Francis] Collins and [Anthony] Fauci? They control the largest source of infectious disease research funding in the world. How many infectious disease scientists, who should have been strong voices during the pandemic, kept quiet for fear of losing the research funding on which their livelihood depends?”

In their section on epidemiologic modeling, they demand, “Why did world leaders overly rely on models that made unverified assumptions about the pandemic’s trajectory rather than trying to verify these assumptions and their implications?”

When addressing COVID-19 vaccines, they raise questions such as, “Why did many organizations continue with mandates through summer and fall of 2021, despite data demonstrating both waning efficacy of symptomatic infection and reduced long term ability to curb viral spread?”

Regarding masks, they state, “Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the evidence that masks did little if anything to stop the spread of respiratory viruses was uncontroversial,” before summarizing a few studies demonstrating this and asking the obvious: “[W]hy did public health officials and agencies promote the idea that masks would be effective against SARS-CoV2?”

In its entirety, the Norfolk Group’s “Questions for a COVID-19 Commission” serves as a blueprint for the kind of investigation our country needs. Just don’t expect the Biden administration to do anything about it.

Daniel Nuccio holds master’s degrees in both psychology and biology. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in biology at Northern Illinois University studying host-microbe relationships. He is also a regular contributor to The College Fix where he writes about COVID, mental health, and other topics.

February 16, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

Logically Unsound

Taxpayer cash used to carry out Stasi-style Government Covert Ops

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | February 16, 2023

Two weeks ago civil liberties group Big Brother Watch released a damning report – entitled ‘Ministry of Truth’, a reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 – revealing highly questionable present day behaviour by shadowy UK Government agencies. The charge sheet includes the setting up of opaque surveillance squads to

  • monitor people who are “critical of the government”,
  • “tackle a range of harmful narratives online” and
  • outsource some of this dirty work – at taxpayer expense – to army units (the 77th brigade) and private (privateer?) companies such as Logically.ai (TheLogically Ltd), which claims to ‘intercept [misinformation and disinformation] threats before they become widespread’.

Picture credit: UK Column News

Reading this, you might be forgiven for thinking you had accidentally stumbled into the Science Fiction section of your local bookshop – despite the parallels, this is not a review of a rehashed version of Philip K Dick’s Minority Report.

No: this, unfortunately, is real. HART itself has been on the receiving end of some Logically’s shoddy – and shady – ‘threat interception’, and it is extremely disheartening to note that at the same time as carrying out its sinister actions, this entity was in receipt of more than £1 million of taxpayer cash to fund its operations.

HART’s experience with the disagreeable Logically.ai outfit came in the summer of 2021. Shortly after we had come together as a volunteer group to counter nonsensical government propaganda and policy, six months’ worth of our internal group messaging was leaked and made public. Logically.ai then gleefully dissected and publicised this ‘leak’, attempting to frame our activities as being somehow subversive by publishing out-of-context quotes from these informal chat logs. We reported this to the police, who agreed that this constituted an illegal hack. The police issued a URN number and one of the perpetrators was identified, but no prosecution ensued. We picked ourselves up, published this riposte to the mud-slingers, and carried on speaking out in the hope that balanced discourse might be resumed.

Though highly objectionable and disruptive to us – and very painful for a handful of our volunteer team who were subsequently targeted – ultimately these leaks only helped establish HART’s credentials – the worst any independent reader of the leaks could conclude is that (1) the grammar of our internal chat logs is not up the standard of our public output and (2) we were somewhat naïve in expressing our unadulterated views on some of the charlatans running the show.

Logically.ai pressed home their ‘threat interception’ mandate by smearing our work. Here are some extracts:

  • Apart from claims that the government is controlling the media, HART believes that the government is using “covert ‘nudges,” and psychological strategies to “increase compliance” with measures, as well as with vaccinations. “Several interventions of this type have been woven into the intensive communication campaign,” a member writes, alleging that fear, shame and peer-pressure are being weaponized by the government.
  • HART members are critical of policies such as lockdowns, mask-wearing, and vaccination.
  • HART members frequently recommend alternative treatments such as ivermectin and vitamin D.
  • The members [of HART] also repeatedly make claims about the media being controlled, social media censoring their views (a number of members have moved to Parler and Gab), often stating that journalists cannot be trusted.

Astute readers will notice that these statements have either been completely vindicated or can be deemed to have been a prudent assessment of the complex risk-reward profile of certain irreversible interventions. In summary, the UK Government used taxpayer money to pay a ‘threat interceptor’ to discredit HART’s correct statements and replace these with fictions of their own making.

It is therefore galling – to say the least – to note that Logically.ai, a government contractor, presented a Kafkaesque self-referenced submission to the House of Commons Joint Pre-legislative Scrutiny Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill by stating that its “investigation into the HART Group is just one example of how those pushing misinformation target legitimate public figures and media outlets to amplify and endorse their content. Without thoughtful safeguards in place, there is a clear risk we could see more of this kind of activity, particularly around elections and political campaigns”.

Well quite. It is frustrating that they didn’t just quote Orwell:

“Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary”.

For a bit of Walter Mitty light relief, it is worth perusing some of Logically.ai’s so-called ‘fact-checks’. With about 98% of humanity having cottoned on by now, in January of 2023 the keyboard warriors at the UK Government’s favourite ‘threat interceptor’ were still bravely wading into battle in defence of virus-defeating shreds of damp cotton worn over one’s breathing orifices — Logically.ai’s efforts are extremely weak fodder compared to the recently updated Cochrane review of these ‘physical interventions to disrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses’.

All of this would be uproarious slapstick comedy if it wasn’t deadly serious. Logically.ai’s underhand disinformation campaigning has led to some of our voluntary senior clinician members who are full time nhs employees, facing long investigation processes, with threats to career and huge risk for their dependent families — this is nothing short of despicable, when these clinicians were doing nothing other than questioning dubious policies with no evidence base, thus aiming to protect their patients and the public and fulfil their oath to first do no harm.

Shortly after its action against HART, Logically.ai appointed Brian Murphy, a senior Department of Homeland Security and former FBI executive as ‘Vice President of Strategic Operations’. We do not need to ask why.

By suppressing legitimate discourse, the reprehensible actions of Logically.ai and its shadowy handlers will undoubtedly have contributed to supporting vested interests and corporate greed. How else did an “adult-only vaccine, for people over 50” end up getting injected into young children? Setting aside the exorbitant cost of this exercise, every single death and adverse event in anyone up to the age of 49 could have been avoided but for these people and entities that executed these ‘black ops’ against legitimate and constructive dissent. Do not take our word for it: even those that were cheerleaders for so-called “extraordinary vaccine success” have come round to our point of view:

“The entire population was vaccinated or offered the vaccine, which now looks like a terrible idea when there were deaths among young people who really had no need to be vaccinated. They were not at risk from Covid. The mantra was it limited transmission. We hear less about that now. Parliament was shut down. Government colluded with social media giants to suppress legitimate questions about the origin of the virus and all manner of other policy debates”.

Neatly summarised. If only the checks and balances had been in place to allow rational and constructive discourse – and shadowy ‘black ops’ outfits hadn’t been paid by the UK Government to deploy guerrilla tactics as part of ‘threat interception’ – many lives could have been saved. Yet Logically.ai’s work will have helped frighten politicians and journalists off engaging with HART (and other professional groups) who were providing a much-needed critical voice and therefore slowed a return to common sense thinking. Furthermore, some of our members (all of whom are unpaid volunteers) faced long investigation processes with professional regulators or employers. Trying to silence professionals — who may have dependent families — by threatening their careers is nothing short of despicable. These clinicians were doing nothing other than questioning dubious policies with no evidence base.  Their primary intention was to their oath to first do no harm, and protect their patients and the public.

For those minded to think of the UK civil service as a benign & mostly ‘good’ counterweight to a (perhaps corrupted and politicised) UK Government, Big Brother Watch’s Ministry of Truth report is a shocking read, covering appalling behaviour by various parts of the UK Government and the civil service. While it has been extensively covered in various alternative media outlets as well as Spectator and the Mail on Sunday (“Army spied on lockdown critics: Sceptics, including our own Peter Hitchens, long suspected they were under surveillance. Now we’ve obtained official records that prove they were right all along”), mainstream coverage has been relatively forgiving. Our experience tells us that much more is yet to come to light. The Ministry of Truth report quite correctly points out that “Whitehall officials are tasked to make a success of government policies – not to act as an authority on truth. These two roles clearly conflict”. These conflicts have not yet been resolved.

The key take-away for those who have hitherto believed that ‘the system’ might be acting in your best interests is a recognition that possibly – just possibly – historical precedent should encourage at least a modicum of scepticism when lapping up the Party Line from so-called ‘trusted’ sources. Statements from ‘saintly’ leaders along the lines of “We will continue to be your single source of truth… unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth” are giant red flags – why does the truth need to be controlled by government diktat? Why does Ofcom still prescribe what broadcasters can and cannot say on topics of critical importance such as these we are seeking to discuss?

For those who have been attempting to challenge the mainstream ‘official’ narrative since March 2020, the Ministry of Truth report is little more than confirmation of what is already well known – or at least suspected – and of course there is great suspicion that this is just a ‘Limited Hangout’ (a controlled minor admission before the ‘dead cat’ strategy is deployed to move the conversation on). On the plus side, it is heartening to see that this is an apolitical topic – it is noteworthy that people from the left and right of the political spectrum are voicing concerns.

The authorities – or actors within – have systematically neutered discourse and the freedom of speech that are so critically necessary for democracy to work properly. Subsequent non-denials and obfuscation – and lack of any sort of regret – give a clue that what Big Brother Watch has been able to publish is likely only the tip of the iceberg.

Let us hope that those controlling the mainstream narrative will find the growing cacophony of peaceful & rational protest harder and harder to ignore.

Call to action:

These investors have ethical responsibilities, and are regulated by the FCA. The industry association, the British Venture Capital Association, might also be interested.

February 16, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

I Was on the NHS Covid Frontline But Quit When I Saw the Harm We Were Doing

BY DR. EASHWARRAN KOHILATHAS | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | FEBRUARY 14, 2023

In late 2019 and early 2020, I was asked to work on the front line in an emergency department to help with the ‘war effort’. We had no idea what was going on, apart from a few videos of the Chinese suddenly collapsing due to this new contagion. We were waiting for it to hit the U.K.

It hit, I saw what it did to people, they became unwell, x-ray x-ray x-ray, PPE, barriers, red lights, code words, panic, panic. Our world changed overnight, and my world changed especially. One minute we were told not to wear masks, the next moment it was made mandatory etc.

At this point, my sole focus was to protect myself and my family, so I began studying in order to do so successfully. I read papers during my breaks and at night before work. I reflected on what I saw at work and made a mental note of the real-life evidence.

The emergency department warped as time went on; I saw a lot of errors and mismanagement of resources. Patient care was being delayed, which led to staff burnout and medical errors. I could see that if this went on, people would needlessly die.

I knew something had to change. So in efforts to bring about some change, I wrote a book outlining how Toyota’s lean manufacturing methods could aid in improving patient safety as well as reducing costs in emergency departments. The book was called Saving A&E The Toyota Way. While researching for it, I learned a lot about healthcare infrastructure, artificial intelligence and preventative medicine. I knew what the national health situation was like; I knew we had to change as a species.

I presented that book to my hospital; my consultants liked it, but as an academic piece. That was not my intention, but hey ho, life goes on. There were more pressing matters at hand.

As the pandemic was progressing, I continued to research, write blogs and share what I saw. And I saw a lot of unscientific rubbish, unethical practices and poor care. The research papers said one thing, and yet we were doing something completely different. I knew very early on that not everyone needed to be jabbed. Something seemed fishy.

I worked in the emergency department and then paediatrics during the second peak. There was one child admitted due to COVID-19 who was later discharged. The ward was largely empty. And yet many doctors online were saying that COVID-19 was extremely dangerous to children. Nonsense.

Something was off: doctors weren’t being doctors, autopsies weren’t being done, the medical field was ignoring anyone who didn’t have COVID-19, and yet staff were doing TikTok dances. They asked me to join. I refused.

While all this was happening, I lost my grandma. The doctors didn’t want to see her in her home; her infection got bad; she didn’t want to go to the hospital; she became septic; she had to go in. I visited her after my shifts and fed her during my breaks.

I got the bad news from a doctor on the night she died. I asked the doctor if we could see her as a family, and he approved. We saw her one after the other, in tears and trying not to wake the other patients. Midway through, a matron I used to work with told us we couldn’t see her due to hospital policy and warned us that if we carried on she would call security on us. I told her we had approval already. She didn’t care. I saw evil in her eyes.

I asked her why she became a nurse. It was surely to treat and help people with compassion. She didn’t budge.  I said, “Go ahead and call security then.”

Thank God, we had enough time for our family to all say their goodbyes. I made sure I was the last one. I knew and saw that many others weren’t as lucky as I was. Many had to FaceTime their dying family members. We were treated so badly and healthcare professionals encouraged it. I also knew the evils that lurked inside mankind that day.

During paediatrics I asked my colleagues about masks and jabs. Why did we only allow one parent to see their newborn child while wearing a mask, whereas we could all snuggle up together in the staff room maskless? I’d get responses that sounded like parrots. “It’s the rules”; “Policy”; “To stop infection”; “We just have to do it”. No science. No debate. No conversation. No brain.

I later worked in a children’s psychiatric ward, and what I witnessed was truly backward. Many children, many of whom wanted to commit suicide, were placed in solitary confinement so that useless PCR swabs could be taken. Two would need to be done, and the nurses would sometimes forget to do these. I actually had to make them a table so they would remember. Children were required to be swabbed, but staff members who would go wherever they pleased over the weekend were not.

I told my seniors that none of this made sense and that children did not suffer with COVID-19, but they just told me it was policy. The hospital trust actually recruited people to make sure staff were changing into scrubs before work too. The worst of it was when we had a ward round on one occasion. In psychiatry, the patient would sit in the room with the rest of the staff. This particular time my consultant found out that the young person who was in the room with us wasn’t swabbed. After the patient had left, she made us all stay in the room and asked us to lock the door and find ways to disinfect the room. She was seriously considering bleaching all surfaces. In disbelief, I asked her if we had to all strip down naked and shower together too. I had work to do, so I left.

The mental health of children and adults during lockdown was the lowest I’ve ever seen it in my career. Children were arriving with life disruption-related issues such as trauma, abuse, etc. all related to lockdowns.

My next job was in general practice. I was working towards becoming a GP. I enjoyed understanding and caring for all sorts of patients. I’m a generalist at heart. However, this transition marked another difficult time for me.

On the last day of hospital medicine and just before the first day of GP work, a close work colleague of mine went to play football, collapsed and never woke up. Deep down, I knew what had caused this. I knew the link between mRNA technology and myocarditis early on.

I cried finding this information out. I cried in front of my mother for the first time in my adult life. I’m in fact tearing up typing this. My friend was killed.

I went to his parents’ house to give my condolences. His parents were there, broken. He recently proposed to his fiancée. She was there too, broken. We viewed his funeral via Zoom.

There’s a spot in the park I dip into regularly while looking up at the leaves. I am reminded of him when I do this. I am reminded of how lucky I am to be alive. Deep down, I was terrified about what this meant for people around the world.

Time went on, and I worked in general practice. There was discussion about making vaccinations mandatory for all healthcare workers. I knew this was not only unscientific and unethical, but murderous. Yet my colleagues didn’t seem to care. They were safe, I guess.

Regardless, I could not do anything about it, so I plodded along. I never stopped reading papers, writing, tweeting and sharing information. I saw patients; I saw jab-related side effects, missed periods, new-onset whole-body inflammation, hair loss, etc. I saw cognitive dissonance too.

All of a sudden, one day, my practice asked me for my full jab status. This puzzled me because the managers knew I had to be jabbed with everything else in order to work in all the other specialties. I knew they wanted to know only one result. Whether or not I had taken the COVID-19.

I didn’t lie. I told them the truth. The next day, in a panic, they asked me to stop seeing patients face-to-face. They had made a team decision as a team, without me, that I was no longer able to see patients. They felt that I was a threat to them and that I would scare them away.

I have never had COVID-19. I worked on my health and immunity every day, and I purposely breathed in the virus in the emergency department to stimulate T cells. I knew jabs increased one’s risk of infection and showed them evidence. I was the least risky person in the practice and I knew it.

They didn’t care. They didn’t care about evidence. They didn’t care about ethics, about immunity, about anything. I shrugged this off and called patients instead. I was ostracised at work and many colleagues acted coldly towards me. I was alone, but not lonely; I knew I had evidence on my side.

Many doctors had to take sick leave from work multiple times due to COVID-19. I had meetings discussing my jab status. A doctor with myocarditis on long-term meds post-jab urged me to get the shot. One said I was “too principled”, It was surreal.

They admitted it was all politics. I asked them why they didn’t read papers? I asked them about T cells. Silence.

I have wanted to become a doctor since the age of six. I love biology and enjoy helping people using my knowledge. But I understood that I was working in an environment that was harming people. I had many sleepless nights thinking about leaving.

One morning, after parking my car at work, I felt a warmth around my head. It had no words, but if it did, it told me that everything would be okay. As soon as I had that experience, my decision was made, and I felt light; a colossal weight had been lifted.

I asked to quit, and a few meetings later (carried out to make sure I wasn’t crazy), I left healthcare and then deregistered myself from the medical register. I wanted to be totally free. I needed to be.

The flat my girlfriend and I were planning to buy fell through. I was in financial turmoil. My mother cried for weeks. I was lost, but I was free. I wasn’t part of the killing system.

I did what I only knew – I began writing. I started a Patreon and am grateful for those who did and continue to contribute to that. But it wasn’t enough. I ended up being on the dole for just less than a year. The guy I had to call every two weeks was surprised I was once a doctor.

I began learning and researching everything I could to help people who had been jabbed. I knew what was going on and I didn’t want another pandemic to happen. I wanted to save as many lives as possible.

I would take my bike, cycle across the park to my local library, and work feverishly every day till close. Around this time, I was permanently suspended on Twitter for stating facts.

I see this as a blessing now, as it made me work even harder to produce something that could never be banned. A book. I worked and researched to make sure I got this book out before 2023.

I was blessed around this time to come into contact with Alex Mitchell. He introduced me to other people injured by the shots. I was determined to make sure their voices got heard. I included their stories in the book.

During this time, on my walks, I had many insights and extraordinary experiences that many people may not believe or might dismiss as crazy. I saw light, and I ended my fears.

Before the new year, I released my book, Calling Out The Shots. It goes through what genetic agents are, what they do to our bodies, how we can improve our immunity, ways we may mitigate jab damage and what we need to do as a society to heal.

The book marks my first gift to the world. I am working on many more and other projects. I will fight for humanity until my final breath.

Dr. Eashwarran Kohilathas is a medical doctor, qualified personal trainer and author who aims to help people achieve physiological, psychological and spiritual freedom. This article first appeared as a Twitter thread.

February 16, 2023 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

WHO Abandons Covid Origins Investigation, Saying China Isn’t Cooperating. But What About America?

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | FEBRUARY 14, 2023

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has quietly abandoned its investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing ongoing challenges over attempts to conduct crucial studies in China. Nature has the story.

Researchers say they are disappointed that the investigation isn’t going ahead, because understanding how the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 first infected people is important for preventing future outbreaks. But without access to China, there is little that the WHO can do to advance the studies, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. “Their hands are really tied.”

In January 2021, an international team of experts convened by the WHO travelled to Wuhan, China, where the virus that causes COVID-19 was first detected. Together with Chinese researchers, the team reviewed evidence on when and how the virus might have emerged, as part of phase one. The team released a report in March that year outlining four possible scenarios, the most likely being that SARS-CoV-2 spread from bats to people, possibly through an intermediate species. Phase one was designed to lay the groundwork for a second phase of in-depth studies to pin down exactly what happened in China and elsewhere.

But two years since that high-profile trip, the WHO has abandoned its phase-two plans. “There is no phase two,” Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, told Nature. The WHO planned for work to be done in phases, she said, but “that plan has changed”. “The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins,” she said.

Researchers are undertaking some work to pin down a timeline of the virus’s initial spread. This includes efforts to trap bats in regions bordering China in search of viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2; experimental studies to help narrow down which animals are susceptible to the virus and could be hosts; and testing of archived wastewater and blood samples collected around the world in late 2019 and early 2020. But researchers say that too much time has passed to gather some of the data needed to pinpoint where the virus originated.

Many researchers aren’t surprised the WHO’s plans have been thwarted. In early 2020, members of then US president Donald Trump’s administration made unsubstantiated claims that the virus had originated in a Chinese laboratory, and US intelligence officials later said they had begun investigations. The city of Wuhan is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a high-security lab that works on coronaviruses. Chinese officials questioned whether the virus originated inside the country’s borders.

In the midst of simmering hostility between the two superpowers, WHO member states requested in May 2020 that the agency put together a science-led effort to identify how the pandemic started. Although China agreed to the mission, tensions were high by the time the WHO group left for Wuhan, and engagement with China quickly unravelled after the group returned.

In its March 2021 report, the team concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus accidentally escaped from a laboratory. But the inclusion of the lab-incident scenario in the final report was a key point of contention for Chinese researchers and officials, says Dominic Dwyer, a virologist at New South Wales Health Pathology in Sydney, who was a member of the WHO team.

That July, the WHO sent a circular to member states outlining how it planned to advance origins studies. Proposed steps included assessing wild-animal markets in and around Wuhan and the farms that supplied those markets, as well as audits of labs in the area where the first cases were identified.

But Chinese officials rejected the WHO’s plans, taking particular issue with the proposal to investigate lab breaches. Zhao Lijian, the spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, said the WHO proposal was not agreed by all member states, and that the second phase should not focus on pathways the mission report had already deemed extremely unlikely.

The Nature report adds that outside the formal WHO process some studies have gone ahead. In May 2022, researchers in China published the results of an analysis of donor blood supplied to the Wuhan Blood Centre before December 2019. After screening more than 88,000 samples collected between September 1st and December 31st 2019, they did not find any SARS-CoV-2-blocking antibodies in the samples (though did find some non-neutralising antibodies, which they imply are false positives due to cross-reaction or other issues). A second study, by the Chinese CDC in February 2022, looked at samples collected at the Huanan wet market in January and February 2020 and found evidence of the virus among humans but not among animals, confirming the early outbreak but casting doubt on the idea of a zoonotic spillover event at the market.

We may not be inclined to believe these Chinese findings. But we should note that they are more than the U.S. has managed to put out in the same period. The U.S. published one study of archived Red Cross blood in November 2020, which found 39 antibody-positive serum samples (2%) collected December 13th-16th 2019 in California, Washington and Oregon. No further studies of early spread in America have appeared. On this evidence, of course, the virus is more likely to have been circulating in the U.S. than Wuhan during autumn 2019. Certainly, the Wuhan data may not be trustworthy, or the U.S. data may be mistaken. But clearly there is good reason to look into what was going on in America as well as China. Note that we still don’t have a single wastewater study from the U.S. to give an indication of when in 2019 the virus may have begun circulating in different parts of the country (to be fair, we also don’t have any wastewater studies from China). A wastewater study from Brazil turned positive as of November 27th 2019, suggesting extensive community spread in the Americas during that month.

We also still have no idea what U.S. scientists were working on in relation to SARS-like viruses at the onset of the pandemic. Yet we know that in collaborative coronavirus projects with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the genetic engineering of the virus was typically stated to be done in the U.S., not China. We also know that Jeffrey Sachs disbanded the Covid origins taskforce which formed part of the Lancet Covid commission he was chairing because he perceived severe conflicts of interest and a basic lack of cooperation from U.S. scientists.

Concerns about a U.S. cover-up are growing. The latest senior figure to call for an investigation into the role of the U.S. in the origin of the virus is Matt Pottinger, the Deputy National Security Adviser at the start of the pandemic, who recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “China hasn’t been the only problem”.

In the early days of the pandemic, a small group of Western virologists came together to consider the pandemic’s origin. Emails that eventually came to light revealed their plan to push the public conversation away from the lab-accident hypothesis and toward the natural-origins explanation. In a now infamous February 2020 letter in the Lancet, and in an equally problematic letter in Nature Medicine the next month, some of these scientists labelled any questions about a possible lab origin as “conspiracy theories”, even though they lacked evidence to dismiss the lab-leak hypothesis.

But in September 2021, a leaked Defense Department document revealed that some of the same scientists had worked together, along with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, on a 2018 proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Their project? Genetically engineering rare gain-of-function features, called furin cleavage sites, into SARS-like viruses in their possession.

To its credit, DARPA didn’t fund that research, but it was highly significant — or spectacularly coincidental — that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, containing this precise feature never-before-seen in any SARS-like virus, began infecting people in Wuhan the next year. Scientists who had called the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy had failed to disclose that the lethal virus sweeping the world was eerily similar to the one they had wanted to create.

China’s systematic efforts to block meaningful investigation doesn’t mean that the U.S. should throw up its arms. In fact, both the Trump and Biden administrations have taken action to dig further. The Trump administration began asking questions internally. Early in his tenure, President Biden also authorised a limited, 90-day review of this issue by America’s intelligence agencies. It’s fair to say that both administrations did something and that neither has done enough.

Earlier this year, an international group of scientists and former national security officials — including us — signed an open letter detailing some of the failures of scientific journals and news organisations and calling for greater accountability. What we now need are bipartisan, evidence-based hearings asking the toughest questions about the pandemic’s origins. Congress must carefully look at China’s transgressions as well as our own shortcomings.

The obfuscation by the Chinese is obviously very poor form and only increases suspicions they are hiding something. However, what the Nature report – and the WHO, based on that report – fail to acknowledge is that we don’t need Chinese cooperation to investigate what U.S. scientists and officials can tell us about the origin of the virus and early spread in America. Investigating this properly should have begun long ago, and even now it is not too late. The politicians need to compel the scientists and officials to reveal what they know.

February 14, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

From the Peak of Fitness to Wanting to Die — How the COVID Vaccine Ruined One Man’s Life

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | February 14, 2023

Adam Rowland had a promising career, working with professional athletes on the PGA Tour and Premiership Rugby, splitting his time between the U.S. and the U.K.

He also was the fittest he’d ever been, Rowland told The Defender — until early 2021, when he received the two-dose primary series of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.

Today, Rowland, 48, cannot work, cannot lie down, and experiences several conditions affecting everything from his heart health to his vision, including pericarditis, pulmonary embolisms, severe thrombotic vasculitis and vascular neuropathy.

He is now separated from his wife, misses most family events and was repeatedly told by doctors that his severe injuries were “all in his head” — bringing him to the brink of suicide.

He said his discovery of online support groups for the vaccine-injured afforded him a new lease on life.

Rowland, who provided extensive documentation supporting his claims, shared his story with The Defender in an exclusive interview.

‘I was the fittest I’d ever been in my life’

Rowland had worked as a medical sports physiotherapist and stroke consultant for professional golfers for the previous 16-17 years.

“I was absolutely at the top of my career in professional sport,” he said, having worked on the PGA Tour with Jason Day and other high-profile golfers.

“I was working in America when COVID kicked off,” said Rowland, “and living quite a luxury lifestyle. And then, I decided to come back to the U.K. because obviously, I didn’t know when I’d be able to get back to the U.K. if I didn’t go then.”

The U.S. government gave Rowland special permission to return to the country and resume his employment. However, “Once the vaccination program kicked in, you had to be double vaccinated.”

It was during this time — before he got the vaccine — that Rowland said he was “even fitter than when I was 18,” because “any workout program I gave an athlete, I would try it myself” to determine firsthand how physically strenuous it was.

He said:

“So, because of that, I exercised six or seven days a week … I was just so fit, I could row on the rowing machine 18 minutes, something around five kilometers. I could ride a bike 20K in under 30 minutes. At one stage I was running 5K in 21 minutes.”

Multiple injuries and conditions brushed off as ‘anxiety’

Rowland received two doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in February and May 2021. That’s when everything changed.

“Very quickly after being vaccinated, I started to get quite ill,” said Rowland. “I never got back to the U.S.” He continued working for six months after his first dose, but had to take a lot of time off from work because he was in the hospital.

“I’ve never worked since,” he said. “I’ve lost my job and I’m disabled as we speak.”

Rowland’s symptoms began with a “fever like I’d never had before in my life,” he said. “I was in bed for four days.” The fever eventually subsided, he said, “but I felt very virally ill for a number of weeks. I started to notice horrendous pains down my left arm and my left leg. And my wife noticed I started to have fits in bed … they were basically non-epileptic fits.”

The symptoms appeared within a week of his first dose.

Rowland couldn’t get a face-to-face appointment with his doctor because of the pandemic, so he had to settle for a phone appointment. The doctor diagnosed him with “anxiety” and “said it was a panic attack” — not unlike what happened to other vaccine-injury victims, whose conditions also were chalked up to “anxiety.”

Rowland’s condition continued to worsen. “I couldn’t sleep for five days because [the fits] were happening 15 or 20 times a night,” he said. “It got horrendous. I just couldn’t lie down.”

Rowland took six weeks off from work. However, when he spoke to his doctor again, “He said it’s anxiety and depression and put me on antidepressant medication. So, I tried this medication, and it made me even worse.”

Rowland’s doctor then prescribed “three or four” additional antidepressants, but none of them helped. Ultimately, his doctor said, “I don’t know what to do for you, I’m going to send you to a psychiatrist because I believe this is like a mental health [issue].”

“He didn’t think it was anything physical,” said Rowland, “and neither of us … I didn’t think it was a vaccine, because I had vaccines all my life. I didn’t figure it was the vaccine … no one put it down to the vaccine.”

Rowland eventually returned to work.

‘I just got sicker and sicker’

Whatever sense of normalcy Rowland reattained was short-lived. After receiving the second dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, “That’s when all hell broke loose in my life.”

Rowland told The Defender :

“Immediately after having the second vaccine … I passed out once at work. I passed out at home … I developed chest pain immediately after the vaccine. I developed such chest pain and dizziness, and I was sweating. The pain was horrendous. I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was having a heart attack.”

Rowland was taken to the hospital, where he was told, “We can’t find anything wrong with you. We think it’s just a panic attack,” and he was sent home.

Not satisfied with the diagnosis, Rowland spoke to a cardiologist at his workplace and asked for an electrocardiogram (EKG or ECG). “So, he did a 24-hour ECG … and it basically showed my heart was going into ventricular tachycardia (VT), when I was getting all dizzy. It’s very dangerous and could cause sudden death.”

The cardiologist instructed Rowland to show the results of this exam to the hospital in the event he was to go back.

“Another week went by,” said Rowland, “I was getting tremendous pain and dizziness and I had another episode where I nearly collapsed again.” He showed paramedics the results of his ECG and was taken to the hospital.

But Rowland’s difficulties with doctors didn’t end there.

“I had a high D-dimer, so they started to look for blood clots on my lungs and kept me in hospital, wouldn’t let me move out of the bed.”

He added:

“They still didn’t think it was the vaccine when they couldn’t find blood clots … they sent my ECG to a specialist heart hospital … and got them to look at the ECG. Nobody thought it was the vaccine.”

As a result, Rowland was discharged and told he would be administered an MRI “in a couple of weeks,” with the expectation of finding cardiomyopathy. But the MRI didn’t find anything.

“Doctors were very, very confused about what was causing this VT,” he said. “They thought it was an adrenal problem and then referred me to an endocrinologist, and that’s when my horrible gaslighting and traumatic story really started. Because, again, they couldn’t find the cause of it, so they kept blaming things on anxiety.”

Rowland described what happened next:

“And then … I just got sicker and sicker. I developed blurred vision, face rashes, jaundice and tinnitus in my head. I started to develop neuropathy in my hands … some of my fingers don’t straighten anymore.

“I developed horrendous pain below both my knees … I can’t feel temperature in my lower legs. My toenails have died … I have no pulse in my feet.”

He was discharged from the hospital but returned monthly. Each time, doctors told him, “We can’t find what’s wrong with you.”

In June 2022, Rowland “collapsed with three pulmonary embolisms” in his lungs — but when he went to the hospital, they again told him it was just anxiety.

“So I said, ‘look at my eyes. I’ve lost two stone [one stone = 6.35 kilograms] in weight … I’m not leaving this hospital until you do some more scans and tests. This is definitely not anxiety.’”

So they scanned his lungs, and that’s when they found the three pulmonary embolisms and “a hundred tiny embolisms on my lungs.”

Rowland ended up in the hospital for a month, where he was diagnosed with pericarditis and told he would have died if they hadn’t found the embolisms.

Since then, Rowland said, “I’ve spent four more months in hospital on separate occasions. And I’ve been diagnosed now with severe thrombolytic vasculitis of my blood vessels.”

But that’s not all that’s wrong with his health. Rowland told The Defender :

“My diaphragm doesn’t work properly. Some of my eye muscles and my facial muscles aren’t working properly, and my leg muscles aren’t working properly … They did something called a CPET [cardiopulmonary exercise] test and … found that my cells in my muscles aren’t getting enough oxygen and nutrients.

“I’m waiting to see a vascular surgeon for the blood — it’s not getting to my legs and my muscles. I’m also waiting to see an immunologist and another hematologist because I’m on three blood-thinning medications and they don’t think it’s stopping my blood clotting properly.

“They think my blood is still clotting. They want me to have a special test where they take my blood out, spin it and take the platelets out and then look how my blood is responding to the three blood thinners I’m on, because for some reason it’s not doing its job.”

Rowland hasn’t been able to get that test because under the U.K. healthcare system, “the government won’t pay for it.”

He’s been trying to get the test through private healthcare. Meanwhile, his doctors tell him they can see that he’s really ill, “but we don’t know how to make it better” because they don’t know what’s in the vaccines. They suggested he travel to Germany to receive specialist treatment.

‘You’re the 239th person we have seen with similar symptoms from the vaccines’

Rowland described how he finally got a diagnosis that definitively linked the vaccine to his injuries:

“After I collapsed with the blood clots and they tried to send me home and I said ‘no, I’m not going anywhere, you scammed me, there’s something wrong,’ they finally admitted it was probably the vaccine.

“I was needing a wheelchair and they just discharged me and said, ‘Take this morphine, we’ll see you in four or five months’ time.’ And I was like, ‘I can’t even walk, you know?’ And they were like, ‘well, we can’t help you.’”

Rowland did his own research, locating a specialist hospital and private lung consultant, whom he visited in London, bringing with him the scans from the exams administered at his local hospital.

He said:

“I just said to him, ‘I feel like I’m dying, can you look at my scans and tell me, am I going to die, you know, imminently? I want you to be honest with me so I can tell my children.’ He looked at my scans and he said, ‘I don’t think you’re going to die imminently from your lungs’ … but he said to me, ‘it is 100% vaccine injury.’

“He said ‘you’re the 239th person we have seen with similar symptoms from the vaccines.’ And that was at one hospital in London … He said, ‘I’m more worried that you’re going to die with your heart and I need you to see one of my colleagues urgently.”

So Rowland saw a cardiologist who told him, it’s “completely vaccine injury. You don’t get VT like you developed for no reason. It’s definitely the vaccine with everything that’s happened to you since.’”

The doctor urged him to go to London immediately for treatment. “So they took me down to London for a month and then they diagnosed me … they realized it was in all my organs. So it’s in my heart, my lungs … so they diagnosed me with multisystem inflammatory syndrome.”

“So, at this moment in time, I’m on steroids for the pericarditis in my heart,” he said. “I’m on two different heart medications, another one for pericarditis [and] one for microvascular angina … and I’m on three blood thinners from my clotting, and various painkillers and things like that.”

‘It’s like living in hell’

As for what his life is like today, Rowland said:

“I don’t say these words slightly, but it’s like living in hell. It’s like torture, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”

He said he’s pretty much housebound and struggles to walk because of his breathing issues and chest pain.

Rowland added:

“Because I have fits trying to lie down, I can’t sleep in a regular bed … my bed’s adapted, so it’s at 45 degrees, so it’s like sitting up in a chair because the fits get triggered when I lie down.

“I don’t sleep. I just get these fits. So, every single day, I dread going to bed because the fits are so scary. And my heart sometimes misses a few beats and stops for a split second. And when I get that, it feels like I’m going to die.”

Rowland’s waking hours are not much better. He told The Defender :

“Because of my pain and my vulnerability, I can’t stand up for very long on some days. I struggle to make food. I can make breakfast and maybe lunch if I’m lucky, but I can’t cook myself an evening meal. When I go to the hospital, I never know whether I’m going to be able to walk from the car park to the hospital …

“Some days I can walk very short distances, 50 meters, maybe 100 meters. I’m really, really breathless … the chest pain is so bad that I can’t walk any further. And it does crazy things in my heart, it gives me the heart arrhythmia.”

Rowland also experiences blurred vision and struggles to type and write because of the neuropathy in his hands and because he can’t straighten some of his fingers.

Most days, he has to “live within the four walls of the house,” he said. “And then occasionally, when I’m on a good day, a friend might come and pick me up and take me for a drive to a nearby coffee shop and have a coffee. That’s about the most pleasure I’m getting in my life. I can’t walk my dog anymore. I can’t take my grandson to the park to push him on the swing.”

Rowland said he lost his wife and family because of the strain. “They couldn’t look after me,” he said. “I’ve not had a Christmas dinner with the family in two years because I’ve been too ill.”

As for his prognosis, Rowland said his doctors “don’t know how much I’ll heal or whether I’m just going to slowly die, because since I got injured, I’ve just gotten worse gradually on a linear projection.”

“I haven’t gotten any better,” he said, “so we don’t know what the future’s going to hold.”

‘I got to a point where I was suicidal’

The gaslighting Rowland experienced from multiple doctors, the lack of definitive answers, and the questioning of his mental health, drove him to the brink of suicide.

“Because they didn’t believe me … I felt like I was going crazy,” he said. “And I got to a point where I was suicidal.”

Rowland said many of the doctors he saw wanted him to be “on lots of pain medications: morphine, oxycontin, pregabalin.” He said his local hospital is “quite happy to give me morphine and all these other medications and leave me like that for the rest of my life.”

He doesn’t want to go back to taking lots of medications, he said, noting that morphine “doesn’t work … it takes a bit of the edge off the pain, but it doesn’t get rid of it.”

Rowland told The Defender he “wasn’t someone who watched TV or used social media.” But taking to social media ultimately helped provide Rowland with a new lease on life.

He said:

“I went on Twitter one evening. I don’t know what drew me to do that. This was when I was suicidal. I found a guy called Alex Mitchell in the U.K. who lost a leg [due to vaccine injury]. I started chatting to him and he was like, ‘it sounds like you might have a vaccine injury.’

“He pointed me to a support group, UK COVID Vaccine Family. I couldn’t believe it, that there was — I think at the time in the U.K. there were 600-odd people in this group — and I was like, ‘there’s all these people [with] all the same symptoms as me’ … It just completely opened my eyes.”

“From that moment,” said Rowland, while “it was nice to get the support, I still realized that the doctors didn’t have a clue what they were doing. I think what it did was, it took me from a place of being suicidal [to] where I wanted to fight for my life now.”

Rowland said he started to seek out specialists who were seeing patients with vaccine injuries and “knew it wasn’t all in their heads and knew what sort of tests to do.”

He also “went on Twitter and decided that I needed to speak out, because I thought, ‘well, if I’m going to die’ — and I didn’t realize how bad my story was — I thought, ‘well, I didn’t want anyone else to go through what I’m going through.’”

“I just wanted to warn people that if they do inject you and it goes wrong,” he said, “they tell you it’s safe and effective but there’s nobody there for you to help you.”

He said he’s met some wonderful people “who’ve reached out to me and offered me support.”

“I just take pleasure from speaking to those people and the people who are trying to help me,” said Rowland.

At the same time, Rowland told The Defender he is also “going down a legal route.”

“I want to know … what’s keeping my blood clotting and giving me vasculitis. [Doctors] don’t seem prepared to do that. So that’s the battle I’m on … I want to prove it’s negligence because then the [U.K.] government will have to pay for private treatment for me, even if it’s abroad. So, it’s about keeping me alive,” he said.

He had some words of advice for other vaccine-injured individuals:

“I think the first thing they need to do is, don’t suffer in silence alone … trust your own body and your intuition. So, if people are saying that to you, don’t just accept that if your intuition says otherwise.

“Try a two-pronged approach. Find a support group and question people in that support group. Even reach out and contact me online. That’s what I’m there for. And then also, if your doctor is gaslighting you … print off a lot of evidence. If your doctor is not helping you, you need to find another doctor, which I know is not as easy as that, but do not accept a doctor that’s telling you it’s in your head.”

Rowland encouraged vaccine injury victims to “come out publicly if you’ve got the strength to do that because there’s hundreds of thousands and probably millions of us around the world.”

“We were part of the worst experiment that I believe has probably ever taken place,” said Rowland. “And I think it’s going to be like a dam that’s going to burst by the back end of 2023 … I don’t think they can keep it covered up much longer.”

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.

February 14, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Long on Covid, terrifyingly short on reason

By Niall McCrae | TCW Defending Freedom | February 14, 2023

As far as the mainstream media goes, the vaccine-injured are unicorns. Their symptoms are delusional or fabricated for ‘anti-vax’ activism. But the real fantasy is in the purported ‘miracle of science’ of the vaccine – novel mRNA technology that is proving to be anything but safe and effective. Any medical treatment has risks as well as benefits, which should have been properly assessed in clinical trials before mass vaccination began.

So strong is faith in heroic medicine that many recipients cannot begin to connect their subsequent maladies to the jabs. A classic of the genre is the latest column by Scottish journalist Emma Cowing in the Daily Mail. ‘A miserable way to find you CAN’T avoid Covid’ is the title of Cowing’s account of catching Covid-19 for the first time.

‘Aware I had recently been in the company of someone who had ended up with Covid, I decided to take a test, and watched with horror as that treacherous first line turned red . . . It wasn’t the first time I had been in contact with people who had tested positive, and yet each time I had got away scot free. I might have known that such pride comes before two lines on a plastic test kit.’

The lateral flow test taken by Cowing is as dubious as the concept of asymptomatic transmission, or indeed of the virus itself. Was there really a coronavirus with the same symptoms and mortality rate of influenza, which almost completely replaced influenza in the last three years? Despite such similarities, the approach taken to Covid-19 was unprecedented: lockdown, school closure, masks and universal vaccination, all pushed by propagandised fear. Just as Dr Mike Yeadon detailed at TCW’s Celebration of Dissent last Thursday. Cowing however believes that we let our guard down too early: ‘The truth is, we have all got pretty complacent. Just a fortnight ago I was in London, and, despite travelling everywhere by Tube, didn’t even think to wear a mask. I think nothing of hugging friends, or sitting in meetings with doors closed and no windows open.’

It’s always a trip to London, isn’t it? City of the medieval Great Plague, and now the Great Unwashed on public transport. As a journalist, Cowing was able to identify her pathogen with specificity: ‘A little research tells me that what I have is likely the relatively new “Kraken” strain, an Omicron sub-variant that took hold in the US and has now made its way over here. It is particularly contagious and fast-moving.’

I’m not sure that Cowing’s research went beyond the archives of her own newspaper. Kraken hasn’t caught the public imagination, a clear sign of Covid-19 fatigue. But for Cowing, the analogy is validated by her debilitation: ‘I have a range of symptoms that I never knew were features of Covid. Cramp in my legs and feet, excruciating pain in my lower back that saw me lying on the floor for an hour in search of relief, a burning pain in my arms and legs. Even my hair hurts.’

Hardly able to work at home, Cowing took days to write her short piece. She is trying to keep her nasty symptoms to herself. ‘All conversations with my husband, who is still testing negative, have taken place from behind a door and I have confined myself to one bedroom, with occasional trips to the kitchen for food and water while wearing a mask, careful to wash my hands and disinfect anything I touch.’

Ironically, the likes of Cowing would regard Covid-19 sceptics as delusional, and the claimed vaccine-injured as hypochondriacal. The latter would not doubt that Cowing’s apparently neurological symptoms are painful and distressing. But it’s a shame that this is not reciprocated. And more importantly for Cowing, she needs to break the spell that clouds her comprehension of why she is so ill. Instead, Cowing doubles down on Covid-19 narrative: ‘Yes, Covid-19, in 2023, even for the quadruple-vaxxed like myself, is no joke.’ Because of the vaccine, Cowing has less to fear than those afflicted by the initial outbreak, when there was no relief by needle, and ‘when many young, healthy individuals were ending up in intensive care’.

Like millions of others who believe that it is somehow a positive to contract the very illness that they were supposedly inoculated against, Cowing worships at the altar of the pharma gods. Her blind faith, her ‘doubling down’ and the cognitive dissonance it exposes, is terrifying.

‘Thank goodness for the scientists who created the vaccine. It is because of them that normal life has been able to go on at all. And as I pop some more painkillers and settle down for another nap, I have never felt more grateful.’

A rational response by the quadruple-jabbed Cowing would be to report her symptoms on the Yellow Card system, as these are not the effects normally expected of an endemic respiratory virus, but more likely adverse reaction to the injections. After all the hubris, it is time for belated backtracking by journalists who have failed in their fundamental role of investigating and telling the truth.

February 14, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

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