On September 8, I wrote about California Governor Gavin Newsom having AB 2098 — legislation that “tells the state’s medical boards to punish doctors who challenge the coronavirus orthodoxy” — on his desk for him to either veto or sign into law. The punishment the state medical boards could impose under the legislation includes revoking doctors’ medical licenses.
Here is an update. On Friday, Newsom signed into law this bill directing the prosecution of an attack on free speech, medical freedom, and the pursuit of better health.
The coronavirus orthodoxy, or party line, the legislation seeks to protect has repeatedly been wrong — from promoting “social distancing” and mask wearing that have not been shown to provide a net benefit in countering coronavirus to advocating that everyone take the “safe and effective” coronavirus “vaccine” shots that turned out to be both exceedingly dangerous and ineffective. The coronavirus orthodoxy also demanded that much of the economy and social interactions be shut down for an extended period of time in a supposed effort to reduce the spread of the not-very-threatening-to-most-people coronavirus. In short, the coronavirus orthodoxy is an enemy of wellbeing.
Newsom’s decision to sign AB 2098 into law is not surprising given that he has been one of the governors most adamant in imposing a coronavirus crackdown.
The evidence for the presence of thermite at the World Trade Center (WTC) on 9/11 is extensive and compelling. This evidence has accumulated to the point at which we can say that WTC thermite is no longer a hypothesis, it is a tested and proven theory.
Therefore it is not easy to debunk it. But the way to do so is not difficult to understand.
To debunk the thermite theory, one must first understand the evidence for it and then show how all of that evidence is either mistaken or explained by other phenomena. Here are the top ten categories of evidence for thermite at the WTC.
Molten metal: There are numerous photographs and eyewitness testimonies to the presence of molten metal at the WTC, both in the buildings and in the rubble. No legitimate explanation has been provided for this evidence other than the exothermic reaction of thermite, which generates the temperatures required and molten iron as a product.
The fires at Ground Zero could not be put out for several months. Despite the application of millions of gallons of water to the pile, several rainfall events at the site, and the use of a chemical fire suppressant, the fires would not subside. Thermal images made by satellite showed that the temperatures in the pile were far above that expected in the debris from a typical structure fire. Only thermite, which contains its own oxidant and therefore cannot be extinguished by smothering it, can explain this evidence.
Numerous eyewitnesses who were fleeing the area described the air mass as a hot wind filled with burning particles.[1] This evidence agrees with the presence of large quantities of thermite byproducts in the air, including hot metallic microspheres and still-reacting agglomerates of thermite.
Numerous vehicles were scorched or set on fire in the area. Photographic evidence shows that cars parked within the lower-level garage areas of the WTC complex burned as if impacted by a super-hot wind like that described by the eyewitnesses. All non-metallic parts of the cars, including the plastic, rubber, and glass, were completely burned off by a hot blast.
There was a distinct “white smoke” present—clearly different from smoke caused by a normal structural fire—as indicated by eyewitnesses and photographic evidence.[2] The second major product of the thermite reaction is aluminum oxide, which is emitted as a white solid shortly after reaction.
Peer-reviewed, scientific research confirmed the presence of extremely high temperatures at the WTC. The high temperatures were evidenced by metallic and other microspheres, along with evaporated metals and silicates. These findings were confirmed by 9/11 investigators and by scientists at an independent company and at the United States Geologic Survey.
The environmental data collected at Ground Zero in the months following 9/11 indicate that violent incendiary fires, like those produced by thermite, occurred on specific dates. Peer-reviewed scientific analysis of these data show that the components of thermite spiked to extraordinary levels on specific dates in both the air and aerosol emissions at Ground Zero.
Carbon nanotubes have been found in the WTC dust and in the lungs of 9/11 first responders. Formation of carbon nanotubes requires extremely high temperatures, specific metal catalysts, and carbon compounds exactly like those found in nanothermite formulations. Researchers have discovered that nanothermite produces the same kinds of carbon nanotubes. That finding has been confirmed by independent analysis in a commercial contract laboratory.
There is also a great deal of indirect evidence for the thermite theory. This includes the attempts by the government agency NIST to downplay the evidence for thermite. It also includes things like a weak effort by Rupert Murdoch’s National Geographic Channel to discredit the ability of thermite to cut structural steel, which was itself roundly discredited by an independent investigator. It is now unquestionable that thermite can cut structural steel as needed for a demolition.
Therefore, debunking the WTC thermite theory is not easy but is very straightforward. Doing so simply requires addressing the evidence listed above point by point, and showing in each case how an alternative hypothesis can explain that evidence better. Given the scientific grounding of the thermite theory, use of the scientific method, including experiments and peer-reviewed publications, would be essential to any such debunking effort.
That is almost certainly why we have seen no such debunking. Instead, the people working to refute the WTC thermite theory have resorted to what might be called a case study in how NOT to respond to scientific evidence.
The failed thermite theory debunkers have produced:
Thousands of chat room comments and other posts yet not one peer-reviewed scientific article.
Alternate hypotheses that have little or no evidence to support them. For example, the mini-nuke hypothesis and the “Star Wars Beam” hypothesis.
Attempts to exaggerate the meaning of the evidence, for example by saying that thermite or nanothermite could not have caused all of the effects seen at the WTC.
The last of these methods has been the most popular. Trying to debunk the tenth piece of evidence for WTC thermite, NIST contractor James Millette produced an unreviewed paper that purports to replicate the finding of nanothermite in the WTC dust. This was apparently organized in the hope that doing so would discredit all of the evidence for thermite at the WTC.
Millette is well known for having helped create the official reports on the analysis of WTC dust. He was responsible for creating the form that was used to pre-screen all materials found in the dust prior to any analysis by official investigators. Those official reports did not mention any of the evidence listed above, in particular failing to report the abundant iron microspheres scattered throughout the WTC dust. Additionally, Millette’s official report team did not find any red-gray chips, let alone nanothermite.
As he worked to debunk the WTC thermite research, Millette was still unable to find any iron microspheres. But he did claim to have finally found the red-gray chips. Curiously, he did not attempt to replicate the testing that would determine if those chips were thermitic.
Claiming to have found the chips, Millette perfomed an XEDS analysis for elemental composition but failed to do any of the other tests including BSE, DSC, the flame test, the MEK test, or measurement of the chip resistivity. Having inexplicably “ashed” the chips at 400 °C in a muffle furnace, thereby proving that they were not the materials of interest (which ignite at 430 °C), Millette ignored the remainder of the study he had set out to replicate.
Because he did not do the DSC test, he could not do XEDS of the spheres formed from the chips. Since he had still not found spheres in the dust, he could not test those and this allowed him to ignore the testing of spheres from the thermite reaction.
Millette rested his case on FTIR, which I have also performed on chips from WTC dust but with a much different result. Like Millette’s paper, my FTIR work is not yet part of a peer-reviewed publication and therefore should not be taken as authoritative evidence. There has been less urgency to this supplemental work because what has been done to date has received no legitimate response from the government or from much of the scientific community. That sad fact should be the central point of discussion today.
In any case, Millette attempted only one tenth of the tests in his struggle to replicate (or refute) one tenth of the evidence for thermite at the WTC. His un-reviewed “one percent approach” was nonetheless very convincing to many people, including some of the people who produced the official reports for 9/11. But it is obvious to others that Millette’s work was not a replication in any sense of the word.
I’m looking forward to the peer-reviewed scientific article that finally does replicate the nanothermite paper or any of the other peer-reviewed scientific papers that document the evidence for thermite at the WTC. Hopefully, we can approach those efforts without concerns about the sources and without recalling all the deception and manipulation that preceded them.
Until then, it is important to recognize the difference between the superficial appearance of science and the actual practice of science. Ignoring 90 percent of the evidence is not scientific. And replication of the 10 percent means actually repeating the work.
If thermite debunkers and alternate hypothesis supporters can find the courage and focus to step through that challenge, maybe they can begin to add to the discussion.
Kevin Ryan is a chemist, former laboratory director, and prominent voice in the 9/11 Truth movement.
Kim Iverson, a TV journalist formerly at The Hill and now streaming her own show on YouTube, has been one of the most honest and courageous voices during the pandemic. She is the rare journalist today who is willing to follow the evidence wherever it may lead. I sat down with her this morning for an interview about California’s latest attempt to suppress the free speech of physicians and undermine the doctor patient relationship. Assembly Bill 2098, which I have posted about previously—see Punishing Dissident Physicians and The Censorship of Medicine—is set to become law unless the governor vetoes it today.
I also had a wide-ranging two-part conversation with Dr. Drew Pinsky on his podcast recently, where we discussed my new book, The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State. It’s available on the Apple Podcasts (link to Part 1 and Part 2), or your other favorite podcast app.
You can pre-order the book here and it will ship in one month…
Like every other important social phenomenon, propaganda regimes have historical genealogies. For example, a very strong case could be made that the ongoing, and sad to admit, largely successful Covid propaganda onslaught under which we now live can trace its roots back to the two so-called demonstration wars (the Panama Invasion and the First Gulf Conflict) waged by George Bush Sr.
The American elites were badly stung by the country’s defeat in Vietnam. In it, they rightly saw a considerable curtailment of what they had come to see as their divine right since the end of WWII: the ability to intervene as they so fit in any country not explicitly covered by the Soviet nuclear umbrella.
And in their analysis of that failure, they correctly alighted to the role that the media—by simply bringing the tawdry and ignoble reality of the war into our living rooms—had played in undermining citizen willingness to engage in such fruitless, costly and savage adventures in the future.
With his massive military build-up and heavy support of proxies in Latin America in the eighties, Ronald Reagan took the first steps toward recovering this lost elite prerogative.
But it was not until the administration of George Bush Sr. and the two conflicts mentioned above that, as he himself exultantly put it in the wake of his pitiless slaughter of some 100,000 poorly equipped Iraqis, “We’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.”
Bush knew what he was talking about, and it wasn’t necessarily, or even primarily, military force or prowess.
What had largely limited Reagan to proxy wars during eight years in office were two things. The first was a citizenry that still had fresh memories of the debacle in Southeast Asia. The second, and arguably more important one was a press corps with on-the-ground familiarity with the reality of these conflicts that continued to challenge him on both their morality and strategic efficacy.
Bush and his team, which as you’ll remember included one Richard Cheney at Defense, made remedying this “problem” of war-hesitancy one of the central aims of his presidency. As Barbara Trent suggests in her remarkable The Panama Deception, experimenting with new media management techniques was not a strategic sideshow of the conflict, but rather its prime goal.
The Panama invasion was followed in quick succession by the Gulf War, where press coverage put heavy emphasis on the opinions of US military figures and their explanations of the technical genius of American-made military technology. In this way, the war was presented to Americans as a sort of exciting video game characterized by flashes of light in the night and precision attacks devoid of any bloodshed and death.
This process of desensitizing of the media, and from there, the American people to the horrendous human effects of war-making culminated in the revolting spectacle, on January 30th, 1991 of reporters chuckling along with General Norman Schwartzkopf as he joked while showing them videos of supposed “smart bombs” killing people like ants from the safety of 30,000 feet.
Having received no coordinated pushback from anyone with power about this degrading treatment of human life and the American people, they tripled down and went full Manichaean after September 11th.
Why not?
With Reagan’s repeal of the fairness Doctrine in 1987 and Bill Clinton’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 never had the media been a) concentrated in so few hands b) so beholden to the government regulation for the continuance of the super-profitability generated through this consolidation c) debilitated by the internet-induced collapse of the newspaper business model and thus d) less obligated to the reflect take into account the concerns and interests of a broad spectrum of the American people.
It was now truly, as George Bush Jr said, a matter of “You’re either with us or against us,” us of course being the war-making government (including the Deep State) along with its slavishly loyal media mouthpieces. If like Susan Sontag—who whether you like her or not, was a very bright and highly accomplished thinker—you believed the maniacal presumptions of the US response to September 11th were flawed, and said so, you could in this new environment, expect to be the object of well-coordinated attacks on your character.
Never once did the administration call for restraint in such attacks, nor did any administration figures remind people of the importance of the supposedly American value of everyone’s right to be respectfully heard.
Seeing the exhaustion of the Bush brand after the Iraq debacle, the Deep State switched party allegiances in the run-up to the 2008 election. And it has stayed firmly on the side of the so-called “left” ever since, encouraging the use of Bush-Cheney-style government-media mobbing against those who might dare to question the motives of the sainted warmonger Obama, or, say, the “logic” of trying to reduce the problems of racism by promoting it through identity politics.
The efficiency of such mob-style takedown tactics was greatly enhanced by the dramatic expansion of social media platforms in the Obama and Trump years.
It is no exaggeration to say that a person born in 1990 or later has little if any understanding of what it means to disagree in detail and in good faith with someone whose political and/or social ideals are different than their own. Nor what it means to feel obligated to respond to the claims of others with careful factual refutations.
What they do know, because it’s mostly all that they have seen from their “betters,” is that to argue is to seek the destruction of one’s interlocutor, and failing that, to make sure his or her arguments are impeded from circulating freely in our shared civic spaces. The ever-increasing dialectical poverty of those who have been socialized and educated in this environment is evident to anyone who has served as a classroom instructor during the last quarter century.
A sanctuary for the weary
While most people seemed to want to pretend that nothing new was happening, that the collaboration between media and government had always been this extreme, many of us did not. We had memories. And we knew the “field of thinkable thought” was dramatically smaller in 2005 than in 1978. And we knew it had become much, much smaller in 2018 than it was in 2005. In our search for answers we turned to media critics and scholars of media history. We also turned to the writings of journalist-activists with both interest and insight into these matters.
When it came to this last group, I found myself drawn principally to what might be termed leftist anti-imperialists. Reading them, I widened my understanding of how elites and their chosen “experts” manage information flows, and constantly seek to shrink the parameters of acceptable opinion on foreign policy issues.
Two years ago last March, however, my sense of intellectual kinship with this subset of thinkers suddenly became very strained. We were facing what I immediately recognized as the largest and most aggressive “perception management” campaign in recent times, and perhaps in the history of the world. One, moreover, that was utilizing all the techniques employed during the previous two to three decades to insure citizen allegiance to US war-making.
And yet in the face of it, almost all my go-to people on propaganda analysis had little or nothing to say. And when I sent contributions outlining my doubts about the congruity of the emergent Covid discourse to places that had generally welcomed my analyses of pro-war propaganda, suddenly there was hesitation on the other end.
And the passage of time cured nothing. Indeed, the only things these people said down the road; that is, if they addressed Covid at all, was to underscore the unprecedented severity of the situation (a very questionable assertion) and harp on Trump’s supposedly disastrous handling of it.
There was virtually no daylight between the opinions of these people and the feckless liberals they, as true-blue leftists, always claimed to disdain. And on it went, for the entire two years of the Covid panic.
A week or so ago, John Pilger, arguably one of the brightest and more persistent leftist analysts of establishment propaganda, published “Silencing the lambs: How propaganda works” on his website and then a number of progressive news outlets.
In it, he repeats all sorts of well-known ideas and concepts. There’s a reference to Leni Riefenstahl and how she believed the bourgeoisie are those most amenable to influence campaigns, a reminder of Julian Assange’s horrendous and undeserved fate, much deserved praise for Harold Pinter’s absolutely extraordinary if largely ignored Nobel acceptance speech, an intelligent discussion about how our media studiously refuses to tell us about anything that went on between Russia and the West, and Russia and Ukraine between 1990 and February of this year.
The underlying thesis of the piece is that while emitting and constantly pushing elite-approved messages are key elements of propaganda, so too is the strategic disappearance of essential historical realities and truths.
All good stuff. Indeed, all themes that I have written about with frequency and conviction over the years.
Toward the end piece Pilger asks the following rhetorical question:
When will real journalists stand up?
And a few lines later, after providing us with a list of where to find the few outlets and journalists that do know what they are doing when it comes to the elite’s informational misdirection plays, he adds:
And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?
Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.
Reading this final flourish while remembering the lamb-like silence of John Pilger in the face of the sustained Covidian onslaught of institutionalized lies and Soviet-grade censorship, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
And when considering that virtually all those he endorses as exemplars of propaganda-savvy journalism—people such as Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone all of whose work I have frequently and enthusiastically championed over the years—took the same cud-chewing path, the sense of farce only grows.
The same can be said of most all of the outlets (Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, Globetrotter ) who portray themselves as being wise to the wiles of elite-sponsored influence operations.
Who, the question thus occurs to me, is actually living in a “a deep bath of righteousness” that impedes the ability to access the truths that lie beyond the “official version” of our past and present?
Who is failing to respond to the presence of fascistic tendencies in our midst?
If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was John and his merry band of crack propaganda dissectors.
Is it that hard for them to see the shadow of fascism in the now heavily documented collaboration between the US government and Big Tech in censoring opinions that go counter to the government’s and Big Pharma’s desired discourse on Covid?
Is it really difficult for them to see the presence of the same dark forces in the US government’s insouciant abrogation of the Nuremberg principle relating to informed consent and medical experimentation?
Are they not troubled by the fact that the experimental vaccines that were sold to the population on the basis of their ability to stop infection do not do that? Or that this was known to anyone who read the FDA briefing papers published when these injections were unleashed on the public?
Does this count as a major “propaganda problem” worth looking into?
Do they care about the millions of people who lost their jobs over these lies, and of course the government’s abject disdain for the longstanding statutory right to object to medical treatment on religious grounds?
As long-time mavens of foreign policy, have they looked into the mafia-like nature of the vaccine contracts forced upon sovereign countries around the world?
Being the great sleuths of information-hiding that they are, did it raise any suspicions in them when Pfizer sought to keep all clinical information relating to the vaccines under wraps for 75 years?
And being the good progressives they are, did the enormous upward transfer of wealth that took place during the years of the Covid state of exception trouble them?
Did it light any suspicions that all this hullabaloo might not just be about health?
Have they organized support groups and action plans for the billions of children around the world whose lives were thrown into chaos by the useless quarantine and masking that was foisted upon them, and who, in all likelihood will never recover the years of developmental progress lost to this program of senseless cruelty?
I could go on.
As far as I can tell, the answer to all these questions is a resounding “NO!”
I am truly grateful for all that John Pilger and his companions in the leftist propaganda dissection cadres have taught me over the years. But as Ortega y Gasset said, a public intellectual is only as good as his ability to remain at the “height of his times.”
Sadly, this group of otherwise talented individuals has failed this test, badly, over the last two-plus years. As much as it may pain them to hear this, they have shown themselves to be much more like the “clerics” that Julien Benda rightly castigated in 1927 after they lost their moral bearings and their critical acuity before the massive propaganda onslaught used to promote the senseless slaughters of World War I.
Why these professional uncoverers of camouflaged realities of our times suddenly decided to unsee what was happening before their eyes is a job for future historians.
But if I had to hazard a guess today, I’d say that it had a lot to do with all the usual human things like fear of losing friends and prestige or being seen by ideological enforcers on their side as going over to the enemy. All of which is fine and understandable.
But if that is the case, isn’t it too much to publicly admit now that you missed the boat on this important story?
And if you can’t manage that, could you at least have the sense to stop issuing sermons on topics like “how propaganda works” for a good long while?
Thomas Harrington, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where he taught for 24 years. His research is on Iberian movements of national identity and contemporary Catalan culture. His essays are published at Words in The Pursuit of Light.
After a delay of 6 months, the journal PLOS One returned our manuscript saying that they could not find an academic editor and reviewers for our manuscript. PLOS One is a fairly open minded journal and has a team of editors representing wide diversity of fields. That’s why this kind of response is quite surprising. This is only for the second time in my life I received this response. Earlier incident was with the journal Biology Direct. Are the two incidents only a matter of rare chance? Or are there any specific reasons to it?
One thing common about both is that both were about diabetes, highlighting models that are at substantial deviation from the prevalent mainstream thinking in the field. I think there lays the reason.
What was our paper about? It pointed out a large number of anomalies in the prevalent theory of glucose dysregulation in type 2 diabetes. It listed dozens of mismatches between the theory and an array of reproducible experimental or epidemiological findings. It also suggested an alternative model that could account for almost every anomaly in a coherent thread of logic. Classically type 2 diabetes is believed to result from an elusive concept of “insulin resistance” and inadequate compensatory insulin response. We, on the other hand assumed with sufficient evidence in hand that diabetes begins with vasculopathy. Because of deficient vasculature there is inadequate and defective glucose transport to the brain which makes the brain deficient in glucose. Deprived of sufficient glucose, the brain instructs the liver to release more glucose in blood. Vasculopathy is long known to be a characteristic of diabetes but the thinking was that chronic rise in glucose is the cause of vasculopathy. We are saying the reverse, vasculopathy the cause of rise in sugar. There is clear demonstration that transport of glucose from blood to brain is reduced prior to hyperglycemia. Further, ALL the experimental and epidemiological patterns not explained by the insulin resistance theory are explained with complete coherence by the “vasculopathy first” model. Therefore the alternative model looks more promising. There also exists published evidence that early signs of vasculopathy are seen much prior to hyperglycemia.
The catch is, if we accept the alternative model, the entire line of treatment of diabetes will become completely redundant. That would lead to collapse of a trillion dollar business. But that is much ahead in the sequence. Right now we are not over-claiming. We only say in this paper that the alternative model explains almost all the anomalies and therefore needs to be considered seriously and trigger research on a new line.
How do researchers in a field react to a finding, hypothesis, model or synthesis that directly contradicts the prevalent theory? You would expect them to critically view the new finding, may be find flaws in the argument, aggressively criticize, debate and so on. I am ready to believe that a welcome response is highly unlikely. It would be natural to expect heavy criticism. This might happen if the new argument is inherently flawed and it is easy to find the flaws in it. But what if the prevalent theory itself is flawed and the new argument it substantially stronger and sound in terms of logic, mathematics and evidence?
From repeated experience I know what a typical response of scientists is, particularly from the field of biomedicine. They prefer to keep mum. They neither accept nor reject any disruptive thinking or evidence. They pretend that they just haven’t heard of it. Criticism can be replied to. A debate is likely to take a logical path so that ultimately truth will prevail with a good chance, if not every time. But the strategy that always defeats novel thinking is “silence”. When the giants in a community have vested interests in a prevalent theory and someone makes a sound case that it is wrong, they just keep mum, pretend that nobody said anything; they did not hear anyone saying anything. In the days of hierarchical structure of science publishing this strategy can perhaps never be defeated. The giants in the field can block the new thought from getting published in the flagship journals of the field. They don’t care if it gets published anywhere else because they know nobody reads research anyway. Research is propagated only through a handful of journals; that too only through the titles and abstracts. Rarely if ever, research papers are read completely. So often the data in the paper contradicts the statements in the abstract. But everyone reads only the abstract and therefore truth remains masked. If we point out stark difference in the data and the conclusions in a paper, the journal is guaranteed to not respond.
This is not different in principle, from the responses of researchers to a disruptive idea described by Thomas Kuhn, albeit two major differences. One is that of difference in culture of the research fields. Kuhn mostly talked about physics in which ideas are debated. Debate is not in the culture of biomedicine. They have smarter ways to suppress alternative thinking. The second difference is that Kuhn wrote when peer review was not a mandatory norm in science publishing. Now peer review is another weapon by which any upcoming thought can be swiftly killed. And you need not waste any time in reading and commenting as well. Just decline to handle the manuscript and that is enough!! Here is our manuscript in a preprint form (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.19.477014v1) and see below the correspondence with the editors.
Ron Johnson, the only Federal politician that has publicly called out the deep corruption behind the failed U.S COVID response, is helping protect doctors.
Senator Ron Johnson and I just published an Op-Ed Monday on the Fox News site, the 3rd most visited news site on the internet, with almost one billion visits per month.
As some are probably aware, California’s Legislature just passed an obscenity of a bill titled “AB 2098” which calls for the state’s medical board to revoke the license of any physician who expresses an opinion “contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus to the standard of care.” I am not even sure what that means but holy cow, they just literally started to outlaw opinions.
Not sure which genius came up with that bill but to pretend there is a “scientific consensus” on a novel disease and a novel gene therapy is absurd. That is not how science works. Medicine is (was?) constantly trying to increase its knowledge base throughout history. In fact, one of the core responsibilities of a physician is not just to care for a patient as their “primary consideration” but also to add knowledge to the discipline and to teach it to others. Here is another responsibility articulated in the Hippocratic Oath written around the 4th century BC: Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Whoa. Hippocrates was warning us 24 centuries ago about the situation of being asked to administer poisons. Wow.
Anyway, what is medical consensus – is it state-wide, national or international? I am sure there are more than a couple of California doctors (or maybe not) whose opinions conflict with the captured Federal health agencies but are instead supported by academies of scientists and health agencies in other countries. Or even states like Tennessee that made ivermectin legally available over the counter to its citizens!
Denmark long ago restricted any person under 30 from getting the Moderna “vaccine.” In the US we now give it to toddlers. I repeat, in the U.S, we now give it to toddlers. If I object to injecting toddlers with Moderna, using the same “science” that Denmarks authorities are using, am I then a misinformationist that should not be allowed to practice medicine? What would happen to me if I go even further and espouse Denmark’s latest guidance which is to not recommend COVID mRNA vaccination to any low risk individual under 50? I guess the California State Department of Health guidance would trump that of Denmark’s. Watch out Denmark, here I come!
The scariest part of that legislation to me is that it reflects a complete ignorance of decades of evidence demonstrating that our Federal Health Agencies are under regulatory capture by the Pharmaceutical Industry. Just look at all the shenanigans the PFDA (the P is not a typo) pulled to sell the most vaccines. The below policies were all written by the Pharmaceutical Industry and issued by the PFDA, yet California doctors who know this and try to warn their patients in order to protect them from the evils of that industry could lose their license. Remember these two brilliant scientific standards?
(I paraphrase from memory)
Testing is no longer indicated for those who have received COVID mRNA vaccination (luckily this one didn’t last very long).
Testing for antibodies to assess prior exposure to COVID is not recommended prior to administering COVID mRNA vaccination.
They literally tried to avoid gathering data that would prove the vaccines were ineffective. Then they literally established that natural immunity should be ignored. With no data to support those “standards.” One of the greatest absurdities in the history of medicine was the fact that the entire health system started vaccinating people right after they recovered from COVID. They didn’t even wait for the variant to change first. But, if you publicly express a difference of opinion with this expert approach to managing an infectious disease, your livelihood could be taken away from you. Seriously? What is happening in America? This is absolutely terrifying stuff. Fantods ripple up and down my spine as I contemplate the very high possibility that such an absurd bill could start spreading across the country, trampling on the very Constitution it is supposedly supported by.
Further, in order to establish a “true” consensus and/or standard of care guideline it has been estimated to require numerous studies over an average of 17 years. So, am I not allowed to voice an opinion until 17 years of studies pass? In a novel pandemic in which insights and data accumulate rapidly? What if I am an expert way ahead of the curve based on research I am doing and/or the ever evolving data and insights I gain from treating patients with this novel disease. Should I be quiet for 17 years until such a time when my insights and expertise are more widely established and accepted?
How will our silence ever get us to that consensus? How will my patients fare during that time? Stay home, wait until your lips turn blue because I am not allowed to have an opinion or practice in treating you if it differs from either non-treatment or giving pathetic Paxlovid, a drug which has one mechanism of action identical to that of just one of ivermectin’s many mechanisms. This is exhausting.
And should I ignore the decades of examples of corruption of the medical sciences via its journals and research funding? The vehicles that have propagated guidelines on any number of fraudulent medications (SSRI’s, statins, Xygris, Oxycontin, Vioxx, Bextra, Avandia and many more). Should I be silent until those frauds are more widely exposed?
Think about all the doctors who saved their patients from those frauds despite being propagated as “medical consensus” at the time? A free and open scientific debate, championing those voices without conflicts of interest is what is needed. Instead this bill will silence those without conflicts while further amplifying the media megaphone of vaccine manufacturer CEO’s. These are dark dark times.
And why are we suddenly displacing the time honored protections of medical malpractice – where the consequences of harming a patient was borne by the physician if they adopted an idea or practice which hurt a patient. That has kept doctors in line for decades. But now, prior to any idea or practice I espouse actually resulting in harm, my opinion would be silenced or else I lose my license to practice. This is an obscenity. This would disappear care practices that would help patients far more frequently than it would care practices that harm patients.
This bill will lead to even more morbidity and mortality, not only in COVID, but in other diseases as well. Pharma already controls the medical journals and Federal Health agencies. But they don’t control independent physician’s opinions and voices. Well, at least they didn’t until now.
Good luck California, I fear for you. No-one from the medical field will be able to warn you of the continued rampages of a documented criminal industry.
Our Op-Ed is here, but I think I already covered most of it. Enjoy, although it ain’t fun.
After months of investigation that identified networks of reviewers and editors manipulating the peer review process, Hindawi plans to retract 511 papers across 16 journals, Retraction Watch has learned.
The retractions, which the publisher and its parent company, Wiley, will announce tomorrow in a blog post, will be issued in the next month, and more may come as its investigation continues. They are not yet making the list available.
Hindawi’s research integrity team found several signs of manipulated peer reviews for the affected papers, including reviews that contained duplicated text, a few individuals who did a lot of reviews, reviewers who turned in their reviews extremely quickly, and misuse of databases that publishers use to vet potential reviewers.
Richard Bennett, vice president of researcher and publishing services for Hindawi, told us that the publisher suspects “coordinated peer review rings” consisting of reviewers and editors working together to advance manuscripts through to publication. Some of the manuscripts appeared to come from paper mills, he said.
We asked what prompted the investigation. Bennett told us:
In April 2022, Hindawi’s Research Integrity team led an initial investigation into a single Special Issue (SI) after a Chief Editor raised concerns about some of the papers published in it. The team decided to investigate the content of the journal further. Through this investigation, the team highlighted a pattern of irregular and concerning reviewer activity and identified potential ‘bad actors’ that were present across many of these publications.
These concerns prompted the Publishing Insights and Research Integrity teams, enabled by recently enhanced analytic capabilities and newly developed dashboards providing views across all reviewer activity, to conduct a wider investigation to determine whether these same bad actors were involved in peer review manipulation elsewhere in the Hindawi portfolio.
Following the discovery that these bad actors were present in other journals, the Hindawi leadership team put in place a cross-functional working team combining the manual and data-driven investigation which resulted in the identification of further published articles.
In early August, Hindawi expanded the investigation under a combined investigation team comprising Research Integrity experts, data and analytics experts, publishing and operational teams, and legal counsel from both Wiley and Hindawi. This team evaluated in depth review activity across all potentially impacted articles and manuscripts. This resulted in a list of ‘compromised’ reviewers and editors in addition to the bad actors already discovered, identification of networks that exist between them, patterns of review activity, and insight into published articles and manuscripts at each stage in the review process that we could initially label as ‘compromised’. On September 6, the combined investigation team began assessing published articles which led to the initial recommendation to retract 511 articles that are compromised based on reviewer activity alone. We expect ongoing investigations to result in further retractions.
The publisher also held up the review and production of submitted manuscripts in which “potentially compromised” individuals were involved, and will begin assessing those articles.
We asked about what Hindawi will do to prevent something similar from happening again, but Bennett declined to share specifics, “as we believe it will simply open up new targets for those who seek to exploit a system based on trust.”
He did say that the publisher has banned the individuals its investigation identified, will contact research integrity officers or department heads as appropriate, and has shared its findings with industry groups:
It is increasingly apparent to all involved in safeguarding and investigating issues of research integrity that closing rings down at one publisher can simply move the problem to others. We are committed to taking an active role in preventing that.
Other publishers have announced large batches of retractions recently. IOP Publishing earlier this month said it planned to retract nearly 500 articles likely from paper mills, and PLOS in August announced it would retract over 100 papers from its flagship journal over manipulated peer review.
In a prepared statement, Liz Ferguson, Wiley senior vice president of research publishing for Wiley, said that attacks on research integrity such as paper mills, manipulated peer review, and image duplication and doctoring “are sophisticated and appear to be coordinated.”
Her statement continued:
As these attacks increase in frequency and intensity, we remain committed to upholding research integrity throughout our publishing programs. We have and will continue to share our findings with our peers and industry bodies to advance a cross-industry approach. This is absolutely essential to safeguard trust in research.
It’s something that we at Wiley are committed to and as a result we have taken the step of sharing our findings as transparently as possible, not just with our peers, but with industry associations, third party databases, and others.
These conversations have been very constructive. Our industry is one of trust – this remains our greatest asset. Only through concerted and collaborative action will we succeed together. This is our goal, and Wiley and Hindawi will continue to advance it tirelessly.
My recent post about scientists finding mRNA nanoparticles containing Covid vaccine genetic code, in the breast milk of vaccinated mothers, and mentioning an infant documented to have died thereof, got quite a bit of traction online.
Today, I want to look at a study from a year ago that purported to NOT find mRNA nanoparticles in breast milk. We will see why exactly the team having Bill Gates and CDC-sponsored researchers, could not find what the independent scientists could find a year later!
I decided to compare the two studies (one that found mRNA in breast milk and the other that did not) very closely and compare their methodologies using the “Modern Discontent” method.
Modern Discontent has a great post about his method, but he mostly is saying “pay close attention and understand the whole f… thing”, which is basically what I usually do with something interesting and important anyway. He posted his method three days ago, and I had my substack for a while longer. So, I intuitively used many of his approaches, but he laid them out very systematically and clearly. His article is extremely useful for all people writing about biomedical science, so take a look:
At first sight, both studies, which I will call the 2022 shedding study (which I discussed two days ago) and the 2021 no-shedding study, superficially appear to be similarly designed. They took several lactating women and tested their milk. One study found shedding, while the other did not. Upon a closer look, the differences between these studies turned out to be extremely important!
Here’s a summary of their differences:
You can see that the study that found mRNA lipid nanoparticle shedding, was done more thoroughly. The shedding study had:
More participants (11 vs 7)
More milk samples were taken (131 vs 13!)
Samples better preserved (frozen immediately)
Samples were taken at varied moments post-vaccination including within mere hours, and also days
Looked at very important Extracellular Vesicles
As a result of being more thorough and covering more cases, the shedding study found actual shedding! Surprise!
What if the women in the shedding study, getting the same vaccines, were analyzed using the poorer methodology of the no-shedding study?
I took the chart from the shedding study showing five women with milk samples positive for mRNA nanoparticles. I crossed out samples that WOULD NOT BE DETECTED, if the no-shedding study methodology was applied to the samples of the shedding study:
You can see that if the researchers in the shedding study used the crippled methodology of the no-shedding study, they would detect only two positive samples, instead of seven.
The methodology of the no-shedding study would miss all extracellular vesicle (EV) samples because they did not look at EVs. That is shown in the column on the right that is entirely crossed out.
The no-shedding study would also miss the 1 hour and three-hour samples because they did not take those samples (save for just ONE woman who happened not to be positive).
As a result, had the less thorough no-shedding study methodology been applied to the shedding study, only 2 positive samples, instead of 7, would be detected!
Since the actual no-shedding study collected only 13 samples and not 131 samples and used deficient methodology, no wonder they missed all positive instances!
It is as if the no-shedding study was intentionally designed not to find anything. Hmmm…
Fishing Analogy
Let me give an analogy that many will understand — fishing using fishing nets.
Let’s say that a good fisherman (the shedding study) was asked to do his best job fishing to see if a particular lake has fish (mRNA nanoparticles). A bad fisherman, on the contrary, would be asked to design his fishing expedition to not catch any fish, so as to falsely prove that the lake has no fish. What would they do? This infographic shows the difference:
What’s up with Bill Gates and the CDC?
By pure coincidence, the study that did not find mRNA nanoparticles in breast milk (the no-shedding study), had key scientists sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They also received money from the CDC. You can see that Prof. Gaw and Dr. Flaherman were key participants, making the most important decisions and analyses!
Did these sponsorships influence the authors’ approach to designing the experiment? We cannot know this. We can only wonder.
One of the best places to raise children is The Netherlands. In several consecutive UNICEF reports the Netherlands ranked first for raising the happiest children among wealthy countries (2008, 2013, 2020). However, in the spring of 2020, The Netherlands became a harsh place for children and young people. The Dutch government adopted a one-size-fits-all policy handling the covid-19 pandemic, which did not spare the youngest and took a great toll on Dutch children. The Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt remarked that the Dutch policies would ‘set the record for worst covid-response ever.’
‘Intelligent Lockdown’
Unable to withstand the rising global panic, the Dutch government on March 16th 2020 announced an “intelligent” lockdown, a phrase coined by Prime Minister Mark Rutte.
Dutch society came to a halt. Offices, shops, restaurants and bars, libraries, sport facilities, as well as daycare centers, schools and universities were closed. The closure of schools was unexpected since the government’s official advisory group, the medics-dominated Outbreak Management Team (OMT), advised against it, for a school closure would have a minimal effect on the spread of the coronavirus.
A reconstruction of events showed that the main reason the Dutch government closed schools was that the educational field started to panic about keeping schools open.Closing schools was a political decision to follow the panic, not a medical decision. Schools supposedly closed for three weeks. Three weeks became three months. Research by The University of Oxford (Engzell, et al. 2021) shows that during the first wave the average Dutch student learned next to nothing during homeschooling. Moreover, students whose parents were not well-educated suffered up to 60% more learning losses.
School Closure ‘No Effect’
According to the Dutch equivalent of Fauci – Jaap van Dissel, chief scientist of the Dutch Health Agency (RIVM) and chairman of the Dutch OMT – the closure of schools in the spring of 2020 had “no effect.” Media, experts and politicians paid no attention to evidence though. Children were portrayed as ‘virus factories’ and schools were depicted as ’unsafe’ environments. Fear had a strong grip on the field of education and teaching unions exaggerated the risks of teachers in schools resulting in a drastic increase in safety demands.
The data was clear that not only did children not run any significant risk, but also that there was ‘no evidence that children play an important role in SARS-CoV-2 transmission.’ Still, a second lockdown would hit children. That second lockdown – now called a ‘hard lockdown’ – was announced on December 15th 2020. Schools closed again, this time advised by the OMT who had increased the number of areas it deemed itself expert on, on the basis of models, of course, proving Martin Kulldorff’s point that lab scientists are no public health scientists.
Dutch minister of Health Hugo de Jonge caused a stir by explaining this intervention was meant to coerce parents to stay at home. The international children’s rights organization KidsRights harshly criticized this policy: “The Netherlands has set a bad example internationally by closing schools during the corona pandemic to keep parents at home.” This children’s rights organization concluded that children were not a priority in Dutch corona policy and warned for the possible consequences.
As new insights on the negative impact of closing schools on children’s lives emerged, governments from countries all over the world decided not to close them again in the future. Undeterred, the Dutch government closed schools again on December 18 2021, just long enough to deny children their traditional Christmas dinner at school with their classmates, a big event in the childhood of Dutch children.
The deteriorating mental health of Dutch children was striking. The Dutch Health Authorities (RIVM) published a disturbing report which stated that more than one in five (22%) teenagers and young adults between the ages of 12 and 25 seriously considered taking their own life between December 2021 and February 2022 during the third lockdown. From happiest in the world to suicidal in a matter of three lockdowns.
Record Low in Sports Participation
Not only were schools closed by diktat. For two years, sports facilities were also repeatedly forced to close. The restrictions were constantly changing, with as a low point banning parents from watching their child play sports outdoors. Once again, there was no scientific evidence that this would help minimize the spread of the virus. The result is a record low in sports participation nationwide. The Dutch Olympic Committee and the Dutch Sports Federation (NOC*NSF) were ‘particularly’ worried by the negative effect on young people’s sports participation.
The Corona Pass
So no school and no sports. Another low point with regard to children was the corona pass (Coronatoegangsbewijs) that was mandatory from September 25th, 2021 for every Dutch citizen above 12. The corona pass was required for most social activities, such as going to the movies, attending a sports game with parents, or entering the canteen at sports club with teammates to drink tea or lemonade after the match.
Unsurprisingly, there was no scientific evidence that this intervention would reduce the spread of covid-19, but the Dutch government enforced it anyway. Crucially, the corona pass required vaccination, recovery from covid-19 or a negative result from a coronavirus test taken less than 24 hours before entry. So essentially, access to social life was used by the government to blackmail Dutch children into invasive medical procedures.
The madness continued, unsupported by evidence. At one point in time, outside playgrounds for children were closed. Parents were not allowed to enter swimming pools to dress their preschoolers before and after swimming lessons. In the winter of 2020-2021 the Dutch government even went as far as trying to regulate snowball fights, by dictating that only those from the same household were allowed to participate, and that their group could not exceed a certain number.
Neither sex nor the sea were exempt from the regulators. Young adults were advised which forms of sex were recommended, bearing the 1.5 m distance rule in mind. Drones were used to prevent people from gathering on the beach. To restrict the movements of young people even further, an evening curfew was introduced. It was not supported by any scientific explanation, just “boerenverstand” (common sense) as the advisory group OMT called it.
Restricting the lives of children and young people during the pandemic should require a great deal of evidence, as well as a risk-benefit evaluation. The Swedish government decided early in January 2020 that the measures in Sweden should be evidence-based. So it kept schools open, a decision supported by the evaluation of the Swedish Corona Commission in 2022. In Norway – where schools only closed briefly – the corona commission concluded in April 2022 that the Norwegian government had not done enough to protect children and that the measures regarding children had been excessive. The Norwegians essentially took the unethical initial decision to harm children without evidence and its authorities recognized that afterwards.
Sweden’s approach to the pandemic contains inconvenient truths for the Dutch, which is why Dutch authorities ignored the evidence from Sweden (and from Norway). As the Swedish journalist and author Johan Anderberg states in the epilogue of his book The Herd:
“From a human perspective, it was easy to understand why so many were reluctant to face the numbers from Sweden. For the inevitable conclusion must be that millions of people had been denied their freedom, and millions of children had had their education disrupted, all for nothing. Who would want to be complicit in that?”
This year, my wife and I decided to spend our summer holidays in Sweden and after two years of often doubtful restrictions in our home country, the Swedish summer and the beaches of Skåne were a breath of fresh air. As a parent and a Special Needs Education Generalist (and former teacher of Physical Education) I am greatly impressed by the path chosen by The Swedish Public Health Agency and the Swedish Government as they remained focused on the health, well-being, and education of children in the process of policy-making. Anders Tegnell and his predecessor JohanGiesecke have tirelessly advocated for not disturbing the lives of children, and they have been proven right.
A very outspoken Giesecke gave his frank opinion on Swedish television: “I am a father and grandfather myself, and I feel if children are given the opportunity to receive a good education and that the risk for me to become infected with covid-19 would increase slightly, it is worth it. Their future is worth more than my future, and it’s not just about my grandchildren, it’s about all the children.”
The successful Swedish approach shows that in many countries government policies met the criteria of child abuse. A key lesson for the future is that schools should not close again in similar circumstances. The Dutch government and the OMT failed the children of their country, a dark and shameful chapter in our history that future historians will surely not look favorably upon.
All expert knowledge and wisdom that has contributed to the health and well-being of Dutch children was thrown out of the window overnight in the spring of 2020. Children and young people were made to carry the burden in order to ‘supposedly’ protect adults.
As Sunetra Gupta and many others have stated, that is the precautionary principle turned upside down. The Danish-American epidemiologist Tracy Beth Høeg rightly condemned such policies, which were also pursued in the US, by calling them: Sacrificing children’s health in the name of Health.
After two years of closing down children’s lives, I firmly believe we owe it to children and their parents to make amends for the wrongs that were done to Dutch children. Above all, Article 3 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child should never be forgotten: “In all measures concerning children, the best interests of the child must come first.” It is mind-boggling how quickly children’s rights have gone out of the window worldwide. With disastrous consequences.
For children and young people a recovery plan should focus on repairing the damage done in education, recovering sports participation, and restoring the trust in the government and institutions that they can traditionally rely on for their health and their well-being. The Netherlands should be a safe haven for children, as it used to be. Pandemic preparedness also includes watching over children’s health and well-being and in this regard the Dutch failed their children and young people. We should do better in the future. Much better.
Dr. Hans Koppies has completed the Academy of Physical Education (ALO). He then studied Pedagogical Sciences at the VU University Amsterdam, specializing in Orthopedagogics: Families in Psychosocial Difficulties. He has worked as a remedial educationalist at various institutions in youth care and special education. He writes about growing up and raising children, parenting and counseling in articles and essays in newspapers and magazines.
As my beleaguered teaching colleagues and I try to get our school communities into the swing of things once again this new academic year, I find myself to be merely, powerlessly wishing that no more grotesque permutations of the Covid Madness return for a third consecutive winter. ‘Home-learning’ in particular was, of course, disastrous for children in a myriad of ways. On a purely practical level, it was fairly tricky for the teachers too, so I do believe that most of the profession hopes to avoid the insidious perfidy of forced absences or outright closures. Granted, I would prefer my colleagues to be motivated in these desires by an understanding of the abhorrent, casual neglect of children’s fundamental needs over which we were forced to preside for two years. But I’ll have to be content if the Department for Education will just let us stay open.
Belatedly, conventional wisdom has it that Covid doesn’t tend to seriously affect the school-aged population. Perhaps if the undistorted version of that truism was more widely accepted – that Covid doesn’t tend to seriously affect the healthy population – some teachers (and their unions) might find that their selfish and flawed but unending clamour for ‘more to be done’ lost its sympathisers.
It’s been a typically warm and sunny September thus far, but a small number of our students remain curiously attached to their face-coverings, sporting them lesson in, lesson out, as I look on aghast but unable to order their removal. The so-called harmless, cost-free non-pharmaceutical intervention continues to wreak its harms.
For those of us who have, by now, long fought Covid restrictions, it might feel like a further, renewed battle this Autumn to see off the prospect of the Return of the Madness. After all the hammer-blows of Spring 2020, we ordered our thoughts, picked our battles, identified our sacrifices, practised our polemics, marshalled our arguments and, eventually, took to the fray. For many of us with little or no previous experience in politicking, we may even have learnt some tricks about the art of discourse and debate along the way.
I am not referring here to my professional life of course. In my professional life I am – quite rightly – not permitted to express my personal or political ideologies or opinions to students. No good and proper teacher would dream of doing so – unless of course you suddenly, naively found that your beliefs fell in line with the government propaganda of the day. If you happened to support the mantra “Hands, Face, Space”, you could plaster it across every TV screen and vacant stretch of wall in the whole place. If you were minded to promote social distancing, or face coverings, or bubbles, or ‘don’t kill granny’, or healthy 12 year-olds giving their own consent to being tested for Covid before entering the building, or any other similar paean to the dreaded virus – exhort it from the corridors, folks! If you were an Assistant Head, you might even have the surprising chutzpah to lead a series of science-themed assemblies (to 1,200 impressionable young minds) in which you vaingloriously celebrated the disingenuous and risible proposition that Professor Sarah Gilbert’s AstraZeneca vaccine “saved 2 billion lives”.
No – when I refer to my endeavouring anew to muster awareness of the risk of restrictions this winter, I’m talking about in my personal life, away from school.
There is a danger for those of us who have resisted the mainstream Covid narrative for two-and-a-half years that we forget quite how completely and devastatingly uninterested the compliant majority are in our version of events. Many may have shifted their positions slightly, faced with ever more piles of evidence (from their own preferred sources) of the damage needlessly done. Surely, it would be hard to find someone who would embrace it all quite so gleefully all over again.
But the big arguments are not won; the wider population are still just not listening. Family members try to gently talk us down; friends tactlessly avoid the subject altogether or just silently disappear from view; some colleagues regard me warily and with increasing wryness as a bit of a crank. They all seem to manage to tell themselves that none of it really affects them and, with a special kind of inward-looking perspective, I suppose they can make that be true.
So we keep talking and waiting and wondering where the socially palatable prima facie evidence to incontrovertibly back us up and help us definitively put a stop to all this might come from. I continue to posit theories, based on my understanding of basic principles of human decency and common sense. Anecdotes, ideas and experiences should be part of our arguments and, after all, when that single piece of elusive, critical, confirmatory data lands – why should anybody ever believe what any expert says these days anyway?
Some older adults – I overhear them in crowded cafes – are delightedly and obediently getting in line for their fifth (count ‘em!) Covid jab, and some disconcerting individuals in the High Street and park remain devotedly wedded to their face-covering. They don’t seem one bit ashamed or embarrassed by the many peculiar and ridiculous things their Government forced them to do for a good while there. Is that just it for them? Over and Out, Shut Up, Move On. Are these things, this history, these awful, ungodly consequences we’re all living with, just a permanent feature of the rest of their lives, no questions asked?
There are certainly those who seemed to revel in the whole drama of it all, those who still reel performatively, sanctimoniously backwards in doorways when you dare to step near; those who complied without thought and still appear blissfully ignorant of any possibility of error or mishap or downside and who probably watch too much TV; those who spewed the new terminologies of their epoch with uneasy, faltering confidence: ‘flatten the curve’, ‘viral load’, ‘third wave’, and – my personal favourite – ‘asymptomatic’.
Is it possible that this merry, obstinate lot are the very same people who seem in recent times also to be lurching emptily but enthusiastically from one cause to another? ‘Stay Safe everyone!’ ‘Respect this virus!’, bang a kitchen pan and ‘Save the NHS!’, erect a flag and ‘Stand with Ukraine!’, buy some frozen Chicken Kievs, close everything when it’s hot and etcetera and blah, ad infinitum.
Could it be that the common thread which connects all the headline-followers, the unquestioning, the frighteningly readily compliant, is a lack of something raw, true, local, deep and meaningful in their lives? Might there be a link between the modern world’s malaise, the tragic lack of connection and community, and a very public hankering after connection and community? You don’t know your neighbour, you’re not invested in your town, you couldn’t possibly overcome the awkwardness involved in helping the elderly lady down the road – why not get your phone out instead to prove how good you are at Joining In and Helping Out?
If people don’t have a potentially perilous stake in something close, precious and valuable, or anything at all to believe in which reaches them viscerally, it seems as though they might just keep scrambling around, somewhat manically and pathetically, for Another Good Cause to get behind.
And if I’m right about all of that, then the solution to the real Covid problem lies with people and professionals who don’t know they’ve got a problem.
Get a life. Get a community. Get some meaning. And do not force a single school kid to stay at home again this year.
The Lancet recently released its long-awaited COVID-19 commission report. The report well reflects the current state of public health science and addresses the business needs of the Lancet. It may have been naïve to expect further, but health is an important area and should be taken more seriously.
The level of obfuscation of evidence, misrepresentation of prior knowledge, and disregard for diversity of scientific evidence and opinion does not reflect well on either Lancet or the commission itself.
The Lancet in context
Medicine and public health are particularly dependent on truth and transparency, as the lives and health of people cannot be entrusted to dogma and superstition. Clear and open debate is fundamental to minimizing mistakes, which can kill, and to building the trust that patients and populations need to follow guidance (as they must ultimately be the decision-makers). These two related disciplines are also increasingly lucrative for practitioners and for the companies supplying the wares they employ. These forces inevitably pull in different directions.
Private companies making these wares, such as those in the pharmaceutical industry, have a responsibility to maximize profits for their shareholders. This means encouraging more people to use their tests or drugs, rather than putting people in states of health where they do not need them (either good health, or death).
This is not an extreme position, it is a simple truth – it is how this industry is structured. If there is a wonder drug in a lab somewhere that resolves all metabolic disease with a single dose, and it is easy to manufacture and copy, then the Pharma industry would collapse. Pharma has a duty to build a market, not heal.
Transparency and truth, on the other hand, could mean admitting certain highly profitable drugs are not needed or even dangerous; that an alternative safe and cheap drug, previously available for other purposes, will be more cost-effective and lower risk.
We cannot expect private companies to state this, as it will damage or destroy their income (their business). If they do not try to block a repurposed drug that puts their own investments at risk, they would be betraying their investors. What they should do, for their investors, is overemphasize the advantage of their own product, maximize the desire of people to use them, and run public campaigns to ensure this situation is prolonged as far as possible. This is what any for-profit business does – it is their job. It is not unexpected.
We have long relied on medical journals to act as a conduit for information from researchers to medical practitioners and the public. This is a plausible model if journals are independent and the staff and owners of the journal promote truth above politics or company profit.
This was once the case; the Lancet, a subject of this article, was once family-owned and that could hold to the values of Thomas Wakley and his descendants, standing against medical authorities up to 1921. It has since been owned by other for-profit companies, now a subsidiary of a larger Dutch-based publishing conglomerate, ‘Elsevier.’
Elsevier in turn is owned by RELX group (back in London), a large company with a typical list of major institutional investors including BlackRock (and so its major owner Vanguard), Morgan Stanley and Bank of America – the same list as major pharmaceutical and biotech corporations whose products Lancet publishes on.
The above does not tell us there is intentional wrong or malfeasance, just intrinsic conflicts of interest of the type journals such as Lancet are supposed to guard against. Lancet’s ultimate ownership has a duty to shareholders to use their portfolio of assets to maximize return; on this measure alone Lancet should favor certain pharmaceutical companies. The only thing that could stand in the way is lack of competence by the owners, or a moral code that rates investors below integrity.
In this context, Lancet’s track record over COVID-19 has been checkered. In February 2020 it published a major letter on COVID-19 origins that ignored major conflicts of interest in which nearly all authors were implicated in the alternative lab origin hypothesis. It published clearly fraudulent data on hydroxychloroquine that were significant in halting early treatment studies.
A lack of early effective treatment was necessary to secure Pharma profits for later COVID-19 medications and vaccines. The later exposure of the fraud was subsequently described by The Guardian and was one of the biggest retractions in modern history.
In 2022 Lancet published a weakly-evidencedopinion advocating medical fascism; dividing and restricting people based on compliance with pharmaceutical interventions. Lancet’s top leadership has remained unchanged throughout. This is relevant context for understanding the report of the Lancet ‘commission’ on COVID-19.
The Lancet COVID-19 Commission’s Report
In mid-2020 Lancet recruited people from various aspects of public life to review various aspects of the COVID-19 outbreak. This ‘commission’ (a somewhat grand name for a privately-convened group from a private for-profit business) was headed by economist Jeffrey Sachs, who preceded the recent release of the report by publicly discussing conclusions on the potential source of SARS-CoV-2, highlighting the probability of a laboratory origin as opposed to direct animal-human spread.
This part of the commission’s investigation had been halted early when Sachs discovered that several panel members had undisclosed conflicts of interest amounting to receipt of funding to conduct the very laboratory gain-of-function research widely suspected of promoting rapid human spread. Some had been authors of the earlier Lancet origins letter.
The Executive Summary provides a foretaste of the quality of work to come, noting IHME estimates of “17·2 million estimated deaths from COVID-19,” a “staggering death toll” as the commission notes, particularly staggering as it is higher than the WHO estimates for total excess deaths throughout the pandemic period. These WHO estimates include all deaths caused by lockdowns and those where virus detection was incidental. It is an implausible figure, even ignoring the lack of context here (nearly all in late old age, and with severe comorbidities).
Ironically, the commission reports in its main text over 2.1 million excess deaths from malaria, tuberculosis and HIV arising from the COVID-19 response in 2020 alone. However, this is a misunderstanding by commission members of WHO’s actual estimates – WHO does report significant excess 2020 deaths from these diseases but not this many – though many more will accumulate through subsequent years.
Reflecting the lack of inclusiveness of the commission itself, the report recommends censorship of the alternate approaches, considering “failure to combat systematic disinformation” to be a contributor to severity. The commission then inadvertently provides an example of disinformation in its characterization of the Great Barrington Declaration, misrepresenting it as calling for “uncontrolled spread of the virus.”
This, based on the declaration itself, must be a lie, as the commission must not have read the declaration within the two years they had available. Did they not consider it pertinent to question those who wrote it or (over 900,000) signed it? Whether the declaration was correct or not, it reflected prior WHO evidence-based policy. Ignoring this is simply untenable for a serious inquiry.
The overall findings of the commission are extremely disappointing from the point of view of science, public health, and simple honesty. Its apparent lack of familiarity with prior public health norms and practice, including that of the World Health Organization (WHO), may have been genuine, or may be contrived to emphasize a narrative it was intended to support. Given Lancet’s COVID-19 track record and business imperatives, the latter would not be entirely unexpected, but it is disappointing to see adults in positions of influence producing a document of this nature.
Summary of key findings
The Report helpfully provides a three page ‘Key Findings’ section. While missing aspects of the main body such as the euphemism “prosocial behaviour” to denote social exclusion, and extolling the “logic” of the completely illogical WHO slogan for mass COVID-19 vaccination, “No one is safe until everyone is safe,” it generally captures the main thrust of the whole text. Reading the rest is however recommended to understand how modern public health thinking has so clearly gone off the rails.
The key findings are stepped through here. Anyone with a public health background is encouraged to refute the concerns raised, as many of the commission’s assertions appear to involve common traps that seem inexcusable for public health professionals. They hang heavily on a failure to grasp three fundamentals of COVID-19 and public health:
Public health interventions are about risk and benefit. Interventions have positive and negative impacts. Recommendations therefore cannot be given without considering the potential harms they may cause in the short and long term, weighing these against perceived benefits.
COVID-19 mortality is highly skewed towards very old age, and heavily associated with comorbidities. Therefore it is imperative to consider COVID-19 disease burden relative to other diseases in terms of life-years lost, not raw mortality (from or with) COVID-19.
Prolonged lockdowns, workplace and school closures were not part of prior policy, or were partially recommended only in far more severe outbreaks. This is not implying the interventions were good or bad, it is just a fact that they defied public health norms and prior evidence. They were recommended against due to the harm they potentially cause. This lands most heavily, as WHO notes, on low income people and populations.
Highlights of the commission’s key findings:
“WHO acted too cautiously and too slowly on several important matters: … declare a public health emergency… restrict travel … endorse the use of facemasks…”
The commission seems unaware of the prior WHO pandemic influenza guideline. It is not among their 499 references. WHO specifically warned against restricting travel in this guideline, also noting that evidence on facemasks is “weak.” Travel restrictions can be significantly harmful to economies – cutting tourism income alone in low-income countries can increase mortality through poverty. The report fails to mention costs that extending these response measures would impose. Where lockdown costs are mentioned at all, it is in the context of costs of ‘failure’ to implement earlier or heavier, never in terms of weighing harm avoided against that caused. Ignoring relative costs, including the long-term health costs of increased poverty from longer lockdowns, is anathema to good public health policy.
Metanalysesof randomized control trials of community masking do not show significant benefit, and trials during COVID-19 show similarresults. At a minimum, WHO was therefore evidence-based when recommending against community-masking – the organization is yet to provide evidence to back its later endorsement of their widespread use. The Lancet commission appears to be specifically recommending against the use of evidence-based approaches.
“… most governments around the world were too slow to acknowledge its importance and act with urgency in response….”
Most people live in low and middle income countries with low COVID-19 mortality and far higher burdens from other infectious disease, which occur in far younger people. This statement therefore seems strangely Western-centric. If they had known earlier, what would countries have actually done? (if earlier implementation of poverty-inducing responses, then for how long?)
The commission appears unaware of serological evidence of spread prior to January 2020, in some cases backed by PCR. This would negate any benefit from this recommendation, even ignoring the harms.
Citing the Western Pacific Region as an example of ‘lockdowns working’ similarly makes little sense, as comparisons elsewhere (e.g. Europe) did not show significant benefit, while in crowded slum areas they are clearly pointless. Evidence of early wide transmission (e.g Japan) indicates that low mortality was due to other factors.
“Epidemic control was seriously hindered by substantial public opposition to routine public health and social measures, such as the wearing of properly fitting face masks and getting vaccinated.”
This statement is ignorant or disingenuous. If the commission members have experience in public health, they know that quarantine of healthy people, prolonged ‘distancing’ and workplace closures were never used at scale before, and that widespread lockdowns were not ‘routine public health and social measures.’ If they did not know this, they had two years to find out. The world, including Lancet, knew by March 2020 that COVID-19 overwhelmingly targets the elderly and has little impact on healthy working-age adults.
The vaccines do not significantly reduce overall transmission – heavily vaccinated countries continue to show high transmission – so to suggest low vaccination hindered epidemic control is a vacuous statement. It may seem intuitive (e.g. it occurs with some other vaccines) but the commission had 18 months to observe COVID-19 mass vaccination.
“Public policies have also failed to draw upon the behavioural and social sciences.”
This is an extraordinary statement to use regarding COVID-19. Many Western governments have openly employed behavioral psychology in an unprecedented way in the COVID-19 outbreak. No public health campaign has ever gained such media attention or had such uniform suppression of non-official messaging from media outlets. It is strange to see a statement so removed from reality.
“Heavily burdened groups include essential workers, who are already disproportionately concentrated in more vulnerable minority and low-income communities.”
This appears to be a nod to compassion for vulnerable populations. It is true that certain groups did suffer higher rates of severe COVID-19, though these are highly correlated with rates of comorbidities (obesity in Western countries is unfortunately associated with poverty, and poverty with certain ethnic groups).
However, the burden was overwhelmingly on the elderly – to a rate several thousand times that in young people. It is the response that burdened these groups most clearly and the report does mention inequity-driving school closures, but this appears forgotten elsewhere in an apparent blind support for faster and harder lockdowns.
“In low income and middle-income countries (LMICs)… better outcomes were seen when previous experiences with outbreaks and epidemics were built upon, and when community-based resources—notably community health workers—were used to support screening and contact tracing, capacity and trust-building within communities.”
This claim appears false. Sub-Saharan African countries did well irrespective of prior experience, with a relative exception of South Africa where obesity is more prevalent and there is a higher proportion of old people. Tanzania instituted very few COVID-19 specific measures but has similar outcomes. More than half the sub-Saharan population is less than 20 years of age, an age-group with extremely low mortality in the West. Actual spread in Africa, confirmed by WHO, has been very high.
“… the support for vaccine production in LMICs, for use in those countries, has come at a great cost in terms of inequitable access to vaccines.”
Nearly all people in low and middle income countries (except perhaps China) will by now haveimmunity. Post-infection immunity is equal or more effective to vaccine-induced immunity. Therefore, mass vaccination of a whole population with COVID-19 vaccines that don’t significantly reduce transmission cannot plausibly provide much benefit, whilst resource diversion is harmful. This statement is therefore devoid of public health sense.
“Economic recovery depends on sustaining high rates of vaccination coverage …”
Economic recovery depends on removing impediments to a functioning economy (lockdown measures). Vaccinating immune people with a vaccine that does not stop transmission cannot help to ‘reopen’ an economy. This statement parrots official mass-vaccination messaging elsewhere, but Lancet’s commission had an opportunity to promote logic and evidence-based policy.
“The sustainable development process has been set back by several years, with a deep underfinancing of investments needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.”
This is indeed clear. Poverty is worse, malnutrition is worse, and preventable disease burdens are higher. Women’s rights are greatly reduced across much of the world, and school attendance has been denied to hundreds of millions of children, entrenching future poverty. Acknowledging this is important, but it also calls into question much of the remainder of the report. Recommendations that acknowledge these mass harms which are concentrated on populations with lowest COVID-19 risk, but go on to recommend more of the interventions that caused them, do not seem well considered.
The remainder of the key findings recommend policies of mass vaccination ‘to protect populations,’ more money for the World Health Organization, and more money internationally for supporters of the growing pandemic agenda. This plays to Lancet’s gallery, but does not consider the harms of resource diversion, the actual very low mortality from pandemics over the last 100 years, or the heterogeneity of human populations and of risk to disease.
If vaccines worked in reducing mortality (for all-cause mortality (the Pfizer and Moderna randomized controlled trials have not shown this to date), if vaccination was confined to highly vulnerable groups where benefit is most likely, and if the trillions of dollars spent on lockdown compensation, mass testing and mass vaccination had been spent on chronic and endemic disease burdens and poverty mitigation, does the Commission really believe more people would have died and outcomes been worse?
A travesty of public health and science
The commission members appear convinced that lockdowns and mass vaccination were a net benefit, but It also appears that in two years of consultation they have not considered the alternative. The loss of decades of progress on infectious disease, human rights, and poverty reduction caused by lockdowns has not been given sufficient pause for thought.
A virus that mainly targets people over 75 years of age was addressed with a public health response that targets the children and the economically productive, cementing long-term poverty and inequity. They support this approach, but consider it should have been instituted earlier, and was lifted too soon.
After emphasizing mandatory and restrictive measures throughout, and misrepresenting or ignoring alternative approaches, the report ends on a note that it should perhaps have started with. “We note the timeliness of recommitting to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN’s moral charter, as we celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2023.”
This declaration includes rights to work, travel, socialize, and express opinions freely including, specifically, through any media. A quick read of the WHO’s charter would also have helped – health includes social and mental well-being (and physical well-being beyond a single disease). The report is void of such thinking – a travesty of both human rights and public health.
The report could well have been written based on slogans from WHO, Gavi and CEPI (whom the Lancet recommends should receive more money), from Pharma companies (on whose support Lancet is heavily directly or indirectly reliant) and from the World Economic Forum (who seem everywhere these days).
Some will have hoped for careful and considered thought, wide consultation, and a strong evidence base. It seems the corporate world may no longer have time for such indulgence. This is, in the end, a rich person’s club, seeking increased taxpayer funding for their favorite project. They are doing this in the name of public health.
It was reasonable to have hoped for better. What would Thomas Wakley have thought?
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is the former Program Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland.
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 11.04.2022
Amid the ongoing global inflation crisis, NATO heads of state and mainstream media repeat a mantra that high energy prices are a direct result of Putin’s actions in Ukraine since end of February. The reality is that it is the western sanctions that are responsible. Those sanctions including cutting SWIFT interbank access for key Russian banks and some of the most severe sanctions ever imposed, are hardly having an impact on the military actions in Ukraine. What many overlook is the fact that they are increasingly impacting the economies of the West, especially the EU and USA. A closer look at the state of the global supply of diesel fuel is alarming. But Western sanctions planners at the US Treasury and the EU know fully well what they are doing. And it bodes ill for the world economy.
While most of us rarely think about diesel fuel as anything other than a pollutant, in fact it is essential to the entire world economy in a way few energy sources are. The director general of Fuels Europe, part of the European Petroleum Refiners Association, stated recently, “… there is a clear link between diesel and GDP, because almost everything that goes into and out of a factory goes using diesel.” … continue
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After months of investigation that identified networks of reviewers and editors manipulating the peer review process, Hindawi plans to retract 511 papers across 16 journals, Retraction Watch has learned.
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