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Top climate scientists slam global warming “so-called evidence” as “misrepresentation, exaggeration & outright lying”

By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | July 11, 2022

Two top-level American atmospheric scientists have dismissed the peer review system of current climate science literature as “a joke”. According to Emeritus Professors William Happer and Richard Lindzen, “it is pal review, not peer review”. The two men have had long distinguished careers in physics and atmospheric science. “Climate science is awash with manipulated data, which provides no reliable scientific evidence,” they state.

No reliable scientific evidence can be provided either by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), they say, which is “government-controlled and only issues government dictated findings”. The two academics draw attention to an IPCC rule that states all summaries for policymakers are approved by governments. In their opinion, these summaries are “merely government opinions”. They refer to the recent comments on climate models by the atmospheric science professor John Christy from the University of Alabama, who says that, in his view, recent climate model predictions “fail miserably to predict reality”, making them “inappropriate” to use in predicting future climate changes.

The ’miserable failure’ is graphically displayed below. Since the observations cut-off, global temperatures have again paused.

Particular scorn is poured on global surface temperature datasets. Happer and Lindzen draw attention to a 2017 paper by Dr. James Wallace and others that elaborated on how over the last several decades, “NASA and NOAA have been fabricating temperature data to argue that rising CO2 levels have led to the hottest year on record”. The false and manipulated data are said to be an “egregious violation of scientific method”. The Wallace authors also looked at the Met Office HadCRUT database and found all three surface datasets made large historical adjustments and removed cyclical temperature patterns. This was “totally inconsistent” with other temperature data, including satellites and meteorological balloons, they said. Readers will recall that the Daily Sceptic has reported extensively on these issues of late and has attracted a number of somewhat footling ‘fact checks’.

Happer and Lindzen summarise: “Misrepresentation, exaggeration, cherry picking or outright lying pretty much covers all the so-called evidence marshalled in support of the theory of imminent catastrophic global warming caused by fossil fuels and CO2.”

Professors Happer and Lindzen’s comments are included in a submission to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which is seeking to impose massive and onerous ‘climate change’ reporting requirements on public companies. But they form part of a wider scientific revolt by many scientists alarmed at the corruption of science to promote the command-and-control Net Zero agenda. Needless to say, these debates are largely ignored by mainstream media. Opponents of Net Zero politicised science are denounced as ‘cranks’ and ‘deniers’, labels at odds with their distinguished scientific achievements. Between them, Happer from Princeton and Lindzen from MIT have around 100 years of involvement in atmospheric science. Richard Lindzen was an early lead author for the IPCC, while William Happer was responsible for a groundbreaking invention that corrected the degrading effects of atmospheric turbulence on imaging resolution.

In their submission, Happer and Lindzen supply a basic lesson in science: “Reliable scientific theories come from validating theoretical predictions with observations, not consensus, peer review, government opinions or manipulated data”.

In the U.K., it will be interesting to see if Net Zero will feature as a major issue in the battle to find a new Prime Minister. At the moment, candidates seem to be steering a widish berth – something that can happen with virtuous green policies when actual votes are at stake. Happer and Lindzen state firmly that “science demonstrates there is no climate-related risk caused by fossil fuels and CO2, and therefore no reliable scientific evidence supporting the proposed rule”. The rule in this case refers to the SEC climate requirement, but it could equally apply to Net Zero. Many people now accept that a rigid Net Zero policy will lead to massive falls in living standards that will disproportionately affect the poorer in society, both in the U.K. and particularly in the developing world. Contrary to the incessant attack on fossil fuels, write Happer and Lindzen, “affordable, abundant fossil fuels have given ordinary people the sort of freedom, prosperity and health that were reserved for kings in ages past”.

Such prosperity, of course, has left the building in the case of Sri Lanka, where the prospect of famine and civil breakdown face 22 million people following (among other things) the decision of the Government to ban fertiliser in the interests of climate change and saving the planet. Such a collapse, with the President hastily fleeing the country, is likely to face any modern Net Zero society that seeks to tamper with reliable and affordable energy supply, restrict diet and try to grow enough food using ‘organic’ methods. Happer and Lindzen state that reducing CO2 and the use of fossil fuels would have “disastrous consequences” for the poor, people worldwide and future generations.

Both Happer and Lindzen have long held out against the current demonisation of atmospheric CO2, pointing out that the current 415 parts per million (ppm) is near a record low and not dangerously high. They note that 600 million years of CO2 and temperature data “contradict the theory that high levels of CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming”. Omitting unfavourable data is an egregious violation of scientific method. Facts omitted by those who argue there is a climate emergency include that CO2 levels were over 1,000 ppm for hundreds of millions of years and have been as high as over 7,000 ppm; CO2  has been declining for 180 million years from about 2,800 ppm to today’s low; and today’s low is not far above the minimum level when plants die of CO2 starvation, leading to all other life forms perishing for lack of food.

Finally, the authors note that the logarithmic influence of CO2 means its contribution to global warming is “heavily saturated”. The scientists calculate that a doubling of current CO2 levels would only reduce the heat escaping to space by about 1.1%. This suggests warming of around 1°C or less. The saturation hypothesis explains, they say, the disconnect between CO2  and temperature observed over 600 million years.

July 11, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

WHO Wants To Run the World?

By Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster, Michael Baker | Brownstone Institute | July 11, 2022

In Geneva in late May at the 75th meeting of the WHO’s decision-making body, the World Health Assembly (WHA), amendments to its International Health Regulations (IHRs) were debated and voted upon. If passed, they would grant the WHO the right to exert unconscionable pressure on countries to accept the WHO’s authority and health policy actions if the WHO decides that there is a public health threat that might spread beyond a country’s borders.

As Ramesh Thakur, the second man at the UN for years, noted, the amendments would mean “the rise of an international bureaucracy whose defining purpose, existence, powers and budgets will depend on outbreaks of pandemics, the more the better.”

This is the first clear instance of a globalist coup attempt. It would subvert national sovereignty worldwide by putting real power into the hands of an international group of bureaucrats. It has long been suspected that the authoritarian elites arisen during covid times would try to strengthen their positions by undermining nation states, and the this 75th jamboree is the first solid evidence of this being true.

What an opportunity then to see who is in the conspiring club. Who drafted the amendments? What was in them? Which individuals supported them or spoke out against them?

WHO were the conspirators?

The amendments on the table at the May WHA meeting had been transmitted to the WHO by the US Department of Health and Human Services on January 18, circulated by WHO to its member states (‘States Parties’) on January 20 and formally introduced to the WHA on April 12.

The proposals, according to an announcement on January 26, were co-sponsored by 19 countries plus the European Union. Even if some co-sponsors had little direct involvement in drafting them, they all would have approved in principle the overarching goal of tightening up the WHO’s authority over member states in the face of a public health event.

Loyce Pace, the HHS’s Assistant Secretary for Global Affairs – the leading US official nominally responsible for the proposed amendments – arrived at the Biden administration fresh from a stint as executive director of an advocacy organization called the Global Health Council.

That council receives funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its members include Eli Lilly, Merck, Pfizer, Abbott Labs, and Johnson & Johnson. You get the idea. Via one of the foxes-turned-chicken-guard, it appears the HHS ‘worked closely’ on these amendments with large pharmaceutical companies, who will be chomping at the bit for a more proactive (read: profitable) response to any public health emergency, real or imagined.

So the conspiring club consists primarily of the US government and its Western allies in lockstep with Big Pharma, and they are looking to undermine both the sovereignty of their own governments and that of other countries, presumably with the idea that the Western elites would do the running.

What was in them? A blizzard of acronyms and euphemisms

To understand what the US proposed at the WHA, we need first to understand how things have worked in the WHO to this point.

The IHRs in their current form have been in force as international law since June 2007. Among other things, they impose requirements on countries to detect, report and respond to ‘public health events of international concern,’ or PHEICs. The WHO Director-General consults with the state where a possible public health event has occurred, and within 48 hours they are meant to come to a mutual agreement on whether or not it actually is a PHEIC, whether or not it needs to be announced to the world as such, and what counter-measures, if any, should be taken. It’s essentially an early-warning system on major health crises. This is a good thing if it’s run by people you can trust and if it has checks and balances to rein in expansionary tendencies.

The proposed amendments would greatly strengthen the power of the WHO relative to this baseline, in a number of ways.

First, they lower the threshold for the WHO to declare a public health emergency by empowering its Regional Directors to declare a ‘public health event of regional concern’ (PHERC, italics ours) and for the WHO to put out a new thing called an ‘intermediate public health alert.’

Second, they permit the WHO to consider allegations about a public health event from non-official sources, meaning sources other than the government of the state concerned, and allow that government only 24 hours to confirm the allegations and a further 24 hours to accept the WHO’s offer of ‘collaboration.’

Collaboration is essentially a euphemism for on-site assessment by teams of WHO investigators, and concomitant pressure at the whim of WHO personnel to enact potentially far-reaching measures such as lockdowns, movement restrictions, school closures, consumption of medicines, administration of vaccines and any or all of the other social, economic, and health paraphernalia that we have come to associate with the covid circus.

Should the state’s government acceptance of the WHO’s ‘offer’ not be forthcoming, the WHO is empowered to disclose the information it has to the other 194 WHO countries, while continuing to pressure the state to yield to the WHO’s invitation to ‘collaborate.’ A non-collaborating country would risk becoming a pariah.

Third, the proposal includes a new Chapter IV, which would establish a ‘Compliance Committee’ consisting of six government-appointed experts from each WHO region tasked with permanently nosing around to ensure the member states are complying with IHR regulations.

There are more crossings-out of the existing IHR language and new language added in, but the flavour of what the US-led alliance is shooting for is a WHO that can unilaterally decide whether there is a problem and what to do about it, and can isolate countries that disagree.

Compliant WHO member states could act as a supporting cast in the isolation effort, through the distribution of their own health budgets and their ‘health-related’ policies, which would include travel and trade restrictions. The WHO would become a kind of command-and-control center for globalist agendas, pushing the produce of (Western) Big Pharma.

Why and how would this work?

We learned during covid times why it would make sense that the US and its allies are insisting on these amendments.

Lowering the bar for declaring a global (or regional) public health threat triggers a huge opportunity for Western pharmaceutical companies. As legal experts have observed: “WHO emergency declarations can trigger the fast-track development and subsequent global distribution and administration of unlicensed investigational diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines.

This is done via the WHO’s Emergency Use Listing Procedure (EULP). The introduction of an ‘intermediate public health alert’ in particular will also further incentivise the pharmaceutical industry’s move to activate domestic fast-track emergency trial protocols as well as for advance purchase, production and stockpile agreements with governments before the existence of a concrete health threat to the world’s population has been detected, as is already the case under WHO’s EULP via the procedures developed for a ‘pre-public health emergency phase’.”

You can bet that the WHO ‘expert teams’ sent in to make on-the-ground assessments, under the banner of ‘collaboration’ with the host country experiencing the health event, will be chock-a-block with operatives from the CDC and who knows what other Western agencies, all poking around potentially sensitive facilities that a host government might justifiably claim a sovereign right to keep to itself. Likewise with the ‘Compliance Committee’ proposed by the US under the new Chapter IV of the IHRs: its government-appointed members have an open-ended brief, enshrined in international law, to be busybodies.

In layman’s terms, the WHO would be turned into an international thug, with its member states offered the role of backyard gang members.

As a bonus for Western elites, the proposals are a sneaky form of rewriting history. By cementing authority within an international organisation to determine the existence of public health crises and direct potentially draconian emergency responses, Western governments would get to enshrine and legitimise their own extreme responses to the covid outbreak, as we have pointed out previously. Their backsides would thereby be given some protection from legal challenges.

The refusniks: Developing countries

The proposals were pushed primarily by Western countries: the US was joined by Australia, the UK and the EU in arguing for passage. The resistance was led by developing countries who saw it as a colonialist ambush in which their ability to set policy and respond to health threats in a manner commensurate with their domestic situations would be overridden.

Brazil reportedly went so far as to threaten to withdraw from the WHO, and the African group of almost 50 countries, along with India, argued that the amendments were being rushed through without adequate consultation. Russia, China and Iran also objected.

Failure on the first try, but the US and its allies in the West will get more shots to push it through.

How do we expect them to do this? Well, when a proposal gets bogged down inside a giant bureaucratic machine like the WHO, the inevitable response is to set up committees to work in the background and circle back with a new set of proposals to be presented at a future meeting. True to form, a ‘working group’ and ‘expert committee’ are being assembled to accept member state proposals on IHR reform by the end of September this year. These will be ‘sifted through’ and reports will be prepared for review by the WHO’s executive board in January next year. The objective is to have a fresh set of proposals on the table when the WHA convenes for the 77th time in 2024.

Not all was lost

Salvaging something from the fact that the WHA failed to get a consensus around its biggest agenda item, the US and its allies got a small victory on the point of when they can try again – though in their desperation they needed to violate the IHRs’ own rules to accomplish it. Article 55 of the IHRs states unambiguously that a four-month notice period is required for any amendments.

In this instance, revised amendments were presented on May 24, the same day that the first lot were rejected. These were discussed, further amended on May 27 and then adopted on the same day. The approved amendments halve the two-year period for any (further) approved amendments to the IHRs to take effect. (The IHRs that came into force in 2007 were agreed to in 2005 – but under the new resolution, anything agreed to in 2024 would come into effect in 2025 rather than 2026.)

Yet, what was achieved in terms of fast-tracking the force of new amendments was lost in slow-tracking their implementation. Nations would have up to 12 months – double the previous suggestion of six months – to implement any IHR amendments that newly enter into force of law.

State of play

Where is all this going?

If the WHO takes the reins on decisions about what constitutes a health crisis, and can pressure every country into a one-size-fits-all set of responses that it, the WHO, also determines, that’s bad enough. But what about if its invitation to ‘collaborate’ with countries is backed up with teeth, such as sanctions against those who demur? And what about if it then broadens the definition of ‘public health’ by, for example, declaring that climate change falls under that definition? Or racism? Or discrimination against LBTQIA+ people? The possibilities thereby opened up for running the world are endless.

A global ‘health’ empire would bring huge harms to humanity, but a lot of power and money is pushing for it. Don’t think it can’t happen.

Paul Frijters is a Professor of Wellbeing Economics at the London School of Economics: from 2016 through November 2019 at the Center for Economic Performance, thereafter at the Department of Social Policy

July 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

From Wild-Type SARS-2 to Omicron: Towards a Theory of Corona Evolution

With additional thoughts on why mass containment probably made everything worse, by playing to the most central strategy of the virus

eugyppius | July 10, 2022

Scientific discourse on Corona remains focused on microbiological minutiae, while ignoring the broader evolutionary and behavioural patterns of SARS-2. This is especially frustrating, because our mass containment policies were at base attempts to change the behaviour of the virus, and their failure has prompted no introspection about the limits of our understanding.

Equally neglected is the evolutionary trajectory of Corona. Aside from simplistic, one-dimensional concerns about things like escape variants, almost nobody in mainstream scientific circles has tried to account for observed evolution or describe the various selection pressures SARS-2 faces.

Among the few people to have given serious thought to the evolution of viral pathogens is Paul Ewald, author of the book Evolution of Infectious Disease, as well as numerous articles explaining the evolutionary pressures on the virulence and transmissibility of viruses.

As he explains in this piece from 2011:

Much of the variation in the harmfulness of acute infections is associated with the dependence of transmission on host mobility. When transmission occurs by direct contact, infected hosts generally need to be mobile to facilitate contact with susceptibles. When transmission of pathogens does not depend on the mobility of infected hosts, evolutionary considerations predict that natural selection should favor high degrees of host exploitation and hence high degrees of virulence.

Basically, the virus wants to make as many copies of itself as possible. But, very roughly speaking, the more aggressively the virus copies itself, the sicker its hosts become. This places an upper limit on the virulence of viruses that depend on person-to-person contact, and it explains why widely transmitted respiratory viruses all fall within the same narrow range of pathogenicity and cause the same kinds of symptoms. The pandemicists raise money by wargaming pandemic viruses with 10% fatality rates, but in the real world, the truly deadly viruses never get very far. They’re all like SARS-1 – they put people in the hospital too soon.

But what about smallpox? And cholera, and yellow fever and dengue fever? Are these not deadly viruses?

They are, but they don’t spread via direct contact. Smallpox falls into what Ewald calls a “sit-and-wait” category of transmission. These are viruses that have remarkable durability, remaining viable in the external environment for months or (in the case of Variola) even years. They can thus disable their hosts while still having hope of new victims. Yellow fever and dengue, meanwhile, are “vector-borne.” They depend on mosquitoes to hop from host to host, and they’re free to make their victims as sick as they want. “Waterborne” pathogens like cholera are similarly advantaged.

More importantly for our purposes, Ewald defines a fourth category of what we might call mediated transmission facilitating higher virulence. This is “attendant-borne” transmission, which occurs primarily in hospitals, where staff unwittingly circulate viruses among patients. Attendant-borne viruses, like their vector-borne and waterborne colleagues, are free to develop remarkably high virulence. Ewald believes that the 1918 influenza outbreak achieved its unusually high mortality via attend-borne transmission related to troop transports at the end of the First World War.

SARS-1, although never properly adapted to human hosts, also depended on attendant-borne transmission, and MERS is a more straightforward case of this phenomenon. But the clearest example of all is surely pre-Omicron SARS-2, which caused elevated mortality near the top of what we would expect for pandemic influenza; and which flourished nowhere as effectively as in healthcare institutions, including hospitals and especially nursing homes.

Remember that SARS-2 arrived in Europe no later than November 2019, and in America no later than December 2019. The West saw multiple months of community Corona transmission, in other words, without anybody noticing that anything was amiss. Hospitals remained as empty or as full as ever. As soon as we imposed lockdowns and started testing everybody, though, mortality spiked. These containment procedures involved nothing so much as identifying Corona patients and putting as many of them as possible in environments favouring attendant-borne transmission – from Corona testing centres to hospitals. And as the mass containment regime continued through 2021, SARS-2 began evolving towards greater virulence, as nosocomial and nursing home infections came to dominate the case statistics almost everywhere.

Omicron, whatever its origins, broke this dynamic. Unlike prior SARS-2 lineages, this is a classic direct-contact respiratory pathogen. With the advent of Omicron, Corona no longer spreads preferentially in healthcare institutions, and behaves much more like a mild flu or the common cold, with an emphasis on keeping its hosts healthy and mobile.

The worst thing we could do, from an evolutionary perspective, is continue the mass containment regime. We want to keep SARS-2 circulating via direct contact in the community. All such respiratory viruses, despite their stark differences, have been subject to the same convergent evolution, with remarkably similar effects on their human hosts. We must stop intervening in matters we don’t understand, or we’ll just continue our recent history, of always making everything worse.

July 10, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Joe Biden and Other Politicians, not Coronavirus, Caused Children’s Educations to Suffer

By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | July 7, 2022

President Joe Biden declared Tuesday at Twitter: “Due to the pandemic, kids are behind in math and reading.” This is yet another example of politicians’ blame shifting we have seen throughout the coronavirus scare. Kids in America have fallen behind in their educations during the coronavirus scare, but not because of coronavirus. They have fallen behind because of coronavirus crackdown actions supported by Biden and many other politicians in the name of protecting students, teachers, and staff at schools from coronavirus that did not improve safety but did interfere with students’ ability to learn.

Since early on in the coronavirus scare it was known that children tended to be in miniscule danger from serious sickness or death from coronavirus. It was also known that, at schools, teachers and other adults tended not to get coronavirus from students. Yet, most American politicians with control over education policy did not say that “for the children” schools would be kept open and continue operating normally, something that was done in other countries and a few places in America without problems. Instead, as politicians are apt to do, they used the “for the children” plea as an excuse to wreak havoc. They shut down schools, then replaced them to some extent with dysfunctional attempts at virtual education, and ultimately reopened the schools in an absurd and menacing manner.

Many schools, when they finally reopened, had all kinds of mandates that made the schools insufferable. The mandates, while failing to protect people from coronavirus, did carry health dangers of their own. Mask mandates, obsessive disinfecting of surfaces at schools and even of children’s hands, enforcement of “social distancing,” the presence of ubiquitous plastic barriers separating people, coronavirus testing, and pressure or even mandates for students to take experimental coronavirus “vaccine” shots were among the nasty changes confronting students at their “new normal” schools. Students found themselves trudging through a real life version of a dystopian novel.

No wonder students’ learning suffered through the coronavirus scare. Learning was not high on the priority list of many politicians rushing to exercise their new powers. And, due to government pressure and bad choices by people in charge, the situation was similarly awful at many private schools as at government schools.

Fortunately, this dark cloud of politicians harming student’s educations in the name of countering coronavirus does have a silver lining, though only for a small subset of students. “Enough is enough,” decided some parents along the way of witnessing the school closures, the dysfunctional virtual learning efforts implemented to replace regular school, and the dystopian “new normal” schools that ultimately came into being. These parents took their children’s educations into their own hands, moving their children to homeschooling. The result is that many more children now than before the coronavirus scare are free from the politicians’ harmful meddling, whether undertaken in the name of protecting children from phantom coronavirus danger or accomplishing other objectives at variance with advancing the math and reading skills Biden mentioned at Twitter. It is a safe bet that most of these new homeschooling parents will do a much better job than the schools they left behind at making sure their children’s educations serve their children’s needs and interests.

Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute

July 9, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

The self-inflicted genocide of late capitalism

By Toby Rogers | July 8, 2022

At some point over the last 50 years, the bourgeoisie (in the U.S. and throughout the developed world) embarked on the first self-inflicted genocide in human history.

While the roots may go way back, the self-inflicted genocide became systematized and legalized with the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.

By 2001 with the publication of Autism: a novel form of mercury poisoning by Bernard, Enayati, Redwood, Roger, and Binstock it was clear that vaccines were largely responsible for the explosion in autism cases.

Faced with this news, the mainstream went all in to cover up the genocide and accelerate the pace of the destruction.

Thomas Verstraeten at the CDC took a job from GlaxoSmithKline in Belgium rather than tell the truth about the genocide.

William Thompson took a promotion from CDC rather than call a press conference to stop the genocide.

Julie Gerberding, Frank DeStefano, and Coleen Boyle at CDC aggressively covered up widespread harms to children like eager S.S. officers at Auschwitz.

Once everyone knew that methyl mercury was neurotoxic, Pharma with the blessing of FDA and CDC took most of the mercury out of vaccines and replaced it with even more aluminum — which leads to more autism cases but less severe symptoms. The genocide marched on.

A new generation of fixers including Tom Shimabukuro, John Su, and Matthew Oster at CDC as well as Nicola Klein at Kaiser Permanente dedicate their careers to hiding vaccine injury.

And now with rushed experimental Covid-19 shots, the genocide has accelerated and expanded to include adults throughout the developed world.

Responsible Parties

Harms are driven by the pharmaceutical industry. It’s gigantic — $1 trillion a year in revenue even before Covid-19. Toxic Covid-19 shots, useless treatments including Paxlovid and Remdesivir, and medicines to treat vaccine injury (including a sharp increase in myocarditis cases) will generate hundreds of billions of dollars of additional profits for Pharma. Pharmaceutical industry executives are avaricious, predatory, and they absolutely do not care who they hurt and kill. Many are also likely eugenicists who want to shrink the size of the global population.

Grifter billionaire psychopaths — including Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, and Alain Mérieux — gravitate towards vaccines because they see the opportunity to vastly increase their wealth while inflicting pain. Their billions of dollars buy them talent — the best management consultants, the best PR firms, and the best private Psy-Ops firms. They also purchased the global public health system, the political system, and the regulatory state. They clearly want to take over the world and enslave (via chronic illness and twice yearly injections of gene modifying substances) anyone who is not a billionaire.

But the genocide also relies on the participation of bourgeois civil society. As we have seen over the last two years, bougiecrats are gleeful about participating in their own self-destruction.

Yes, Pharma propaganda, marketing, and psy-ops are very good. Over the last forty years, the average person just did not know about the dangers of vaccines. But at this point, there is more than enough information in the public square about the dangers of these products (just look around for gawdsakes!) for the bourgeoisie to opt out of shots. And yet they drive themselves to their own demise.

Self-preservation is the most fundamental of all human instincts, more primal even than sex. Yet the most educated class in human history has lost its ability to feel the urgent necessity to protect one’s own life and protect their kids from those who are harming them.

All of our elite institutions failed over the last two years. The fact that Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia require staff and students to be vaccinated with useless toxic Covid-19 shots shows that almost no one at these institutions is capable of understanding basic statistics nor risk benefit analysis. Why do these institutions even exist at this point?

I think there is a common factor that explains the participation of the bourgeoisie in their own self-destruction and the failure of all of our institutions to respond appropriately to a virus that could have been handled with existing off the shelf medicines.

We are in the midst of a mass-poisoning-event.

As I explained above, the children born after 1986 are massively over-vaccinated. But wide-scale vaccine programs began in the 1960s with polio and measles so anyone who lived through those eras may be affected as well (albeit to a lesser degree). 2,021 nuclear weapons tests during the Cold War likely made matters worse.

A strong case can be made that the societal chaos we are experiencing — from a lack of fundamental self-preservation instincts to the inability to think critically — is evidence of society-wide neurological injury. People are not experiencing ennui, they are experiencing too much aluminum (and other toxic chemicals) in their brains. There is likely a dose response relationship as well — the more shots, the more crazy things become. And with globalization and concentrated wealth, neurologically injured psychopathic billionaires can inflict unprecedented harm around the world and turn global politics into their own live action version of Orwell’s 1984.

So the task before us is this:

1. We must opt out of the crazy and say no to their toxic drugs;

2. Detox from the toxic chemicals that already exist in our bodies; and

3. Build the better sane world out of the ashes of the collapse of mainstream society.

July 8, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Uruguay Halts COVID-19 Vaccine for Kids Under 13, Judge Demands Officials Turn Over Pfizer Contracts

By Megan Redshaw | The Defender | July 8, 2022

Uruguay suspended COVID-19 vaccines for children under 13 after a judge on Thursday issued an injunction halting vaccinations in that age group until government officials turn over its contracts with Pfizer.

Uruguayan government officials and Pfizer were ordered on Wednesday to appear in court after judge Alejandro Recarey gave them 48 hours to present detailed information on Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine while the court considered an injunction request to halt COVID-19 vaccinations for children 5 and older.

The government said a confidentiality clause in the contract prevents it from producing the documents, The Washington Post reported.

According to ABC News, the judge received answers to 18 questions about the safety and chemical composition of COVID-19 vaccines, signed by Health Minister Daniel Salinas, but did not turn over the contracts.

It is unknown whether the answers provided by government officials adequately addressed the questions posed by the judge, who ultimately ordered an injunction based on what was provided.

Salinas, after the court’s ruling, strongly defended the government’s vaccination plan and criticized the judge for questioning the safety of vaccines.

Alvaro Delgado, the secretary of the presidency, said the halt is a threat to public health.

“We’re convinced that it’s crazy to suspend voluntary vaccination because it has a strong scientific backing,” Delgado said at a news conference.

Vaccinations for those older than 13 will continue, the Health Ministry said in a statement.

The government plans to appeal the decision, according to ABC News.

As The Defender reported Wednesday, judge Recarey of the Administrative Litigation Tribunal used his inquisitorial powers to demand the Uruguayan Ministry of Public Health, State Health Services Administration and the President’s Office submit all information regarding the contracts for the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines, including contractual information related to any clauses of civil indemnity or criminal impunity of the suppliers in the event of adverse effects.

The judge is seeking, among other things, to know whether there are clauses in the contracts that promised pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer civil and criminal immunity for adverse effects caused by their vaccines.

Judge Recarey posed a series of questions to government officials and Pfizer regarding the chemical composition, efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines, and required Pfizer to state whether it has “admitted, in any area, internal or external to it and its partners, the verification of adverse effects” of its COVID-19 vaccines in children.

© 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 8, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Ontario stops showing COVID by vaccine status

By Mike Campbel | The Counter Signal | July 8, 2022

After months of off-brand COVID stats, Ontario’s official reporting database has stopped showing cases and hospitalizations based on vaccine status.

Now, why would they do that?

Well, the reason given is to prevent false impressions that the vaccine isn’t working:

“This data set reported the total number of patients in hospital by vaccination status without taking into consideration the number of people in Ontario who are vaccinated overall. Comparing groups using count data (such as the number of patients) is appropriate when the groups being compared are about the same size (i.e. around mid-2021). However, now that approximately 87% of eligible Ontarians are fully vaccinated (compared to 3% partially vaccinated and 10% unvaccinated) This comparison is no longer appropriate and may be misleading.”

In other words, they’re hiding behind the “base rate fallacy,” which occurs when categories with different population sizes are compared. For example, if there are 10x as many Americans as Canadians, comparing deaths needs to be done per 100,000 people to show a rate rather than the base numbers, wherein American death totals will be higher because of their larger population alone.

However, this reason for pulling the data appears to be a cop-out and is misleading.

At The Counter Signal, we’ve reported that the rates themselves have become unfavourable and disproportional for the vaccinated categories.

In Ontario, by April 5, those who had not received two doses of the COVID vaccine have a COVID death rate of 0.02 per capita, as did the fully vaccinated. However, those who had received booster shots had a COVID death rate of 0.03 per capita.

Additionally, those with a booster dose were also more likely to be infected with COVID-19 than any other group. Those with booster doses had 22.35 cases per capita, fully vaccinated had 15.47 cases per capita, and partially vaccinated or unvaccinated had 12.75 cases per capita.

As for Canada more broadly, during the week of April 10-17, 222 fully vaccinated individuals died from COVID compared to only one unvaccinated person (among the eligible population). 99% of COVID deaths were in vaccinated persons that week, a higher percentage than the 85-90% of eligible Canadians who’d been fully vaccinated.

That’s beyond base rate fallacy.

Moreover, between May 8 to 22 in Canada, the vaccinated with at least one booster population accounted for 82 per cent of new COVID deaths — despite making up only 48.6 per cent of the population.

The following two weeks were similar.

Between May 22 and June 5, the unvaccinated population in Canada (at 5+ years old) made up 10.7% of the eligible population in Canada yet only accounted for 8% of COVID deaths.

It appears we’ve gone from trusting the science to hiding it.

July 8, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Anthony Fauci on day 26 of his Paxlovid- and vaccine-enhanced Corona experience

Says that he is “Close to if not at 100% the way I was before infection”

eugyppius – July 8, 2022

Despite not only following, but embodying, The Science, global vaccinator-in-chief Anthony Fauci caught Corona while attending his high school reunion on 11 June. While most Omicron infections resolve within a week, the quadruple-vaccinated NIAID director and blight upon human civilisation suffered Paxlovid rebound at the end of June and is now approaching a month of infection.

Yesterday, he ended his radio silence to give some press interviews:

I believe I’m about close to if not at 100% the way I was before infection. So I’m really fortunate that I’ve done very well. And I keep telling people when they ask me that, is that I was vaccinated, and doubly boosted, and I believe if I did not have that degree of background protection I would’ve had a much more serious course. My course was relatively light minor symptoms, and right now I’m completely without symptoms and I feel very good, very energetic.

Nonzero chance he rebounds again.

July 8, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Is a Colonoscopy Worth the Risk?

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | October 16, 2019

Knowing your potential risk for developing cancer can help you weigh the risks against the benefits of different tests for your situation. According to the American Cancer Society,1 more than 16.9 million people in the U.S. have a history of cancer. At least 1.9 million new cases will be diagnosed in 2022, which does not include a diagnosis of carcinoma in situ (noninvasive cancer).

The society estimates 609,360 people will die from cancer in 2022, which is about 1,670 deaths per day. The four most common types include lung, breast, prostate and colorectal cancer. One of the screening tests commonly prescribed to rule out colorectal cancer is a colonoscopy.

Colorectal cancer can start in the colon or in the rectum but the two types are grouped together since they have many of the same characteristics.2 The society estimates that in 2022 there will be 106,180 new cases of colon cancer diagnosed and 44,850 new cases of rectal cancer. Although it remains the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths in men and women, the rate has been dropping for several decades.3

According to the Colorectal Cancer Alliance,4 the five-year survival rate has been rising and there are more than 1 million colorectal cancer survivors alive in the U.S. Knowing your risk factors and making lifestyle changes to prevent the development of colorectal cancer are the basis of the most recently published Rapid Recommendation of The BMJ initiative.5

In Many Cases Routine Colonoscopies Are Unnecessary

The 2019 practice guidelines published in The BMJ 6 recommend physicians use a tool to estimate an individual’s potential risk for developing colorectal cancer in the next 15 years. The team recommends that only those who have a risk of 3% or greater should undergo screening tests.

Current guidelines recommend screening for everyone over the age of 50, without regard to their individual risk. At the age of 50, this is typically less than 3%.7 The international panel reviewed scientific evidence and research data to evaluate the risks versus the benefits of colonoscopies.

They found their recommendations could accurately be applied to healthy people from 50 to 79 years who expected to live another 15 years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends colorectal cancer screening for those over 50.8

Using data from across the U.S., they found the number who were up to date with their screening went up 1.4% from 2016 to 2018, representing an additional 3.5 million people.

In addition to asking if screening made a difference in health outcomes, The BMJ initiative team also attempted to differentiate the type of testing best used to screen for colorectal cancer.9 They recommended that those with a 3% risk or greater over the following 15 years could choose from one of four screening options.

The first was a fecal immunochemical test (FIT) done every year, or every two years depending upon their risk factors. Patients may also choose a single sigmoidoscopy or, the weakest recommendation from the team, a single colonoscopy.

Possibility of Cancer Compared to Screening Hazards

From their examination of the evidence, the team believed a yearly FIT, sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy could reduce the incidence of cancer while a FIT every two years may not have an effect on incidence over 15 years. They wrote:

“Based on benefits, harms, and burdens of screening, the panel inferred that most informed individuals with a 15-year risk of colorectal cancer of 3% or higher are likely to choose screening, and most individuals with a risk of below 3% are likely to decline screening. Given varying values and preferences, optimal care will require shared decision making.”

The team determined that the risks associated with colorectal cancer screening outweighed the benefits in many cases. For instance, the risk of death from a colonoscopy from one source was 1 in 16,318 procedures evaluated.10 In the same analysis, the researchers also found 82 suffered serious complications.

Colonoscopies Are Not Risk Free

Although a colonoscopy is supposed to help find early tumor growth, one study reported a 17% rate of missed diagnosis.11 Other risks associated with a colonoscopy include worsening stool patterns and contributing to the growth of colorectal polyps or tumors.

Perforation of the colon during the exam has an incidence of 0.2% to 5% and is widely recognized as a serious complication associated with a high morbidity and mortality rate.12 The risk of perforation rises with the age of the patient and the presence of two or more other health conditions. One study showed 51.9 people per 1,000 whose colons were perforated died within the first 14 days.13

Dysbiosis may occur after using harsh laxatives to prepare for a colonoscopy. A study published in Cell14 suggested even a short-term course of laxative use could trigger an immune response. Research on an animal model15 found treatment eliminated one family of beneficial gut bacteria and allowed another to flourish. Even two weeks after completing the laxatives the bacteria showed reduced diversity.

Many experts agree you should opt for the lightest level of sedation possible, or none at all, as full anesthesia increases risks. Those who have sleep apnea, are obese, have high blood pressure or diabetes are at increased risk from the anesthesia.16 Across the U.S. 34.4% of those undergoing a colonoscopy used anesthesia.17

The use of anesthesia was associated with a 13% increased risk of experiencing complications within 30 days of the procedure and specifically associated with an increased risk of perforations of the colon and/or a stroke. The risk of complications varied by area, with those in the Northeast reporting an increase of any complication of 12%, but among those performed in the West this increased to 60%.

Researchers who conducted one study found an increased risk of aspiration pneumonia.18 Another19 sought to determine if the procedure could be successfully completed without any sedation. Patients were given the option of undergoing a colonoscopy without premedication and then evaluated immediately following the procedure, two and five days later.

The researchers asked about the severity of pain and willingness to consider the procedure again without sedation. When questioned, only 5% experienced no pain; 41% had mild pain; 34% reported moderate pain and 20% said they experienced severe pain. However, despite the level of pain experienced, 73% were willing to repeat it without sedation and only 18% said they would request sedation the next time.

Equipment Contamination Another Risk of Colonoscopies

A real risk of undergoing an endoscopy of any nature is chance of improper sterilization of the flexible scope. David Lewis, Ph.D., and I discuss this in the short video above. One issue is the inability to thoroughly clean the inside of the scope.

Lewis describes a problem that he states is commonly experienced by physicians. During the examination the physician may be unable to see through the scope and is unsuccessful in the attempt to flush it using the air/water channel as it is clogged with human tissue from a past exam.20 The scope must be retracted and another one used.

Since endoscopes have sensitive equipment attached, they cannot be heat sterilized. Unfortunately, manufacturers have not been made to produce a scope with the ability to be heat sterilized. As Lewis points out:21 “We can put a Rover on Mars, surely we can build a flexible endoscope that we can put in an autoclave.”

These expensive tools are not disposable but require sterilization between each patient. Lewis reports that up to 80% of hospitals are sterilizing the flexible endoscopes with glutaraldehyde (Cidex). On testing, he finds this has complicated the process as it does not dissolve tissue in the endoscope but rather preserves it.

When sharp biopsy tools are run through the tube, patient material from past testing is scraped off and potentially carried into your body. This is why it’s important to find a clinic or hospital that uses peracetic acid to thoroughly sterilize the equipment by dissolving proteins found in the flexible endoscopes. Before scheduling any endoscopic examination call to ask how the equipment is sterilized between patients.

Tailor Lifestyle Choices to Reduce the Risk of Colon Cancer

Like many other types of cancer, colorectal cancer is often preventable. Research suggests only 5% to 10% of all cancer cases are due to genetic defects, while the rest are linked to environmental and lifestyle factors.22 The Mayo Clinic writes that one-third of the most diagnosed cancers in the U.S. could be prevented through diet and nutrition alone, i.e., with plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables.23

The extent that diet contributes to cancer death varies by the type of cancer, which researchers find is associated by as much as 70% in the case of colorectal cancer.24 For example, long-term exposure to chlorinated drinking water can increase the risk of leukemia, colorectal cancer and bladder cancer.

There are several strategies you can use to lower your risk of developing this potentially deadly disease as it is impacted by your diet, vitamin D levels, exercise and alcohol intake.

Sources and References

July 8, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Stop the War on Doctors

My Rather Public Reply To The Threat Made Against Me By The American Board Of Internal Medicine

By Pierre Kory | July 2, 2022

Anyone in America who deviates from the group-think enforced by public health bureaucrats runs the risk of cancellation. Politicians, parents, comedians, teachers – now they’re even coming for the doctors.

As a lung and ICU specialist, I have practiced medicine for 14 years and successfully treated more than 450 patients during the pandemic. Long before anyone had heard of Covid-19, I was studying and implementing cutting-edge methods to treat critically ill patients. I’m the Senior Editor of a best-selling textbook in my field, now in its second edition, which has been translated into seven languages.

For my efforts, I now find myself on the receiving end of “disciplinary sanctions” from the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), who sent me a letter threatening “suspension or revocation of board certification.”

The “sin” threatening to end my medical career was my unwillingness to go along with Fauci’s monolithic vaccines-above-all-else strategy. The failure of this approach is plain to see, and anyone with an ounce of curiosity knows there are many methods of treating the virus.

Ivermectin is one of them. This cheap, readily available generic medicine is approved by the FDA for certain uses in humans – but not for Covid-19, despite 85 controlled trials from around the world demonstrating its effectiveness. In Brazil, the largest study to date found a reduction in Covid mortality rate of 70%. In India, the second most populated country in the world, the drug has been credited with near eradication of the disease. Studies attempting to discredit ivermectin have been debunked again and again.

Other trials, such as the recent TOGETHER trial, are designed to fail from the start to drive a desired narrative. In the National Institutes of Health’s ACTIV-6, despite starting the majority of patients on treatment after five days of Covid-19 symptoms at a lower than recommended dose, they found a statistically significant reduction in the time to recovery, particularly among the most severely ill. Unsurprisingly, major newspapers reported that the study showed ivermectin was ineffective.

Despite ivermectin’s proven effectiveness, in the opinion of the ABIM, advocating for its usage is a form of “disinformation” and carries the penalty of losing one’s medical license and livelihood.

Throughout the pandemic, I’ve maintained an open mind, analyzed what works for patients, discussed strategies with fellow doctors, and conducted my own extensive research. When new data arose that changed my understanding, I admitted as much and changed course—like with the vaccines. If only the powers that be at the ABIM and our government could say the same.

Consider the evolution of accepted facts about Covid-19 safety measures from Fauci and his ilk. Despite government mandates, neither lockdowns nor cloth masks prevent transmission. They never have. It turns out former Surgeon General Jerome Adams had it right when he tweeted in March 2020 that masks are, “NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus” – a comment for which he was pilloried. We are only beginning to learn the impact of the societal costs of these early preventative measures, a price our children who were kept home from school will be paying for years.

Second, there is no evidence the vaccines stop Covid-19, despite the constant lecturing from the Biden Administration and the mainstream media. In the United States and globally, cases continue to rise and fall without any correlation to the pace or percentage of population vaccinated. This is not what we were promised. In 2021, Fauci said vaccinated people were “dead ends” for the virus, and  President Biden declared, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” Today, approximately 110,000 cases are announced daily in America, where more than two thirds of the population is fully vaccinated.

There is a backlash brewing in America right now, and it goes beyond inflation rates and gas prices. People are tired of arrogant public officials and compromised institutions who believe they have all the answers but constantly get it wrong and make no apologies as they steamroll those who don’t support the current narrative. The ABIM’s sudden (and suspiciously well-funded) persecution of doctors who stray from the party line is only the latest example.

Doctors on the ABIM’s board and across the country need to stand up against this witch hunt. It’s demeaning to honest doctors and dangerous to the patients we’ve dedicated our careers to serving.

Pierre Kory, M.D., is president and chief medical officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.

July 7, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

The dangers of gender-affirmative care

American doctors are unnecessarily harming children

By Eliza Mondegreen | UnHerd | July 5, 2022

The Biden administration recently announced a plan to ban “conversion therapy” and dismantle barriers to “gender-affirming care” for transgender-identifying children and adolescents. A few days later, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal introduced the  “Transgender Bill of Rights” on Capitol Hill which sought to legislate what the Biden Administration proposed to impose by executive order.

On this issue, the Democratic Party assumes the mantle of righteousness. Who could oppose “life-saving” “gender-affirming care”? Who supports “conversion therapy”, which the Biden administration described as “a discredited and dangerous practice that seeks to suppress or change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQI+ people”?

The reality diverges sharply from the loaded language the Biden Administration deploys, lifting terms directly from the most radical trans activists occupying positions at the outermost extreme of an ongoing debate between different factions of gender clinicians.

The dispute over how best to treat gender-questioning children that the Biden Administration seeks to resolve by enshrining “gender-affirming care” and stigmatising “conversion therapy” boils down to whether or not clinicians regard the children in their care as exceptions to everything we know about child development, human biology, sexual orientation, and more. Attending closely to the language of the activists with whom the Biden Administration has sided provides a masterclass in how to manipulate language to normalise risky and invasive medical intervention on a class of people — children — who are widely understood to be unable to provide consent in other contexts.

For exploratory providers, a child’s transgender identification is the beginning of a clinical inquiry that will travel through the individual patient’s biography, their social context, and the templates the culture at large offers that young patients use to make sense of suffering. Nothing magical or transformative happens when a patient experiences gender dysphoria or expresses a transgender identity. Children and adolescents remain children and adolescents. Clinical practice does not overthrow itself when a young patient changes her pronouns.

For affirmative clinicians, on the other hand, the declaration of a transgender identity and the desire for a particular gender presentation suffice. That’s what affirmation means: no further inquiry required. A transfer of loyalty takes place when affirmative clinicians are confronted with “trans” children and adolescents: clinicians’ sense of responsibility shifts from the patient in front of them to the patient’s transgender “alter”. Doctor and patient then collude to slice and drug the patient’s body into compliance with the new identity regime.

Across the Atlantic, countries such as Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom are stepping back and shifting away from hormones and surgeries and toward exploratory psychotherapy as evidence of harm mounts. It’s remarkable that the United States government has chosen this moment to double down, without reference to serious inquiries underway at home and abroad.

Rather than bending the arc of history toward justice, the Biden administration has put the full force of the federal government behind a treatment model that amounts to little more than an unregulated medical experiment on vulnerable children and adolescents. Don’t let the language of civil rights fool you.

To understand gender affirmation and the people who push it, we need to take a closer look at their belief in the utterly exceptional “transgender” child. What do affirmative clinicians believe about such a patient, who arrives in their office with a label firmly affixed? Affirmative care starts not with a question or a clinical assessment but with a moral imperative: validate the patient’s transgender identity.

Presented with a “transgender” patient, what else matters? Does a patient’s age or developmental stage matter? What about his or her sex or sexual orientation? What parts of a patient’s life story — or medical history — stand out?

Gender clinicians such as Johanna Olson-Kennedy prefer to talk about gender-questioning three-year-olds as “people”. And they are people. But when we talk about three-year-olds as “people”, rather than toddlers, important information gets lost, with consequences. When we talk about “people”, we think adults. We think autonomy. When we talk about “toddlers,” we think: tiny humans who need constant care and guidance, who cannot be trusted to brush their teeth or cross an empty street, much less start down a medical pathway.

That’s the reason Olson-Kennedy talks about “people” when she’s referring to toddlers. The ideas that underpin gender-affirming care lose their moral force when translated from “people know who they are” to “toddlers know who they are”.

What about sex and sexual orientation? As recently as the mid-2000s, medical providers understood cross-sex identification in childhood and adolescence to be a normal stage of homosexual development, resolving in the majority of cases as the child moved through adolescence and became comfortable with his or her sexual development and sexual orientation. Long before the concept of gender identity took root, the idea of being “born in the wrong body” resonated with many young gays and lesbians — not to mention medical providers, who viewed homosexuals as “inverts” in need of psychological or surgical “correction”.

Affirmative providers overlook, downplay, or outright deny the overrepresentation of same-sex attracted youth among youth seeking transition. But clinicians who rate the “gender presentation” of “transgender” preschoolers on a scale from stereotypical girl (fitted, sparkly, frilly) to stereotypical boy (baggy, sporty) inevitably sweep up children whose rejection of gender stereotypes is rooted in their same-sex orientation. Affirmative providers such as Diane Ehrensaft argue that “prototransgender youth use [same-sex] sexual identity as a stepping-stone toward their transgender true gender self”, a rhetorical move that overwrites the connection between homosexual development and gender dysphoria, and equates accepting your same-sex sexual orientation with pursuing irreversible medical interventions.

Much like their views on same-sex attraction as a “stepping stone” toward a young person’s “transgender true gender self”, affirmative providers treat just about any mental health comorbidities as secondary to gender dysphoria. Suicide attempts, psychotic episodes, anorexia nervosa, depression, anxiety, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, experiences of sexual abuse and trauma, and substance abuse aren’t taken as reasons to question or delay transition but instead are treated as evidence for the need to accelerate transition.

In order to grease the skids, affirmative providers have invented or adapted a wide range of new medical concepts, all of which operate to obscure what they do from the public and from providers themselves,  scrambling the complex clinical presentations they need to parse — and manipulating patients, parents, and policymakers. These concepts include “wrong puberty”, “sex assigned at birth”, “reconstructive surgeries”,  and “internalised transphobia”.

Reconceptualising patients as “wrongly sexed” (thus in need of reconstructive relief) and giving allegiance over to the patient’s transgender “alter” over the physical patient and her social and medical history skew clinical assessments and lower clinicians’ barriers to providing experimental medical interventions. Girls become “boys”, not in reality, but in the way gender clinicians talk about reality. Elective double mastectomies on girls become “reconstructive chest surgery” on “boys”. Exploratory therapy to understand where distress over sex and gender originates becomes “conversion therapy,” something no ethical clinician would practice. Drastic, life-altering medical interventions — such as “pausing” puberty and all the cognitive, physical, and emotional development that goes along with it — become conceptualised as non-interventions on the one hand, “life-saving” on the other. In any case, language becomes detached from reality, skewing risk analysis.

This language of determined identities and autonomous “people” speak to the way affirmative clinicians see their role: deferring to patient self-identification and facilitating hormonal and surgical interventions to bring patients’ bodies in line with how they want to “wear their gender”, Meanwhile, activists inside the medical profession push for policy changes to lower the age at which minors can consent to transition — a priority of the forthcoming guidelines from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health — and remove requirements for parental assent. California legislators are on the verge of passing a bill that would equate denial of “gender-affirming care” with child abuse, a move advocates say would turn California into a “sanctuary state” for trans-identifying children.

Ask for stronger evidence or stricter safeguarding measures and you’ll get an earful about suicide and self harm: affirmation is a “matter of life and death.” (Never mind that researchers had to cook bad survey data at extremely high temperatures in order to make such dire claims.)

Affirmative clinicians frequently compare gender dysphoria to endocrine conditions such as diabetes. Take Johanna Olson-Kennedy, dismissing the need to explore the causes of a young person’s distress over gender: “I don’t send someone to a therapist when I’m going to start them on insulin”. Never mind that medical providers can test for diabetes (and monitor whether the treatment is working), while relying on patient testimony to initiate medical transition. Never mind that untreated diabetes kills. Analogies to cancer also abound, especially when clinicians need to justify serious risks like permanent loss of fertility and the very real possibility that patients will lead shorter, sicker lives after medical transition. Ask clinicians and they’ll tell you that gender dysphoria, like cancer, is a life-threatening condition. In the absence of supporting evidence, this is emotional extortion, nothing more.

Affirmative clinicians evade the possibility of regret and detransition. They prefer to talk about “gender fluidity” or “gender journeys”— “journeys” that may include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and elective double mastectomies. Journeys that could not and should not have been avoided, in other words.

Affirmative providers also cleave to a narrow set of explanations about why patients experience regret and detransition, pinning regret and detransition on lack of social support for the patient’s transgender identification. By placing the blame on factors outside the medical system, providers avoid the suggestion that regret and detransition may be the result of inadequate evaluation or inappropriate medical interventions. This interpretation also keeps patients firmly within the ideological framework that underlies affirmative care. Under this framework, a patient remains “really transgender”, even if external factors conspire to keep the patient from living out that identity. Even if the patient disavows their transgender identity entirely.

***

If affirmative providers’ belief in the exceptional “transgender” child bears out, we can make a strong case for affirmation. But if this belief is merely an article of faith, nothing more, clinicians risk doing serious harm to their patients under the banner of affirmation. In other words, if gender-dysphoric children and adolescents are truly exceptions to everything we know about identity formation, child and adolescent development, how humans make sense of distress and their susceptibility to social influence, the role of sexual orientation in gender dysphoria, and more, then affirmation may be the right approach.

But what if supporters of gender-affirming care are wrong?

What if children who identify as transgender are just that: children? What if they hurt, like other children? What if they’re trying to figure themselves out and learn how to navigate the strange world they live in, like other children?

What’s changed are the ideas and expectations that we’ve raised children on and the way we’ve turned them loose in an online world whose terrain no one has mapped. Many of these children have grown up with extended experiences of online disembodiment. They may not be free to run around outside with their friends but they’re free to roam the darkest corners of the Internet. Who knows what strangers and strange ideas they encounter there.

These children have grown up hearing a very new and confusing set of fairy tales about gendered souls that can end up in the ‘wrong bodies’. Adults who should know better — adults who do know better — have made these children impossible promises.

Children who identify as trans aren’t sages. They aren’t sacred. They haven’t been endowed with wisdom beyond their years. It’s not fair to treat them as exceptions to the safeguards we place around children, so that when they grow up and change their minds and ask why we let them do this, we say: You wanted it. You asked for it. You were so sure. What else could we have done?

There’s a way in which everything that touches trans must be exceptional — the children, the stakes, the feelings, the possibility of knowing anything for sure — because if these kids aren’t exceptional, then we threw everything we knew out the window. We didn’t ‘help’ exceptional children but harmed ordinary ones, struggling with ordinary challenges of development, sexual orientation, identity, meaning, and direction.

July 7, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

LOCKDOWN’S LASTING EFFECTS

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | July 5, 2022

As we move past the COVID era, the devastating effects of lockdowns are becoming apparent, from the current mental health crisis, to substance abuse spikes and developmental delays in infants.

July 7, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

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