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Agree with Us or Hold your Tongue

BY RAMESH THAKUR | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | OCTOBER 19, 2022

Every crisis, they say, is an opportunity. Governments, health bureaucrats and drug regulators all over the world have exploited the Covid-19 crisis to grab power and gain control over our lives. Predictably, rather than to most people’s surprise, many are proving singularly resistant to relinquishing their extraordinary powers, instead extending the emergency and broadening its scope to embrace other issues.

Efforts to control the pandemic narrative began with a systematic suppression of any suggestion that it might have originated in a research lab of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, then moved on to denigrate, silence and smear critics of lockdowns, masks and vaccine efficacy and mandates.

Australia’s Amended Health Practitioner Regulation National Law

The latest iteration in Australia occurred on October 13 when the Queensland Parliament amended the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law Act to fundamentally reshape the relationship between doctors, patients and health regulators. As per an existing intergovernmental agreement, the Queensland change will be replicated in cascading legislative amendments in other states and territories to ensure a uniform National Law.

On February 22, Australian federal and state health ministers had approved the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law Amendment Bill. The updates to the guiding principles included “an increase in the regulatory responses available to protect public safety.” At best, this is vague and ambiguous.

At worst, it shifts the balance decisively from the individual-centric in liberal democracies to the collective safetyism of technocrats and experts, justifying restrictions on individual rights and agency for the greater good as determined by government agencies. Doctors will be prohibited from expressing their opinion and using their experience, training, education and knowledge of the patient, if this contradicts what the health bureaucrats say is in the interests of “public confidence in safety.” The latter will remote-control how doctors should approach treatment recommendations for patients.

There were several submissions arguing against various elements of the amendment. The Australian Medical Association queried what a “main guiding principle” means “in practice” and argued that the “concept of public confidence is not always clear cut.” The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners submitted that the amendments would imbalance the system even further away from the protection of patient safety and toward “the prosecution of practitioners,” to the detriment of doctors’ confidence in the National Law.

The most substantial submission came from the Australian Medical Professionals Society and the Nurses Professional Association of Australia representing more than 10,000 health professionals. They expressed concern that “the broad and discretionary nature of claims to ‘public safety and confidence’” can be abused “as a mechanism to enforce compliance with government directives.” On the one hand, these could be disconnected from science and evidence.

On the other, they could be used to control health practitioners in direct “conflict with their ethical duties and code of conduct obligations.” They weren’t confident that the provisions for public health and safety would in fact either “improve public protection from clinical misconduct” or “increase confidence in the public health system.” Instead the proposed powers would “serve to conveniently silence voices of expertise that wish to correct health authorities” and prove counterproductive by preventing “necessary information and communication from entering the public sphere.”

Everything done by health bureaucrats and regulators since March 2020, in the name of ensuring public safety and stopping disinformation, indicates we should fear the worst and would be naive to hope for the best. This includes psychological manipulation of emotions and feelings to nudge people into compliance with health directives.

Long-standing principles that have guided Australian doctors and ensured its health system is second to none will be undermined: the Hippocratic Oath’s duty of “Do no harm,” informed consent of the patient based on a harm-benefit evaluation of different treatment options, the risks associated with them in the best professional judgment of the doctor, and the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship.

People’s faith in their GPs could collapse once they realize doctors are barred from questioning putative benefits or pointing to possible risks of recommended treatments. Instead, they must stay within the boundaries laid down by bureaucrats and regulators, the latter often subject to industry capture.

California has passed a similar law empowering the state’s medical board to revoke the license of physicians who express opinions “contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus to the standard of care.” Or, as helpfully translated by the New York Post sub-editors: “California makes it illegal for doctors to disagree with politicians.”

The Debate on the Harm-Benefit Balance of Covid Vaccines

For health bureaucrats and regulators, the latter often with compromising links to industry, to claim a monopoly on scientific truth is scandalous. The effort to shut down legitimate debates on pain of excommunication from the medical profession represents a clear and present danger to public health.

Having overturned a hundred years of science and policy orthodoxy on pandemic management with Covid, we are intent on revolutionizing the everyday practice of medicine by subordinating the professional judgment of doctors on the best treatment options for their patients, to the directives of bureaucrats and health regulators. With public esteem for politicians at all-time lows, this is not likely to inspire confidence in the health service.

Consider globally contested opinion on the benefit-harm balance of Covid vaccines for children. Their risk of severe illness or death from Covid is tiny, of serious adverse reactions is higher and the long-term effects are unknown. On October 7, Florida issued a press release recommending against mRNA Covid vaccines for 18–39 year-old males. Their analysis had found an 84 percent higher risk of cardiac-related death within 28 days of vaccination in this group. Over-60s have a 10 percent increased risk.

This complements Florida’s guidance on paediatric vaccine guidance issued in March which recommends against Covid vaccines for healthy under-18s. They note the limited risk to infants and children of severe illness due to Covid, the high prevalence of existing immunity among them, reduced vaccine efficacy and “higher than anticipated” severe adverse events, including myocarditis.

Florida thus joins Denmark, Norway and Sweden in ending vaccine recommendations for 12–17 year-olds and also, in two of these, for under 50s and 65s. Albeit contested, there is a substantial and growing body of scientific studies that support their skepticism toward the net benefits of Covid vaccines for infants, children and adolescents.

Florida’s guidance includes three recommendations that are directly relevant to Australia’s National Law:

  1. People are encouraged to discuss all potential vaccine benefits and risks with their health care provider.
  2. The risk associated with mRNA vaccination should be weighed against that with Covid infection.
  3. Doctors should inform patients of the possible cardiac complications that can arise after receiving an mRNA vaccine.

Yet Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration has approved vaccines for children aged 6 months-5 years. Meanwhile, many of the claims advanced in support of the vaccines – they stop infection and transmission and prevent severe illness and death – have had to be abandoned one after another but were never “fact-checked” by social media platforms, while the early critics of these claims were assessed by the self-styled fact-checkers to be spreading disinformation and promoting conspiracy theories – until they aren’t any longer.

Moreover, people who die inside 14 days of a vaccine dose are wrongly classified as “unvaccinated.” This distorts the statistics on the net harm-benefit balance to an indeterminate degree. In a particularly egregious example, an article in Nature on September 23 explained that the authors (1) had classified unvaccinated and single-dose vaccinated into the one catch-all category of unvaccinated, and (2) unvaccinated individuals with previous infection had been classified as “fully vaccinated” (Supplementary Table 2).

This in a study whose main objective was to assess the comparative susceptibility to infection by the Omicron variant of the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated within Danish households in December 2021. They concluded that the vaccinated are less susceptible. I can empathize with the reaction of Julian Conradson that after such analytical legerdemain in a leading peer-reviewed journal, “Academia Is Dead.” Little wonder that a poll by the Pew Research Center in February mapped falling confidence in medical scientists since 2020.

Examples of Off-Limits Topics

Examples of studies that doctors could not discuss without fear of investigation and repercussions include:

  • In a new study in preprint that looked at 31 pre-vaccination national seroprevalence studies to estimate the infection fatality rate (IFR) stratified by age, John Ioannidis and his team found that the average IFR was 0.0003% at 0-19 years, 0.003% at 20-29 years, 0.011% at 30-39 years, and 0.035% at 40-49 years. The median for 0-59 year-olds was just 0.035%. These are well within and often lower than the seasonal flu range for the under-60s. The last sentence would be ruled out as disinformation, or misleading, or at the very least missing context.
  • In the weekly report for August 14–20, NSW Health said: “The minority of the overall population who have not been vaccinated are significantly overrepresented among patients in hospitals and ICUs with Covid-19” (p. 2). Two pages later, the same report gives us the data for hospital and ICU admissions by vaccination status. The number of unvaccinated is exactly zero for both. Now, this makes it mathematically impossible for the unvaccinated to be “overrepresented” among hospital and ICU Covid patients. There is an important conceptual distinction between the statement on page 2 and the statistics in Table 1 two pages later. The first is part of public messaging by the health department of Covid vaccines being “safe and effective.” The second is actual data. The way I read the amended National Law, and therefore the way that some AHPRA (Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency) official could read it at some time in the future against any doctor, the latter must conform to the public message and not mention the actual data.
  • Imagine a family of 45-year-old parents with three young children aged 5-12 who visit their family doctor to discuss vaccination for their kids and boosters for themselves, both to protect themselves and their parents in turn as they take the kids to spend quality time with grandparents. In the name of public safety, will Australian doctors have to promote the mRNA vaccines to children, boosters to grown-ups and be forbidden to mention advice to the contrary in Scandinavia and Florida?  In New South Wales, of the 2,311 Covid-related deaths since May 22, only 3 have been under 20 and 34 under 50. Has any healthy under-20 died of Covid in Australia through the pandemic? If children are at virtually no risk and vaccines don’t stop transmission, why expose children to the risk of serious adverse events?
  • What of the startling revelation that Pfizer had never tested its vaccines for transmissibility and therefore the entire vaccine passport requirement was built on a conspiracy of lies? In an NBC interview on February 26, 2021 Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla clearly says “there are a lot of indications right now that are telling us that there is a protection against transmission of the disease” provided by the vaccine. In a CBS interview on May, 26, 2021, Anthony Fauci said: “when you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health, that of the family, but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community … you become a dead end to the virus.” Australian data too confirm that while vaccines and boosters continue to provide protective benefits against severe disease and deaths, despite 95 percent adult vaccination they do not provide immunity against infection, hospitalization, ICU admission or even death (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Covid-19 statistics for New South Wales (NSW) by vaccination status, May 22–October 10, 2022. Source: NSW Health, Weekly Surveillance Reports.

In an article on news.com.au, Frank Chung has done Australians a great service by compiling a list of statements from Australian ministers and health bureaucrats repeatedly stating their firm conviction that vaccines stop transmission. Michael Senger has done us all a service with a similar look back at the demonization of the unvaccinated by various public authorities, only too eagerly amplified by the media, and all predicated in the false belief that vaccines stop transmission.

For readers with an interest in Australia, Richard Kelly provides a review of many head-shaking edicts and enforcement actions – such as fining a delivery man for washing his van at an empty car wash at 1.15 a.m. and a teenage learner driver for going for a lesson with her mum – that were issued by public health officials. Their ignorance about the disease was exceeded only by their arrogance and hubris about their ability to control the behavior of a coronavirus. Would Australian doctors be at risk of deregistration for mentioning any of this?

Oliver May of News UNCUT wrote an open letter to 20 British news editors on October 12, asking them to explain why they had failed to run a story either on the powerful documentary on vaccine injuries called Safe and Effective: A Second Opinion, or on Dr. Aseem Malhotra’s painfully honest peer-reviewed study calling for a pause in Covid vaccination because of serious adverse events until all the raw data has been subjected to fully independent scrutiny. Both would be interesting to the public and both are very much in the public interest. We shouldn’t hold our breath for an answer. Maryland School of Pharmacy’s Peter Doshi, senior editor of the  British Medical Journal, is right to call out the legacy media for their lack of balanced coverage of Covid vaccines.

Remarkably, the Pfizer admission has been studiously ignored by the Australian MSM. In case I had missed the coverage of the bombshell interview in the Australian media, I did a search on the website of ABC (Australia’s version of the BBC), Age, Australian and Sydney Morning Herald papers. I got zero hits for Robert Roos, the Dutch MEP who asked the question in the European Parliament of Pfizer director Janine Small, and for the latter who confessed to lack of testing for transmissibility. Fading trust in our principal institutions is contributing to the multipronged global crisis of democracy.

The lack of media interest and coverage means there is little pressure for public accountability. Absent that, there will not be any punishment meted out to ministers and bureaucrats for the extensive range of malfeasance in inflicting cruel and inhumane harms on millions of their citizens; no prospect of emotional closure for the people for the trauma they have suffered, including deaths of despair and desolation born of loneliness; delayed prospects of the masses shedding their sheer dread of a virus that for most healthy people under 70 or 65 is not really a severe illness; and a refusal to institute the most powerful deterrent of all for any repeats of public criminality on a grand scale.

Instead we can all look forward to endless cycles of rinse and repeat of surveillance, compulsion and coercion of the masses on the whims of their technocratic betters.

Ramesh Thakur, a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.

October 19, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

‘Insane’: Boston Researchers Create ‘More Lethal’ Strain of COVID, Prompting Calls to Shut Down Risky Gain-of-Function Research

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 18, 2022

A team of 14 scientists at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) developed a new strain of COVID-19 that killed 80% of the mice infected with the virus in a laboratory setting, according to a preprint study published Oct. 14.

Following the announcement, numerous news stories about the study’s results focused on the fatality rate observed in the laboratory mice used in the study.

However, behind the headlines, some scientists and others raised concerns about the nature of the research and the fact that it was partially funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The research was conducted using what some scientists called “gain-of-function” research, raising concerns that this type of research — which some theorize led to the creation and escape of the original Wuhan strain of COVID-19 — is still being done, despite concerns that it could lead to more lab escapes and more pandemics.

Gain of function refers to the “manipulation of pathogens to make them more dangerous,” in the hope of “getting ahead of a future outbreak.”

Commenting on the researchers’ announcement, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Children’s Health Defense chairman of the board and chief legal counsel, remarked on the potential danger of such research — and its federal funding:

“What could be more insane than Anthony Fauci funding more of his GOF [gain of function] experiments to soup up coronavirus lethality in the middle of a pandemic caused by a juiced-up coronavirus that has killed millions?

“All of horrified humanity is watching Lord Of The Flies play out at NIH [National Institutes of Health] and praying for the adults to appear.”

Rachel Lapal Cavallario, Boston University’s associate vice president for public relations and social media, told the media the research conducted was not gain-of-function research and that, “In fact, this research made the virus [replication] less dangerous.”

However, others disputed that claim.

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), a doctor, said the research involved “lethal gain of function virus research” that creates the “potential to kill more people than any singular nuclear weapon.”

“Viruses have managed to escape even the most secure labs,” Marshall said, adding that this type of “research must stop immediately while the risks and benefits can be investigated.”

Jessica Rose, Ph.D., commenting on the NEIDL research on Substack, wrote:

“What they have done in this work, as described by their own methods and results, is akin to madness.

“It is akin to madness because … they basically created and published a recipe for a deadly pathogen (80% mortality rate in the subjects of their experiments) of their own construction in their lab.

“By the way, this is precisely gain-of-function research. It couldn’t be more descriptive.”

Boston University today issued the following statement, downplaying the risks of the research:

“The research was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), which consists of scientists as well as local community members. The Boston Public Health Commission also approved the research.

“Furthermore, this research mirrors and reinforces the findings of other, similar research performed by other organizations, including the FDA. Ultimately, this research will provide a public benefit by leading to better, targeted therapeutic interventions to help fight against future pandemics.”

Efforts to prevent construction of NEIDL BSL-4 lab failed

NEIDL describes itself as “a Boston University Center dedicated to research on emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases and the pathogens that cause them,” and “a major step forward in advancing public health” that “provide[s] the necessary information and understanding to develop diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines.”

NEIDL also claims that it “will not conduct any secret or classified research” and that “the public will have access through several channels to information about any and all research before it even begins” — making NIAID’s claims that it was unaware of the spike protein research project all the more perplexing.

According to the Daily Mail, NEIDL is one of 13 biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) labs in the U.S.

However, this particular research took place under BSL-3 precautions, although according to STAT, “There is no evidence the work … was conducted improperly or unsafely,” noting that an internal biosafety review committee and the Boston Public Health Commission approved the work.

The journal Nature described the difference between BSL-3 and BSL-4 as follows:

“BSL-3 laboratories are designed so that scientists can safely work with potentially lethal and inhalable pathogens in a contained environment. Experiments are conducted in sealed workspaces in which the air is filtered and not recirculated, and the entrance to the facility is typically secured by self-closing doors.

“BSL-4 facilities, in which researchers work with fatal pathogens that can spread through aerosols, and for which vaccines or treatments are lacking or limited, require extra security measures.”

University of Illinois international law professor Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., said the dangers of BSL-4 facilities have long been known, which is why he participated in efforts to stop the construction of the NEIDL facility.

Boyle, a bioweapons expert who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, told The Defender:

“Years ago, there was a lawsuit to prevent and stop the building of this BSL-4 [facility] at Boston University that I did work on, and we failed.

“At that time we argued that the BSL-4 would engage in existentially type dangerous biological warfare research, and that was even before … gain-of-function.

So, we knew from the get-go how dangerous this lab was going to be and tried to stop it. We tried, we failed, and now this Nazi biowarfare death science dirty work is going on.”

However, the Boston University facility was completed with $128 million in NIH funding.

Commenting on gain-of-function research in general, Boyle said:

“You’ll note it was funded by NIH and NIAID under Tony Fauci.

“The New York Times has pointed out that about 94% of all this Nazi biowarfare death science dirty work has been funded by NIH and NIAID since Reagan put him in charge of NIAID.”

According to Boyle, this has resulted in more than $100 billion in federal bioweapons spending since Sept. 11, 2001.

Boyle said the federal government “doesn’t rein in or prosecute” scientists working on such projects, “because the federal government is paying for this type of Nazi biowarfare death science dirty work.”

Such research, and the facilities in which it is performed, also pose a risk to surrounding communities and the world at large, Boyle said, suggesting a Wuhan-like leak could occur at any similar facility in the U.S.:

“This is another catastrophe waiting to happen, and that Boston University BSL-4 [facility] should be shut down immediately.

“They know full well how existentially dangerous this is, certainly for the metropolitan Boston area … and especially for the African American community in Dorchester surrounding that Boston University BSL-4 lab.”

For Boyle, “It’s not enough to ban gain-of-function.” He also called for BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities, including the Boston University facility, a CDC facility in Atlanta and a new facility in Kansas where the federal Plum Island Animal Disease Center is being relocated, to be shut down.

“The only remedy here is to shut down all BSL-3s and BSL4-s in the U.S.A., immediately and effectively,” Boyle said. “Otherwise, there is going to be another leak.”

Notably, the Wuhan Institute of Virology where research involving “engineered novel bat coronaviruses” took place is said to have been performed in BSL-2 and BSL-3 facilities.

Rose questioned the lower safety conditions under which the NEIDL researchers created the hybrid strain, while also raising broader security concerns and calling for gain-of-function work to be “banned” and its products “destroyed immediately.”

She said:

“This paper reveals more than the successful creation of a deadly new virus. It [gives] this recipe in the methods to anyone with a decent lab to recreate it.

“They don’t even mention what the hell they are planning to do with this new virus! They don’t say a bloody word about the fact that they created a virus that for all intents and purposes, is a Level IV pathogen, so why the hell are they playing with it in a Level III [laboratory]?”

NIH claims it didn’t know what it was funding

According to NEIDL, grants from the NIH “provide the support for research at NEIDL.”

In September, the study’s lead author, Mohsan Saeed, Ph.D., received a five-year, $2 million grant from the NIAID, and a separate five-year, $2 million grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, to “explore novel aspects of clinically important viruses and human defense mechanisms.”

Nancy J. Sullivan, NEIDL’s new director previously was chief of the Biodefense Research Section at NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center.

Following the publication of the preprint study — and the controversy that ensued — the NIAID appeared to distance itself from the research. According to STAT, “The research team did not clear the work” with the NIAID, leading the agency to look “for some answers as to why it first learned of the work through media reports.”

Dr. Emily Erbelding, M.P.H., director of the NIAID’s Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, told STAT that the research team’s “original grant applications did not specify that the scientists wanted to do this precise work. Nor did the group make clear that it was doing experiments that might involve enhancing a pathogen of pandemic potential in the progress reports it provided to NIAID.”

Erbelding said the NIAID is “going to have conversations” with the research team in the coming days, adding that “we wish that they would have” informed NIAID of the “intent of the research.”

According to Erbelding, this would have likely resulted in a committee being convened “that would assess the risks and benefits” of the research involving “enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential.”

What the NEIDL researchers did

According to STAT, the NEIDL researchers set out “to determine if the mutations in the Omicron spike protein were responsible for this variant’s increased ability to evade the immunity to SARS-2 that humans have built up, and whether the changes led to Omicron’s lower rate of severity.”

The research involved extracting the Omicron variant’s spike protein and attaching it to the original strain.

Put differently, the scientists took the deadliest COVID-19 strain and combined it with the spike protein from the most infectious strain. They then infected laboratory mice and human cells with the new hybrid strain.

The results showed that while the Omicron variant’s spike protein was responsible for the variant’s ability to evade immunity developed via infection, vaccination or both, it is not responsible for the decrease in the severity of the Omicron strain.

According to the Daily Mail :

“The researchers looked at how mice fared against the new hybrid strain compared to the original Omicron variant.

“When a similar group of rodents were exposed to the standard Omicron strain, however, they all survived and only experienced ‘mild’ symptoms. …

“[The researchers] found the hybrid strain produced five times more viral particles than the original Omicron.”

According to the MetroUK, “The scientists also infected human cells with the hybrid variant and found it was five times more infectious than Omicron.”

In the preprint, the researchers wrote:

“We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant.

“The Omicron S-bearing virus robustly escapes vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the receptor-binding motif (RBM), yet unlike naturally occurring Omicron, efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells.

“In K18-hACE2 mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80%. This indicates that while the vaccine escape of Omicron is defined by mutations in S, major determinants of viral pathogenicity reside outside of S.”

In a statement remarking on the outcome of the study, NEIDL’s Saeed, who is also an assistant professor of biochemistry at Boston University, said:

“Consistent with studies published by others, this work shows that it is not the spike protein that drives Omicron pathogenicity, but instead other viral proteins.

“Determination of those proteins will lead to better diagnostics and disease management strategies.”

Media focuses on study’s findings, but critics more concerned about the research itself

Some media outlets focused on the researchers’ findings that 100% of the mice infected with the engineered virus died.

Others, however, downplayed the study’s findings. According to Fox News, for example, one of the study’s limitations was that the specific breed of mice used may not provide an accurate model for the risk posed to humans, “as other types [of mice] are more similar to humans.”

In a blog post, commentator Alex Berenson, a former writer for The New York Times, also addressed the sensationalism surrounding the study’s findings, pointing out that while an 80% fatality rate in lab mice sounds bad, 100% of the mice that previously were infected with the wild variety of COVID-19 had died.

He wrote:

“[The research] says the Omicron/wild-type Sars-Cov-2 combination the researchers created is more lethal than Omicron.

“However, it ALSO says the Omicron/wild type virus is LESS lethal than [the] original wild type. Neither of those findings should be a surprise. Omicron is much less dangerous than the original Sars-Cov-2, so blending the two together produces a virus with intermediate lethality.

“What’s with the 80 percent mortality rate then? It’s in mice, people. And guess what? The wild-type had a 100 percent mortality rate in mice. Yes, all the mice infected with the original Sars-Cov-2 died. I think we can agree that Sars-Cov-2 does not have a 100 percent mortality rate in humans.”

Specifically addressing the probable risk to humans, Berenson added:

“Nor did the researchers provide any evidence that the blended Omicron/wild-type coronavirus is able to defeat antibodies in people who have been infected with and recovered from Omicron. Which is basically all of us. (They did show that both the original Omicron and their variant beats the mRNA vaccines, but that fact is not a surprise either.)”

Erbelding shared similar remarks, stating, “That 80% kill rate, that headline doesn’t tell the whole story, because Wuhan” — the original strain — “killed all the mice.”

In turn, behind its headline, the Daily Mail wrote, “The scientists admit the hybrid virus is unlikely to be as deadly in humans as it was in mice,” adding, “This is because the specific breed of lab mice used are very susceptible to severe COVID disease. Mice and humans also have very different immune responses to the virus.”

STAT also remarked on this point, writing:

“The fatality rate seen in this strain of mice when they were infected with these viruses raises questions about how good a model they are for what happens when people are infected with SARS-2. The Wuhan strain killed less than 1% of people who were infected.”

But Boyle and Rose and others, like David Livermore, Ph.D., a professor of microbiology at the University of East Anglia, and Shmuel Shapira, an Israeli government scientist, said the news coming out of NEIDL was less about the study’s results and more about the research itself.

Livermore told the Daily Mail, “Given the strong likelihood that the COVID pandemic originated from the escape of a lab-manipulated coronavirus in Wuhan, these experiments seem profoundly unwise.”

Shapira also condemned the research. “This should be totally forbidden, it’s playing with fire,” he said.

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.

October 19, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

mRNA in your food

NSW fast tracks vaccines for cattle

The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | October 19, 2022

The NSW Department of Primary Industries have partnered with the Queensland Government, the Federal Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and Meat and Livestock Australia. These will be the first mRNA vaccines for these diseases and will be created by US biotech company, Tiba Biotech.

Deputy Premier and Minister for Regional NSW, Paul Toole wants to prepare for a potential outbreak and so has written to vaccine manufacturers to develop both vaccines by 1 August 2023.

Cattle are currently vaccinated for FMD using traditional live attenuated virus vaccines and there is no LSD vaccine in use in Australia. Therefore, Minister for Agriculture, Dugald Saunders, wants mRNA vaccines quickly because they are “cheaper and quicker to produce, highly effective and very safe.”

Except for there haven’t been any trials to see if these vaccines are highly effective and very safe because they haven’t been designed yet.

Meat and Livestock Australia managing director Jason Strong said “This type of vaccine technology may not require the longer testing and approval processes required for conventional vaccine development and importation as it does not use animal products”.

Sounds reassuring?

The NSW Government has spent 229 million Australian Dollars (144 million USD) on biosecurity so far this year.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, mRNA technology is an exciting development but it is relatively new and needs far more extensive testing.

Fact checkers from last year said vaccinated Mothers didn’t have mRNA in their breast milk. Studies this year contradict those fact checks and say they do. Before mRNA is pumped into every animal on the planet, I want long term studies showing what happens to that mRNA, whether it transfers via milk and meat, how long it takes for the mRNA to degrade and most importantly how it interacts with humans if it passes to them.

For all we know, the mRNA could transfer to humans, where our cells start producing proteins from the FMD and LSD viruses.

It’s opening a whole can of worms to not test these things and to fast track approval is ridiculous.

Looks like I will be eating bugs after all!

October 19, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Organized Chaos in South Central, Los Angeles

BY DANIEL NUCCIO | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | OCTOBER 19, 2022

The LAPD’s 77th Division in South Central serves what some officers consider “pretty much the most violent area of the entire city and county of Los Angeles,” explained Officer Charles Simmering in a phone interview. “You’re just running and gunning all night. You’re just running. There’s never a dull moment. You’re just going from one call to the next to the next. ‘Organized chaos’ is the best way we describe it.”

Each night, he explained, the 77th Division puts out a minimum of 12 cars, usually two officers per car, all 24 officers feeling “beyond overwhelmed.” The 77th Division can’t afford to lose people, Simmering said. But, he continued, that’s exactly what’s happening.

“Last year at my division alone I think we lost roughly 40 officers – and that’s putting a hurt, putting a strain on everybody,” said Simmering.

“People are leaving,” he stated. “They’re tired. They’re fed up.” Their reasons vary according to Simmering’s account. Lack of support. Lack of trust on the part of the city. Frustrations over not being allowed to make their own decisions out on the job. Nonetheless, the departure of these officers only exacerbates some of the problems that drove them to leave.

“If you need a particular day off for something family-related, your mother’s birthday or kid’s birthday, or something important,” Simmering explained, “They deny you and say, ‘No, you can’t have the day off. Sorry. We’re undermanned. We need people here.’”

That is, they need people, assuming they are vaccinated for Covid-19 because to the city bureaucracy Covid-19 remains the greatest threat to the citizens of South Central, as well as the rest of Los Angeles. Hence, officers such as Simmering, who remain unvaccinated for Covid-19, are considered dispensable.

The Parallel Reality of LA’s City Workers

Announced in July of 2021 and later passed and approved that August at the height of the Pandemic Era’s mandate madness, Los Angeles’ vaccine mandate for city employees still remains in effect. Predicated on the continued threat of Covid-19 to public health, the effectiveness of Covid vaccines, and the danger posed by the unvaccinated, the mandate comes off as a relic from a bygone era, as do the protracted Byzantine processes to which employees seeking exemptions must submit and the testing protocols such employees must agree to follow.

According to the anti-mandate organization Roll Call 4 Freedom, the ordinance and the system it established are illegal. According to the unvaccinated employees living under the ordinance, the system often seems random and arbitrary. Yet, in October of 2022, when there appears to be little doubt that Covid vaccines do little to stop the spread of Covid and that the vaccinated can spread the disease as easily as the unvaccinated, vaccine mandates are alive and well in the city of LA.

By the account of James Greenfield, a manager in the sanitation department, “It’s like we’re living in a parallel universe… [we’re] just in a parallel reality.”

Looking back on the past year, Greenfield, who is unvaccinated for Covid due to religious reasons, described life under the ordinance in a phone interview, saying requirements for compliance are always changing, “the goal post is always moving.”

“It was originally, you know, submit an exemption…” he stated. “It later developed into like this four-page, unconstitutional questionnaire on your religious beliefs.”

The city also wanted employees to “have a pastor answer questions.” Greenfield added. “I mean it [was] just over the top on violating your, you know, your religious freedom.”

Greenfield said he filed for a religious exemption, but refused to fill out the four-page form.

As a condition of remaining employed while working through the exemption process, Greenfield said, he and other unvaccinated city employees were initially required to test twice per week, but that was later reduced to once per week. The city, he said, also threatened to deduct the cost of the tests from people’s paychecks. However, before the city could charge anyone’s paycheck, they first needed them to fill out paperwork giving them permission to charge their paychecks.

“I didn’t fill out the paperwork,” Greenfield said. “I’m not going to give [the city] permission to take money out of my paycheck.”

But, he noted, he believes “a lot of people were coerced” and the city managed to bill at least a couple of people before they had to stop.

More recently, said Greenfield, they tried to bill the tests to the insurance of unvaccinated employees but backed off from those attempts within a couple of weeks.

Yvette Smith, an animal control officer at the City of Los Angeles’ Harbor Animal Shelter in the San Pedro neighborhood, stated, “We just didn’t give our insurance information and then [the city] pulled away.”

Like Greenfield, Smith has been required to test for Covid for nearly a year as she works her way through the exemption process. During the past year, Smith said, she had submitted a request for a religious exemption, was informed that it was denied, and appealed the decision. Now, in October of 2022, she awaits a decision regarding her appeal.

In some ways, although frustrated and inconvenienced, she believes people in her department (or at least her corner of her department), have gotten lucky. “As long as you have submitted a religious exemption that [the city has] denied and it’s in some imaginary nebulous area and you agree to test, they’re pretty much leaving us alone. So I’m grateful for that.”

However, Smith noted, “Every department is treating [the ordinance] differently.”

The Autumn Purge

Currently, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation appears to be one of the departments in which a purge of the unvaccinated is in full swing.

Navy veteran and former wildland firefighter, Rene Ochoa, has been a traffic officer with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation for the past 19 years. “I’ve been grateful for my job,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s helped me to have a lifestyle [I wanted], permitted me to have my home and provide for my wife and my children.”

Last year, he said, he filed a request for a religious exemption due to concerns about potential side effects and the use of aborted fetal cell lines in the development of the Covid vaccines. After his request was denied in May 2022, Ochoa said he appealed the denial. That appeal, he explained, was denied in July.

“Then, September 13 of this year…” he said, “I was walked off the job, locked out of my station in front of all my fellow coworkers…”

“I am currently on administrative leave,” stated Ochoa. “I have a Skelly hearing scheduled for Friday November 4 at 10:00 am.”

Amongst city employees working their way through the process of attaining a religious exemption from the Covid vaccine mandate, Skelly hearings are generally seen as the final step prior to termination.

Reflecting on the strong likelihood that he will lose his job on November 4, Ochoa said, “I’m in a much better position than a lot of other people I know that are younger than me and with maybe say half the time [in a city job].”

Because of his time working other positions with the city and with LA County, Ochoa is eligible for retirement, although with an early retirement penalty if he takes it before he turns 55; Ochoa is currently 53.

Smith expressed similar sentiments, commenting on the possibility she might be terminated. “I’m in a different position than most people. I’m pretty close to retirement [in June 2023] and kind of don’t give a shit at this point. So, you know, I’ll just keep jumping through the hoops until it bothers me too much and then I just won’t do it any more.”

If the City of Los Angeles does try to proceed with her termination, Smith is optimistic that she can work within the system to delay its finalization through a strategic use of vacation time, family leave, and possibly agreeing to unpaid leave until she can retire at least sort of on her terms. She admitted she is morally conflicted about having to resort to these kinds of tactics, but will do what she needs to do.

Yet, most Los Angeles city employees do not find themselves in positions where they can retire early or maneuver their way through the system until they can run out the clock and retire on terms they find acceptable.

Pearl Pantoja, for example, an employee with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, who was interviewed previously for an article published by Brownstone Institute about the troubles faced by LA city workers, has five children, one of whom has special needs. She also serves as the caregiver for her disabled mother. She and her family depend on her paycheck and the benefits that come with her job.

However, she said, “Friday, September 16, I was in effect placed on, my supervisor used the word suspension. I know the city’s calling it administrative leave without pay.”

“They gave me a notice with an appointment…” she stated. “It says you’re being placed off for non-compliance.”

But, Pantoja holds, “I was compliant, except they refused to accept my religious exemption.”

“They also did not… attempt to see if there were any reasonable accommodations that could be made so that I could continue to work.” Pantoja claims these are “parts of the process [that were] just simply ignored.”

Currently, Pantoja, like her colleague, Ochoa, awaits her Skelly hearing. Based on what she has seen happen to other unvaccinated colleagues, she is not optimistic about the future. “I have a colleague who lost his job and he is now homeless…I have another colleague who is expecting his first child and he’s now out of work and [has] no healthcare.”

“I’m really worried,” she said. “I almost know with certainty that I’m going to lose my job.”

What Lies Behind the Curtain

Perhaps the City of Los Angeles’ mandate, exemption process, and the personal and professional devastation they wrought can best be described as a form of organized chaos.

Part of what makes this all so frustrating and demoralizing, according to Greenfield, is the way the whole system is set up. No one is really accountable for any of the decisions made regarding exemptions, testing, appeals, or terminations. Everything is done through third parties and anonymous emails.

“You’ll get an email… with no name,” he explained. “Nobody attached to it. Nobody personally to talk to about it.”

“It’s like they’re just hiding,” he said. “They’re hiding behind a shroud. You know, supposedly there’s this committee that’s reviewing and coming up with these policies except who would know who’s on this committee. Who the names are? When they meet? It’s just a blind process like the wizard behind the curtain. The Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. You know, and that’s the process.”

Moreover, Greenfield noted, he and other unvaccinated city employees live with this feeling that “the hammer can drop anytime.”

“So, you’re just living under this uncertainty,” he said. “When’s the carpet going to get pulled out from beneath you?”

Simmering, who is currently on medical leave due to an injury sustained on the job, said the decision regarding his exemption has been placed on hold until he can return to work, at which point he said he’ll have to “play the Russian roulette with whether not they’re going to approve [his] exemption.”

“It’s like so much of the country is going in a different direction and maybe backtracking,” Greenfield said. “You know, maybe they thought [mandates were] a good decision. But [in LA], there’s no backtracking. It’s like they’re doubling down. [They’re] sticking to [their] guns here even though nobody else is.”

October 19, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

IS THERE EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT THE SAFETY OF GENDER AFFIRMING TREATMENTS FOR KIDS?

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | September 23, 2022

Florida Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, MD, explains the lack of scientific studies necessary to balance the benefits versus the long term effects of underage children receiving gender affirming treatments.

October 19, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

“Until Proven Otherwise, it is Likely Covid mRNA Vaccines Played a Significant Role in All Unexplained Heart Attacks Since 2021”

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | OCTOBER 18, 2022

“Until proven otherwise, it is likely that Covid mRNA vaccines played a significant or primary role in all unexplained heart attacks, strokes, cardiac arrhythmias and heart failure since 2021.”

That’s according to Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a renowned British cardiologist who once endorsed the vaccines on TV but is now raising awareness of their dangers. In September his two–part, peer-reviewed analysis of vaccine efficacy and safety was published in the Journal of Insulin Resistance.

Dr. Malhotra made the comments in a new interview with James Freeman Wells, a former Head of U.K. Trade and Business Inflation Statistics at the Office for National Statistics, the U.K.’s Government statistics agency. James has tweeted a link to the full interview here.

Dr. Malhotra’s comments come ahead of a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on COVID-19 Vaccine Damage, where he will speak to MPs and Peers about the evidence of the risks from the vaccines, putting it in the context of wider problems with the way medicine is regulated and marketed globally. The meeting was originally planned for September but was delayed due to the Queen’s death and will now take place this coming Thursday, October 20th in the House of Commons of the U.K Parliament.

Referring to the worrisome influence of large pharmaceutical companies in the regulation of drugs – whom he describes as “immoral” and “psychopathic” because he says they are constitutionally unable to put people before profits – he proclaims:

“It’s time to put patients before profits, to put truth before money, to put human needs ahead of the needs of an immoral, psychopathic entity. Let’s do this.”

James Wells has posted a link to a template letter to encourage your MP to attend here.

Let’s hope this delivers another hammer blow to the wall of silence that has thus far met the growing clamour for recognition of the extraordinary level of injuries associated with these experimental genetic vaccines.

October 18, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Those Demonising the Unvaccinated Need to Look in the Mirror

BY NICK RENDELL | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | OCTOBER 17, 2022

It’s been known since the outbreak of Covid that obesity leads to higher rates of hospitalisations and deaths. Despite this, very few resources were deployed to encourage healthier eating and lifestyles. This article argues that this was a disastrous decision for the long term health of the nation and the short to medium term capacity of the NHS.

Boris Johnson (BMI 34; healthy is under 25) in his New Year message broadcast on December 31st 2020 said: “Get a vaccine, it’s far easier than losing weight” (see video from two minutes in). Well, the people of the U.K. took him at his word: we’ve had 30 months to galvanise the population into losing weight and getting fitter, 30 months entirely squandered.

First, let’s just look at how effective spending £25bn injecting 150 million vaccines into the U.K. population has been. As the NHS continues to struggle to meet demand, perhaps Covid hospital admissions are the key metric. For the vaccine programme to have been a success we should expect the unvaccinated to be disproportionately admitted to hospital. They’re not. These figures come from the latest UKHSA Weekly Vaccine Surveillance Report; table 12a on page 49 gives us the figures for hospital admissions between March 21st and August 28th of this year. In each age cohort the unvaccinated are proportionately less likely to be hospitalised than the vaccinated. As an example, in the 50-64 year-olds, 129 of the 1,342 admissions were unvaccinated, that’s 9.6%. Yet, about 14% of that age group are unvaccinated. If the unvaccinated were more likely to be hospitalised we would expect the figures to be reversed, to see a higher proportion of the unvaccinated hospitalised than the total proportion of people unvaccinated.

Demonstrably, despite the Government’s claims that vaccines have reduced hospital admissions, this can’t be true. Something has reduced hospital admissions from the peaks in the first two waves, but if the rate of admission is much the same for the vaccinated and the unvaccinated I struggle to see how vaccines can explain it. Surely, far more likely are the twin benefits of immunity brought about by prior infection and a less virulent variant. Figure 2 shows the peaks and troughs of Covid hospital admissions since the start of the pandemic.

Also worth noting, the seven-day average number of hospital admissions for Covid is currently 132% higher than it was on October 7th 2020, before anyone anywhere had been vaccinated, and 86% higher than on October 7th 2021 when most people had been vaccinated – though it should be noted that over half of Covid hospital admissions since Omicron have been primarily being treated for something else.

Despite my deep scepticism of the efficacy of the mRNA vaccines and the real world evidence presented above, to avoid any accusations of dogmatism I’m going to indulge the vaccine zealots’ figures for vaccine effectiveness. Again, with the data taken from the Government’s week 40 vaccine surveillance report, figure 3 suggests that the UKHSA thinks that the best protection a fourth dose of vaccine can offer is about 50%, soon falling to 20%.

Now let’s compare that vaccine efficacy with the impact of obesity on severe Covid outcomes by turning to a fascinating study published in June in the Lancet that looked at how BMI affects Covid outcomes. What made this latest study particularly interesting was that it used real, though anonymised, data from about 20% of the U.K. population. The data, from QResearch had over 12 million patient records but about 3 million couldn’t be used, mainly because BMI data were missing, but that still left 9,171,524 patient records to be analysed. So, again, we’re looking at real-world evidence whereas the UKHSA vaccine efficacy rates are estimates.

The data related to the period from December 2020 to November 2021. This was the period covering the initial rollout through to booster doses in older people. Part of the summary table is reproduced in Figure 4. I’ve highlighted in red hospital admissions.

There were 3,509,213 people of a healthy weight in the study, of whom 8,315 were hospitalised with Covid, that’s 0.23%. Of the 3,062,925 overweight people, 10,653 or 0.35% were hospitalised. That means the overweight were 50% more likely to end up in hospital than those classed as healthy weight.

Of the 2,278,649 obese people 13,044 or 0.57% were hospitalised. This means they were 150% more likely require hospital treatment than the healthy weight group.

Let’s now compare the relative risk of being vaccinated with that of being obese. The obese get hospitalised at a rate 150% greater than those of a healthy weight while the best you can hope for from your fourth vaccine is a 50% reduction in the likelihood of being admitted to hospital, dropping to 20% after about four months. And that’s another key point, keep the weight off and that risk reduction remains in contrast to any benefit from vaccination that soon wanes to nothing (assuming it ever existed in the first place).

But of course, it’s not just Covid where the overweight and obese have worse outcomes. The Lancet study goes on to list some of the other health outcomes for other conditions. The obese are almost six times more likely to have type 2 diabetes, more than twice as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease and over three times more likely to suffer hypertension.

Lose weight and many of these rates of disease would fall. The burden on the NHS would be reduced, the people losing weight, in most cases, would feel better and no doubt their mental health would, in the round, be improved.

I was interested in a piece by Michael P. Senger in the Daily Sceptic on October 14th 2022 highlighting the demonisation of the unvaccinated. I really don’t recall anyone in the mainstream media or in Government objecting to this vilification at the time yet it was evident from the Week 35 2021 Vaccine Surveillance Report that in each of the age groups from 40 to 80 the double dosed were testing positive for the virus at a higher rate than the unvaccinated (see an article I wrote back in June that goes into some detail on this point), so it was evident that the unvaccinated represented less of a threat than the vaccinated. Likewise, it’s been known since the Covid outbreak on the Diamond Princess back in February 2020 that obesity was a risk factor. However, can you imagine the furore that would result if people were to suggest that the obese were denied hospital treatment?

It’s not the unvaccinated who are clogging up the NHS, it’s disproportionately the obese and overweight – some of whom have been particularly vocal in vilifying the unvaccinated or in failing to promote healthier lifestyles:

  • Andrew Neil (estimated BMI 32) argued for restrictions on the freedoms of the unvaccinated.
  • Piers Morgan (estimated BMI 29) argued for the unvaccinated to be denied NHS care if they caught Covid.
  • Boris Johnson (estimated BMI 34) attempted to bring in vaccine passports.
  • Michael Gove (estimated BMI 28) was a keen advocate of vaccine passports.
  • Therese Coffey (estimated BMI 30), the new Health Minister appears to be far keener on promoting vaccines rather than healthy lifestyles.

The Government spent about £12bn vaccinating the under 50s, largely a pointless exercise. As an advocate of lower taxes and a smaller state I don’t argue that this money should have been spent on schemes to subsidise healthier living. Such schemes invariably fail. What’s more, I would object just as fiercely to coercing people to lose weight as I do to coercing people to get vaccinated. However, I would like to see them campaign to raise people’s awareness of the risks associated with a high BMI. In rough terms, there appears to be about a 10% Covid hospitalisation risk reduction for each BMI point reduction and associated risk reductions for various cancers, diabetes, heart conditions, muscular/skeletal problems and mental health.

Body positivity is all well and good but being overweight is neither risk or cost free. If Andrew Neil, Piers Morgan, Boris Johnson et al. want target a group to be censorious of perhaps they should follow Jordan Peterson’s advice and go tidy their own room first.

October 17, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

COVID-19 Much Less Deadly Than Previously Thought, Major Study Finds

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | OCTOBER 17, 2022

COVID-19 is much less deadly in the non-elderly population than previously thought, a major new study of antibody prevalence surveys has concluded.

The study was led by Dr. John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Stanford University, who famously sounded an early warning on March 17th 2020 with a widely-read article in Stat News, presciently arguing that “we are making decisions without reliable data” and “with lockdowns of months, if not years, life largely stops, short-term and long-term consequences are entirely unknown, and billions, not just millions, of lives may be eventually at stake”.

In the new study, which is currently undergoing peer-review, Prof. Ioannidis and colleagues found that across 31 national seroprevalence studies in the pre-vaccination era, the average (median) infection fatality rate of COVID-19 was estimated to be just 0.035% for people aged 0-59 years people and 0.095% for those aged 0-69 years. A further breakdown by age group found that the average IFR was 0.0003% at 0-19 years, 0.003% at 20-29 years, 0.011% at 30-39 years, 0.035% at 40-49 years, 0.129% at 50-59 years, and 0.501% at 60-69 years.

The study states that it shows a “much lower pre-vaccination IFR in non-elderly populations than previously suggested”.

A breakdown by country reveals the wide range of IFR values across different populations.

The significantly higher values for the top seven suggest some of the difference may be an artefact of, for example, the way Covid deaths are counted, particularly where excess death levels are similar. Note also that the antibody studies date from various points during the first year of the pandemic, most of them prior to the large winter wave of 2020-21, when levels of spread and numbers of deaths were more varied than later in the pandemic as subsequent waves caused countries to converge.

The reason some countries had much lower values and some much higher is not completely clear. The authors suggest that “much of the diversity in IFR across countries is explained by differences in age structure”, as per the plot below.

However, the age breakdown by country suggests that the IFR differed for each age group in each country, casting doubt on that suggestion. (In the chart below, note the logarithmic scale, and ignore the zig-zag lines, which are due to small countries having low numbers of deaths.)

Why are countries seeing differing IFRs even for the same age groups? The authors suggest a number of explanations, including data artefacts (e.g. if the number of deaths or seroprevalence are not accurately measured), presence and severity of comorbidities (for example, obesity affects 42% of the U.S. population, but the proportion of obese adults is only 2% in Vietnam, 4% in India and under 10% in most African countries, though it affects almost 40% of South African women), the presence of frail individuals in nursing homes and differences in management, healthcare, overall societal support and levels of drug problems.

Prof. Ioannidis has previously published a number of papers estimating COVID-19’s IFR using seroprevalence surveys. He and his team conclude that their new estimates provide a baseline from which to assess further IFR declines following the widespread use of vaccination, prior infections and evolution of new variants such as Omicron.

October 17, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

FDA Just Approved Kids Covid Booster — with ZERO Testing!

Testing it on 8 baby mice was too much work for Pfizer

By Igor Chudov | October 12, 2022

Pfizer just reported FDA’s decision to approve a bivalent Covid booster for “emergency use” for children 5-17 years of age.

What is amazing is that the approved bivalent vaccine was NOT tested on children or even on baby mice, at all!

For each of the bivalent COVID-19 vaccines authorized today, the FDA relied on immune response and safety data that it had previously evaluated from a clinical study in adults of a booster dose of a bivalent COVID-19 vaccine that contained a component of the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 and a component of omicron lineage BA.1. The FDA considers such data as relevant and supportive of vaccines containing a component of the omicron variant BA.4 and BA.5 lineages. In addition, the FDA has evaluated and considered immune response and safety data from clinical studies of the monovalent mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, including as a booster dose in pediatric age groups. These data and real-world experience with the monovalent mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, which have been administered to millions of people, including young children, support the EUA of the bivalent COVID-19 vaccines in younger age groups.

May I ask, why no testing? The FDA and Pfizer had plenty of time: they were testing bivalent boosters on adults since the beginning of the year. No testing on children was done with any bivalent booster.

Could Pfizer at least purchase 8 baby mice and try their booster on 8 mouse babies? They surely could do that along with the adult dose testing.

An added touch of ridiculousness here is that the FDA also chose NOT to consult “FDA advisors” and thus did not convene the VRBPAC committee. That committee would, of course, approve anything. So, what is the reason for not convening it? The reason is that the FDA did not want to have any votes — even one vote — against this vaccine and did not want to have a public hearing about this travesty.

Three-Year-Old Spike Injections Still Required for Primary Series

It gets worse, of course. Only 30% of children 5-11 years of age are Covid vaccinated.

Should the parents of the 70% of unvaccinated children decide that they want their child to receive a bivalent (updated with Ba.5 formulation) shot, they would have to first give that child two shots of a three-year-old monovalent Wuhan-based vaccine (primary series), and only then they would be allowed to give their children the new and updated shot. Why? The FDA is not telling us.

The Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent is authorized for administration at least two months following completion of primary or booster vaccination in children down to six years of age.

If someone asked me three years ago, whether it is possible that the FDA would approve a children’s vaccine with ZERO testing on children, I would of course laugh the question off as ludicrous. Now it is reality. Even worse, schools and camps may start requiring it.

I thought that the reputation of our health authorities could only bottom at zero. Clearly, though, they want to drive it down to the negative territory.

What do you think?

October 16, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Scientists Discover Massive Recent Slowdown in Melting of Antarctica ‘Doomsday’ Glacier

By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | October 16, 2022

Forget coral reefs and polar bears – they are so yesterday’s climate scare stories. The real big one, the tipping point du jour, is the collapse of the West Antarctica ice shelf and the prospect of global flooding on a biblical scale last reported in the times of Noah. It’s in rapid retreat says every scaremonger from Sir David Attenborough to the BBC’s resident green activist Justin Rowlatt. It is in retreat – a natural process as the Earth slowly moves out of an ice age. But now, new scientific work has found the process at the huge Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica – nicknamed the ‘Doomsday Glacier‘ for the supposed approaching catastrophe of its swift demise – is much slower than in the recent past.

The Thwaites Glacier has long been of interest. It is the second largest ice stream in West Antarctica and occupies an area the size of Florida. A group of oceanographers, led by Dr. Alastair Graham of the University of South Florida, has mapped part of the floor once occupied by the glacier, and discovered it was retreating at twice the rate in the past than that now indicated by the satellite measurements made between 2011-2019. The earlier rate of retreat was said to be “exceptionally fast”. Work is in progress to establish when that fast retreat occurred, but it is almost certain it pre-dates the 1950s, could be about 180 years old, and possibly dates back several centuries. What is completely clear, however, given the timing, is that human-caused climate change was not a factor in the faster retreat.

The results were obtained by using autonomous submersibles to map an area of the sea floor where markings were discovered representing the retreating glacier. Mapping 13 square kilometres, the researchers found a series of ridges caused by the moving glacier hitting the sea floor as it rose and fell with the tides. It was found that during the daily tidal cycle, the glacier retreated around 6-7 metres a day, although sometimes reaching 10m. Over about five months of data, the glacier retreated 2.1 kms a year, twice the current rate measured by the satellites.

The ridges were discovered on a ‘bump’ in the sea floor that had helped pin the glacier. It was found that over a 5.5 month period, the average spacing of the ridges increased upstream from 5.8m to 6.3m. This 8% increase accelerated the annual retreat rate from 2.13km to 2.3km. The results are said to indicate that the movement across the area to the present day position was “probably rapid”. The scientists note: “Our results indicate that the rate of retreat from the bump was double the average estimated for the period 1996-2009, and about three times faster than a location immediately inland of the bump between 2011 and 2017.”

Two years ago, another group led by glaciologist Professor Julian Dowdeswell of Cambridge University measured similar tidal wedges under the Larsen continental shelf in the western Weddell Sea. Grounding line retreat rates of 40-50m a day were discovered, equivalent to 10kms a year. The scientists concluded that this retreat occurred 14,000 years ago and was 100 times faster than the rate over the past 10,000 years.

This is all fascinating scientific work that gives us more information about the natural processes that shape the Earth. But it will be largely ignored in the mainstream if such findings are seen to cast doubt on the ‘settled’ science of human-caused global warming. In March 2020, the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt took a camera crew to the middle of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, an area he called the “front line of climate change”. The equilibrium that had held our world in balance for tens of thousands of years was beginning to slip and crash, he claimed. The “epic forces” at work were like a “scream of anguish”, he continued. “The glacier is being torn and shattered.” The acceleration in melting that affected the entire West Antarctica ice sheet was, “needless to say”, the result of the global warming gases our lifestyles produced. The emotional tosh continued: “A colleague interviews me for a programme we are making and I burst into tears. It takes me days to process my emotions.”

Humans may have a part to play in a climate that has always changed. Considering the massive forces at work in the natural world, many only partly understood, it is probably minor or even insignificant. But the move to declare the science around the subject ‘settled’ is harming our efforts to better understand the natural forces that shape the planet. It is certainly harming our ability to have a reasoned conversation about it. Vast sums of money are being diverted into a command-and-control Net Zero political agenda designed to radically alter the lifestyles and economic prospects of every single human on the planet. Only science that supports this political narrative gets a hearing in the mainstream media, and when politics is involved, emotion is never far from the controlling message.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

October 16, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Court: Facebook “fact-check’ label does not mean that the assessment is “objective fact”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | October 15, 2022

US TV host and journalist John Stossel sued Facebook (Meta) and its third-party “fact-checkers” – specifically, Science Feedback, as several of these groups’ parent companies, and its site Climate Feedback – for defamation.

But the US District Court, Northern District of  has granted both ’s motion to dismiss the defamation complaint with prejudice (meaning that it cannot be refiled), as well as Meta’s and Science Feedback’s anti-SLAPP motions.

We obtained a copy of the decision for you here.

One of Stossel’s videos, “Government Fueled Fires,” got labeled as “missing context,” and then deliberately downranked by ’s algorithms, resulting in traffic and revenue loss from his account with more than a million followers.

The video was seen as “downplaying” climate change as the decisive factor and primary cause of the 2020 California wildfires, asserting instead that although the phenomenon plays a role, it was bad policies that contributed the most to the scale of that natural disaster.

In April 2021, Stossel published another video, “Are We Doomed?”, that discusses what the journalist calls environmental alarmists and their claims. This one received the “partly false information” from Facebook’s “fact-checking partner.”

Stossel’s failed lawsuit sought to prove that Facebook and the “fact-checker” in question defamed him in the first instance by falsely inferring that he made a statement he says he never did, and in the other, by accusing him of making false statements.

The court explained its decision by saying that, although called a “fact-check program” what Facebook is actually doing – and has the right to do – is “reflect a subjective judgment about the accuracy and reliability of assertions made.”

Therefore, the use of the term “fact” isn’t to say that Facebook is under an obligation to establish actual facts, and apply its censorship accordingly. “Simply because the process by which content is assessed and a label applied is called a ‘fact-check’ does not mean that the assessment itself is an actionable statement of objective fact.”

The defamation complaint was dismissed based on CDA’s Section 230 and the protections it affords Facebook in crafting (and wording) its policies.

Facebook’s and “fact-checker’s” motions to dismiss based on anti-SLAPP (Anti-Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) rules were granted because Facebook is a public forum, the court said.

October 16, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

50% increase in miscarriages; 50% decrease in fertility after COVID vax

But Eric Topol says there is “no evidence” that the vaccine causes harm. That’s reassuring. So Eric, if it isn’t the vaccine, what IS causing it?

By Steve Kirsch | October 15, 2022

Watch this exclusive 30 second video of Kimberly Biss, MD an OB/Gyn in Tampa Bay, FL explaining what they’ve observed in their large practice:

However, Dr. Eric Topol, who is an expert on the COVID vaccine, says this isn’t caused by the vaccine:

I’d love to know what IS causing it, but Dr. Topol blocked all of my accounts on Twitter and Twitter has banned me for life twice, so I am not allowed to ask that question.

It cannot be COVID since the problem only surfaced after the vaccines rolled out. So his explanation just doesn’t fit the observation.

So maybe you can ask Eric for me?

Please share my posts (and follow me):

October 16, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

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