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Twitter accounts suspended for “COVID-19 misinformation” have increased over 70%

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | July 28, 2022

Twitter suspended a record 4,466 accounts for violating its “COVID-19 misinformation” rules in H1 2022, according to the latest stats in its COVID-19 Misinformation Transparency Report. This represents a more than 70% increase from its previous record of suspending 2,614 accounts for violating the COVID-19 misinformation rules in H2 2021.

The report also revealed that Twitter removed 13,803 pieces of content and challenged (forced the account owner to verify their account with an email or phone number) 7,025 accounts for violating its COVID-19 misinformation rules in H2 2021.

One of the most controversial aspects of Twitter’s far-reaching COVID-19 misinformation rules is that users who repeatedly claim that vaccinated people can spread COVID-19 can be banned from the platform.

When Twitter introduced this rule, even the CDC was admitting that vaccinated people can become infected and “have the potential to spread the virus to others.” More recently, former White House COVID response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx admitted during congressional testimony that the US government’s claim that the vaccinated can’t spread the virus was based on “hope” and acknowledged during a recent interview that she “knew” the vaccines do not protect against infection and that the US government “overplayed them.”

Despite these admissions and acknowledgments, this rule that bans users from saying vaccinated people can spread the virus is still in place.

Other claims that are banned under Twitter’s COVID-19 misinformation rules include “claims contrary to health authorities” that Twitter deems to “misrepresent research or statistical findings pertaining to the severity of the disease, prevalence of the virus, or effectiveness of widely accepted preventative measures, treatments, or vaccines” and claims that the vaccines are part of a “global surveillance” effort.

Twitter hasn’t published its censorship stats for July but several high-profile COVID commentators, including British consultant surgeon Tony Hinton and epidemiologist Andrew Bostom, have already been banned from the platform this month.

July 28, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Recent warming isn’t unusual, temperature spikes within decades have occurred regularly over the last 150 million years

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JULY 28, 2022

Remarkable new scientific evidence has been published that suggests abrupt rises in temperature have been a feature of global climate change going back to the iceless Jurassic period over 150 million years ago. These warming events, in which the temperature rose many degrees centigrade within decades or less, were thought to be a feature of the last ice age up to 100,000 years ago and confined to Greenland and the North Atlantic. This dramatic new evidence suggests they were a feature across the globe going back millions of years.

The findings will give fresh insight into the highly politicised debate around climate science and Net Zero. It is constantly argued that the recent small rise in global temperature, which started over 200 years ago, is unprecedented, and is caused by humans burning fossil fuel. Far from being unprecedented, it seems similar changes in temperature over comparable, and often shorter, time periods were ubiquitous across paleoclimatic history stretching back to the Jurassic era.

A group of French scientists led by Slah Boulila from the Sorbonne carried out extensive research into what are known as Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) events. These events, named after two paleoclimatologists, track 1,500 year temperature cycles when large rises suddenly occurred followed by a reversion to ice age conditions. The scientists noted warming up to 15°C within a few decades, “pointing to abrupt and severe changes in Earth’s past climate”. Scientists and green activists seeking to downplay the significance of large changes in the paleoclimatic record have suggested that oscillations of northern hemisphere ice sheets and surrounding waters played a part.

But the French scientists now say that paleoclimatic studies have shown that the 1,500-year climate cycle is no longer restricted to the North Atlantic Ocean of the last glacial period. “The 1,500-year cycle is documented in both hemispheres, in other oceans and in continents, such as in lake and river deposits, in pollen fossils, in stalagmite proxy records, and in loess-paleosol deposits,” they add. In conclusion, the scientists note that the analysed paleoclimate records of the late Jurassic “supports the global nature of DO-like event, and in particular that their potential primary cause is independent of ice sheet dynamics”.

Of course, the inconvenient fact that the planet has seen countless significant temperature rises in the past is not unknown. Back in 1999, before global climate hysteria got into its full stride, geographer Mark Maslin from Imperial College co-wrote a paper on “sudden climate transitions” in which he stated: “All the evidence indicates that most long-term climate change occurs in sudden jumps rather than incremental change.” He went on to add that some, and possibly most, large climate changes involving movements of several degrees occurred at most on a timescale of a few centuries, sometimes decades, “and perhaps even a few years”.

These days Maslin is Professor of Earth Systems Science at the politically-named UCL Anthropocene, and tweeting that “Earth is already becoming unliveable”. A frequent guest on BBC programmes, Maslin has explained that the Anthropocene began with European colonisation and mass slavery. The origins of racism and climate emergency “share common causes”. Climate change politics helps build “a new political (and socio economic) system”. In 2018, he was one of a number of eco-activists who signed a letter to the Guardian saying they would no longer “lend their credibility” by debating climate change scepticism.

It would seem that the record of large – often startlingly large – rises in past temperature needs to be downplayed if the command-and-control Net Zero project is to be promoted. Removing fossil fuel from modern lifestyles within less than 30 years demands enormous economic and societal sacrifices, particularly from poorer members of society and across the developing world. It can only be done if enough people and populations believe there is an existential threat to the planet from recent warming and model-projected future warming.

Meanwhile, science continues to produce evidence of major temperature changes in the past. Two recent studies suggesting much higher temperatures are noted by the No Tricks Zone climate science site. A new study is said to have shown that it was warm enough 8,000 to 5,000 years ago for the plant Ceratopteris to have grown at 40°N in northern China. These days, the plant’s limit is 34°N, suggesting that winter temperatures in the past needed to be 7.7°C higher than today. Another warmth threshold species study argues that the Arctic Svalbard needed to have been 6°C warmer than today during the early Holocene. This is because 9,000 years ago, molluscs survived 1,000km north of where they are currently found.

Further details on the work undertaken by the Boulila team, including its scientific methodology, can be accessed here. More details about the two papers can be found on the No Tricks Zone.  And further reporting on past global temperature changes by the Daily Sceptic can be found here.

July 28, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Remote learning was built to fail School shutdowns were no innocent mistake

By Will Collins | UnHerd | July 27, 2022

Imagine that it’s September 2020 and you’re teaching at a middle school that has gone online. Miraculously, all of your students have functioning laptops and can join class remotely. You’ve checked your equipment with a colleague, who assures you that the audio feed is clean and the lighting in your apartment does not make you appear demonically possessed. You have a slideshow and a digital worksheet ready to go on the flora and fauna of different climate zones.

You start the lesson by marking attendance. This process, which usually takes a few seconds, now lasts five minutes because you have to remind almost every student to turn on their cameras. Most will turn them back off after you share your screen because they’ve realized you can’t navigate a slideshow and monitor 17 different video feeds simultaneously. You pause after slide three to ask what you think is a basic question about the material, just to make sure everyone is paying attention. You are greeted by absolute silence. You call on one student by name, but someone else says she’s in the bathroom. Another student is having problems with his wifi. A third’s microphone doesn’t work (it never works). It’s 15 minutes into the lesson and you’ve barely covered three slides. The students have six more online classes to sit through before the school day ends.

Even at the beginning of the pandemic, it was obvious that remote learning was uniquely ill-suited for children and teenagers, who are easily distracted, prone to online mischief, and unlikely to pay attention to academic material from their living rooms. Even adults struggle with corporate conference calls and lengthy Zoom meetings. Instead of acknowledging this reality and keeping students in class, American public schools embarked on a disastrous experiment in remote learning that persisted in many places even after the vaccine rollout.

As the consequences of school shutdowns become obvious and undeniable, a new media narrative has emerged. Pandemic-era learning loss was a tragic but unforeseen consequence of an unprecedented public health crisis. Shutting down schools, says The Economist, “was worse than almost anyone expected.” In an otherwise sobering article on the collapse of public education in the pandemic era, The Atlantic tells us that learning loss “is far greater than most educators and parents seem to realize.”

In truth, these problems were completely predictable. Indeed, they were acknowledged from the very beginning of Covid, albeit sotto voce. Many studies have examined the disproportionate impact of school closures on poor and minority students. An equally telling but under-discussed fact is that even at the height of the pandemic, when alarmists were calling for total school closures and blithely assuring skeptics that kids were “resilient,” students from affluent families were usually able to stay in school.

In California, Governor Gavin Newsom was widely criticized for a night out at an upscale restaurant while most of the state remained under lockdown. A more galling example of official hypocrisy is his approach to education. After California imposed public school shutdowns, Newsom’s children continued to attend in-person classes at a local private school. Affluent and well-connected families across the country made similar decisions. As public schools shut down, private schools remained open and enrollment surged. Those who could afford to send their kids to private school clearly understood the value of in-person instruction, even if they were reluctant to acknowledge this publicly.

It is all but forgotten now, but at the height of the pandemic, school shutdown advocates embarked on a clumsy media campaign against the very idea of learning loss. The New York Times credulously quoted an anti-testing activist (no ulterior motives there!) in a long, chin-scratching meditation on the case against measuring pandemic learning shortfalls. Pundits, union officials, education experts, and teacher organizations cautioned against use of the term “learning loss” because it was unduly pejorative. In retrospect, the motive behind these linguistic gymnastics is obvious. School shutdown supporters knew their policy would yield disastrous results and wanted to do everything possible to obscure that fact.

The pandemic era lowering of standards reached its sad culmination last summer with Oregon’s decision to waive basic math and reading requirements for high school graduation. You do not need to be an advocate of relentless, No Child Left Behind-style testing to admit that schools need benchmarks to ensure they’re actually teaching something. And just about every benchmark available shows that students have suffered dramatic educational setbacks from remote schooling.

Beyond the usual academic indicators, public schools are now contending with chronic absenteeism, a youth mental health crisis, and a wave of disciplinary problems. Missing students and behavioral outbursts occur because kids who have lost a year or more of school are unaccustomed to regularly attending classes, sitting still, and paying attention. The study habits of an entire generation of students have atrophied online, a loss that will persist for the rest of their academic careers and beyond. Meanwhile, kids deprived of normal social interactions naturally suffer from feelings of isolation, alienation, and loneliness. None of these findings should come as a surprise.

The most striking thing about remote learning in the United States is how lengthy American school closures were compared to peer nations. Progressive wonks and education activists are usually enthusiastic boosters of European practices. When Covid hit, they became strangely incurious about foreign schools. Social democratic Sweden kept its schools open for almost the entire pandemic. Other European countries confined their shutdowns to the viral winter months. None of these schools experienced mass student death or out-of-control community spread. Abbreviated school closures in Eastern European countries like Hungary also disprove the notion that American schools lacked the financial resources to reopen safely.

Full article

July 28, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

BOOSTED, SICK & GETTING SICKER

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | July 22, 2022

Despite his triple vaccination status, Biden has tested positive for Covid-19. Watch as we revisit Del’s now famous “football analogy,” illustrating “original antigenic sin,” and why the highly vaccinated might be in big trouble.

THE BLOODY TRUTH

Neither government regulatory agencies, nor vaccine makers, cared to monitor what the experimental Covid jabs did to women’s cycles. After widespread alarm, the menstruation issues have turned out to be real, and lacking any long-term studies on fertility.

July 28, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

New IPCC attribution statistics are distorting observational evidence 

Global Warming Policy Foundation | July 27, 2022

A new paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation finds that the IPCC’s recent shift in methodology has led to misleading claims about changes in weather extremes.

The review, from physicist Dr Ralph Alexander, finds that IPCC claims that many of these weather extremes are increasing significantly are largely unsupported by observational evidence.

According to Dr Alexander

“On almost every kind of extreme weather, with the possible exemption of heatwaves, the evidence for significant changes is scant. But the latest IPCC report has introduced novel ‘attribution’ statistics and now insists that things are getting worse. It’s yet another case of scientists trying to scare the public into compliance.”

Dr Alexander’s paper looks at:

– droughts
– floods
– hurricanes
– tornadoes
– wildfires
– hot and cold extremes
– coral bleaching.

He concludes that

“The mistaken belief that weather extremes are worsening because of climate change is more a perception, fostered by media coverage, than reality. The IPCC’s new statistical method is playing an unworthy part in bringing this sorry state of affairs to pass.”

GWPF invited the Royal Society and the Met Office to review this paper, and to submit a response to be published as an appendix to it. No reply was received.

Ralph Alexander: Extreme Weather: The IPCC’s Changing Tune (pdf)

July 27, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

WHO calls for global censorship to combat monkeypox “misinformation”

TCS WIRE | July 27, 2022

WHO Director-general Tedros Adhanom has requested that social media companies around the world combat all “misinformation” regarding monkeypox.

“As we have seen with COVID-19, misinformation and disinformation can spread rapidly online. So, we call on all social media platforms, tech companies, and news organizations to work with us to prevent and counter harmful information,” Adhanom said earlier today.

This news comes only four days after the WHO chief Adhanom declared monkeypox an international health emergency, overruling a majority of panel members that voted against making such a declaration.

Now, it looks like the WHO is taking the next step: censoring anyone who isn’t on board with their monkeypox madness.

This is the same step the World Health Organization took in 2020 and 2021 when the WHO claimed that all information that went against the narrative was part of a broader “infodemic.”

“Soon after the world started getting used to the terms coronavirus and COVID-19, WHO coined another word: “infodemic” — an overabundance of information and the rapid spread of misleading or fabricated news, images, and videos. Like the virus, it is highly contagious and grows exponentially. It also complicates COVID-19 pandemic response efforts,” reads a 2020 article entitled “Immunizing the public against misinformation.”

Over the course of the pandemic, the WHO began partnering with countries to combat the “infodemic,” which, more often than not, meant censoring people online who had genuine concerns or were trying to proliferate the truth of adverse reactions following mRNA jabs.

Such adverse reactions are now known to be a fact, and health officials worldwide have begun warning people of the risk from things like post-vaccine myocarditis, which the WHO has consistently waved away as a conspiracy theory.

July 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

TUCKER CARLSON ON OPIOIDS, COVID AND ANTIDEPRESSANTS

TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT | JULY 25, 2022

Tucker Carlson reveals the shocking side effects of antidepressants and calls out Democrats for not holding Big Pharma accountable. His full opinion piece can be read here: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-drugs-not-answer-every-human-problem

July 27, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Jacinda’s duplicity as pupils are told to mask up again or be punished

By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | July 27, 2022

LAST week the New Zealand government called for mask wearing to be enforced in schools – and many schools have apparently decided to punish students who do not comply.

Asked whether she was happy with that situation, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ducked the question, denied the mandate, passed the buck, and still managed to appear happy for students to be punished.

She said: ‘We are really open-minded on this issue. We in fact went back multiple times to education and health and said, “Look, if you believe we should bring that mask mandate back we are happy to do that. Whatever you think is going to be in the best interest of our learners, our schools, and our health outcomes.”

‘They came back to us and said we should strongly encourage their use, but we should still allow schools to implement the policies themselves. That’s where we have landed. We have not said mask wearing is compulsory, but we are strongly encouraging it.’

You can watch the full interview here. There is plenty of spin, but not a lot of ambiguity. Head teachers have been given a green light to dust off the detention book.

Some schools are giving students detention either during lunchtime or after school (the modern equivalent of writing out ‘I will wear my mask’ a thousand times), which translates into loss of opportunities to participate in extracurricular activities and sports. This should be unacceptable and is certainly deleterious to a student at any age and may result in them becoming alienated or adversely affected emotionally or socially. Students go to school to learn and understand the process of verifying knowledge, to engage socially, and to develop skills in communication; whereby they may debate and agree or disagree with one another, without the fear of being punished or discriminated against.

There is a considerable body of scientific evidence pointing to the ineffectiveness of masks to stop transmission. Long-term mask use also poses health risks and causes significant learning deficits.

Some parents, and hence their children, will be well aware of this. A policy of punishment for non-mask wearers is the antithesis of a constructive learning environment and teaches: ‘Comply without question or face a penalty.’

School attendance in New Zealand is already at an all-time low. As a result of this move, it is going to fall further. The opportunities for constructive debate are fast disappearing in education, and we can understand why many parents are turning their thoughts to home-schooling.

The problem here is that the public is being deliberately kept in the dark about the ineffectiveness of masks and the dangers of prolonged mask-wearing. Most are following government advice, thinking that they are protecting themselves and others from Covid. They are ending the day with a headache and a sore face, but sure that they have thereby saved the world.

So far, the NZ government has kept a tight hold on the Covid narrative by warning people that alternative news sources and social media conversations are full of misinformation, whilst government announcements are closely following ‘the science’. They also give cash grants to the mainstream media and advertise to the point of saturation.

That is all set to ramp up from today. The government has concluded a formal binding agreement with Meta (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok, Google (Gmail and YouTube), Amazon (Spark) and Twitter to limit the availability of harmful content including ‘misinformation and disinformation’ in New Zealand.

In a world first, the code is described as ‘voluntary’, but it includes a ‘commitment’ to being held ‘accountable’ which allows its provisions to be ‘enforced’. How is that for doublespeak? And who is deciding what is harmful?

The mask mandate rules and the information censorship have something in common. The government is asking others to do its dirty work, then asking us to believe it has nothing to do with those others. We are not naive: we already know how this works.

The agreement cleverly conflates things that we all feel should be controlled, such as child sexual exploitation and incitement to violence, with rational discussions about drug safety and effectiveness.

YouTube has previously withdrawn Covid content from view at the private request of the Ministry of Health. Apparently this can happen if any content causes the NZ government embarrassment.

I don’t suppose it has escaped your notice that internet censorship is a tool of oppressive governments. The dangers are becoming all too obvious here, where the majority of the public, subjected to blanket government advertising, still believe that regular mRNA boosters and flu shots offer protection for life that is stronger than natural immunity.

This is all taking on a macabre aspect, because official Covid data here and in the EU is showing that boosted individuals are increasingly more likely to die with Covid than are the unvaccinated. The apparent reluctance on the part of the government to engage with the implications of this official Covid data is seriously worrying. Governments traditionally have a general duty of care when it comes to policing public health measures.

This year has been one of the wettest on record in NZ. As a result, ants are coming into homes in record numbers and you may have been struck with how expendable ant populations are.

Ant colonies appear to have a centralised administrative policy whereby any number of workers can be put at risk in the search for homes and food for queens. This is a sort of groupthink which starkly contrasts with human ethics, wherein the individual is highly valued.

Here in New Zealand, we are 90 per cent mRNA vaccinated and we currently have the highest rate of all-cause mortality in the world. Even the Ministry of Health has admitted this is not because of Covid. Yet if you follow the government advertising and press statements, you will probably be unaware of this and happily sure that ‘the science’ is being followed.

I don’t need to draw conclusions for you here. If you are following the current Covid science journal publishing, you will be well aware of mathematical arguments entirely based on collected data which are taking place within a rational framework. Ignoring or hiding these is dangerous.

The author is in New Zealand 

This blog is co-authored with Narayani Hatchard. 

July 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Lie Exposed: BBC Says Covid-19 Came from Wuhan Market

BBC forgot to add Wuhan Institute of Virology to the map

By Igor Chudov | July 26, 2022

BBC has a new article out, about the “origins of Covid-19”:

Great, right? If BBC says that Covid origin studies point to the Wuhan seafood market as the source of Sars-Cov-2, then it must be so, right? After all, we trust the BBC and we especially trust science and scientific studies.

BBC’s map of early cases clustering around the market, offers the only real evidence that the BBC article provides, and looks extremely convincing:

I was almost convinced myself. I was just about ready to delete all my Covid origin articles, but at the very last moment, I decided to check with Google maps on the location of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Infectious Diseases (archive link). I placed both on the same picture as above, so you can see where they are in relation to the early outbreak cases:

Again, the dots represent the first recorded cases of Covid-19. The circled “X”’s are WIV and WIID. Please tell me, after seeing the second picture, are you still sure about the Wuhan’s market being the source? If you are capable of elementary thinking, which all of my subscribers certainly are, you would think that the BBC article is total bunk. And of course, you would be right!

So:

  • Why did BBC’s map exclude locations of WIV and WIID, which are obviously known to anyone in the news business who is writing about Covid, and are critically important to the story if they wanted to tell it truthfully?
  • Because if the article included these locations, it would be obvious to any reader that the article is total nonsense and is a completely laughable attempt at misdirection.
  • Therefore, BBC wanted to lie to us and mislead us by omission.

Okay, then, why did BBC decide to lie to us?

It lied because if BBC showed locations of WIV and WIID on the map, the story of Covid would sound something like this:

Dear Citizens! By pure accident, a Chinese virological laboratory released an experimental deadly virus, whose creation was funded by the NIH. But do not worry: purely by coincidence, NIH scientists also worked on a vaccine against such viruses. We are very fortunate that Moderna, with NIH help, in just TWO DAYS, was able to design a perfect vaccine against Sars-Cov-2. Never mind that previous vaccines took decades to develop. Science works faster now!

Dear Readers: you must take this vaccine. We are certain that it works and if you get vaccinated, you will not get the virus. The virus stops with every vaccinated person. If you do not take our vaccine, you will be fired from your job, will be excluded from society, and will starve for disrespecting science and authorities. This vaccine is safe for pregnancy because there is no proof that it is unsafe for pregnancy (we made sure of that).

The crazy right-wing conspiracists, rogue scientists, and discredited doctors warning that the vaccine is not safe, have been fired from their jobs, lost medical licenses, and were removed from social networks and Google. Therefore, we now have total scientific and medical consensus about the vaccine. Please believe us, because all NIH-funded scientists and still-licensed doctors agree with us. If you do not believe this, you are an ignorant, anti-science fool and a “winter of death” awaits you.

Get vaccinated! Get vaccinated! Get vaccinated! Get vaccinated!

That would be a strange and somewhat less believable story, right? It would be much easier to deal with the general public if the public believed that the virus came from Wuhan’s “wet market”. That’s why BBC is publishing such obviously dishonest articles.

July 26, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

A Pandemic of the Triple Vaccinated

By Ramesh Thakur | Brownstone Institute | July 26, 2022

Deborah Birx was the White House Covid-19 response coordinator under President Donald Trump. Jeffrey Tucker recently wrote a brutal takedown of her deliberate misrepresentations of science and data in order to manipulate Trump into going along with her preferred but misguided policy interventions to deal with the Covid outbreak.

In an ABC podcast on December 15, 2020, she said: “I understand the safety of the vaccine … I understand the depth of the efficacy of this vaccine. This is one of the most highly-effective vaccines we have in our infectious disease arsenal.”

Appearing on Fox News on July 22, however, she claimed: “I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection. And I think we overplayed the vaccines. And it made people then worry that it’s not going to protect against severe disease and hospitalization.”

This might help to explain why there has been such a concerning collapse of public confidence in leading health institutions and “authorities.”

Biden’s claim of a pandemic of the  unvaccinated

During a CNN Town Hall event on July 21, 2021, President Joe Biden said: “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you are not going to die.”

On May 16, 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci claimed that vaccination did not just protect the individual, but also the community, because “by preventing the spread of the virus … you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere.”

Relying in the judgment of his chief medical adviser, Biden took to talking about the pandemic of the unvaccinated in a two-track effort both to encourage vaccine takeup and to vilify, demonize and shame those who remained uncertain enough of the balance of benefits and short and long-term risks of the rushed Covid-19 vaccines to avoid succumbing to the multiple pressures to go along with the zeitgeist in order to get along with everyone.

We have now had both Dr. Fauci, the public face of the US management of the pandemic, revered in some quarters and reviled in others, and President Biden himself get infected with Covid, despite both being double-vaccinated and double-boosted.

Inevitably, to try and stop the official narrative on the benefits of the vaccine from unraveling completely and in order to encourage continuing vaccine and boosters takeup, they insist that their updated vaccination status helped to limit the severity of their infection. This is based on a cult-like faith, akin to self-validating and self-canceling explanations put forth by astrologers for predictions that come true and don’t, as the case may be.

Although on July 20, Fauci admitted that the data do make it clear that “vaccines – because of the high degree of transmissibility of this virus – don’t protect overly well, as it were, against infection.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked why the media was not holding Fauci “accountable for the costly national policies and the lockdowns that were utterly built upon his initial assertion that the vaccines would prevent transmission and end the pandemic.”

Equally, of course, one must ask again: if vaccines don’t stop transmission, how does the government justify vaccination mandates for travel to the US?

In a matching vein, the New South Wales (NSW) Health report for the week ending 16 July claims that: “The minority of the overall population who have not been vaccinated are significantly overrepresented among patients in hospitals and ICUs with Covid-19.”

The following challenges that claim using their own data.

By drawing on the distinction between the efficacy and effectiveness of vaccines, it’s possible to argue that in NSW, rather than a pandemic of the unvaccinated, what we have witnessed is a pandemic of the triple-vaccinated.

NSW health facts

In September 2021, NSW had 844 staffed ICU beds, of which 173 (20.5 percent) were occupied by Covid-19 patients. (Australia-wide, the number of ICU beds is 2,183.) By January 2022, the number had increased to around 1,000. If necessary, this can be bumped up further by utilizing the limited number of ICU beds in private hospitals.

There are 9,500 general ward beds in public and another 3,000 beds in private hospitals in NSW. In mid-July 2022, there were 2,058 people in hospital with Covid-19 in NSW, or 21.7 percent of the public system’s capacity and 16.5 percent of the state’s total hospital beds capacity. An additional 6,500 people were in hospital for non-Covid reasons.

During the week of July 10–16, a total of 806 people were admitted to hospital with Covid-19, another 77 into ICU, and 142 people died with Covid-19 illness (though not necessarily as the primary cause of death). Moreover, of the 142 deaths, only four were aged below 60, so that people aged 60 and above accounted for 97.2 percent of all Covid-related deaths in the state.

Additionally, of the 142 dead, the vaccination status of 2 was not known. One hundred and eighteen of the remaining 140 – 84.3 percent – were at least double-vaccinated and 69 had received three doses of the vaccine: by far the biggest single cohort and almost equal to all the others combined. Hence the thought that perhaps what we are experiencing is a pandemic of the triple-vaccinated.

Efficacy vs. effectiveness

The Cambridge Dictionary defines efficacy as “how well a particular treatment or drug works under carefully controlled scientific testing conditions.” By contrast, effectiveness is defined as “how well a particular treatment or drug works when people are using it, as opposed to how well it works under carefully controlled scientific testing conditions.”

Thus doubts about the effectiveness of a new product in treating any disease can only be resolved once the vaccine is widely available and administered in the target population. GAVI (the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization), now called Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is a partnership between the World Health Organization, Unicef, the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Writing for GAVI, Priya Joi offers similar definitions, describing “efficacy” as the measure of how much a vaccine prevents infection (and possibly also transmission) under ideal, controlled conditions where a vaccinated group is compared with a placebo group. She adds: “Vaccines do not always need to have an exceptionally high effectiveness to be useful, for example the influenza vaccine is 40-60% effective yet saves thousands of lives every year.”

Examining the percentage of the thrice-jabbed in hospital admissions, ICU beds, and dead against the baseline of their share in the overall population, preferably age-adjusted, is critical to calculating vaccine efficacy. I’m not sure how helpful that is to assessing the effectiveness of vaccines in keeping the absolute numbers down below the state’s or country’s capacity thresholds of hospital and ICU beds.

If the primary public health justification for universal vaccination is to reduce the burden on the health infrastructure and prevent hospitals and ICU capacity from being overwhelmed – which was indeed the main justification in the language of two-three weeks to flatten the curve – then the key question becomes: How effective are the vaccines in preventing hospital admissions and ICU occupancy? Their role in preventing infection by itself is less important than their effectiveness in controlling the severity of the disease.

For example, a report from the Dutch health ministry found that the effectiveness of two doses of vaccines after one year had fallen overall to 0 percent against hospitalizations and minus 20 percent against ICU admission. Perhaps more pertinently in relation to NSW, Dr. Eyal Shahar notes signs in Israel of a short-term fatality rate of a third dose.

Efficacy is more helpful to an individual in assessing the relative risk of infection if vaccinated or not. Because Covid vaccines were granted emergency-use authorization and long-term efficacy and safety profiles were simply not available, doubts have persisted about the integrity, credibility and long-term reliability of data and results from the trials conducted by the vaccine manufacturers.

Moreover, as we’ve been made aware with respect to the UK, different branches of the government like the Health Security Agency and the Office of National Statistics use different and hotly contested methodologies for calculating the numbers and proportions of the population infected by Covid, which in turn determines the estimated infection fatality rate (IFR).

In any case, even if we agree that the IFR and case fatality rate (CFR) of flu and Covid are broadly comparable by now, the scale and magnitude of Covid means that similar IFR and CFR still produce vastly different orders of challenges for public health policy.

By contrast the effectiveness of the vaccines for controlling hospital admissions, ICU bed occupancy and mortality is measured by solid and reliable information that is both accurate and comprehensive in Western countries. This makes vaccine effectiveness a better policy tool for deciding on population-wide mandates while efficacy might be the more relevant for informed individual decisions.

Covid in NSW

In the period for the weeks ending May 28 to July 16, 2022 in NSW, of those whose vaccination status was known, only eight unvaccinated people were among the 3,509 who required hospital admission (Figure 1). The numbers in ICU were 5 unvaccinated and 316 with 2-4 doses (Figure 2); the number of Covid dead were 110 unvaccinated and 662 with 2–4 doses (Figure 3).

With 83 percent of people at least double-vaccinated, they accounted for 99.4, 96.3, and 85.4 percent, respectively, of NSW Covid hospital admission, ICU and deaths in these seven weeks.

In the final week of this seven-week period, of those whose vaccination status was known, there were exactly zero – zilch, nada – unvaccinated people among the 624 hospital and 59 ICU Covid-19 admissions, compared to 615 with two, three and four vaccine doses in hospital and 58 in ICU beds. Just the triple-vaccinated, who account for 68 percent of the population of NSW, made up 57.5 percent in hospital, 53.7 percent in ICU and 53.5 percent of the Covid dead.

The claim that the unvaccinated are “significantly overrepresented” in Covid-19 hospital admissions and ICU occupancy is not just misleading, it’s downright false. Seriously, do they look at the data in their own reports before drawing policy conclusions?

As knowledge about the rapidly fading efficacy of the vaccines, and in particular of each successor booster dose, has firmed, and also as the vaccine escape properties of the newer variants of Covid-19 have become better known, the equivalent question now is: are we into the era of the pandemic of the triple -vaccinated? The biggest strain on NSW hospitals and ICU beds is coming from their numbers.

Public health officials can talk and dissemble all they want about the baselines for comparisons and pretend to possess great sophistication in their understanding of the current state of the disease. They still cannot spin their way out of the hard data.

Instead they are exhibiting a severe case of cognitive dissonance in encouraging the double-vaccinated to get boosted and double-boosted. The ineffectiveness of vaccines in reducing hospital admissions and ICU demand is in itself sufficient to torpedo vaccine mandates. Doubts on their efficacy and concerns about their adverse effects and long-term safety further strengthens the case against mandates.

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

July 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

CHD Demands D.C. Schools Rescind COVID Vaccine Mandate, Says It Violates Federal Law

By Megan Redshaw | The Defender | July 25, 2022

Schools in Washington, D.C., will require all students ages 12 and older to get the COVID-19 vaccine before they can attend school in the fall, despite warnings from legal experts who say the mandate violates federal law.

The Office of the State Superintendent of Education announced on July 19 that student immunization requirements for the upcoming 2022-2023 school year will include the COVID-19 vaccine for all students who are of an age for which there is a vaccine fully approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

“On July 8, 2022, the FDA fully approved the COVID-19 vaccine commonly known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine for individuals 12 to 15 years old,” said State Superintendent of Education Christina Grant in a press release.

“The approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for individuals 12 to 15 means that, unless exempted, any student age 12-15 at the start of the 2022-23 school year must have received the primary COVID-19 vaccine series or have started receiving the shot by Sept. 16, 2022,” she said.

“We want to make sure that all of our students have everything they need for a healthy start to the school year,” Grant added. “This means making sure children see their primary medical provider for a well-child visit and receive all needed immunizations.”

D.C. law requires students in all area schools, including private, parochial and independent schools, to be fully compliant with mandated vaccinations, unless they have an approved exemption. The law also requires schools to verify immunization certification for all students.

The requirement was detailed in a law the D.C. Council approved last year and is the first legislation of its kind in the region.

CHD demands D.C. Schools rescind mandate

In a letter sent today to Grant, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman and chief legal counsel for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), asked Grant to rescind the program or CHD would sue to overturn the mandate.

Kennedy said Grant’s press release was incorrect because the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was never fully approved and still remains under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).

The FDA earlier this month granted full approval to Pfizer’s Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine for adolescents 12 through 15 years old, without convening its vaccine advisory panel.

In August 2021, the agency granted full licensing of the Comirnaty vaccine for ages 16 and older.

However, there are no Comirnaty-labeled vaccines available in the U.S., for any age group.

Although courts have upheld many childhood vaccination requirements for licensed and approved vaccines, no court has ever upheld a mandate for schoolchildren for an EUA vaccine, according to Kennedy.

Kennedy wrote:

“In fact, a District of Columbia United States District Court held that EUA vaccines cannot be mandated to soldiers in the U.S. military, who enjoy far fewer rights than civilians. Doe #1 v. Rumsfeld, 297 F.Supp.2d 119 (2003). That court held: ‘… the United States cannot demand that members of the armed forces also serve as guinea pigs for experimental drugs.’ Id. at 135.

“Federal law 21 U.S.C. § 360bbb-3(e)(1)(A)(ii)(III) requires that the person to whom an EUA vaccine is administered be advised, ‘of the option to accept or refuse administration of the product, of the consequences, if any, of refusing administration of the product, and of the alternatives to the product that are available and of their benefits and risks.’

“The reason for the right of refusal stems from the fact that EUA products are by definition experimental.

“Under the Nuremberg Code, a universal legal norm, no one may be coerced to participate in a medical experiment. Consent of the individual is ‘absolutely essential.’ The liability for forced participation in a medical experiment, not to mention liability for injury from such coerced medical intervention, may be incalculable.”

Commenting on the D.C. mandate, CHD President Mary Holland said, “It violates fundamental human rights and international law to force people, and especially children, to take experimental medical products.”

“We sincerely hope the District will reconsider its misguided policy for schoolchildren,” Holland added.

Another organization — Liberty Counsel — said it may also challenge the District of Columbia’s vaccine mandate.

“There is no FDA-approved COVID shot available and therefore, individuals have a right under the emergency use authorization to refuse these shots,” Matthew Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, told The Epoch Times.

Under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, people receiving an EUA product must be advised that some benefits and risks “are unknown” and given the “option to accept or refuse administration of the product.”

“It is your choice to receive or not receive [the vaccine],” Staver said. “Should you decide not to receive it, it will not change your standard medical care,” according to FDA fact sheets on EUA COVID-19 vaccines.

Several other school systems have attempted, so far unsuccessfully, to implement a COVID-19 vaccine mandate:

• Louisiana: The Louisiana Department of Health in May said it would no longer seek to make COVID-19 vaccines mandatory for the upcoming school year because the shot had not received full FDA approval for people under the age of 16.

The decision came after CHD and thousands of concerned parents on March 16 filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit seeking to stop the Louisana Department of Health from adding COVID-19 vaccines to the state’s school immunization schedule.

The joint lawsuit was filed in December 2021, by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and state Rep. Raymond Crews against Gov. John Bel Edwards after he announced COVID-19 vaccines would be mandatory for all children age 5 and over at public or private schools.

• Los Angeles: Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Superintendent Alberto Carvalho on April 28 recommended the district postpone its COVID-19 student vaccination mandate until at least July 2023 because the FDA had not fully approved the COVID-19 vaccine for all ages covering grades 7 through 12.

LAUSD officials announced last fall students 12 and older would be required to be vaccinated by the start of the 2022-2023 school year but delayed the mandate because tens of thousands of students still had not complied with the requirement.

• Washington: The Washington State Board of Health in April voted unanimously against adding COVID-19 vaccines to the requirements for students to attend K-12 schools this fall after its advisory group recommended against the requirement. The board said more data was needed about vaccines for ages 5 to 11 and raised concerns that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has yet to be fully approved for ages 5 to 15.

Megan Redshaw is a staff attorney for Children’s Health Defense and a reporter for The Defender.

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

July 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

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