This report is all over the media, and all with virtually the same wording, suggesting a carefully coordinated, manufactured story, almost certainly from one of the well funded, climate misinformation organisations.
The BBC headline is grossly misleading, as the 30cm is the water under the boat; As Captain Kempl comments, the river depth is actually 1.5m.
The river gauge measurement of 42cm at Kaub is also widely reported, but is equally misleading, as this measurement is taken near the river bank, rather than at the deepest part of the stream.
In none of the dozens of reports I have read is there any actual historical data to compare against this event, whether rainfall or water level data. We are told this is the lowest water level since 2018, as if this means anything at all. There is no evidence presented to show that this drought is in any way unprecedented, or that droughts are becoming more extreme; merely this claim that appears in most of the articles:
“HGK and other shipping companies are preparing for a “new normal” in which low water levels become more common as global warming makes droughts more severe, sapping water along the length of the Rhine from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea.
“There’s no denying climate change and the industry is adjusting to it,”
However, annual rainfall trends at Mainz, which is just upstream of Kalb, show that while recent years have been drier than the 1980s and 90s, they are no drier than the 1950s. We also see exactly the same trends with April to September rainfall:
And finally, WUWT offers an insight to some of the megadroughts in Germany in the past, notably in 1540.
There is therefore nothing to suggest that this is not just another weather event.
In 2015 a team of researchers employed by the medical services of the US military published a peer-reviewed paper on the incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis after smallpox vaccination (SPX) and vaccination with an inactivated trivalent influenza vaccine (TIV).
Despite being published 7 years ago before anyone had heard of “covid”, the findings in this study could have very significant implications for the Covid-19 mRNA injections.
In this study, the researchers found that:
When active surveillance systems are used, significantly more myocarditis cases were identified than in earlier studies which had relied on more passive reporting.
The incidence of cases of possible myocarditis without symptoms – detected by testing all subjects vaccinated regardless of symptoms – was far higher than the cases in which subjects developed symptoms such that they would seek medical help.
Given these observations, it seems highly likely that the incidence rates of myocarditis following Covid vaccination have to date been severely underestimated.
The background to the study was that the US military rolled out a limited program of SPX following a perceived threat that smallpox might be used as a weapon in a bioterrorism incident. By the time of the paper’s publication, >2m doses had been administered, but the US had 290m doses in reserve to use for the general population if required. Concerns had been raised about a possible risk of myocarditis after this vaccination. This study sought to quantify these risks.
Key aspects of the study design:
Subjects were selected from previously healthy military personnel presenting for either SPX (1081 subjects) or TIV (189 subjects). A battery of baseline tests were performed and these were repeated either once or twice 5-8 days after vaccination and / or 9-28 after vaccination.
The notable difference between this and other studies assessing myocarditis and pericarditis rates was that the assessments were performed on all subjects and they included measurements of cardiac troponin levels (a protein which is released by damaged heart muscle cells) and ECG, in an attempt to detect possible “subclinical” cases of myocarditis – ie those which did not result in symptoms and so ordinarily would not gain the attention of healthcare systems.
Clinical myocarditis and pericarditis were determined according to published epidemiological case definitions that require the development of new onset cardiac symptoms soon after vaccine exposure, and each case was confirmed by an independent adjudicator.
Possible subclinical myocarditis and pericarditis were diagnosed whenever troponin levels rose by or to a certain level[1], or by ECG changes respectively, in the absence of symptoms.
Incidence rates were compared to background incidence rates calculated from a 2002 study among 1,390,352 service members (no exposure to any vaccines).
Key results:
Subjects receiving SPX were predominantly young (mean 23 years) and male (88%), those in the TIV cohort were more evenly balanced (54% male) and older (mean 36 years)
8.8% of the SPX recipients reported severe cardiac symptoms (defined as >3 out of 10 on a visual scale for at least 2 days).The most frequently reported cardiac symptoms were chest pain and dyspnea on exertion.
Despite no significant differences in pre-vaccine health self-assessment between the cohorts and fewer reported physical limitations in the SPX cohort, there was a significantly higher incidence of new onset cardiac symptom(s) post-SPX (10.6%) compared to the older post-TIV cohort (2.6%), p<0.001. These differences remained 4-5 fold higher in the SPX cohort after adjusting for group differences in age, sex, weight, race, smoking, and physical limitations, and also when symptoms were limited to consideration of those above 3 out of 10 on the visual scale.
The incidence rate of clinical myocarditis / pericarditis after SPX was 5 cases out of 1081 (4 were myocarditis and one pericarditis), equating to 463 per 100,000, which was >200 x background expected rates.
The incidence of possible subclinical myocarditis / pericarditis after SPX was 2868 per 100,000, or nearly 3%, which was 6 x the rate of clinical myocarditis.[2] This could not be compared to an expected background rate as this had never been measured before in this way.
No cases of either clinical or subclinical myocarditis were detected after TIV.
Implications.
Before going on to discuss the implications of this study for the Covid-era, it must be emphasised that “full recovery” from myocarditis is a misleading term: whilst the patients may initially become symptom-free, all should ideally receive regular cardiological follow-up to detect cardiomyopathy and / or arrhythmias later in life, and there is a significantly raised risk of cardiac morbidity and mortality.
Moreover, in several case series, for example this one published in JAMA, “Late Gadolinium Enhancement” on cardiac MRI[3] indicative of long term heart damage was found in the majority of clinical myocarditis cases which underwent detailed investigation. This finding is not consistent with mRNA-induced myocarditis having a more benign course than other forms, as was originally hoped.
For the above reasons, it is important to try to accurately capture all possible cases of myocarditis, both for the individuals concerned (so they can receive proper follow-up) and for calculating the extent of any added risks from vaccination.
In respect of the accurate detection of myocarditis cases, this study raises several important concerns relevant to the Covid injections:
Passive surveillance misses many cases.
Before this study, the rate of clinically diagnosed myocarditis / pericarditis had been previously estimated to be 16.1 cases per 100,000 in a cohort of US service members receiving smallpox vaccination, nearly 7.5-fold higher than the expected background rate of 2.16 per 100,000 observed among comparable unvaccinated service members.
The rate of clinical myocarditis observed in this SPX study was approximately 28 times higher than the previous estimate, at 463 per 100,000 – several hundred times the expected background rate. The higher incidence rate detected is almost certainly due to the active surveillance systems in place, where cases were pro-actively sought out and participants and their physicians made aware of their possibility.
As the authors state:
Prior to the present study, the incidence of myocarditis / pericarditis following smallpox vaccination was estimated from passive surveillance registries and population databases, with an inherent bias towards underestimation of disease incidence.
Myocarditis cases may be easily dismissed as musculoskeletal in origin.
Myocarditis is usually self-limiting in its acute phase, improving with self-treatment by a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug such as ibuprofen. It could quite easily be confused with “expected” aches and pains following injection, or with musculoskeletal injury, and this would be more frequent in the young, especially if active in sport.
The authors make the point that:
“3 of the 5 clinical cases would not have sought medical care without study interventions including enhanced education and surveillance.”
With the Covid mRNA injections, not only have we experienced a lack of active surveillance and a reliance on passive adverse event reporting, but there has been an atmosphere of discouragement of reporting. Many physicians have reported censure by hospitals or other health authorities for even discussing a possible vaccine origin for adverse events, and even subjects themselves have received opprobrium online after questioning the origin of their symptoms.
Hence, whatever factors the authors noted in 2015 in relation to underreporting of myocarditis following SPX are likely to be even more in evidence now for the Covid vaccines.
Because of this, there must be a very significant possibility that the actual numbers of clinical myocarditis cases caused by the mRNA injections have to date been very significantly underestimated.
The frequency of subclinical cases may dwarf the clinical cases.
This was actually the first study to attempt to detect possible subclinical cases of myocarditis (ie those without discernible symptoms) following vaccination. It is highly likely that, just as there is a spectrum of outcomes with symptomatic cases, such that a proportion have zero long-term problems, so with the subclinical cases an unknown proportion may well go on to have cardiac problems. Given that heart cells are irreplaceable and that scar tissue in the heart can disrupt electrical conduction the degree of concern about heart damage must be much more than with, say, damage to the skin, which can self-repair and still perform its primary function.
The actual proportion of subclinical cases which go on to manifest in cardiac disease later in life is unknown, however the authors selected a threshold for the measured troponin levels by which to define a subclinical case which is known to be associated with an increased risk of adverse outcomes. In the paper cited by the authors in support of their chosen troponin criterion it had been concluded that:
“In the general population, cTnT [troponin – protein released from heart damage] elevation is rare in subjects without CHF, LVH, CKD, or DM, [Congestive Heart Failure, Left Ventricular Hypertrophy, Chronic Kidney Disease or Diabetes Mellitus] suggesting that the upper limit of normal for the immunoassay should be <0.01 μg/L. Even minimally increased cTnT may represent subclinical cardiac injury and have important clinical implications, a hypothesis that should be tested in longitudinal outcome studies.”
*Definitions in [ ] with bold added by this author
The rate of possible subclinical myocarditis detected after SPX (3% of subjects) was 6 x the rate of symptomatic myocarditis. That these findings are or might be significant rather than chance fluctuations is supported by the fact that zero such cases were detected in the TIV cohort.
Moreover, the authors point out that even this may be an underestimate (bold added):
“While assumptions about benign troponin release from the myocardium have been made, there is a growing body of literature suggesting that even in generally healthy populations with no known cardiac disease risk, small elevations in troponin (stratified below the levels measured by the assay in this study) are associated with increased risk of all cause and cardiovascular mortality. Therefore, the rate of reported elevations in this study may actually be an underestimate of the true incidence of vaccine related subclinical myocarditis.“
There seem no reasons to suggest that possible subclinical myocarditis might not also be occurring after Covid injections, and also at higher rates than clinical cases. In fact, given the use of active surveillance for clinical cases employed in the SPX study, it is likely that the ratio between possible subclinical and reported clinical myocarditis cases for the Covid vaccines may in fact be higher than the 6-fold seen after SPX, because of the significant underreporting of clinical cases after Covid vaccines for the reasons mentioned above.
It should be stressed that little is known about the long-term prognosis of myocarditis / pericarditis, whether infective in origin or otherwise. No follow-up to the Engler et al paper (now 7 years old) measuring cardiac status in either the clinical or possible subclinical cases has been published to date.
A 2005 paper reported a well-conducted follow-up study of 67 cases detected following smallpox vaccination of 540k military personnel and found normalisation of echocardiography, ECG, and functional status (measured by ECG exercise-testing) in all subjects including those who initially had depressed cardiac function. This is encouraging, although the median follow-up period was just a few months and none were followed for more than one year after the myocarditis; hence concerns must remain regarding cardiac function in later life, especially in those in whom cardiac reserve falls secondary to other cardiac pathology such as coronary artery disease.
Concluding remarks
The authors conclude their paper with this warning:
Our study identified a rate of myocarditis/pericarditis following SPX immunization that is significantly higher than previously described, and highlights the challenges of post-licensure vaccine safety surveillance to identify adverse events that are not well understood or previously unrecognized.
Applying the incidence described in this study to a SPX immunization program that has delivered over 2 million doses, largely to young, healthy primary vaccinees, there are potentially thousands of vaccine associated cases, many undiagnosed because of self-medication or lack of provider awareness].
In our study, 3 of the 5 clinical cases would not have sought medical care without study interventions including enhanced education and surveillance. The recognition of potential adverse events following immunization requires accurate diagnosis of new onset clinical symptoms.
Our study reinforces the need, as part of all post-vaccine (and potentially new drug related) adverse events surveillance, to include specific standardized inquiry about new onset cardiac symptoms and to highlight the value of dynamic pre to post immunization cardiac troponin increases as a potential biomarker of risk in future safety surveillance studies.
Two million doses of SPX sounds a large number, but it is sobering to consider where we are today in respect of our understanding of the association of the Covid vaccines to myocarditis, having rolled out several billion doses, a program which is now continuing with 3rd or even 4th doses (whereas the incidence studies published to date have been based on 2 doses only).
It is accepted now that there is a definite association between mRNA vaccination and myocarditis, yet the precise rates of increased risks reported vary hugely between different studies, which probably reflect vastly different methodologies between investigators and countries according to prevailing local reporting standards and customs.
Moreover, initial claims that myocarditis risk might be higher after Covid infection compared to vaccination have not held up to scrutiny. The latest study – based on a large (~200k) cohort of adults in Israel – found no increase in the incidence of pericarditis or myocarditis in adult patients recovering from COVID-19.
In addition to the high, yet underreported, rates of clinical myocarditis, there remains a distinct possibility that there may have been very large numbers of subclinical myocarditis cases caused by Covid vaccines, the long-term outcomes for which are uncertain.
Approximately 3% of those receiving a single SPX vaccination met the criteria for having developed possible subclinical myocarditis, and given that billions have now received Covid mRNA products (many multiple times), if the frequency is similar to SPX the number of such cases following mRNA injections could well be in the millions.
Despite these worrying data, we have inexplicably witnessed the rollout of multiple booster doses, including in many countries to young adults and even children, despite there having been:
No active surveillance for myocarditis, only passive reporting
No prospective studies of troponin levels (which would be relatively simple to perform).
No standardised inquiries about new onset cardiac symptoms
One could be forgiven for thinking that the reason for this is that those who have relentlessly pushed this program into younger and younger people at little to no risk from Covid, simply do not want to know, and prefer to maintain a degree of “plausible deniability”.
Footnotes:
For subclinical myocarditis, the criteria for diagnosis were: the development of any one of the following: a) elevated post-vaccine levels of cTnT ≥ 0.02 ng/ml with pre-vaccine cTnT levels <0.01 ng/ml; or b) a post-vaccine cTnT level of 0.02 ng/ml greater than the pre-vaccine level based on the imprecision profiles of the assay.
The absolute subclinical cTnT elevations post SPX vaccine ranged from 0.02 to 0.24 ng/ml with the majority (n = 28, 90.3%) ranging from 0.02 to 0.07 ng/ml
This is a radiological feature seen on cardiac imaging which is indicative of myocardial damage consistent with a high risk of poor long-term prognosis.
In 2020, government orders to stay home — along with lockdown-produced job losses, public fear of COVID-19 and other factors — led to dramatic declines in in-person utilization of healthcare services among adults and children, both in the United States and globally.
“Well-baby” and “well-child” visits were some of the noteworthy casualties.
In the U.S., children’s and teen’s vaccination rates plummeted dramatically, falling that year by as much as 91% depending on the age group, including a noticeably lower uptake of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccines (DTaP or DTP), meningitis shots and human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines.
Public health officials expected this “pandemic hangover” to dissipate by 2021, but instead, the change in parents’ vaccine-seeking behavior for their kids persisted.
Internationally, 6 million fewer children worldwide got at least one dose of DTP vaccine in 2021 versus 2019, causing the head of UNICEF to lament “the largest sustained drop in childhood immunization in a generation.”
And in the Philippines — where the president threatened to jail COVID-19 vaccine refusers — 2021’s percentage of children receiving a first DTP dose was just 57% versus 92% a decade previously.
Stateside, Washington State reported flu shot uptake in children under age 5 was down by around 25% in November 2021, compared to the two previous flu seasons. And Michigan’s state registry for March 2022 showed that 24% fewer toddlers “were considered vaccinated” compared to March 2020.
When Michigan compared its 2020 vaccination data against the 2016-2019 period, it found vaccination coverage had declined in “all milestone age cohorts, except for birth-dose hepatitis B coverage.”
At this juncture, state officials are openly speculating that COVID-19 shots — thus far rejected by the parents of 97% of under-5-year-olds — are the reason parents are increasingly ambivalent about childhood vaccination more generally.
Referring to this “spillover doubt,” a Michigander public health spokesperson said parents who once accepted childhood vaccination without question are now saying, “Wait a minute. Do I really need these vaccines?” and asking, “How are these vaccines made?”
According to another Michigan official, “vaccination” — the “V-word” — has become a “trigger word” for irate parents who believe government not only overstepped its authority during COVID-19 but is fraudulently pushing unsafe vaccines on their little ones.
Fewer babies dying is no ‘disaster’
In October 2020, three scientists from the U.S. and U.K. authored the Great Barrington Declaration and condemned — quite gloomily — the steep decline in childhood vaccination resulting from COVID-19 lockdowns.
As long-time proponents of vaccination — professionally involved in vaccine development, promotion of the dangerous HPV vaccine and accepting of COVID-19 vaccines as a solution to lockdowns — the three declaration authors positioned the decline in childhood vaccination rates at the head of their list of “disastrous” lockdown consequences.
Far from witnessing a disaster, however, observers by June 2020 had begun noticing a wonderful silver lining — a “surprising” pandemic effect on the death rate among infants, in particular, with 200-plus fewer infants dying per week, amounting to a 30% reduction in expected child deaths within a few months.
To explain the “something mysterious” saving the lives of infants, these analysts, along with Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker, pointed out how the missed infant vaccines coincided with a “precipitous drop” in reports of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
SIDS deaths — which by definition affect children who are normal and healthy — and sudden unexplained deaths in children over age 1 typically occur in close temporal proximity to vaccination, with nine out of 10 SIDS deaths following two- and four-month “well-baby” visits.
An analysis of three decades of VAERS data found 75% of reported post-vaccination SIDS cases occurred within seven days of childhood shots.
Japanese pathologists who identified SIDS cases taking place within a week of vaccination agree that “suspicious cases do exist,” leading them to encourage forensic pathologists to “devote more attention to vaccination” in SIDS events.
Naturally, “fact-checkers” dispute the hypothesized association between 2020’s lower vaccination rates and the decreased deaths in young children.
Additional clues
CHD has reviewed dozens of studies showing dramatically better health in unvaccinated children while finding “no studies that show superior health outcomes in vaccinated children.”
However, because the effects of vaccination are complex, cumulative and synergistic with other toxic exposures — and because most chronic disease data sets have not yet caught up to the pandemic — it is not so easy to tease out other upsides resulting from 2020’s lower childhood vaccination rates.
There are a few clues, however.
Consider the decline in emergency department (ED) visits and the fact that the largest declines were in persons under age 15.
Ordinarily, an estimated one in seven children experiences an ED visit every year.
An analysis comparing 2020’s pediatric ED visits to ED encounters over the previous decade found “substantial” decreases for certain diagnoses — notably abdominal pain, ear infections, asthma, pneumonia, upper respiratory and urinary tract infections and trauma — while visits for diagnoses such as seizures and complications of diabetes held steadier.
Although there is no surefire way to know why ED visits declined for those specific conditions, all of the diagnoses in question show up in vaccine package inserts as post-vaccination occurrences — along with nearly 400 other acute and chronic symptoms and conditions.
Abdominal pain may not sound serious, but it can be a sign of acute pancreatitis (sudden-onset inflammation of the pancreas), so much so that clinicians advise “always” considering acute pancreatitis “in the differential diagnosis of abdominal pain in children.
And case reports are now flooding in (for example, from the U.S., Japan, Poland and New Zealand) describing severe pancreatitis in the aftermath of COVID-19 vaccination.
Moreover, acute and chronic pancreatitis began mysteriously surging in children following the childhood vaccine schedule’s expansion in the 1990s and 2000s, and juvenile diabetes and pancreatic cancers in young adults — two conditions associated with pancreatitis — began escalating soon thereafter.
COVID vaccines — a line in the sand?
Most observers attributed the sudden drop-off in routine childhood vaccination in 2020 purely to circumstance-imposed foregone care (“the gap between perceived need and actual utilization of healthcare services”).
Now, however, it is COVID-19 vaccines — and particularly the unscientific authorization of the jabs for teens and young children — that appear to be the principal reason many parents no longer “perceive a need” to rush back into the vaccine fold.
Even the propagandistic New York Timesadmitted to a hardy new contingent of vaccine “skeptics” whose questioning was forged in the crucible of COVID-19 restrictions, COVID-19 vaccine mandates and, tragically for some, a child’s adverse reaction to the COVID-19 shots.
As a physician tweeted from the “frontlines of medicine” in early August, “Parents are DONE with giving their kids any and all [syringe emoji]. Not only that but they’re disgusted with what they had already allowed to be injected into their kids. They wish they could turn back.”
Public health’s tired old strategy for recapturing these wayward parents appears to be (surprise, surprise) badgering parents to “catch up as many vaccines as possible in a single visit” — bolstered by the false claim that it is to a child’s advantage to get a bunch of shots at once — while also stoking worries about a resurgence of so-called “vaccine-preventable” illnesses.
Thus, following a single case of paralysis ascribed to “polio,” New York State is busily trying to conjure up a polio outbreak, never mentioning the decades of manipulation of the “polio” diagnosis intended to mask nonviral causes of paralysis that include vaccination and poisoning.
Florida, meanwhile, is urging college students and other groups to get meningococcal vaccines following the deaths of seven gay and bisexual men, allegedly from meningococcal disease.
Why did the deceased men develop meningitis to begin with? No one has shared information about their COVID-19 vaccination status, but researchers around the world are reporting meningitis as a post-COVID-vaccination adverse event in adolescents and adults — for example, in Japan, Singapore, Korea, Iraq, Belgium and Germany.
Meningitis also is a listed adverse event for DTaP, hepatitis A and B, influenza and MMR vaccines, and vaccines containing Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) and polio components.
And a 28-year-old physician who volunteered in Brazil’s clinical trials for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine died after receiving the meningitis vaccine given to the “control group.”
What kids really need
Sadly, whatever temporary or longer-lasting silver lining may have emerged from the COVID-19-induced lull in childhood vaccination, children and their parents still face many challenges.
According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, the weight status of children and adolescents who were already overweight or obese worsened significantly during 2020, and children’s food insecurity is rising both domestically and internationally.
In addition, the massive social and behavioral changes commanded through government restrictions have prompted dire headlines about young people’s mental health — although experts caution these could counterproductively lead to overdiagnosis and overmedication with black-box-warning drugs known to cause violence and suicide.
Rather than more vaccines or drugs that have never delivered on their hype or promises, what children and youth need to thrive are the slower-but-surer public health fundamentals — such as solid nutrition, safe housing and economic security — and the loving attention of their parents.
In 2013, the CNN presenter Deborah Feyerick asked if asteroids falling to earth were caused by climate change. Earlier this year, CBS anchor Nate Burleson commented on the Tonga earthquake by saying: “We talk about climate change… these stories are a harsh reality of what we are going through. We have to do our part because these are more frequent.” Last week, the academic networking blog The Conversation discussed the Fagradalsfjall volcano eruption in Iceland and asked: “Is climate change causing more eruptions?”, adding that it had the potential to increase volcanic eruptions and affect their size.
In the climate change show, jumping the shark is now a daily occurrence, particularly in the mainstream media. Gaslighting on a global scale is evident as the media push the command-and-control Net Zero agenda. Bad weather incidents and natural disasters are catastrophised to promote this increasingly hard-left political agenda. But the distinguished atmospheric scientist Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT recently voiced the views of an increasing number of people when he said the current climate narrative was “absurd”. Yet he acknowledged that it had universal acceptance, despite the fact that in a normal world the counter-arguments would be compelling. “Perhaps it is the trillions of dollars being diverted into every green project under the sun, and the relentless propaganda from grant-dependent academics and agenda-driven journalists, along with the political control offered to elite groups in society by Net Zero, that currently says it is not absurd,” he speculated.
The Daily Sceptic has written numerous articles presenting evidence that global warming started to run out of steam over 20 years ago, despite the frequent, back-dated and upward temperature adjustments made by state-funded weather services. No science paper exists that proves conclusively that humans cause noticeable changes in the climate by burning fossil fuel. Despite years of research, scientists are no nearer knowing how much temperatures will rise if carbon dioxide doubles in the atmosphere. No link has been shown directly connecting temperatures and CO2 rises (and falls) over the entire paleoclimatic record. Countless natural processes play a part in determining climate conditions. And attempts to link individual weather events to long-term changes in the climate are produced by climate modellers and green activists giving vent to wishful thinking.
In the absence of credible science, there has been a resort to the name-calling, shaming and appeals to authority, common in previous ages. The recent news that the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) had returned to blooming health, and was showing record growth, was a disaster for most mainstream media outlets. All parts had reported for years that the coral was on its last legs due to human-induced climate change. During this time, the GBR observer Professor Peter Ridd was vilified for stating that the reef was a vibrant and healthy ecosystem. He was fired from his post at James Cook University for pointing out the deficiencies in the output of reef science institutions.
In August 2019, the Guardian reported that the former Australian chief scientist Ian Chubb had accused Ridd of “misrepresenting robust science” about the plight of the GBR. Shamefully, it repeated without comment Chubb’s slur that Ridd was relying on the “strategy used by the tobacco industry to raise doubts about the impact of smoking”.
Professor Ridd emerges from the whole sorry affair with his reputation restored and an acknowledgement that true scientists report their findings without fear of the mob, or seeking the favour of the Establishment.
Just days before the news was confirmed that the GBR was continuing to grow back in record amounts, the Guardian ran a long article saying that scientists had demonstrated “beyond any doubt” that humanity is forcing the climate to disastrous new extremes, They hadn’t, of course, and “beyond any doubt” is a phrase borrowed from the criminal law, not science. Professor Terry Hughes from the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce estimated that close to 50% of the GBR coral is already dead. Attribution science is said to show that the hot March weather in 2016 that caused a “catastrophic die-off” in 2016 was made “at least 175 times more likely” by the human influence on the climate. A more realistic explanation, invariably ignored in mainstream media, is that the powerful El Nino experienced in that year warmed sea waters temporarily, and led to a natural burst of bleaching. Full reef health was quickly restored when the effect of the natural oscillation was removed.
The global media gaslighting over political climate change is easier to understand if you follow the money. Earlier this year, the Daily Scepticreported that the Associated Press was adding two dozen journalists to cover “climate issues”. Five billionaire foundations, including the left-wing Rockefeller operation, supplied $8 million. AP now says over 50 jobs are funded from these sources. The BBC and the Guardian regularly receive multi-million dollar contributions from the trusts of wealthy donors. It is estimated that Bill Gates has given more than $300 million over the past decade to a wide variety of media outlets. Democrat power couple James and Kathryn Murdoch also help pay the staff’s wages at AP. On their Foundation web site, it is noted that there is an investment in Climate Central, where meteorologists are used as “trusted messengers” of the links between extreme weather and climate change.
Meanwhile, the foundation of the green technology-funding Spanish bank BBVA hands out annual €100,000 payments. Last year the cash went to Marlow Hood of Agence France-Presse, who describes himself as the “Herald of the Anthropocene”, the latter being a political renaming of the current Holocene era. In 2019 Matt McGrath of the BBC took home the annual prize, while in 2020 it ended up in the coffers of the Guardian.
The White Queen tried to believe in six impossible things before breakfast. It’s a shame climate change wasn’t around in Alice’s day.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
The CDC has dropped special quarantine recommendations for unvaccinated persons, finally admitting that natural immunity should be considered and that vaccines don’t stop infection.
“CDC’s COVID-19 prevention recommendations no longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status because breakthrough infections occur, though they are generally mild, and persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection,” their update reads.
The CDC removed the recommendation that unvaccinated persons quarantine after they’re exposed to the virus. They now recommend that individuals wear a mask for ten days post-exposure and get tested after five days.
The CDC further acknowledged that the Omicron variant of COVID poses a smaller risk of hospitalization and death than previous variants.
This announcement will likely pressure Canada’s health authorities (and Trudeau) to follow suit. Although numerous countries dropped their medical segregation policies long ago, Canada remains one of the last to do so.
Moreover, each consecutive variant appears to be weakening, with immunity (including natural immunity) being widespread. Although Canada has an abnormally high amount of mask and vaccine fanatics, the remaining medical segregation could soon be a thing of the past.
With that said, Canada’s health authorities have done nothing but warn of a return to restrictions and upcoming waves of COVID, telling Canadians that the pandemic is not over.
Additionally, the University of Toronto recently mandated that young health students living on residence get a 3rd vaccine.
‘We need a new plague’ was the sentiment in the early 1980s in the corridors of America’s Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), because the agency was facing closure. In his book The Real Anthony Fauci Robert F Kennedy Jr cites Dr Kary Mullis recalling the institutional desperation reflected in circulating memos which said: ‘We need to find something to scare the American people into giving us more money.’
The events which followed, and the panoply of artifices used to secure this end, became a template for amassing unbridled power over the population, the institutions, and even the White House.
Kennedy recounts that in the summer of 1981 the CDC reported that approximately 50 gay men in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York had presented with Kaposi’s sarcoma (a skin cancer associated with immune suppression) and other immune deficiency-related health problems including a rare form of pneumonia (PCP).
As cases starting appearing in other major cities in the same cohort, the hunt was on for the cause of this new disease, dubbed Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (Aids).
Responsibility for it fell under the US National Cancer Institute (NCI). In 1983 the French virologist Dr Luc Montagnier identified signals of a retrovirus in some Aids patients, which he believed could be responsible for causing the disease. Dr Robert Gallo of the NCI persuaded Montagnier to send him a sample of the virus in exchange for fast-tracking the publishing of Montagnier’s work in the journal Science.
Before doing so, Gallo cultured the sample, gave it a different name, patented an antibody kit he claimed capable of detecting it, and in April 1984 called a press conference to announce to the world that the probable cause of Aids had been found in the form of a ‘known human cancer virus’, claiming the discovery as his own. Once the announcement was made, no one could review Gallo’s work which was published subsequently.
A bitter row ensued between Montagnier and Gallo, which eventually led to an ‘accommodation’, whereby the researchers agreed to share the discovery, and the virus was given the name HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus).
The hypothesis that HIV caused Aids, however, had not been subject to the normal processes of independent replication, verification, dissent and rebuttal. A nascent hypothesis had been seized and hurriedly converted into accepted fact. ‘Science by announcement’ was a dangerous development which has had grave repercussions to the present day.
Robert Gallo’s overt ambition to be awarded a Nobel Prize made him a natural ally of Anthony Fauci. So once the HIV story of a worldwide lethal virus was launched, claiming the highly infectious nature of it, Fauci wrested jurisdiction for the disease away from NCI and into his moribund National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NAID), thus capturing the flood of congressional funds that would be made available to combat it.
Many eminent scientists had misgivings about the hypothesis. Foremost was Professor Peter Duesberg, a world-respected molecular biologist. Duesberg was a consummate scientist and an applied scholar. At thirty-three, having discovered the ‘oncogene’ which appeared to cause cancer, he subjected his own theory to more rigorous tests than his critics had, and became convinced his discovery had been a lab fluke. He therefore publicly abandoned his own hypothesis, at the height of his acclaim. Colleagues praised him for his ‘integrity, his genius, his kindness and his intelligence’.
Duesberg, Kary Mullis and their school of critics believed the first generation of Aids was a complex illness which had its cause in a variety of chemicals. The profusion of recreational drugs used by the homosexual community, particularly amyl nitrate (poppers) known to cause immune suppression, in combination with the constant use of antibiotics to treat infections, were strong factors in immunity collapse. But after Robert Gallo’s April 1984 press conference Fauci moved to quash all talk of toxic causation to attribute Aids uniquely to the deadly virus.
Following Gallo’s announcement, Duesberg studied every scientific publication on HIV and Aids, and in 1987 published his observations in the journal Cancer Research. He argued that retroviruses were not, by accepted definition, a life form, and HIV was not capable of causing either cancer or Aids. Referring to the supposed indeterminate incubation period of HIV he said: ‘There are no slow viruses causing Aids, only slow scientists.’ Duesberg was committed to clean functional proof at a time when electron microscopy and other technologies for detecting new viruses were making biology – particularly the study of viruses – increasingly murky. Fame and finance were driving the frenzy in viral research. With official and commercial encouragement, researchers were blaming newly discovered viruses for an assortment of ancient diseases. Duesberg argued that the apparent high incidence of HIV-Aids in Africa was a function of the now notorious PCR to produce false diagnoses of infection, and the broad definition of Aids, which captured everything in its net from malnutrition to endemic diseases.
The second generation of Aids in the early 1990s is now widely recognised to have been caused by the poisonous drug Azidothymidine (AZT) pushed by Fauci on to ‘HIV positive cases’. AZT was developed in the 1960s as a leukaemia chemotherapy drug but abandoned when government researchers deemed it too toxic even for short-term use. Described by Joseph Sonnabend as ‘incompatible with life’, AZT randomly destroys bones, kidneys, livers, muscle tissue, the brain and the central nervous system.
After Peter Duesberg’s compelling 1987 article, which challenged point by point the basis of the HIV-Aids hypothesis, the scientific world waited for answers to Duesberg’s probing questions, but Gallo never attempted a reply. Instead Fauci moved ruthlessly to annihilate Duesberg’s voice. His stature and the respect he commanded were an existential threat to Fauci’s plans for control and grandeur through the theory of a dangerous virus.
Marshalled by Fauci, the self-interested scientific press banished Duesberg. John Maddox, editor of the journal Nature, invited Duesberg’s colleagues to slander him without fear of response, writing an editorial stating that the virologist, by his heresy, had forfeited the standard scientific practice of ‘right of reply’.
Scientific conferences disinvited Duesberg. His graduate students were warned by their university that working with him would render them irrelevant, and the fawning mass media followed the instructions handed down from on high. As the reporter Celia Farber wrote, ‘Duesberg’s problem transcended science: It was career protection to partake in his bullying and degradation. The Fauci serf scientists were driven by fear that if they did not publicly denounce Duesberg in sufficiently disgusted tones they themselves would be punished.’
In 1994 a senior geneticist, Dr Stephen O’Brien, was dispatched by the very same editor of Nature, John Maddox, to try to persuade Duesberg to change his position, in exchange for ‘reinstatement’. O’Brien rang Duesberg on the pretext of needing to speak to him urgently and the two met at the opera in San Francisco. O’Brien pulled from his pocket a paper entitled ‘HIV Causes Aids: Koch’s Postulates Fulfilled’ with his own name and that of Duesberg printed at the bottom, and begged Duesberg to sign it. To his undying credit, Duesberg refused.
Duesberg’s remarkable lack of bitterness towards his persecutors is the sign of a man at peace with his soul. It is likely that Fauci’s rancour, and the depths to which he sank to humiliate and denigrate Duesberg, sprang from a hatred of his ability and integrity, qualities Fauci could not bear to contemplate.
Further legitimate doubts are being raised about the scale of global warming claimed by the U.K. Met Office, following publication of a damning report into U.S. weather stations. The report found that 96% of the weather stations used by the U.S. weather service NOAA were “corrupted” by the localised effects of urbanisation. The U.S. has one of the largest temperature measuring systems in the world, and information from the stations forms an important part of the Met Office HadCRUT5 database.
Since 2013, the Met Office has boosted recent global warming by 30%, depressed past measurements and abolished the temperature pause from 1998 to 2012 – this pause is still discernible in the accurate satellite and meteorological balloon record. Using the HadCRUT5 database means the Met Office can claim continuing warming and further heat records. Anthony Watts, the author of the report, titled Corrupted Climate Stations, noted that data from the stations that have not been corrupted by faulty placement, “show a rate of warming in the United States reduced by almost half compared to all stations”. With a 96% warm-bias in U.S. temperature measurements, “it is impossible to use any statistical methods to derive an accurate climate trend for the U.S.”, added Watts. The same can, of course, be argued to apply to all global sets that use the corrupted U.S. data.
The corruption is caused by close proximity to asphalt, machinery and other heat-producing, heat-trapping, or heat-accentuating objects. “Placing temperature stations in such locations violates NOAA’s own published standards, and strongly undermines the legitimacy and magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends in the United States,” it says.
Of course the Met Office’s own U.K. temperature measuring is subject to considerable urban heat distortions. During the recent brief heatwave (“feels like an apocalypse,” Piers Morgan), three of the four highest temperatures were recorded at airports including Heathrow, one of the least suitable sites it is possible to imagine. Interestingly, the average temperature for the U.K. last month was 16.6°C, the same as the year before and nearly identical to the 16.5°C of 1976. Given that 11 million more people live in the U.K. and urbanisation has rapidly expanded since then, last month was almost certainly cooler than the same glorious period in 1976. In addition, these averages were not far off the temperature of 16°C recorded in 1911.
Frequent upwards adjustments to HadCRUT, and an increasing disconnect with satellite and balloon records, do pose legitimate questions that the state-funded Met Office is actually recording increasing urban heat, and not much warming of the global atmosphere. And further questions can be posed along the lines – is it just a coincidence that the data is beneficial to those arguing the climate is breaking down, and a command-and-control Net Zero solution must be imposed in less than 30 years?
As we reported recently in the Daily Sceptic, Watts also publicised a rarely referenced dataset that NOAA started in 2015, designed to remove all urban heat distortions. Called the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), it collected data from 114 U.S. stations and was aiming for “superior accuracy and continuity in places that land use will not likely impact during the next five decades”. Over the last 17 years it found very little evidence to indicate a warming trend. In fact it showed that May 2022 was cooler than May 2005. Watts comments that the data the network produces are never mentioned in monthly or yearly climate reports published by NOAA for public consumption.
Much of the Watts report supplies details of the field trips made to NOAA stations. He supplies copious notes and photos of what was found.
The above photo was taken at Fort Pierce in Florida and shows a digital measuring devise (MMTS) sited next to a large building and five air conditioning units pumping out hot air. Watts, a meteorologist by profession, notes that digital devices are often placed next to buildings since installing a cable to a reading devise is more difficult when roads and paths have to be crossed.
Several examples of stations where the siting could be described as “absurd” were noted in the survey. Watts gives further details:
These include a GHCN station at Lava Hot Springs, Idaho – a tourist site at which the MMTS sensor was placed into a natural hole in the ground where hot water for bathing and swimming emanates from the ground: … a station in Virginia City, Nevada – at which the MMTS was not only missing its protective cap, but also placed near asphalt, generators, and air conditioning units exhausts. Perhaps the most absurd was a UNHCN station in Colfax, California, which was recently moved due to a modernisation upgrade at the California fire station where it is located. The new station has been placed directly above a 20-foot rock wall that absorbs a massive amount of solar energy during the day, and releases it as LWIR [Long Wave Infrared] at night, with heated air rising to the sensor.
In conclusion the report found a “slight warming trend” when examining temperatures from “unperturbed” stations and this was similar to the satellite record compiled by the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). “This warming trend, however, is approximately half the claimed rate of increase promoted by many in the climate science community,” it was noted. The UAH monthly record is frequently published by the Daily Sceptic as providing the best guide to global temperature. Not only does it show clearly that temperatures paused from 1998-2012 but a current pause is underway, and this has lasted nearly eight years. The inconvenient data are not to everyone’s taste. Earlier this year, Google Adsense ‘demonitised’ the page providing the monthly results on the grounds of “unreliable and harmful claims”.
“The rate of warming as measured by unperturbed surface stations, USCRN and UAH does not represent a climate crisis,” says Watts. Meanwhile it is almost certain that as temperatures rise in the U.K. this week, the Met Office will be reporting from Heathrow. But its addiction to such data, shown to be “corrupted” by the Watts report, is leading to serious doubts about its ability to provide an accurate indication of U.K. and global temperatures.
Chris Morrison is theDaily Sceptic’sEnvironment Editor.
I joined the Tavistock Clinic in North London as a clinical nurse therapist in 2003. Back then, Tavistock was prestigious—known all over the world for its professional seminars and specialized psychological treatments for mental-health patients. Before I ever worked there, I would attend lectures and training workshops to hear from renowned psychoanalysts, who were considered some of the best in the field.
A lot can change in a decade.
Last week, the National Health Service ordered that the gender youth clinic at Tavistock to shut its doors by next spring. And I am part of the reason why.
The story of what happened at Tavistock is the story of how a small group of whistleblowers—doctors, nurses, parents and patients, together with the help of journalists and reporters—were able to relentlessly expose activist-driven medicine that they knew was irresponsible. It’s also an object lesson for others who are deeply concerned about a one-size-fit-all approach to transgender healthcare and wonder what they should do about it.
I was delighted when I started working at Tavistock back in the early 2000s. My role as senior clinical lecturer was to devise and deliver training courses for mental-health staff. Shortly after I joined, I took on another part-time role working with children and adolescents in what was called the Gender Identity Development Service.
There were, as I recall, seven of us on the team back then. We would have clinical meetings each week in which we would discuss our referrals and caseloads. Back then we had fewer than 100 referrals per year in the entire country and they were mostly biological boys.
Sometime during my first few weeks we were discussing a newly referred patient, a 16-year-old boy with a complex history, who felt he had been born in the wrong body. My colleague took on the case. Four months later, the boy’s name came up again in the meeting, and my colleague announced that she was recommending him for puberty blockers (gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists), which are used to suppress the further development of secondary-sex characteristics like breast tissue in females or facial hair in males. Puberty blockers are almost always followed by cross-sex hormones (testosterone or estrogen).
Usually, when new patients arrived at the service, they would come in for an hour or so once a month for the first few months. So I was surprised to hear that my coworker was recommending drugs when, in my view, no meaningful understanding of his internal world could have been reached. I knew from my experience in working with adolescents that any diagnostic assessment arrived at after such a short time span would have been superficial.
It’s worth pointing out that Tavistock specialized in therapy—talking through problems with patients—and that we did not generally prescribe drugs. For that reason, I had expected the same approach when it came to treating children and teens with gender dysphoria. But it seemed that, even back then, certain staff didn’t hesitate to recommend puberty blockers—even for vulnerable kids contending with anxiety, autism, internalized homophobia or other challenges.
I had also noticed that senior clinicians in the service would regularly meet with Mermaids, a transgender patient-advocacy group. At the time, various patient-advocacy groups were springing up alongside mental-health services so that patients would have a voice in the examination room. At first, I viewed all of this as an overdue development. But as time progressed, it seemed clear that groups like Mermaids were exerting influence over doctors and clinicians in the service—sometimes dictating the expectations of care for our patients.
One small anecdote: I was once instructed by a superior to rewrite a letter I’d written to a male patient’s referring doctor—making sure to use the patient’s chosen, female name and new pronouns. I understood the sensitivities around this subject, but I pointed out that using a female name and female pronouns might be confusing to the clinical team, since we had been talking about a male child with gender dysphoria..
I was informed that failure to use the right name and pronouns might result in problems or even litigation for me and the gender clinic at Tavistock.
The external influence of the advocacy groups increased. Instead of being a clinical, research-focused service where we were learning and developing ideas, it felt like it was a fait accompli that we had to go along with what Mermaids and patients wanted—even if we, the mental-health-care professionals, had legitimate questions about the appropriateness of the treatments that patients and patient advocates were demanding.
For example, a weird paradox arose at a conference on transgender health care hosted by Tavistock around 2005: the opening speaker declared that we were no longer supposed to think of gender dysphoria as a mental illness. But we were a mental-health team working at a mental-health facility. What were we supposed to be doing if not treating patients with psychological conditions?
Remember, this was all before the internet took hold of an entire generation of teenagers. There were no online groups dedicated to gender affirmation and coaching kids on what to say to their providers to secure cross-sex hormones. We mostly saw younger boys who believed themselves to be girls from an early age and a few teenagers who felt like they were trapped in the wrong bodies. So, although I felt aware of the gathering force of thinking around the area of gender dysphoria and transgender identity, it was hard to foresee the slow-motion avalanche that would hit over the next two decades.
Yet even what I saw in those years worried me deeply and working on the Gender Identity Development Service started to affect my personal well-being. I would come home with a headache on the days that I worked in the unit, and my heart would beat quickly when I went in the next morning. It felt like every time I raised a concern about us rushing prematurely to prescribe drugs that would have permanent effects on our patients, I’d be met with an eye roll and the unstated “Oh, here she goes again,” or “Can’t she just fit in?”
There were a few colleagues who shared my views. One colleague, Dr. Az Hakeem, would also speak up at team meetings. But for the most part I felt alone, and I felt very anxious about some of the children who had been referred for body-altering medications. I began to feel as though I might be part of something unethical. I tried to take on only children who were legally too young to commence the blockers, which would allow me more time to do long-term therapeutic work while avoiding the dilemma of the fact I worked in a so-called “gateway service” to medicalization.
I spoke a lot to my husband, Marcus, who is a psychoanalyst and who was by now a senior member of staff in the Adult Department of Tavistock. He suggested I go to the clinical director at theTavistock, which I did. She listened and took my concerns seriously. I later learned that she reached out to Dr. David Taylor, the Medical Director of the Trust, who was asked to launch an investigation into the work of the gender clinic. That was issued in 2006.
I do not remember being shown the report then, and don’t recall any in depth discussion about the contents of it or how the recommendations would be implemented. The only change that I remember was that a senior staff member from the more general Adolescent Department began overseeing our work. That oversight petered out when this staff member retired.
It was only in 2019 that I saw the full report when Hannah Barnes, a BBC journalist, obtained it via a Freedom of Information request. It confirmed all the disturbing things I had reported: Our data was poor; it wasn’t being stored properly; and there were not sufficient follow-ups with patients once they left the service—meaning we didn’t know how our patients were faring unless they voluntarily wrote to us.
As we have now learned from more recent whistleblowers, the recommendations in the report were buried, and when any criticism or difficult questions arose in the press, the Tavistock management would repeat the same mantra about how they were “a world-class service.” It’s important to acknowledge that there might have been some staff still struggling to deliver thoughtful, measured care, but the noise around our standards was growing louder.
I had tried hard to help the Gender Identity Development Service from the inside, but it felt like I was swimming against a stronger and stronger tide. I didn’t want to be part of something that felt wrong, and I knew that each time I spoke up I was being cast in a darker shadow of suspicion by my colleagues.
So in 2007, I quit.
After I left the gender clinic, I continued to work in other departments at Tavistock. I continued my clinical lecturing and practiced psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Life was satisfying and busy, and I tried to put the experience out of my mind.
But it became increasingly impossible to ignore.
In the past decade, there has been an explosion in referral numbers to the gender clinic at the Tavistock—over 3,000 in 2019—and the service came under mounting pressure to get through the long waiting lists. This resulted in even more children getting fast-tracked and put on blockers if they expressed a wish for them.
The profile of the patients changed significantly, too. Many were adolescent girls who had never exhibited signs of gender dysphoria. Often, their feelings of wanting to be a boy developed along with their breasts, or when they got their period. They were horrified by their bodies, and they wanted control over the changes taking place in them.
Between then and now, there were more whistleblowers, like Dr. David Bell, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at Tavistock, who issued yet another report on the service in 2018 that raised a lot of the same concerns that I had raised back in 2005. Sonia Appleby, whose job title was Safeguarding Children Lead, spoke out in November 2019, claiming that she was being blocked from doing her job by management. By then, the political pressure, the institutional capture, and the influence of social media had become much more intense, and about 40 people were working on the youth gender care team. Shortly after Dave’s report came out, my husband Marcus resigned from the Tavistock Board.
His resignation gained national publicity, and Marcus was invited to present at a 2019 House of Lords meeting, which I attended with him. A representative of the Tavistock Trust who was also at the meeting read a statement claiming that no one was being rushed through treatment, that Tavistock was a best-in-class facility. This was my second Damascene moment. I raised my hand to speak. “Look, that is not correct,” I said. “I worked there. And I saw that children were being pushed to transition very quickly.”
After that meeting, a group of us met, and we learned that a mother of a girl with autism and gender dysphoria was seeking support as a claimant in a judicial review of Tavistock’s practice of giving puberty blockers to minors. (Adults who transition are also prescribed blockers prior to starting on cross-sex hormones.) She had contacted a lawyer and he arranged a meeting with several of us who had attended the House of Lords meeting. The mother was worried about her daughter’s referral to the Gender Identity Development Service, as she did not feel that her daughter would be able to fully understand the ramifications of the treatment and give informed consent to it. She needed to remain anonymous and, therefore, needed a co-claimant who could afford to go public. Dave was still at Tavistock and was being threatened by the administration there. My husband had his hands full with his own patients. I did not relish the idea of sticking my neck out, but I knew I had to get back into the ring. By now, the whistleblowers’ reports felt grave. I signed onto the suit.
Almost no one in the U.K. wanted to get involved, so I set about finding expert witnesses in the United States, Australia and Scandinavia. Gradually, we put together statements and evidence to support our claim that children could not give fully informed consent to an experimental treatment with lifelong, as yet unknown consequences. I found, among many others, Kiera Bell through a journalist, and I was immediately taken by her story.
Keira is a young woman who went on puberty blockers at 16, testosterone at 17, and then had a double mastectomy—only to realize, at 21, that she wasn’t, in fact, a man trapped in a woman’s body. She argued that, as a minor, she hadn’t been able to consent in any meaningful way to the treatment. Eventually, she became a co-claimant in the case against Tavistock.
In December 2020, we won. The court ruled that minors under 16 could not give informed consent to having their puberty blocked. The ruling came as a great relief. I thought, Finally, people will have to pay attention and examine the evidence base for treatment of childhood gender dysphoria.
It’s hard to deal with the feeling of being hated. I’m aware how contentious this area is, and while I was only ever trying to do my best for our young patients, there was a loud group of people who would only hear my concerns as transphobia or bigotry or that I was a proponent of conversion therapy. The win felt like such a victory—not just legally, but culturally. It felt like an honest conversation was finally beginning to happen.
But then, in September 2021, we lost on appeal. It was awful—deflating.
The only thing that softened the blow was the fact that the government commissioned yet another report into Tavistock. And the results were devastating. It vindicated everything we had been saying for years.
But this time, the NHS decided they were going to do something about it. On July 28, the NHS announced that Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service would be closed and that, from now on, regional clinics would handle cases of transgender kids. I was blown away. I still can hardly believe it. The aim is that the new services should be more holistic, taking into consideration the whole child, and adopt better clinical standards according to the new report’s findings.
I didn’t seek any of this. It has been a pretty stressful few years. When I get a letter from patients or parents from around the world, and they tell me, “Well done, thank you for speaking up, you didn’t give up,” I sometimes get a lump in my throat. It’s been hard to be suspected of being prejudiced when all I wanted was safer clinical practice, more scrutiny and evidence collecting, and improved data storage.
Because what I am is a nurse. And my job as a nurse is to treat all my patients with respect and an open mind. I try to think about who they are as people, and to relate to their experience and empathize with them. I also believe we need to keep an open and curious clinical mind when something is occurring in society that seems novel or not yet fully understood. It should never be that doctors and nurses are unable to question diagnoses and prescriptions.
If my actions all those years ago have made a contribution, then I am proud. I made the right decision to raise my hand to ask another unwanted question.
Sue and Marcus Evans run a private psychotherapy practice in London. They are the authors of “Gender Dysphoria: A Therapeutic Model for Working with Children, Adolescents and Young Adults,” which you can buy here.
Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) until 2004 posted an interesting opinion piece in the BMJ last year.
I have posted it below for you to read.
Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?
Health research is based on trust. Health professionals and journal editors reading the results of a clinical trial assume that the trial happened and that the results were honestly reported. But about 20% of the time, said Ben Mol, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Monash Health, they would be wrong. As I’ve been concerned about research fraud for 40 years, I wasn’t that surprised as many would be by this figure, but it led me to think that the time may have come to stop assuming that research actually happened and is honestly reported, and assume that the research is fraudulent until there is some evidence to support it having happened and been honestly reported. The Cochrane Collaboration, which purveys “trusted information,” has now taken a step in that direction.
As he described in a webinar last week, Ian Roberts, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, began to have doubts about the honest reporting of trials after a colleague asked if he knew that his systematic review showing the mannitol halved death from head injury was based on trials that had never happened. He didn’t, but he set about investigating the trials and confirmed that they hadn’t ever happened. They all had a lead author who purported to come from an institution that didn’t exist and who killed himself a few years later. The trials were all published in prestigious neurosurgery journals and had multiple co-authors. None of the co-authors had contributed patients to the trials, and some didn’t know that they were co-authors until after the trials were published. When Roberts contacted one of the journals the editor responded that “I wouldn’t trust the data.” Why, Roberts wondered, did he publish the trial? None of the trials have been retracted.
Later Roberts, who headed one of the Cochrane groups, did a systematic review of colloids versus crystalloids only to discover again that many of the trials that were included in the review could not be trusted. He is now sceptical about all systematic reviews, particularly those that are mostly reviews of multiple small trials. He compared the original idea of systematic reviews as searching for diamonds, knowledge that was available if brought together in systematic reviews; now he thinks of systematic reviewing as searching through rubbish. He proposed that small, single centre trials should be discarded, not combined in systematic reviews.
Mol, like Roberts, has conducted systematic reviews only to realise that most of the trials included either were zombie trials that were fatally flawed or were untrustworthy. What, he asked, is the scale of the problem? Although retractions are increasing, only about 0.04% of biomedical studies have been retracted, suggesting the problem is small. But the anaesthetist John Carlisle analysed 526 trials submitted to Anaesthesia and found that 73 (14%) had false data, and 43 (8%) he categorised as zombie. When he was able to examine individual patient data in 153 studies, 67 (44%) had untrustworthy data and 40 (26%) were zombie trials. Many of the trials came from the same countries (Egypt, China, India, Iran, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey), and when John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University, examined individual patient data from trials submitted from those countries to Anaesthesia during a year he found that many were false: 100% (7/7) in Egypt; 75% (3/ 4) in Iran; 54% (7/13) in India; 46% (22/48) in China; 40% (2/5) in Turkey; 25% (5/20) in South Korea; and 18% (2/11) in Japan. Most of the trials were zombies. Ioannidis concluded that there are hundreds of thousands of zombie trials published from those countries alone.
Others have found similar results, and Mol’s best guess is that about 20% of trials are false. Very few of these papers are retracted.
We have long known that peer review is ineffective at detecting fraud, especially if the reviewers start, as most have until now, by assuming that the research is honestly reported. I remember being part of a panel in the 1990s investigating one of Britain’s most outrageous cases of fraud, when the statistical reviewer of the study told us that he had found multiple problems with the study and only hoped that it was better done than it was reported. We asked if he had ever considered that the study might be fraudulent, and he told us that he hadn’t.
We have now reached a point where those doing systematic reviews must start by assuming that a study is fraudulent until they can have some evidence to the contrary. Some supporting evidence comes from the trial having been registered and having ethics committee approval. Andrew Grey, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Auckland, and others have developed a checklist with around 40 items that can be used as a screening tool for fraud (you can view the checklist here). The REAPPRAISED checklist (Research governance, Ethics, Authorship, Plagiarism, Research conduct, Analyses and methods, Image manipulation, Statistics, Errors, Data manipulation and reporting) covers issues like “ethical oversight and funding, research productivity and investigator workload, validity of randomisation, plausibility of results and duplicate data reporting.” The checklist has been used to detect studies that have subsequently been retracted but hasn’t been through the full evaluation that you would expect for a clinical screening tool. (But I must congratulate the authors on a clever acronym: some say that dreaming up the acronym for a study is the most difficult part of the whole process.)
Roberts and others wrote about the problem of the many untrustworthy and zombie trials in The BMJ six years ago with the provocative title: “The knowledge system underpinning healthcare is not fit for purpose and must change.” They wanted the Cochrane Collaboration and anybody conducting systematic reviews to take very seriously the problem of fraud. It was perhaps coincidence, but a few weeks before the webinar the Cochrane Collaboration produced guidelines on reviewing studies where there has been a retraction, an expression of concern, or the reviewers are worried about the trustworthiness of the data.
Retractions are the easiest to deal with, but they are, as Mol said, only a tiny fraction of untrustworthy or zombie studies. An editorial in the Cochrane Library accompanying the new guidelines recognises that there is no agreement on what constitutes an untrustworthy study, screening tools are not reliable, and “Misclassification could also lead to reputational damage to authors, legal consequences, and ethical issues associated with participants having taken part in research, only for it to be discounted.” The Collaboration is being cautious but does stand to lose credibility—and income—if the world ceases to trust Cochrane Reviews because they are thought to be based on untrustworthy trials.
Research fraud is often viewed as a problem of “bad apples,” but Barbara K Redman, who spoke at the webinar insists that it is not a problem of bad apples but bad barrels if not, she said, of rotten forests or orchards. In her book Research Misconduct Policy in Biomedicine: Beyond the Bad-Apple Approach she argues that research misconduct is a systems problem—the system provides incentives to publish fraudulent research and does not have adequate regulatory processes. Researchers progress by publishing research, and because the publication system is built on trust and peer review is not designed to detect fraud it is easy to publish fraudulent research. The business model of journals and publishers depends on publishing, preferably lots of studies as cheaply as possible. They have little incentive to check for fraud and a positive disincentive to experience reputational damage—and possibly legal risk—from retracting studies. Funders, universities, and other research institutions similarly have incentives to fund and publish studies and disincentives to make a fuss about fraudulent research they may have funded or had undertaken in their institution—perhaps by one of their star researchers. Regulators often lack the legal standing and the resources to respond to what is clearly extensive fraud, recognising that proving a study to be fraudulent (as opposed to suspecting it of being fraudulent) is a skilled, complex, and time consuming process. Another problem is that research is increasingly international with participants from many institutions in many countries: who then takes on the unenviable task of investigating fraud? Science really needs global governance.
Everybody gains from the publication game, concluded Roberts, apart from the patients who suffer from being given treatments based on fraudulent data.
Stephen Lock, my predecessor as editor of The BMJ, became worried about research fraud in the 1980s, but people thought his concerns eccentric. Research authorities insisted that fraud was rare, didn’t matter because science was self-correcting, and that no patients had suffered because of scientific fraud. All those reasons for not taking research fraud seriously have proved to be false, and, 40 years on from Lock’s concerns, we are realising that the problem is huge, the system encourages fraud, and we have no adequate way to respond. It may be time to move from assuming that research has been honestly conducted and reported to assuming it to be untrustworthy until there is some evidence to the contrary.
In this in-depth interview series with Kirsten Murfitt of NZLSOS, we highlight the key points and outline the crucial yet-to-be-answered questions from Kirsten’s excellent Open Letter to Parliament, which she penned on 22 July 2022. This is Part 1.
Please share this interview. Please also utilise the steps involved at the end of the interview in order to put pressure on the government to answer our important questions:
The 3 main questions are:
1.) Why doesn’t the Government require mandatory reporting of deaths and serious adverse reactions, following the administration of a vaccine which has only provisional approval?
2.) Why does the Government refuse to investigate the safety and contents of the vaccine, given both the emerging overseas data and the court-ordered release of Pfizer’s documents?
3.) Why did the Government market the vaccine as “Safe and Effective”, when it knew that neither of those statements was true?
The World Health Organization (WHO) is moving ahead with plans to enact a new or revised international pandemic preparedness treaty, despite encountering setbacks earlier this summer after dozens of countries, primarily outside the Western world, objected to the plan.
A majority of WHO member states on July 21, during a meeting of WHO’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB), agreed to pursue a legally binding pandemic instrument that will contain “both legally binding as well as non-legally binding elements.”
STAT Newsdescribed the agreement, which would create a new global framework for responding to pandemics, as “the most transformative global health call to action since [the] WHO itself was formed as the first specialized United Nations agency in 1948.”
Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum, African Union and World Bank — which created a $1 billion fund for “disease surveillance” and “support against the current as well as future pandemics” — are developing their own pandemic response mechanisms, including new cross-country vaccine passport frameworks.
WHO’s ‘pandemic treaty’: what’s been proposed and what would it mean?
Ongoing talks to formulate a new or revised “pandemic treaty” are building on the existing international framework for global pandemic response, the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR), considered a binding instrument of international law.
On Dec. 1, 2021, in response to calls from various governments for a “strengthened global pandemic strategy” and signaling the urgency with which these entities are acting, the WHO formally launched the process of creating a new treaty or amending the IHR, during Special Session — only the second in the organization’s history.
During the meeting, held May 10-11, WHO’s 194 member countries unanimously agreed to launch the process, which previously had been discussed only informally.
The member countries agreed to:
“Kickstart a global process to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.”
The IHR, a relatively recent development, were first enacted in 2005, in the aftermath of SARS-CoV-1.
The IHR legal framework is one of only two binding treaties the WHO has achieved since its inception, the other being the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
The IHR framework already allows the WHO director-general to declare a public health emergency in any country, without the consent of that country’s government, though the framework requires the two sides to first attempt to reach an agreement.
The proposals for a new or revised pandemic treaty, put forth at the special ministerial session of the WHO in May, would “somewhat” strengthen the WHO’s pandemic-related powers, including establishing a “Compliance Committee” that would issue advisory recommendations for states.
However, according to the Daily Sceptic, while the IHR is already legally binding, the amendments proposed in May would not strengthen existing legal obligations or requirements:
“The existing treaty regulations, like all (or most) international law, do not actually compel states to do anything other than talk to the WHO and listen to it, and neither do they specify sanctions for non-compliance; almost all their output is advice.
“The proposed amendments don’t alter that. They don’t allow the WHO unilaterally to impose legally binding measures on or within countries.”
The Daily Scepticnoted one of the risks stemming from the negotiations for a new or updated treaty include the potential codification of “the new lockdown orthodoxy for future pandemics,” which would “replace the sound, science-based, pre-COVID recommendations” previously in place.
According to Dr. Joseph Mercola, such a treaty would grant the WHO “absolute power over global biosecurity, such as the power to implement digital identities/vaccine passports, mandatory vaccinations, travel restrictions, standardized medical care and more.”
Mercola also questioned a “one-size-fits-all approach to pandemic response,” pointing out that “pandemic threats are not identical in all parts of the world. In his view, he said, “the WHO is not qualified to make global health decisions.”
Similar concerns contributed at least in part to opposition against the proposals presented at the special ministerial session, during which a bloc of mostly non-Western countries, including China, India, Russia and 47 African nations, prevented an agreement from being finalized.
Will opposition fade away?
Although no final agreement was achieved at the May meeting, consensus was reached to organize a new special ministerial session of the WHO later this year, possibly after the WHO’s World Health Assembly, scheduled for Nov. 29 through Dec. 1, Reuters reported.
Mxolisi Nkosi, South Africa’s ambassador to the UN, told the WHO’s annual ministerial assembly the new special session would “consider the benefits for such a convention, agreement or other international instrument.”
Nkosi added:
“Probably the most important lesson COVID-19 has taught us is the need for stronger and more agile collective defences against health threats as well as for building resilience to address future potential pandemics.
“A new pandemic treaty is central to this.”
At the time, the U.K.’s ambassador to the UN, Simon Manley, addressing the lack of an immediate agreement and the consensus to hold a new meeting, tweeted “negotiations may take time, but this is a historic step towards global health security.”
The INB, at its meeting held in Geneva July 18-21, also agreed with this view, reaching a consensus that its members will work on finalizing a new legally binding international pandemic agreement by May 2024.
As part of this process, the INB will meet again in December and will deliver a progress report to the 76th World Health Assembly of the WHO in 2023.
According to the WHO, “Any new agreement, if any when agreed by Member States, is drafted and negotiated by governments themselves, [which] will take any action in line with their sovereignty.”
The WHO further claims that “governments themselves will determine actions under the accord while considering their own national laws and regulations.”
The Biden administration expressed broad support for a new or updated pandemic treaty, with the U.S. heading previous negotiations on this issue, along with the European Commission, via its president Ursula von der Leyen, who, as previously reported by The Defender, is also a strong proponent of vaccine passports and mandatory COVID-19 vaccination.
An analysis by the Alliance for Natural Health International speculated that any final agreement may simply strengthen the existing IHR or, alternatively, may involve an amendment to the WHO’s constitution — or both.
Just two days after the July 21 INB agreement, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, tweeted:
“I’m pleased that alongside the process of negotiating a new [international] accord on pandemic preparedness & response, WHO’s Member States are also considering targeted amendments to the [IHR], incl. ways to improve the process for declaring a [public health emergency of international concern, or PHEIC].”
In the same Twitter thread, he also declared the ongoing monkeypox outbreak “a public health emergency of international concern,” one “that is concentrated among men who have sex with men, especially those with multiple sexual partners.”
Notably, the WHO director-general overruled an expert panel that was divided over whether to classify the outbreak as a global public health emergency.
With this declaration, three “global health emergencies” are now in place, as determined by the WHO: COVID-19, monkeypox and polio.
Busy summer for vaccine passport proposals
While the WHO and global governments weigh plans for an updated or new pandemic treaty, other organizations are moving forward on vaccine passport technologies and partnerships.
On July 8, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), composed of many of the world’s industrialized nations, announced it would promote the unification of the different vaccine passport systems currently in use around the world.
Thirty-six countries and international organizations participated in a July meeting with the goal of “creating a multilateral framework for establishing a global vaccine passport regime,” according to Nick Corbishley of Naked Capitalism.
The development is a continuation of efforts involving the WHO to harmonize global vaccine passport regimes.
In February, the WHO selected Germany’s T-Systems as an “industry partner to develop the vaccination validation service,” which would enable “vaccination certificates to be checked across national borders.”
T-Systems, an arm of Deutsche Telekom, was previously instrumental in developing the interoperability of vaccine passport systems in Europe.
Also in July, 21 African governments “quietly embraced” a vaccine passport system, which in turn would also be interlinked with other such systems globally.
On July 8, which is also Africa Integration Day, the African Union and the Africa Centers for Disease Control launched a digital vaccine passport valid throughout the African Union, describing it as “the e-health backbone” of Africa’s “new health order.”
This follows the development in 2021, of the Trusted Travel platform, now required by several African countries, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Togo and Zimbabwe, and air carriers such as EgyptAir, Ethiopian Airlines and Kenya Airways, for both inbound and outbound travel.
Beyond Africa, Indonesia, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the G20, is conducting “pilot projects” that would bring about the interoperability of the various digital vaccine passport systems currently in use globally. The project is expected to be completed by November, in time for the G20 Leaders’ Summit.
Naked Capitalismhighlighted the role of South African company Cassava Fintech in the efforts to develop an interoperable vaccine passport for all of Africa.
A subsidiary of African telecommunication company Econet, Cassava initially developed the “Sasail” app, which the company described as Africa’s first “global super app” that combines “social payments” with the ability to send and receive money and pay bills, chat with others and play games.
Cassava and Econet entered into a strategic partnership with Mastercard, “to advance digital inclusion across Africa and collaborate on a range of initiatives, including expansion of the Africa CDC TravelPass.”
Mastercard’s top two stockholders are Vanguard and BlackRock, which hold significant stakes in dozens of companies that supported the development of vaccine passports or implemented vaccine mandates for their employees. The two investment firms also hold large stakes in vaccine manufacturers, including Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.
Mastercard provides funding for the World Bank’s Identity for Development (ID4D) Program, which “focuses on promoting digital identification systems to improve development outcomes while maintaining trust and privacy.”
The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York School of Law recently described the ID4D program, which touts its alignment with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) , as one which could pave the way to a “digital road to hell.”
According to the center, this would occur through the prioritization of “economic identity” and the use of an infrastructure that has “been linked to severe and large-scale human rights violations” in several countries.
Mastercard is also active in Africa through its joint initiative with another fintech (financial technology) company, Paycode, to “increase access to financial services and government assistance for remote communities across Africa” via a biometric identity system containing the data of 30 million individuals.
World Bank, WHO promote ‘pandemic preparedness’ and vaccine passports
The World Bank in late June announced the creation of a fund that will “finance investments in strengthening the fight against pandemics” and “support prevention, preparedness and response … with a focus on low- and middle-income countries.”
The fund was developed under the lead of the U.S., Italy and current G20 president Indonesia, “with broad support from the G20,” and will be active later this year.
It will provide more than $1 billion in funding for areas such as “disease surveillance” and “support against the current as well as future pandemics.”
The WHO is also a “stakeholder” in the project and will provide “technical expertise,” according to WHO’s director-general.
The agreement follows a 2019 strategic partnership between the UN and the World Economic Forum, to “accelerate” the implementation of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its SDGs.
Although the agreement has recently circulated on social media, it was announced in June 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. It encompasses six areas of focus, including “health” and “digital cooperation.”
In terms of health, the agreement purports that it will “support countries [sic] achieve good health and well-being for all, within the context of the 2030 Agenda, focusing on key emerging global health threats that require stronger multistakeholder partnership and action.”
In turn, the “digital cooperation” promoted by the agreement will purportedly “meet the needs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution while seeking to advance global analysis, dialogue and standards for digital governance and digital inclusiveness.”
However, despite rhetoric preaching “inclusiveness,” individuals and entities that have refused to go along with applications such as vaccine passports have faced repercussions in their personal and professional lives.
Such was the example of a Canadian doctor who was fined $6,255 in June over her refusal to use the country’s ArriveCAN health information app — which is being investigated over privacy concerns — to enter the country.
Dr. Ann Gillies said she was fined when re-entering Canada after attending a conference in the U.S.
Andrew Bud, the CEO of biometric ID company iProove, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security contractor, described vaccine certificates as driving “the whole field of digital ID in the future,” adding they are “not just about COVID [but] about something even bigger” and that “once adopted for COVID [they] will be rapidly used for everything else.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
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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