Last week, a day after the FDA authorized the new “Omicron booster” targeting the dominant Omicron BA.5 subvariant, the CDC’s vaccine committee formally recommended the shots for Americans as young as 12. Pfizer’s Omicron boosters will be available for people ages 12 and older, while Moderna’s new shots are for adults ages 18 and older. The new mRNA composition contains two half components of the spike protein: the ancestral virus strain and BA.1 or BA.4/BA.5, which have identical spikes.
The totality of public evidence for this new magical inoculation is detailed by CNBC:
For the BA.4/BA.5 boosters, the companies have submitted animal data. They have not released those data publicly, although at the June FDA meeting, Pfizer presented preliminary findings in eight mice given BA.4/BA.5 vaccines as their third dose. Compared with the mice that received the original vaccine as a booster, the animals showed an increased response to all Omicron variants tested: BA.1, BA.2, BA.2.12.1, BA.4, and BA.5.
Yes, on the basis of “increased response” to Omicron in eight mice, the Biden administration has ordered 171 million doses of the new Pfizer and Moderna boosters. Even had this vaccine been tested in humans and shown some efficacy against infection – like the primary series – there would be more than enough reason for caution and hesitation. The European Medicines Agency has warned against the potential adverse immunological effects of repeated boosting every four months. As Dr. Marty Makary from Johns Hopkins has noted, recent research shows a “reduced immune response against the Omicron strain among people previously infected who then received three Covid vaccine doses compared to a control group that previously had Covid and did not have multiple shots.”
It is just impossible to overstate the unconditional absurdity of the FDA and CDC decision. Not only is the booster merely available to the public (or most rationally, the greatest at-risk in nursing homes) but it is recommended by the state for everyone, including children and teenagers – those with least to gain and most to lose. The regulatory framework that allows them to approve and universally promote the booster is that of the Emergency Use Authorization:
The FDA may authorize unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products to be used in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions caused by CBRN [chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear] threat agents when certain criteria are met, including there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.
What these serious “diseases or conditions” might be, which pose such a risk to a healthy 20-year-old that they warrant the use of these criminally under-tested inoculations, is nowhere mentioned. Moreover, rather than observing any kind of remotely defensible dosing schedule, the FDA has recommended the new booster as early as two months after the prior dose. Short vaccination intervals are known to elevate the risk of vaccine myocarditis – another towering and studiously ignored concern.
The most robust research for vaccine-induced myocarditis in young men, who are most at-risk for this adverse reaction, puts the probability at around 1 in 1,800 per second dose. As I’ve previously written, myocarditis is not “mild” and if left undetected, can easily be lethal (read about law enforcement member Dev’s near-death vaccine experience here).
What reassurance can CDC officials give to those concerned with the most documented serious adverse event associated with mRNA vaccination?
CDC official Dr. Sara Oliver: “We know that the myocarditis risk is unknown but anticipate a similar risk to that seen after the monovalent vaccines.”
Sigh.
Anyone who has followed the corruption of the FDA and CDC over the past two years could hardly find these developments surprising. Recall that 12 months ago, two top officials (Dr. Marion Gruber and Dr. Philip Krause) at the FDA’s office of vaccine products resigned over political pressure from the White House to universally authorize the original booster shot to the public. Previously, the Trump administration pressured the FDA to “bend” vaccine emergency use authorization standards and allegedly prevented the collection of safety data prior to the 2020 election.
It’s more than rational to have subzero faith in institutions which are continually rotting on the inside and prone to outside influence from the most powerful political actors in the world. Those still working inside these banana-laboratories attest to their deterioration. On Bari Weiss’s Substack, Dr. Marty Makary and Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg reported stunning, privately obtained quotes from top FDA officials. Here’s a sampling:
“It’s like a horror movie I’m being forced to watch and I can’t close my eyes… people are getting bad advice and we can’t say anything.”
“I can’t tell you how many people at the FDA have told me, ‘I don’t like any of this, but I just need to make it to my retirement.’”
For those who have previously complied with the authoritarian dictates of the government, this may be a great awakening. Do you trust a state-recommended medical intervention based on a 10th grade science experiment on eight mice (all of which got Omicron anyway)? Do you trust an agency which has been under tremendous political pressure, forcing their top vaccine experts to resign and other employees to witness an abject mockery of the scientific method? Do you trust a vaccine that hasn’t even been tested in humans, and will probably never be studied for effectiveness against infection or severe disease because “such trials are very expensive”?
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Dr. Paul Offit, the most prominent vaccine expert in the U.S and member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee (VRBPAC):
“I’m uncomfortable that we would move forward—that we would give millions or tens of millions of doses to people—based on mouse data.”
Rav Arora is a 21-year-old writer from Vancouver, British Columbia. His work has appeared in such places as the NY Post and The Globe and Mail. Yet his heretical writing on vaccine injuries and mandates has forced him to go independent. Please consider supporting him by becoming a paid subscriber at his Substack, Noble Truths.
A leaked video recording reveals researchers in June shared data with the Israeli Ministry of Health (MOH) showing serious and long-term side effects associated with Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.
However, the MOH did not disclose the researchers’ findings to the expert committee that met later that month to decide on recommending the vaccine for children under age 5, or with leaders of Israel’s COVID-19 vaccine booster program.
Additionally, the MOH on Aug. 2 issued a report — on adverse events following the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine from Dec. 9, 2021, to May 31, 2022 — that contradicted the data presented during the early-June meeting.
Yaffa Shir-Raz, Ph.D., health communication and pharmaceutical companies public relations strategy researcher at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, translated the June meeting from Hebrew into English.
The English translation shows the research team warned MOH officials they should think carefully about how to present the researchers’ findings to the public because they posed a potential legal risk, as the findings contradicted MOH’s claims that serious side effects are rare and short-term.
Shir-Raz tweeted on Sept. 1 an excerpt from the recorded meeting in which the research team warned MOH seniors they would have to think of the legal ramifications of the team’s findings.
According to the video recording, the researchers informed MOH officials about the many reports of serious and long-term side effects of the Pfizer vaccine, including side effects Pfizer didn’t list on the patient information leaflet, such as digestive side effects — especially abdominal pain in children — and back pain.
Additionally, Levi told GB News:
“On the free text part of the form, where patients were allowed to report whatever they wanted to, they [the researchers] observed and got many, many reports of neurological side effects — some not currently listed by Pfizer as side effects of the vaccine.”
The researchers also noted many cases of what Levi called the “re-challenge phenomenon” — or the recurrence or worsening of a side effect following repeated doses of the vaccine — which the researchers said indicated there was most likely a causal link between the vaccine and many side effects.
“The research team repeatedly stressed during the discussion,” Shir-Raz said in her translation and summary in English, “that their findings indicate that — contrary to what we were told so far — in many cases, serious adverse events are long-term, that last weeks, months, a year, or even more, and in some cases — ongoing, so that the side effect still lasted when the study was over.”
The side effects included menstrual irregularities and various neurological side effects, muscle-skeletal injuries, GI problems and kidney and urinary system adverse events, Shir-Raz said.
According to Levi’s review of the meeting footage, the researchers expressed a sentiment of “concern” and felt their “conscience” bothered them by the reality of their findings.
The researchers told the MOH officials their findings contradicted the MOH’s prior messaging that the vaccine was safe and side effects were both rare and short-lasting.
In 50% of the reports in which a duration was specified by the individual, the researchers said, the duration was over six months, according to the video’s English subtitles.
Moreover, in 65% of the neurological cases that mentioned a duration, the individuals reported their symptoms were ongoing, Levi said.
“Now it turns out that the reality is not what the narrative was promoting,” Levi said. “The side effects are long-term and serious.”
The research team told the MOH officials:
“You have to think very very carefully about how you communicate this to the public because you may open yourself to legal lawsuits and liability issues because what you promoted is, in fact, not the reality in what we see in the reports.”
Despite the importance of this discussion, Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, head of public health services at MOH — and the person who signed the contract with Pfizer — was not present during the meeting. The researchers repeatedly asked MOH officials to make sure Dr. Alroy-Preis saw their findings
The MOH commissioned the Shamir Medical Center team of researchers with experience in pharmacovigilance to analyze the data from the adverse effects reporting system launched in Dec. 2021.
Although Israel began its COVID-19 vaccination campaign in 2020, it did not have an adverse effect reporting system until the end of 2021.
Steve Kirsch, executive director of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, commented on the news in a Sept. 2 Substack post, asking, “Why didn’t they release the original presentation made by the safety team?”
“There needs to be an investigation ASAP into what happened, but the head of the MoH, Nitzan Horowitz, isn’t calling for one,” he said.
“The precautionary principle of medicine now demands an immediate halt to the COVID vaccination program,” Kirsch said.
Kirsch also commented on the lack of media coverage of the Israeli researchers’ findings:
“Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, the Health Ministry’s head of public services and a top COVID adviser to the Israeli government, issued no public statement.
“Leaders of our ‘trusted institutions’ all over the world said absolutely nothing after the news broke on August 20, 2022.
“This suggests that there is widespread corruption in the medical community, government agencies, among public health officials, the mainstream media, and social media companies worldwide: they will not acknowledge any event that goes against the mainstream narrative.
“This is a level of corruption that is unprecedented. The atrocities here are clear-cut.
“Everyone should be speaking out and calling for a full investigation and fully evaluating the safety data collected by the Israel government.”
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
During the coronavirus scare, a small dissident group of American doctors stood up against the concerted effort of many politicians, people in the media, “public health” bureaucrats, doctors, and medical organizations to portray the coronavirus “vaccine” shots as “safe and effective” and something everyone should take.
Dissenting doctors also explained that, despite the scare campaign proclaiming otherwise, exposure to coronavirus created natural immunity, most people — especially younger and healthier people — faced minimal to nearly zero risk of death or serious sickness from coronavirus, and early treatments with common medicines and vitamins could prevent serious sickness.
Some doctors also wisely pointed out early on that actions such as mask wearing, business closures, and “social distancing” were ineffective in stopping the spread of coronavirus. A major warning from dissident doctors was that hospital protocols for dealing with coronavirus such as forced isolation of patients from friends and family, as well as routine use of ventilators early on and remdesivir later, created huge health risks of their own.
Pushers of the coronavirus scare denigrated all of these arguments of dissenting doctors as fringe and dangerous. But, as time has passed, more and more evidence supports these arguments. It is becoming increasingly understood among critical observers that it is the doctors derided as disinformation agents who turned out to be right all along.
These brave doctors stood up for people’s health and liberty by disputing the heavily pushed, and dangerous, coronavirus party line.
If only more people had heeded these doctors’ protestations, the harm from coronavirus and extreme actions taken in the in the name of countering coronavirus could have been significantly reduced.
Government, media, and big tech companies sought to silence these heroic doctors. In some cases, medical boards even sought to revoke their licenses — an action that puts a doctor out of business.
Now, in California, Governor Gavin Newsom has a bill — AB 2098 — on his desk that tells the state’s medical boards to punish doctors who challenge the coronavirus orthodoxy. AB 2098 directs the state medical boards to take action against such doctors in the state, including revoking these doctors’ license. That threat hanging over doctors would serve as a huge disincentive for even a small group of doctors to stand up for what they believe is true. It is a means of placing on doctors a medical propaganda straitjacket preventing them from using their unique expertise to advise people.
Suzanne Burdick provides a detailed examination of AB 2098 in a Wednesday Children’s Health Defense article you can read here.
Following the recent authorisation of the new omicron boosters, the former US Surgeon General encouraged Americans to receive two to four mRNA jabs annually.
Residents in northeast Australia have been told they might need a fifth dose by the end of the year.
In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that New South Wales’ top doctor said that people should expect to receive covid-19 booster shots “indefinitely.”
But could repeated boosters at close intervals be causing more harm than good? I speak with experts concerned that policymakers are not following the science.
Europe sounded the alarm
Earlier this year, the European drug regulator sent a dire warning to the world. The agency was concerned that repeated boosters every four months could weaken a person’s immune response to the coronavirus.
Marco Cavaleri, the agency’s head of vaccines strategy, said that regular boosters might be “overloading people’s immune systems and leading to fatigue.”
I spoke with Cody Meissner, an FDA advisory member, ahead of the agency’s April 6 meeting, during which experts were to discuss the evidence for a fourth dose. He told me that he was not convinced by the data at the time.
Prof Cody Meissner, FDA advisory member
“I personally don’t think that we have sufficient basis on which to recommend a fourth dose, and we don’t know what the harm will be,” said Meissner.
“The reason we’re giving the vaccine is to keep people out of the intensive care unit and to keep people from dying, or even going into the hospital. So, before we vigorously endorse a fourth dose of this vaccine, I think we have to understand not only more about the immune response, but also about how much severe disease is occurring after three doses,” he added.
Meissner blamed socio-political interference for many of the questionable covid-19 strategies. “I think that the politicians and certain groups within society, such as the teacher’s union here in the United States, have driven a political agenda that is certainly not based on science. People like to say it’s based on science. It’s not. It’s based on emotion and generating great fear,” said Meissner.
Despite the concerns, most policymakers have forged ahead with recommending third, fourth and fifth doses for large swathes of the populations.
But over the past year, observational data have emerged from countries like the UK, Scotland and Australia showing that the most highly vaccinated people are acquiring the highest rates of covid-19 infections, suggesting that the vaccines have lost their effectiveness or something unexplained is happening.
Multiple jabs, multiple infections
Meissner hinted at a possible explanation for why someone’s immune response could be suppressed after multiple covid-19 shots. “It gets into this issue of ‘original antigenic sin’, which is still a theoretical issue, but may have some validity it seems to me,” said Meissner earlier this year.
Original antigenic sin – scientifically referred to as immune imprinting – is a phenomenon whereby prior exposure to one virus strain (e.g. wuhan stain) limits the development of immunity against new variants (omicron strain), because the immune system has been “imprinted” to favour the original strain.
This leaves the immune system trapped because the antibodies it prefers to produce against the original strain are ‘mismatched’ for the new strain.
Meissner said, “To keep vaccinating with very similar [wuhan] antigens, may or may not be beneficial — or the benefit may not outweigh the harm. I think we need to look at that.”
Since then, the data suggesting that immune imprinting is occurring, has only strengthened says Nikolai Petrovsky, Professor at Flinders University and developer of a protein-based covid-19 vaccine called SpikoGen® in use in Iran.
Prof Nikolai Petrovsky, Flinders University
“I feel the evidence for immune imprinting is increasingly compelling. It’s a known phenomenon with flu where it was first described, and the data now suggests it’s happening with covid-19,” said Petrovsky.
“The omicron vaccines may struggle to switch the immune system of a heavily vaccinated person to making omicron-specific antibodies, as their immune system is so heavily biased toward the Wuhan spike protein in the original vaccines. In the end, this could be harder to achieve in a vaccinated person than someone who has not yet been exposed to any spike protein, for example, someone unvaccinated,” he added.
Petrovsky says not only do too many shots of the mRNA vaccines increase the risk of immune imprinting, but they also seem to be uniquely pushing the immune system into “tolerance” against the virus.
“Immune tolerance” occurs when the immune system becomes unresponsive to a particular antigen after repeated exposure. This is the principle for desensitising people to allergy, i.e. by repeatedly injecting them with small doses of the offending allergen over time.
Petrovsky points to a recent pre-print study out of Germany. “People who’ve had three or more doses of mRNA showed a change in their antibodies to IgG4 which is typically an antibody associated with allergy desensitisation but not a normal antibody seen produced after infectious disease vaccines,” said Petrovsky.
Petrovsky said, “What this means, we simply don’t know as this has never been seen before. That in itself is concerning as it indicates just how little we understand about what these new mRNA vaccines are doing and how they work. But to me, it raises a red flag that repeated doses of the mRNA vaccines might be driving immune tolerance against the virus. Maybe this could explain why the more doses of these vaccines, the less they seem to work, and more and more people are getting breakthrough infections?” Interestingly, the study did not find a similar shift in antibody patterns after AstraZeneca’s covid-19 vaccine.
Now, that the FDA has authorised the new bivalent boosters – which code for the original wuhan strain plus BA4/BA5 omicron lineages – without first requiring any human data to be collected, it has left many doubting that our public health authorities are even paying attention to the science.
Yesterday, the UK’s Daily Mailpublished an article about a new app which claims to be able to diagnose Covid19 infection just through the sound of your voice.
The story was also covered by Sky, The Independent, the Telegraph and many others.
The Mail headlined:
Could a mobile APP replace lateral flows? Scientists reveal new Covid testing software that detects virus through a person’s voice in under a minute – and experts say it can be more accurate than a swab test
The article goes on to explain:
The Dutch researchers say coronavirus usually affects the upper respiratory tract and vocal chords, leading to changes in a person’s voice. The team decided to investigate whether it was possible to detect the novel virus in people’s voices.
Now, does this make any sense? Is it really possible to diagnose disease just from the sound of someone’s voice?
Simply put, almost certainly not. Without seeing the scientists’ actual data it is not possible to rule it out completely, but there are multiple apparent issues.
“Covid19” is not the only infection which affects the respiratory tract. How could an app differentiate “Covid” and “flu”?
Different mobile devices have different microphones, how can the app distinguish feedback or interference from a sore throat?
Huge numbers of (alleged) Covid19 “cases” are supposedly symptomless, so the app could never detect those.
The only way to test the results is by confirming with PCR tests, which don’t work, or lateral flow tests, which also don’t work.
So, even if “Covid19” was a thing (which it isn’t), and even if we try to be objective and open-minded about the idea, it doesn’t seem like it would be any use at all.
And honestly, it feels like we’re giving the concept WAY more respect than it deserves. The very idea you can diagnose disease through the sound of a voice is completely ridiculous. But Covid times have enabled all the clowns in the world.
However, if you want a little silver lining read the comments below the Daily Mail article, and see that no one is buying this. One of them makes an interesting observation:
So they have harvested your DNA with the PCR test swabs, now they are after your voice print as well?
Is that what’s really going on here? We can’t rule it out.
The US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued a ruling, ordering Dr. Anthony Fauci and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to respond to document requests by the New Civil Liberties Alliance in conjunction with the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general on behalf of plaintiffs in State of Missouri ex rel. Schmitt, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al.
Judge Terry A. Doughty made the order, which has great importance for the millions of Americans experiencing censorship on social media – which is allegedly at the pressuring of government bodies and officials and would therefore be a violation of the First Amendment.
The judge’s ruling was on “whether the White House Defendants, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre and Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci should be compelled to respond to Plaintiffs’ interrogatories and document requests” and “[w]hether Dr. Fauci, in his capacity as National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (“NIAID”) Director, should be required to provide additional responses to Plaintiffs’ interrogatories and document requests.”
The judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and the defendants have no legal right to refuse to comply with the order.
“In accordance with the previous expedited discovery order, Plaintiffs served interrogatories and document requests upon White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and upon Dr. Anthony Fauci in his capacity as Chief Medical Advisor to the President,” the ruling states. “Government Defendants have refused to provide any interrogatory responses or responsive documents, maintaining that these would be internal communications that would implicate serious separation of powers concerns, that Plaintiffs are required to exhaust other avenues for the discovery first, and that it would be unduly burdensome and disproportional to the needs of the case.”
“The breadth and extent of the government’s censorship activities has turned out to be massive and far exceeded that disclosed by the federal government in response to initial court-ordered discovery made public last week,” the NCLA said in a statement to Reclaim The Net.
Much light has recently been shed on the Federal Government’s role in calling for direct censorship on social media platforms, as a result of the documents obtained during the lawsuit. Collusion between social media platforms and the CDC was also evident.
NCLA is representing several plaintiffs, some of which are prominent and well-respected epidemiologists who were censored by Big Tech platforms for diverging from the White House’s narrative on COVID-19.
The US district court judge Terry A. Doughty ruled on Tuesday:
“First, the requested information is obviously very relevant to Plaintiffs’ claims. Dr. Fauci’s communications would be relevant to Plaintiffs’ allegations in reference to alleged suppression of speech relating to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin, and to alleged suppression of speech about the efficiency of masks and COVID-19 lockdowns,” the ruling continues. “Jean-Pierre’s communications as White House Press Secretary could be relevant to all of Plaintiffs’ examples.
“Government Defendants are making a blanket assertion of all communications to social media platforms by Dr. Fauci, and Jean-Pierre based upon executive privilege and presidential communications privilege,” the order adds. “Plaintiffs concede they are not asking for any internal White House communications, but only external communications between Dr. Fauci and/or Jean-Pierre and third-party social media platforms.”
7%. Seven percent. SEVEN PERCENT! Americans have said, “No more.” And so the authorities are trying a new con job to get more of us to offer our arms. The new improved version that the government and manufacturers were too scared to test! How many times do they think they can fool you?
In its article on the new booster authorizations last Wednesday, the WaPo had quotes from Peter Hotez and Michael Osterholm, both huge vaccine supporters. Neither was happy about the rush to get the boosters out before any human testing had been done.
Neither the WaPo nor the NY Times nor most other media bothered to tell their readers that the FDA had refused to convene an advisory committee meeting so the public could see the evidence for the boosters and hear a discussion about them. They must have been instructed what to leave out.
The claim is that flu shots get grandfathered in each year with minor tweaks, so why not COVID shots? Here’s why:
Flu shots have been around for decades and their differences from year to year are well understood
Flu shots are used first in the southern hemisphere, so the US actually gets the benefit of six months of data before using them
But the HUGE difference is that flu shots are licensed! They have liability! You can apply to the vaccine injury compensation program for damages. You get a legal hearing with a “special master’“ judge. The new COVID boosters are unlicensed, have no quality standards they are required to meet, and the manufacturers and government are off the hook if anything goes wrong
They fooled us enough. This time it’s shame on me.
There is no compelling evidence linking bats to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Israeli researchers at Tel Aviv University have found after examining numerous scientific papers on infectious diseases.
“Two years after the pandemic first broke out, we still do not know for sure what the exact origin of the COVID-19 variant is,” Dr. Maya Weinberg, the lead author of the study, which was published in the August issue of iScience, said.
According to Weinberg, blaming the pandemic – which has taken the lives of over 6.4 million people – on bats is an “erroneous theory” that “was not based on sufficient compelling scientific proof and caused unnecessary stress and confusion worldwide.”
The possession of antibodies for the novel coronavirus by bats does not necessarily mean the disease was passed on to humans by them. It only shows that the animals were able to survive the disease and became resistant to it, Dr. Weinberg said. “Bats have a highly effective immune system that enables them to deal relatively easily with viruses considered lethal for other mammals.”
The researcher said her team studied papers on the origins of around 100 viruses, including Covid-19, SARS, and Ebola, finding that almost half of the claims regarding bats in them were “based on the incidence of antibodies or PCR tests, rather than actual isolation of identical viruses. Moreover, many of the reported findings are not convincing.”
“In general, bats are mistakenly conceived of as reservoirs of many contagious diseases,” she added.
On the contrary, scientists “must study in-depth the immunological anti-viral capabilities of bats and thus obtain new and effective means of coping in humanity’s struggle against contagious disease, aging and cancer,” Dr. Weinberg said.
Physicist and former CalTech provost Steven Koonin’s superb 2021 book,Unsettled? What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, busts many popular myths about climate change. Koonin is clear that global temperatures are indeed rising, and that some of this rise in temperatures is caused by human activity. But Koonin warns – and he marshals much data to justify his warnings – that what we really know about the details behind and beyond these large facts about climate change, and about efforts to arrest it, is surprisingly tentative. Indeed, such knowledge is often so skimpy as to be non-existent.
Our relatively meager amount of knowledge about climate change, as well as about the likely consequences of different policies to deal with it, is surprising not because of any recent discoveries that cast new-found doubt on what was once legitimately believed to be ample knowledge. No, our relatively meager amount of knowledge about climate matters has always been meager, yet this ‘meagerness’ has been consistently ignored by prominent politicians, journalists, and other ‘elite’ molders of public opinion.
A public frightened into believing that some collective calamity is in the offing is a public more eager for, or at least more docile in the face of, authoritarian efforts marketed as necessary to prevent the calamity.
With the turn of almost every page of Unsettled? I was struck by the ominous parallels between the mainstream narrative on the climate and the mainstream narrative on COVID. Pointing out such parallels wasn’t at all Koonin’s purpose; in fact, I suspect that he himself took no notice of these parallels. And, of course, I’d earlier been alerted by other writers to these parallels. But the length and reality of these parallels weren’t driven home to me until I’d read Koonin’s tract. Each and every one of the following attitudes – which I distill from my reading of Koonin’s book and from my immersion over the past 30 months in all things COVID – is prominent in matters of COVID as well as in matters of the climate.
Humanity is doomed to suffer gravely unless the government takes drastic, indeed, unprecedented corrective action and does so immediately!
Nothing – no other goal, aspiration, hope, or concern – nothing is as important as doing all that we can to reduce as much as is physically possible our exposure to the toxic substance that poses an existential threat to humanity! Therefore, there’s no need to account for the ‘costs’ and other collateral harms that might arise from drastic corrective action, for none of these costs and harms, even if they’re real, can possibly compare to the costs and harms that will befall us if we don’t take in full measure the prescribed drastic action!
The present emergency demands decisive interventions that are neither delayed nor diluted by trifling concerns, such as the sanctity of private property rights or the desire to avoid overreach by the government’s executive branch!
The problem is one that can be correctly diagnosed only by scientific experts. Fortunately, such a diagnosis has been confidently made. And so to save humanity we must put aside our petty individual self-interests and for the greater good do as we are instructed by the experts! Humanity’s very survival demands that we all obey the Science, for only the Science can light the path from a dark and dangerous today into a shining and safe tomorrow!
The Science reveals that there is one and only one path to our salvation. Everyone must follow the One Path! Those who insist on other paths would not only destroy themselves but all of humanity!
Fortunately, the Science is clear, complete, and settled! Therefore, anyone who challenges the Science – anyone who dares to challenge the prediction that catastrophe will occur unless government overhauls society and the economy as instructed by the Science and the Scientists – is a slack-jawed ignoramus, a sociopathic apologist for plutocrats, or a dangerously benighted ideologue! And so there’s nothing to be gained by allowing these dissenting voices to speak! Indeed, dissenting voices must be silenced lest they lure the unsuspecting masses into a self-destructive skepticism of the Science!
To keep to a minimum the number of anti-social renegades who insist on acting contrary to the counsel of the Science, the Scientists and their champions in government and the media must, sad to say, routinely simplify or exaggerate – and occasionally, alas, even to falsify – the public messaging. Taking such liberties with the strict, literal truth is, of course, not to lie; only a rube would think it to be so. The taking of such liberties with the strict, literal truth furthers the higher Truth. Taking such liberties is a necessary means of promoting the greater good by ensuring that the noble masses, simple-minded creatures that they are, aren’t misled by pointless doubts and irrelevant nuances to behave self-destructively.
These parallels of public discussions about the climate and public discussions about COVID are indeed real and ominous.
The passage in Koonin’s book that, more than any other, drove home to me the reality of these ominous parallels appears on page 171:
Creating alarming headlines through highly uncertain projections of the future is one thing, but promoting the specter of climate-related deaths by distorting existing data is quite another. A 2019 article in Foreign Affairs by the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Ghebreyesus, was titled “Climate Change Is Already Killing Us.” Yet the text doesn’t deliver on the catchy title. Astoundingly, the article conflates deaths due to ambient and household air pollution (which cause an estimated 100 per 100,000 premature deaths each year, or about one-eighth of total deaths from all causes) with deaths due to human-induced climate change. The World Health Organization itself has said that indoor air pollution in poor countries – the result of cooking with wood and animal and crop waste – is the most serious environmental problem in the world, affecting up to three billion people. This is not the result of climate change. It’s the result of poverty. That pollution does indeed affect the climate … but pollution deaths aren’t caused by a changing climate; it’s the pollution itself that kills. Such brazen misinformation by the WHO’s leadership is particularly upsetting for its potential to diminish confidence in the organization’s public health mission.
Readers might recall that Dr. Ghebreyesus, seated in his high perch, has a habit of predicting calamity from COVID, even well into the virus’s decline in lethality. This dishonest or incompetent (I’m not sure which) performance by one of the world’s supposed leading public-health officials is, obviously, part of a longer pattern. The pattern is ominous.
Science is an especially sweet and nutritious fruit of the Enlightenment. But an even sweeter and more nutritious fruit is the recognition that truth – including, but not limited to, scientific truth – is only reliably approached without ever being absolutely and forever secured, and approached only through open inquiry, discussion, debate, and tolerance for dissenting opinions and perspectives.
Too many elite intellectuals and public officials today – and, I fear, also too many ordinary men and women – have lost sight of the fact that science and reason are tools for improving our understanding and for supplying us with some information that’s useful for making the complicated and inescapably value-laden trade-offs that, in this vale, we must make. The belief that science is a source of complete and godlike knowledge is not merely mistaken, it’s a toxic fuel of authoritarianism when it’s combined with the false understanding of social problems as being a science project to be ‘solved’ by persons in power.
1,172 views Premiered Aug 18, 2022 For a fourth year, public school kids in New York City will have their programming disrupted. 374,705 NYC students will be excluded from the Public School Athletic League (PSAL) and other “high-risk” after-school activities like music because they do not have 2 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. This policy is forcing families like lifetime Harlem residents, the Hicks, to flee the city.
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Regular use of ivermectin led to a 100% reduction in hospitalisation rate, a 92% reduction in mortality rate and an 86% reduction in the risk of dying from a COVID-19 infection when compared to non-users, a major new study has found.
The study, published in the medical journal Cureus, analysed data from 223,128 people from the city of Itajaí in Brazil, making it the largest study of its kind and giving its findings a high degree of certainty. Senior author Dr. Flavio A. Cadegiani wrote on Twitter: “An observational study with the size and level of analysis as ours is hardly achieved and infeasible to be conducted as a randomised clinical trial. Conclusions are hard to be refuted. Data is data, regardless of your beliefs.”
The study compared those who took ivermectin regularly, irregularly and not at all prior to being infected with COVID-19 (i.e., as prophylaxis), and found a dose-dependent relationship, confirming that the difference in outcomes is very likely to be due to the drug and not other factors, such as differences between the groups.
The authors used a technique called ‘propensity score matching’ to control for confounding factors that may otherwise have biased the study in one direction or another. For example, those taking ivermectin tended to be older than those not taking it (average age 47 years vs 40 years), but by matching people of similar age in each group and comparing outcomes this confounding factor was controlled for.
Here is the abstract of the study, which summarises the methods and results.
Background
We have previously demonstrated that ivermectin used as prophylaxis for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), irrespective of the regularity, in a strictly controlled citywide program in Southern Brazil (Itajaí, Brazil), was associated with reductions in COVID-19 infection, hospitalisation, and mortality rates. In this study, our objective was to determine if the regular use of ivermectin impacted the level of protection from COVID-19 and related outcomes, reinforcing the efficacy of ivermectin through the demonstration of a dose-response effect.
Methods
This exploratory analysis of a prospective observational study involved a program that used ivermectin at a dose of 0.2 mg/kg/day for two consecutive days, every 15 days, for 150 days. Regularity definitions were as follows: regular users had 180 mg or more of ivermectin and irregular users had up to 60 mg, in total, throughout the program. Comparisons were made between non-users (subjects who did not use ivermectin), and regular and irregular users after multivariate adjustments. The full city database was used to calculate and compare COVID-19 infection and the risk of dying from COVID-19. The COVID-19 database was used and propensity score matching (PSM) was employed for hospitalisation and mortality rates.
Results
Among 223,128 subjects from the city of Itajaí, 159,560 were 18 years old or up and were not infected by COVID-19 until July 7th 2020, from which 45,716 (28.7%) did not use and 113,844 (71.3%) used ivermectin. Among ivermectin users, 33,971 (29.8%) used irregularly (up to 60 mg) and 8,325 (7.3%) used regularly (more than 180 mg). The remaining 71,548 participants were not included in the analysis. COVID-19 infection rate was 49% lower for regular users (3.40%) than non-users (6.64%) (risk rate (RR): 0.51; 95% CI: 0.45-0.58; p < 0.0001), and 25% lower than irregular users (4.54%) (RR: 0.75; 95% CI: 0.66-0.85; p < 0.0001). The infection rate was 32% lower for irregular users than non-users (RR: 0.68; 95% CI: 0.64-0.73; p < 0.0001).
Among COVID-19 [infected] participants, regularusers were older and had a higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes and hypertension than irregular and non-users. After PSM, the matched analysis contained 283 subjects in each group of non-users and regular users, [283] between regular users and irregular users, and 1,542 subjects between non-users and irregular users. The hospitalisation rate was reduced by 100% in regular users compared to both irregular users and non-users (p < 0.0001), and by 29% among irregular users compared to non-users (RR: 0.781; 95% CI: 0.49-1.05; p = 0.099). Mortality rate was 92% lower in regular users than non-users (RR: 0.08; 95% CI: 0.02-0.35; p = 0.0008) and 84% lower than irregular users (RR: 0.16; 95% CI: 0.04-0.71; p = 0.016), while irregular users had a 37% lower mortality rate reduction than non-users (RR: 0.67; 95% CI: 0.40-0.99; p = 0.049). Risk of dying from COVID-19 [once infected] was 86% lower among regular users than non-users (RR: 0.14; 95% CI: 0.03-0.57; p = 0.006), and 72% lower than irregular users (RR: 0.28; 95% CI: 0.07-1.18; p = 0.083), while irregular users had a 51% reduction compared to non-users (RR: 0.49; 95% CI: 0.32-0.76; p = 0.001).
Conclusion
Non-use of ivermectin was associated with a 12.5-fold increase in mortality rate and a seven-fold increased risk of dying from COVID-19 compared to the regular use of ivermectin. This dose-response efficacy reinforces the prophylactic effects of ivermectin against COVID-19.
The authors draw particular attention to the dose-dependent relationship as confirming the efficacy of the treatment:
The response pattern of ivermectin use and level of protection from COVID-19-related outcomes was identified and consistent across dose-related levels. The reduction in COVID-19 infection rate occurred in a consistent and significant dose-dependent manner, with reductions of 49% and 32% in regular and irregular users, when compared to non-users. The most striking evidence of ivermectin’s effectiveness was the 100% reduction in mortality for female regular users.
The data in the study come from official government databases and, according to the authors, “conclusively show that the risk of dying from COVID-19 was lower for all regular and irregular users of ivermectin, compared to non-users, considering the whole population”.
The study, while not a randomised controlled trial (RCT), used a “strictly controlled population with a great level of control for confounding factors” and was larger than would be feasible in an RCT.
The authors highlight a “notable reduction in risk of death in the over 50-year-old population and those with comorbidities”.
They conclude that the evidence provided by the study is “among the strongest and most conclusive data regarding ivermectin efficacy”.
Many governments have suppressed the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19, claiming there is a lack of evidence of efficacy. However, this purported lack of evidence often relies on poorly designed trials and biased conclusions. For example, a recent widely-reported RCT concluded the study “did not show adequate support for the effectiveness of this drug” – yet its own results showed statistically significant benefits for speed of recovery as well as large (though not, in that study, statistically significant) benefits for mechanical ventilation and death. Participants also were not given the treatment until over a week into having symptoms and the study may have been confounded by people in the placebo arm also taking the drug.
One of the new study’s authors and a seasoned proponent of repurposed treatments like ivermectin, Dr. Pierre Kory, made clear his thoughts on Twitter in April as he responded to an FDA tweet reminding the public that ivermectin is not approved: “Messaging BS with one corrupt study while ignoring 82 trials (33 RCTs) from 27 countries, 129K patients – sum showing massive benefits. Stop lying man, people are dying. #earlytreatmentworks.”
Social media companies have censored information about ivermectin, often considering any suggestion that it is an effective treatment for COVID-19 to be misinformation. Yet ivermectin is a cheap, safe drug that many studies have shown brings considerable benefit in treating and preventing COVID-19. The latest study impressively confirms this efficacy as a prophylactic, with a reduction in mortality of up to 92%.
Shockingly, most governments still do not have a protocol for early treatment or prevention of COVID-19. The NHS says treatment is only available for those at high risk of serious disease who have a positive test and symptoms that are not getting better. Its guidance on self-care for people ill at home only recommends paracetamol and ibuprofen. Yet here is a highly controlled study of over 200,000 people that shows huge benefit – 92% reduction in mortality, 100% reduction in hospitalisation – for the prophylactic use of a cheap, widely available drug, and which confirms the results of multiple earlier studies. What are our governments waiting for? What more do they need to approve drugs that have been shown to save lives?
UAE security officers detained, tortured, and killed Emirati poet and news editor Habib al-Sayegh in August 2019, shortly after he published a column opposing UAE normalization with Israel, according to a newly published book.
“Princes and Thieves,” a book by investigative journalist Matthew Cole published on 25 October, alleges that UAE security officers raided Sayegh’s Abu Dhabi home shortly after the publication of the column, hooded him in front of his wife and took him to a detention facility where he was tortured to death.
His interrogators reportedly pulled out several of his teeth with pliers and beat him repeatedly with a sharp metal object.
On 11 August 2019, Sayegh criticized the UAE’s plan to normalize relations with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords in his weekly column for Khaleej newspaper. The column was titled “Israel Is Our Real Enemy and A Dangerous Project.”
Sayegh described Israel as “a real and natural enemy” while questioning “who authorized the normalizers to speak on behalf of everyone?”
Nine days after the column was published, Emirati state media announced his death, without stating a cause. … continue
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