The conversation is exploding across Europe as politicians and media raise the alarm about record excess mortality rates in 2022. Why are so many non-Covid related deaths happening now?
Obstetrician, Dr. James Thorp, and Postpartum Nurse, Michelle Gershman, speak out about unprecedented elevation of reproductive and pregnancy complications that have been reported that directly coincide with the Covid-19 vaccine rollout.
November 16, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Video, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, European Union, United States |
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Anyone following the news cycle since the Covid “vaccines” rolled out has seen a simply remarkable uptick in the number of things that can reportedly cause sudden strokes or heart attacks.
Cold weather, hot weather, depression, various food, long covid AND short covid, new magical chemicals just found in the atmosphere, “post-pandemic stress disorder”, undiagnosed aortic stenosis and expensive electricity.
That’s not even an exhaustive list, it just goes on and on and on.
… and now we can add pollution to the rogues gallery, according to this piece from Science Alert, which headlines:
Tiny Particles in The Air May Trigger Sudden Heart Attacks, Study Suggests
On a similar theme, the Daily Mail headlined yesterday:
America’s growing wildfire crisis could lead to a wave of heart attacks, lung disease and cancer diagnoses years down the line, scientists warn
Now, we don’t need to break down these articles piece by piece, it’s perfectly apparent what’s happening here.
The Covid vaccines are either causing more heart attacks, or the people in charge are aware they might, and are prepping fall-back stories accordingly.
We predicted that would be an ongoing story this year back in January, and they haven’t disappointed.
The new wrinkle here is working pollution and wildfires into the narrative, and associating heart attack risk with environmentalism and climate change.
This provides fuel for the metamorphosis of “climate change” from an environmental issue into a public health issue, allowing them to talk about it the same way they talk about “Covid”, and perhaps treat it the same way too (climate lockdowns etc.)
This is classic narrative braiding, the practice of intertwining two separate propaganda narratives together so they reinforce each other.
I coined the term, just this moment, but it’s the perfect metaphor.
It’s beautifully efficient, really. The vaccine-associated heart attacks provide evidence that “climate change” is a public health problem, while “climate change” can be used to conceal the vaccine-associated heart attacks.
Covering up something they caused with something they invented, and propping up something they invented with something they caused.
Clever in theory, but rather transparent in practice.
November 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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The crime committed against Dr. Paul Marik and his patients
The following post is from The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, by John Leake and Peter A. McCullough. MD, MPH.
Dr. Paul Marik testifying at the US Senate on January 24, 2022
At the same time that Dr. McCullough was stripped of his job and professorships, his colleague and kindred spirit, Dr. Paul Marik, experienced a similar fate. On October 15, 2021, his hospital’s administration circulated a memo to the entire healthcare system stating that its doctors were authorized to administer remdesivir to COVID-19 patients, but not ivermectin or a host of other repurposed drugs. As Dr. Marik read the memo, he marveled at the sheer perfidy of it. Especially grotesque was the inclusion of “Ascorbic acid” (vitamin C) on the list of banned substances.
The administration issued this directive at a time when seven COVID-19 patients were in the ICU, desperately in need of Dr. Marik’s care. He, in turn, desperately wanted to treat them with the drug regimen that he knew would give them a good chance of recovery. Three months later, at the January 24, 2022 panel discussion (COVID-19: A Second Opinion),hosted by Senator Ron Johnson, Dr. Marik recounted his helplessness. His heart-wrenching testimony (starting at 4:19:30) was probably the most dramatic moment in the extraordinary conference.
This system was effectively preventing me from treating my patients according to my best clinical judgement. … As a clinician for the first time in my entire career, I could not be a doctor. I could not treat patients. I had seven Covid patients [he holds up his hands showing seven digits] including a 31-year-old woman. I was not allowed to treat these people. I had to stand by idly [he clenches and raises his fists with anguish and begins to weep]. I had to stand by idly, watching these people die.
I then tried to sue the system, so then they did something called peer sham review. It is a disgusting and evil concept. They then accused me of seven most outrageous crimes … and [claimed] that I was such a severe threat to the safety of patients, they immediately suspended my hospital privileges because I posed such a threat to these patients—ignoring the fact that under my care, mortality was 50% less than it was under my colleagues. I then went on to this sham peer review. I went to a Kangaroo Court, where they continued this, and the end result was that I lost my hospital privilege and was reported to the National Practitioner Databank. So here I was standing up for my patients’ rights, and this hospital, this evil hospital, ended my medical career.
November 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights |
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The General Medical Council was established in 1858 to regulate doctors and to protect patients from charlatans. Quite right too. Doctors are trained to look at the science and translate this into the ‘art’ of treatment for individual patients. This works well for established disease processes, but what happens when a new disease appears?
This became a real issue in the spring of 2020 with Covid-19. Doctors working on the front line used their experience of treating similar viral infections, consulted widely with colleagues, perused the scientific literature as it became available, repurposed old drugs and developed treatments that were biologically plausible and relevant to the clinical imperatives. These treatments were intrinsically safe and, most importantly, remarkably effective. Yes, people died but death rates were no worse than the usual seasonal influenza. We know seasonal flu kills those with co-morbidities such as cancer or heart disease. Covid-19 was the same – it is simply another flu-like illness.
In their management of Covid-19, front-line doctors quickly established three clinical principles that needed tackling: first to improve basic immunity, secondly to reduce the viral load and thirdly to prevent the cytokine storm with anti-inflammatory interventions. For your information, those treatments are:
· Improve immune function with low carbohydrate diets, vitamin D 10,000iu, zinc 30mg and vitamin C 5g.
· At the first hint of any symptom, reduce the viral load with vitamin C 5g (and more), iodine mouthwash or inhalation (povidone iodine or Lugol’s iodine), ivermectin 12mg twice daily, hydroxychloroquine 200mg twice daily.
· Reduce inflammation to prevent the cytokine storm: vitamin C 5g, vitamin D 20,000iu, B complex, curcumin 500mg twice daily, fish oil 4g daily, nigella sativa 500mg twice daily. Possibly NSAIs and steroids.
These safe and effective treatments are inexpensive and available to all. But this did not fit with the prevailing narrative that Covid-19 was extremely dangerous, necessitating draconian measures such as lockdown, mask-wearing and vaccinations. We now know these measures are not just ineffective at preventing Covid-19 but have generated pathology in their own right – lockdown rendered many stressed, miserable, fat, poor, unfit, ill, un-educated and anti-social. These are all risk factors for cancer, heart disease and dementia.
The official narrative was that there were no treatments available. People were advised to stay at home until they became really ill. Only a vaccine would save us from disease and death. The nation, driven by the BBC, came to believe the official narrative and vaccines were rolled out. The consequence? During 2022, death rates have increased to 16 per cent above average with more than 1,500 people a month dying above the expected rate. We now have consultant cardiologists, paediatricians and obstetricians calling for an immediate halt to the vaccine programme because of the excess death rates, miscarriages and stillbirths directly attributed to vaccines. These doctors expect the situation to get worse since the malign effects of vaccines increase with more doses.
So what happened to all those doctors who advocated these safe and effective interventions, all of which, as a bonus, help to prevent heart disease and cancer? Remember these doctors are advocating low carbohydrate diets, nutritional supplements, herbal preparations and repurposed safe prescription drugs. What happened to those doctors who eschewed the narrative that the only way to prevent covid was a vaccination programme? They have been and continue to be targeted by the General Medical Council. They have or are being investigated because they have stuck to their principles. Principles enshrined by the Hippocratic Oath and GMC codes of conduct and ethical actions. The overriding rule is ‘First, do no harm. Make the patient your first concern’. Any doctor who advises a patient not to receive a Covid vaccine risks prosecution by the GMC – and this risks loss of livelihood, career, income, pension and all such securities. Any doctor who advocates diet, nutrition, herbal or homeopathic remedies or repurposed drugs risks GMC prosecution. It is no surprise that doctors, to save their own skins, have become puppets of the narrative. Many are leaving the NHS demoralised and disempowered.
Any medical intervention, including administering a vaccine, demands informed consent. This is part of English law. It is my experience, and that of many of my colleagues, that people are not getting proper informed consent. Critical parts of informed consent that are being routinely omitted include:
· The right to be informed of all risks including potential long-term risks;
· The right to be informed of all alternative treatments;
· The right not to be coerced.
No vaccinated person who has consulted with me has ever been informed of long-term risks (such as heart disease, infertility, cancer), they have never been informed of the efficacy of safe treatments detailed above and they have been coerced by non-medical issues such as the need to travel, to hold down a job, to be educated or entertained.
I have now reported ten doctors to the GMC for obvious breaches of Good Medical Practice. Some of the nonsenses these doctors have stated in the public arena include:
‘All we can offer is a ventilator . . .’
‘[People should] accept a vaccine with exceptional, and demonstrable, safety and effectiveness.’
‘The vaccine won’t do you any harm.’
‘It’s incredibly safe.’
‘After 12 days from the first vaccination of the AstraZeneca vaccine, you are 100 per cent protected against hospitalisation and death.’
‘It [the vaccine] actually reduces your chance of catching it [Covid-19] in the first place.’
‘The vaccine reduces your chances of passing it on which is why it is such a good idea.’
The GMC has refused to investigate any of these doctors.
By contrast, I am currently being investigated by the GMC for my advocacy of vitamin C, vitamin D and iodine. These are all scientifically proven, effective, inexpensive, safe interventions which are available to all. The GMC has chosen to ignore the science and punish all these who do such.
The GMC is the longest-established regulatory body in the world. All institutions become self-serving and, in the opinion of many, the GMC is in the terminal stages of senile dementia. It has achieved this by ignoring the science, punishing those doctors who dare question the narrative and allowing bad doctors to spout non-evidence-based opinion. The NHS is in a state of decline largely because the GMC will not allow doctors to doctor.
November 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, UK |
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As a truth-seeking journalist writing on Covid policies surrounding the young, I have been bewildered by the scientific establishment’s failure to have an honest, rational discussion of the data. Being an ordinary, critical-thinking person with no prior scientific expertise, my impression was always that the costs and benefits of an medical intervention must be carefully weighed before making a decision. Moreover, I assumed there is no “one-size-fits-all” medicine — everything from Tylenol, prescription drugs, to novel psychedelic therapies — that can be universally recommended.
According to the foremost public health “experts”, I was wrong.
This suddenly dawned on me when I watched CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta refuse to acknowledge the risk of vaccine myocarditis in young boys on Joe Rogan’s podcast, then appear on CNN shortly after doubling-down on his assertions by presenting a study finding infection-induced myocarditis poses a greater risk compared to the vaccine (across the population, as opposed to young men specifically).
Publication after publication have printed articles quoting medical experts “debunking” concerns of vaccine myocarditis in young males using flawed CDC data or aggregate population-level data which shows the risk of Covid myocarditis exceeding that from the vaccine.
This is incredibly dishonest. The conversation from the start has always oriented around the specific risk in young men.
Among the most rigorous, comprehensive data we have on vaccine myocarditis is from Katie Sharff who analyzed a database from Kaiser Permanente. She found a 1/1,862 rate of myocarditis after the second dose in young men ages 18 – 24. For boys ages 12 – 17, the rate was 1/2,650. Active surveillance monitoring in Hong Kong shows virtually identical figures.
After failing the Joe Rogan test, Dr. Gupta decided to promote his one-size-fits-all vaccine advocacy on a less questioning and critical-thinking platform: Sesame Street. “The second vaccine dose gives you stronger, longer, and wider protection,” he stated on the kids program. “Hopefully the protection lasts a long time!”
Leading public health officials who do honestly discuss vaccine risks are immediately punished. Last week, after Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health conceded the possible 1/5,000 risk of myocarditis for healthy young people at a conference promoting the fourth dose, a number of top “doctors” in the province rebuked his remarks.
“The incidence of myocarditis after vaccination is much lower than 1 in 5000,” cardiac radiologist Dr. Kate Hanneman stated, referring to the risk in the wider population.
City News: ‘Much lower than 1-in-5,000’, doctors take issue with Dr. Moore’s myocarditis claim
As a result of the mainstream medical community’s failure to weigh the age-specific cost and benefits of vaccination, young people across North America have been coerced, misinformed, and marginalized. Virtually all across Canada, anyone unvaccinated between 15-30 (and over) was barred from exercising at a gym, dining in at restaurants, and attending large gatherings.
In the United States, a number of school districts are now bizarrely mandating the primary vaccine series for the fall, despite newer variants and a seroprevalence rate indicating prior covid infection in children of 75% (pre-Omicron).
ABC News DC to require students 12 and older to be vaccinated against COVID-19 this fall
As Megyn Kelly recently lamented, her kids are now not only facing exclusion from sports and after school activities, but expulsion if they don’t get double vaccinated at their school in Connecticut.
The institutional push to mandate and coerce vaccination in the young is not only pushed in schools and public health centers, but by journalists as well. As a pro-vaccine writer reporting on vaccine myocarditis in a specific demographic (arguing only for personal choice and no mandates), I have been stunned by a number of reputable outlets refusing to publish anything that acknowledge the risks.
After pitching one editor, she replied:
“The _____ is a pro-vaccine publication. We don’t run any pieces that discourage the public from getting vaccinated.”
Another editor:
“Rav, I don’t know why you’re still writing about this. I personally think everyone should get vaccinated already and stop making this a big deal for everyone. The risks for young men are still incredibly small.”
One editor I had a very close relationship with:
“I think the risk of vaccine myocarditis has been vastly exaggerated. It comprises a minuscule fraction of vaccinations. Please pitch this to another outlet.”
The scientific community’s misleading claims have also permitted the violation of informed consent and a number of preventable vaccine-induced myocarditis incidents.
In a recent long-form investigative article (rejected by several publications), I interviewed a 33-year-old previously healthy and incredibly fit man who unwillingly got double-vaccinated to keep his job in law-enforcement.
He didn’t hear the term “vaccine-induced myocarditis” till the doctor told him his diagnosis when he ended up in the hospital after almost dying from heart failure (210 beats per minute) following the second Pfizer dose.
Or take the recent viral story of a triple-vaccinated mother who followed the advice of public health authorities and got her 14-year-old son double-vaccinated, resulting in vaccine myocarditis:
Mom Whose 14-Year-Old Son Developed Myocarditis After Pfizer Vaccine No Longer Trusts CDC, Public Health Officials
We’ve known that teenage boys are at two to three times higher risk of vaccine myocarditis than Covid hospitalization. We’ve known men under the age of 40 remain at elevated risk of vaccine myocarditis (Oxford analysis).
Yet, the government — as informed by “top epidemiologists” — has not created any public awareness surrounding this issue. Perhaps they are worried this would discourage some people from getting vaccinated, and they want as many people vaccinated as possible.
Instead of making careful, age-stratified recommendations, they now strongly encourage everyone to get three doses. Hardly day goes by without a Canadian government advertisement popping up on YouTube prompting teenagers and young adults get boosted to “prevent serious illness.”
Many in the media and medical establishment promote vaccination to prevent serious illness or death in the elderly, but react to any information that questions the safety and efficacy of vaccination in children with a kind of religious opposition.
Supporting the vaccine means judiciously recommending it to those who have more to gain and less to lose and being transparent about the real risks of vaccination in specific demographics — without either agenda-driven minimization or exaggeration. Obfuscating, downplaying, and misleading the public, on the other hand, undermines trust in public health recommendations.
November 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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The lords of lockdown barely escaped their worst possible fate, namely that the topic would become the national and international source of scandal that it should be. And let’s add the vaccine mandates here too: even if such had been morally justified, which they were not, there is absolutely no practical reason for them at all.
To have imposed both of these within the course of one year – with zero evidence that they achieved anything for public health and vast amounts of unfolding evidence that they ruined life quality for countless millions – qualifies as a scandal for the ages. It was in the US but also in nearly every country in the world but a few.
Might that have huge political implications? One would suppose so. And yet today it appears that truth and justice are further off than ever. The most passionate of the anti-lockdown governors – those who never locked down or opened earlier than the rest of the country – won on their record. Most of the rest joined the entire political establishment in pretending that all of this is a non-issue. Tragically, this tactic seems to have worked better than it should have.
Meanwhile, a few points to consider:
The US government, through the Transportation Safety Administration, has signed yet another order extending the ban on unvaccinated international visitors until January 8, 2023. This means that no person who has managed to refuse the shot is allowed to come to the US for any reason. This is 30% of the world’s population, banned even to enter the US on their own dime. Something like this would have been inconceivably illiberal three years ago, and been a source of enormous controversy and outrage. Today, the extension hardly made the news.
The Biden administration has once again extended the Covid emergency declaration another 90 days, which continues to grant government vast powers without Congressional approval. Under a state of emergency, the Constitutional structure of the US is effectively suspended and the country remains on a wartime footing. This announcement was not controversial, and, like the above, it barely made the news.
Many colleges and universities, and also other schools and public agencies, continue to enforce the vaccine mandate even without any solid science behind the approval of the bivalent shots or any real rationale behind the push, given that most people have long ago been exposed and acquired natural immunity, and, moreover, it is very well established that the shots do not protect anyone from infection nor stop transmission. They just keep doing this anyway.
Masking is not in disrepute because we never really obtained anything like an honest admission of their failure to control the spread. Even today, there is a percentage of people out there permanently traumatized. On travels, I’m seeing perhaps 10-20% but in some Northeastern cities, regular wearing of masks is also very common. Once they became a symbol of political compliance and virtue, that sealed the deal and the culture was changed. Now we face the threat of mask mandates whenever government deems it necessary because the Transportation Safety Authority has been given the go-ahead by the courts.
The end of vaccine mandates in most areas of life, and hence also the drive for a passport to distinguish between clean and unclean people, is a good sign. But the infrastructure is still in place and becoming more sophisticated. It is hardly a final victory. It might only be a temporary respite, while all the ambitions are still extant.
More than that, the Biden administration (and all that it represents, including the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, and everything else called the establishment) has its own pandemic plans in place. The idea is not to dial back the mandates or cool it on them. It’s the reverse: centralize all pandemic planning to make a South Dakota, Georgia, and Florida experience impossible the next time. Also, spend tens of billions in more money.
The principle seems to have emerged among the agencies, intellectuals, and politicians who did this. Whatever you do, never admit to having made any major mistakes. And never connect the economic, cultural, health, and educational disasters all around us to anything the govenrment did in 2020 or 2021! That would be nothing but a conspiracy theory.
The pandemic racket is so huge at this point that it is even embroiled in the FTX meltdown over the weekend. Sam Bankman-Fried’s brother Gabe actually founded a nonprofit solely for the purpose of providing “support” for the $30 billion that the Biden administration has allocated to pandemic planning. The institution “Guarding Against Pandemics” is very obviously a honeypot for such funding, complete with on-the-record endorsements from many Democrat Party candidates who won election.
Meanwhile, yes, there have been many successful court challenges to many features of the pandemic response. But not enough. The main machinery that took away liberty and property in the name of virus control is still in place in all its essentials. The CDC to this day brags of its awesome quarantine powers that it can deploy any time government deems it necessary. Nothing about that has changed.
In the big picture and rendered in a philosophical sense, humanity seems to have lost its ability to learn from its own errors. Put in more gritty terms, too many people among ruling-class interests gained financially and in terms of the lust for power during the pandemic to prompt any serious rethinking and reform.
In any case, that rethinking and reform is now put off for another day. Anyone seriously concerned about the future of humanity and the civilizations it built must throw themselves into the long-term battle for truth and reason. That will require that we use every bit of what remains of free speech and what remains of the longing for integrity and accountability in public life. The group we have come to call “they” want a demoralized population and a silent public square.
We cannot allow that to happen.
Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.
November 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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World leaders have been taking energy advice from people like Michael Mann and Greta Thunberg, who have no experience or expertise related to energy. Simultaneously, governments have been refusing to listen to the people who provide the world’s energy.
November 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video |
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There’s been an interesting follow up to BBC’s recent story about the Pakistan floods at the end of August.
Readers will recall that the claim that one third of the country was under water immediately set off my BS detector, and I did a full analysis here, totally debunking it.
But just a couple of days after my piece, the BBC’s More or Less radio programme also looked at the claim, after some viewers had complained.
They interviewed an environmental scientist who checked out what the various satellite records indicated. His conclusion was that the true figure was that about 10% of the country had been affected by floods, and much of this was short term.
In fact, all the BBC had to do was what I did in a few minutes, and check what NASA were reporting.
It was plainly evident that nothing like a third of the country had flooded. Indeed a simple look at the map would have shown them that much of Pakistan is either mountainous or desert, which would be impossible to flood.
They could also have checked with the UN disaster agency, OCHA, who were publishing regular reports on the flooding.
According to them, the area affected was 75000 sq km, or 9% of the country.
In fact, these are precisely the sort of checks the BBC should have carried out before making their absurd claim. One which anybody with an ounce of common sense, or integrity, would have immediately suspected was wrong.
It is doubly ironic that the BBC’s defence was that the one third claim had been widely reported across the media. This shows just how utterly corrupt most of the media is nowadays.
November 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | BBC |
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History shows that hiding clinical trial data can be deadly.
Vioxx is a well-known example of how the US drug regulator withheld important information about the harms of the drug for over three years, before it was withdrawn from the market and tens of thousands of people died as a consequence.
Numerous initiatives have been launched over the past two decades to improve access to trial data after it became evident that what was reported in peer-reviewed journals was often cherry-picked and misleading.
Eminent scientists have succeeded in gaining access to trial data from the European and Canadian drug regulators, but a recent analysis published in the Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics, found that the US FDA still lags behind others when it comes to data transparency.
Drug regulators have traditionally been the guardians of a treasure trove of trial data which they kept hidden from the public. But, over a decade ago, the efforts of Danish professor Peter Gøtzsche turned that on its head.
Gøtzsche and his PhD student were studying the effects of an anti-obesity drug and requested the trial data held by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
“We already had good evidence that the efficacy and harms of drugs were incompletely reported in the medical journals, so by asking for the regulatory data for the anti-obesity pills, we were convinced it would get us closer to the truth”, said Gøtzsche.
At first, EMA denied their request, saying that it needed to protect commercially confidential information, but Gøtzsche was undeterred. He made a formal complaint to the European Ombudsman.
After an arduous 3-year process, the Ombudsman accused EMA of “maladministration” for refusing to share its data – it was a serious and embarrassing charge, so EMA had no choice but to capitulate.
In 2013, EMA announced that it would provide public access to regulatory data – which included study reports, protocols and the raw anonymised patient data in statistical programmes enabling anyone to independently scrutinise the data for all new drugs that it approved.
It was a bitter-sweet moment for Gøtzsche.
“I was satisfied with the outcome, but I also felt a bit betrayed. When EMA praised itself for being transparent, it conveniently omitted telling the public that it was basically forced to make the decision because of my efforts and that of the Ombudsman,” said Gøtzsche.
“I’ve been around a while to know that this is exactly how the drug industry operates. They cover up their failures while praising themselves for what others force them to do,” he added.
Millions of pages containing trial data have since been released. Interestingly though, this remarkable feat has gone largely unrecognised and the response from the research community has been rather tepid.
Gøtzsche suspects it’s because analysing regulatory documents is complex and requires experience to decipher regulatory data – skills that few researchers have.
“It is a huge job to do systematic reviews of clinical study reports held by drug regulators, but it is the difference between producing reliable reviews or merely “garbage-in, garbage-out” reviews,” said Gøtzsche.
Since then, Gøtzsche’s group showed this was the case for reviews of antidepressant drug trials.
When they compared data from medical journals to that from regulatory documents, they found major discrepancies such as underreporting of harms, including suicide attempts and aggressive behaviour.
Following the landmark policy change in Europe, researchers believed it would help unlock regulatory documents elsewhere that were historically kept hidden from the public.
In 2016, Peter Doshi, professor at the University of Maryland and senior editor of The BMJ requested the release of unpublished clinical trial data relating to antivirals for the treatment of influenza (Tamiflu, Relenza) and three human papillomavirus vaccines from the Canadian drug regulator, Health Canada.
After some resistance, Health Canada agreed to allow Doshi access to the documents but imposed a confidentiality agreement that would prevent him from making his findings public.
When Doshi refused to sign the confidentially agreement, his request for access to the trial data was denied, so he filed a lawsuit in a federal court seeking a judicial review of the regulator’s decision.
Remarkably, in 2018, in the case of Peter Doshi v. Attorney General of Canada, a federal court judge ruled in favour of Doshi and in the public’s interest, ordering Health Canada to hand over the trial data for independent scrutiny.
It was hailed a “major victory” for transparency and after the win, Doshi told The BMJ, “For me this case has always been about something larger than my specific request. It is about the principle of transparency. If my case sets a precedent and Health Canada begins making clinical trial data available to others—promptly, and without imposing confidentiality agreements—that will be the real victory.”
Notably, the Canadian drug regulator has gone one step further than EMA by proactively releasing data for not only approved drug submissions, but also “unapproved, and withdrawn drug and biologic submissions… Class III and IV medical device applications.”
The US FDA houses the largest known repository of clinical trial data in the world, but it doesn’t proactively share it.
In 2018, the FDA launched a new pilot program to proactively publish clinical study reports from the pivotal studies of nine recently approved drugs – but the agency put an end to that program in March 2020.
“It is just so typical of the FDA, which is very beholden to industry, and which some have dubbed the Foot Dragging Agency when it comes to the public interest,” said Gøtzsche.
Now, the only mechanism to ascertain regulatory data for FDA-approved drugs is to submit Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, a lengthy process which often results in heavily redacted documents of limited value.
A study by US researchers, analysed the FDA’s willingness to release data, compared to other regulators, EMA and Health Canada.
They found that between 2016 and April 2021, EMA released data for 123 unique medical products, while Health Canada released data for 73 unique medical products between 2019 and April 2021.
In stark contrast, the FDA only proactively disclosed data supporting one single drug that was approved in 2018, clearly demonstrating that the agency has failed to keep pace with the European and Canadian regulatory bodies.
The problem of data secrecy within the FDA has been especially evident during the pandemic. Recently, I reported in The BMJ that the agency had failed to disclose covid-19 vaccine ‘safety signals’ derived from post-marketing data.
Also, the non-profit group, Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency had to sue the FDA for access to trial documents used as the basis for licensing Pfizer’s covid-19 mRNA vaccine. Initially, the agency wanted 75 years to release all the data but a Federal Court Judge rejected its request, ordering the release of the documents at a rate of 55,000 pages per month, taking approximately 8 months.
Given the widespread use of this important public health intervention, and the billions of dollars in public funds used to conduct vaccine research and development, these data should have been made publicly available immediately.
Data secrecy has undermined the health care system by subverting the allocation of scare resources and eroding public trust. The damage done to people’s confidence in vaccines, and medicines more broadly, will be felt for generations and likely to harm public health.
November 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | EMA, FDA, Health Canada |
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Dr. Rochelle Walensky Tweeting Counterfactuals with Intent
CDC Director, Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH, for the record, continues to make false claims about the COVID-19 vaccine boosters with the apparent motivation of getting more Americans “fully vaccinated.” This is in the backdrop of an 8.4% rate of Americans over age 5 taking one of them.[i]
No matter how hard the internal pressure is at the CDC to get a “needle in every arm,” what would be such a strong motivation for Walensky to blatantly deceive Americans with such obvious counterfactual information?
She states “COVID-19 vaccines may not prevent every infection (as apparent in her personal case), but they do provide us important protection against severe illness, hospitalization, and death…”
In order for that claim to be valid by US regulations, a COVID-19 vaccine would need to reduce the risk of adjudicated COVID-19 hospitalization and death as a primary endpoint in a prospective, double blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial. The benefit would need to be meaningful, e.g., ~20% relative risk reduction, and statistically significant, e.g., p<0.05. The conclusive study should have no significant threats to validity such as loss to follow-up. There has been no pivotal randomized trial, and no one can claim COVID-19 vaccines reduce hospitalization and death. The shortest section on the FDA Pfizer Fact Sheet is the “Benefits” section! This is given with the consent form and makes no claims about severity, hospitalization, and death.[ii]
She goes on to promote a two-month period between the last injection (presumably legacy mRNA) and the new bivalent vaccine. This schedule has never been tested and demonstrated to be safe in human beings. Even more shocking, the bivalent boosters which failed in animal studies to stop Omicron, have never been tested for safety or efficacy in human RCTs with clinical outcomes. In academic medicine and the pharmaceutical regulatory community, the question is WHY does Walensky cross the line into making false claims, an illegal act for fully FDA approved and marketed drugs/vaccines? Only senate or congressional hearings with direct questions will get the truth out of her.
Here are some possibilities: 1) she is following orders from higher governmental authorities, 2) she knows the claims are false but truly believes the only way for vaccination to work is to keep everyone vaccinated on a continuous basis no matter what the costs, 3) she is in a form of a trance or psychological state driven by fear in herself and for humanity where COVID-19 vaccination has become like a talisman with special powers and cannot be challenged. Indeed, Walensky has never comprehensively discussed safety of COVID-19 vaccination, and she has not disclosed who should NOT take a COVID-19 vaccine. So, the next time someone in your circles claims you or your loved one should take a COVID-19 vaccine to be “safe” or “protected” from serious outcomes, ask them to take a look at the consent fact sheet and read the tiny benefit section.
[i] CDC COVID Tracker, Accessed November 9, 2022
[ii] VACCINE INFORMATION FACT SHEET FOR RECIPIENTS AND CAREGIVERS ABOUT COMIRNATY (COVID-19 VACCINE, mRNA), THE PFIZER-BIONTECH COVID-19 VACCINE, AND THE PFIZER-BIONTECH COVID-19 VACCINE, BIVALENT (ORIGINAL AND OMICRON BA.4/BA.5) TO PREVENT CORONAVIRUS DISEASE 2019 (COVID-19) FOR USE IN INDIVIDUALS 12 YEARS OF AGE AND OLDER, August 22, 2022
November 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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One novel feature of the pandemic, from the standpoint of public debate, is the fact that so much name-calling, ‘fact-checking’ and censorship was aimed not just at random dissidents but at credentialed scientists.
Academics who’d reached esteemed positions within their field were denounced as ‘Covid deniers’, accused of spreading ‘misinformation’, and subjected to multiple forms of censorship.
Renowned scholars had warning labels attached to their tweets, and found their articles blacklisted on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. In one particularly egregious case, the Great Barrington Declaration was downranked by Google, so that when users searched for it, articles critical of the Declaration appeared above the Declaration itself.
Somehow, Big Tech firms felt they were in position to adjudicate complex scientific debates. This would be like two scientists having an argument at speaker’s corner in Hyde Park, but the groundskeeper keeps blasting an airhorn every time one of them speaks.
And it wasn’t just Big Tech that restricted one side’s freedom of speech. Academics who questioned the mainstream view on Covid faced sanctions from their universities, journals and professional associations.
In a recent paper, Yaffa Shir-Raz and colleagues analysed the tactics that were used against dissenting scientists, based on semi-structured interviews with some of the targets. Their findings have already been summarised by Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson, but it’s worth pulling out a few anecdotes from the paper.
One interviewee recounted that he/she was even censored on Google docs – a program for creating documents and spreadsheets (like Microsoft Office):
Google Docs started restricting and censoring my ability to share documents… This is not Twitter throwing me off like they did. This is an organisation telling me that I cannot send a private communication to a colleague or to a friend, or to a family member.
Another interviewee explained that his/her employment contract was re-written after he/she deviated from the narrative:
They offered me a new contract… we got some new terms for you, because my old contract was not restricted. The new one basically had like seven or eight restrictions of my First Amendment rights… basically I couldn’t talk to the press, I couldn’t speak in public… unless I said, these are my opinions not that of my employer… It was a relatively short conversation. I said that’s never going to happen, I’m never going to sign that thing.
A third interviewee described how he/she was cancelled by several organisations without any due process:
There was a whole series of actions taken again with no due process and no explanation… I received a notice from the [medical association] that I was being stripped from a committee position… I received a letter from a journal…where I was the Editor-in-Chief, being stripped of the editorship, again with no due process, no phone calls no, tractable explanation… I received a letter from the National Institutes of Health being stripped from a longstanding committee position.
Remember, these were all “established doctors and scientists”, not foreign spies engaged in subversion.
The point isn’t that dissenting scientists were right about everything (although they were right about a lot). It’s that we can’t have a proper debate if one side faces a barrage of name-calling, ‘fact-checking’ and censorship. Enforcing a narrative around Covid shouldn’t be the role of Big Tech companies. And it certainly shouldn’t be the role of academic institutions.
November 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Facebook, Google, Human rights, LinkedIn |
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In my research into “early spread,” one oddity that’s jumped out at me is how some people with antibody evidence of early infection seem to intuitively know this information is taboo or controversial. Some people clearly sense when they’re saying something that “goes against the narrative” … and this makes them very nervous.
On one level, this has always bothered me. What’s wrong with simply telling the truth? For an investigative journalist, it’s frustrating that some people with important information won’t go on the record and provide such information.
On the other hand, I get why some people would prefer to remain anonymous or not be mentioned in any story at all. Fear rules the thinking of just-about everyone (a maxim that also explains how those who create said fear effectively rule the world).
Many people with important information clearly fear some type of reprisals even if they are simply telling the truth. The disturbing point is that many of these people aren’t being paranoid. They probably would suffer some kind of negative blowback if they told the truth. This could be as extreme as losing a job or as prosaic as having friends or family members treat them differently because they said something others don’t agree with.
I started thinking about this topic when I went back and re-read a couple of stories published by The Seattle Times that document two residents of Snohomish County who almost certainly had Covid in December 2019.
One of these two residents was not named. However, the other resident did exhibit some level of courage by allowing a reporter to interview her. But the lady was only identified in the story by her middle name. So “Jean,” a 64-year-old retired nurse from a rural area of Washington state, thinks she had Covid.
My hunch is Jean intuitively knew her story might upset some powerful people – people who did not want to “confirm” any evidence that Americans were coming down with this illness before the Wuhan Outbreak in China.
Or maybe Jean thought her claims might bother some of her friends and neighbors, friends who always trust the experts and authorities and don’t like it when anyone goes against, say, the pronouncements of Anthony Fauci … or CNN.
For whatever reason, Jean settled on a compromise. She’d share her story, but she wouldn’t use her full name.
After researching the case of another “early spread” candidate, I understand why Jean might have wanted to be identified only by her middle name.
Michael Melham happens to be the mayor of Belleville, New Jersey. Along with Jean and the other unknown person from Washington, Melham is among the 17 Americans I’ve identified in previous articles as Americans who almost certainly had Covid weeks or months before the virus was supposed to be circulating in our country.
Michael Melham did go public with his story. Among the news organizations covering his claim was NJ.com.
The headline from the “straight news” piece makes this news organization’s point, as well as my point:
“N.J. mayor makes unfounded claim that he had coronavirus in November.”
One piece of yellow journalism apparently wasn’t enough so the news organization also published a scathing opinion column the next day.
Wrote columnist Jeremy Schneider:
“It needs to be said. Again. This is not the time for voluntary stupidity. If you have something to say about the coronavirus that is not supported by proven truths presented by experts, you should really, really just keep it to yourself. People are dying and you are almost certainly not an epidemiologist. Be quiet and listen.”
Schneider also called the people who suspect they may have had Covid before the experts said was possible, “a sub-sect of well-meaning dopes on social media.”
And although readers had already gotten the author’s unsubtle point – our official guidance – the writer made it again in the smear piece he was happy to pen: “Stay safe, listen to the experts.”
Basically, Schneider is calling Mayor Melham, and anyone else who believes they had Covid before mid-January 2020, idiots. It never occurs to the author he might be the real idiot. Nor does it occur to him that the experts he thinks are infallible may be using people like himself to advance their misery-producing agendas.
Why don’t more people come forward as whistleblowers? Here we probably have part of our answer.
But the sociology and psychology component that really fascinates me is how so many people quickly accept the authorized “narrative” and then have a visceral reaction to people who do not happen to subscribe to this thinking.
This evidence of mass “groupthink” can also be seen from reading the 1,600 reader comments that followed a Fox News story on Michael Melham’s claim.
As I was doing my “due diligence” on early spread, I think I read every one of these comments. I would say that 95 percent of commenters thought Melham was simply wrong in thinking he had Covid or, like the NJ.com columnist, were angered the mayor had the temerity to share his own story and personal opinions.
What I’m really trying to understand is why so many people are so quick to share their disgust with individuals who don’t think like they do.
People with important information like Jean who are afraid to use their full name (or those who won’t come forward at all) must conclude that the potential wrath of their peers is not worth the benefits … and/or that there are no benefits from going against the narrative.
Due to this dynamic, the public is unlikely to learn important, narrative-changing information. The only thing that might change some harmful and false narratives is if people did come forward and expose this. However, in the “home of the brave” very few people are bold enough to do this.
And as we saw above, even when people like Mayor Melham do come forward, their revelations are dismissed or ridiculed by the people who matter – the watchdog press and authorities. That is, everything works to “protect the narrative.”
Which leads me to my final depressing point: If 99 percent of the people posting in Reader Comments sections happen to be dead wrong, this wouldn’t matter if, say, 10 percent of the country’s journalists were real skeptics and did the job of real journalists.
If this was the case, truth-seeking journalists would write important stories that might influence the 90 percent of the population who’ve been sold a bill of goods. That is, journalists – if they did their most important job – could maybe change a few bogus or dubious narratives.
But this isn’t going to happen because, at least regarding Covid narratives, the group think is 100 percent.
So what we have is some kind of “Catch-22” self-protecting loop of WrongThink. In such a world, the probability any taboo truths could break through the barricades erected by our “gatekeepers of the news” is probably zero. No false narratives will ever be de-bunked.
The journalists who are supposed to challenge narratives won’t do it because they always believe authorities and experts. As most people get their information from mainstream journalists, it’s a case of the dumb leading the …. ah, non-critical thinkers.
Anyway, all of this probably explains, at least in part, why so many would-be whistleblowers are afraid to blow any whistles.
In summary, many people intuitively sense when they posses information that contradicts the official narrative. This Sixth Sense makes many people leery of coming forward or attaching their name to revelations that go against conventional wisdom .
While this is a small observation, the implications which flow from it are probably large. For example, the quality of life of our children and grandchildren will be lower because important truths were not previously acknowledged, because rotten leaders were not previously exposed.
It might be counter-intuitive, but it’s not the false opinions of the masses that matter. It’s the views of a very small minority of truth-revealing contrarians, a group that’s too often afraid to come forward and reveal what they know.
Those who smear, bully or dismiss such people know not what they do … nor the harm they are really causing.
November 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 |
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