By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | April 4, 2022
Another month has been added to the standstill in global temperature, according to accurate satellite measurements compiled by the University of Alabama and NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer (see above). The pause is now 90 months long. In fact a small downwards movement is now discernible, since the trend measured over the last 90 months is minus-0.01°C, which equates to minus-0.14°C a century. It must be noted, however, that such small movements, although widely used by climate alarmists in the upwards direction, are within the margin of error.
As I have noted in recent articles, the Spencer data has been kicked off Google AdSense for “unreliable and harmful claims”. The move demonetised Dr. Spencer’s monthly satellite update page by removing all Google-supplied advertising. Google says it will ban all sites that are sceptical of “well established scientific consensus”. Agenda-driven commentators almost invariably ignore satellite data, which has consistently shown less warming than surface measurements.
Satellite temperature measurements of the atmosphere are generally considered more accurate, because they avoid the urban heat distortions common to surface measurements. It is suggested that such measurements have been pushed higher over time as stationary measuring stations are enclosed by growing urban development. For instance, temperature measurements are common at busy airports. Before the planes arrived at Chicago O’Hare, one of the world’s busiest airports, it was rural orchard fields (as indicated by its IATA code, ORD).
Interestingly, however, the global temperature standstill is starting to show up in the surface record, as measured (above) by the Met Office HadCrut database. Here we see almost no movement over the last 96 months. The 0.04°C century rise is most definitely within the margin of error! But it would seem that the Met Office is failing to discuss these significant trends. This might be considered surprising, since in the U.K. we know that local temperatures have been plateauing for some time. The average temperature in the 2010s at 9.17°C was colder than the 2000s at 9.31°C.
Writing about the latest standstill in Watts Up With That?, the journalist and former political adviser Christopher Monckton described the pause as “one of the best kept secrets” in journalism. Monckton was a former lead writer on the Evening Standard and these days rarely minces his words. Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic dare not lose face over the politics of climate change, he suggested. “They cannot bring themselves to admit that they have been wrong, that they have been fooled, and that they have needlessly and expensively ended the free market in energy supply,” he added.
Two months ago, the seven-year satellite record was still showing a tiny warming trend with the Net Zero 1.5°C target achievable in 400 years’ time. Alas, for Thermogeddonites everywhere, even that small consolation is no longer available.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic‘s Environment Editor.
Thoughts about the significance and meaning of the Shanghai lockdown
eugyppius | April 5, 2022
Sooner or later, Zero Covid makes you crazy, and right now, it is making the Chinese crazy.
That is my theory about what is going on in Shanghai, which has descended into a mass panic over a relative handful of Omicron infections, imposing a harsh and destructive lockdown to stop a disease that is probably no more dangerous than influenza.
Let us rehearse some recent history:
Lockdowns and mass testing and contact tracing and masking are all Asian (primarily Chinese) policies, adopted en masse and with little forethought by western countries in Spring 2020. Our public health mandarins set aside their own planning and opted for Chinese mass containment instead, because they noticed the virus was not very deadly in Asia, and they assumed this was because whatever it was the Asians were doing was the thing to do. Mass containment is a worldwide delusional rain dance: Everyone hops about trying to coax water out of the heavens, copying whatever dance was current in the first place it started to rain.
Crucially, virology has a very primitive and inadequate understanding of how viruses actually circulate. Virological doctrine is that they ought to behave the same everywhere, but they don’t. Early wild-type SARS-2 strains spread far more slowly and were far less deadly in the Asia Pacific, and this had nothing to do with lockdowns or “SARS experience.” Japan started out by ignoring Corona more or less entirely, while South Korea set up mass testing and contact tracing operations straightaway, and both countries saw minimal mortality.
There are many theories about why SARS-2 hit Asia so softly. Probably, the Asian-Pacific populations enjoyed some kind of prior immune protection, which would explain why the later, immune-resistant variant strains of SARS-2 have coincided with higher mortality in the East.
But the main point is this: Countries which did well early in the pandemic got another kind of virus, the Zero-Covid kind. They adopted an eradicationist orientation; they believed their containment measures had succeeded, and the officials who had championed these measures ascended to new heights of prestige. This is what happened in China and throughout Asia, and it is what happened in Australia and New Zealand. To a lesser extent, it is even what happened in Germany. The next act of this play, is the return of SARS-2, the impending revelation that there was only ever the illusion of control, and a spiral of harsh suppression measures that everyone believes in because they seemed to work last time, even though they’re not working now.
We’ve spent many months speculating about Chinese reasons for locking down Hubei and then promoting lockdowns to the rest of us. While malicious ends shouldn’t be excluded, their behaviour in Shanghai points increasingly to official incompetence and stupidity. The Chinese government has almost surely spent two years sowing horror of Corona among its people, to defend its harsh actions in Wuhan and to collect accolades for its alleged Zero Covid success. Now they are going the route of other Zero Covid regimes. They will double down on worthless policies, until their failure becomes so overwhelmingly evident, that they give up.
Further considerations, developed mostly in the context of a recent conversation with a friend, who is sceptical of my thoughts here:
Is this not better understood as some sort of exercise in new authoritarian methods? I don’t think so, because the Chinese won’t be able to control Omicron, and whatever methods they deploy in their attempts to do so will just be discredited.
Did the Chinese then promote lockdowns to the West, simply out of good will and charity, because they sincerely believe in these policies? No. We may never fully understand their motives, but an important aspect, was probably the fear that the West would ignore Corona, nothing much would happen, and the Hubei lockdown would be discredited. These were policies that had been developed in the belief that China was facing a wider-scale version of the SARS virus from 2003. In early March 2020, it was clear that these fears were exaggerated. Evidently, this does not mean that the institutional (and perhaps also popular) momentum behind Zero-Covid policies vanished. In China, in Australia, everywhere, the lockdowners are empowered, as long as Corona appears to be under control. When Corona endangers this illusion, the lockdowners will fight powerfully to vindicate their policies, but sooner or later they’ll lose.
Doesn’t this destroy your prior hypothesis, that the Chinese escaped the mass containment dilemma entirely, by changing test criteria and perhaps taking other actions behind the scenes to ‘construct’ Corona out of existence? Maybe, but perhaps these aren’t mutually exclusive possibilities. As long as a given virus isn’t having any population-wide impact, it is possible to ignore it. Omicron spreads too fast to be ignored.
Do Chinese officials, with unique knowledge of SARS-2 origins, know something we don’t about the virus? Most of the SARS-2 genome has natural analogues, with a couple of odd tweaks, like the furin cleavage site. There’s not a lot of room for hidden functions in there, and mainland Chinese policies and science have never demonstrated special foreknowledge or awareness of SARS-2 features. If anything, the opposite is true: They overestimated the risk at first, and they seem to persist in this error now.
So you believe the West is stupid, and China is stupid, you just believe everyone is stupid but you I guess? I think institutions in mass society develop behaviours and even ideologies that are beyond the understanding of the individuals who participate in them. Our critical views of containment and mass vaccination are surely shared by many people throughout these institutions, who however find it in their best interests to promote quite different ideas, not reluctantly but even with enthusiasm.
Why is it always boring banal explanations from you? The extent to which Corona resists elaborate conspiratorial theories is a good sign that it is either an emergent phenomenon or epiphenomenal. The most compelling theories are those which cast Corona and containment as the unintended consequences of something else.
Swiss Policy Research | April 3, 2022
A Brazilian investigator may have identified the mechanism driving mRNA vaccine myocarditis. And the US CDC finally acknowledges the strongly increased risk in young males.
What is causing vaccine myocarditis?
What is causing post-vaccination myocarditis, and why does it affect primarily young adults, especially young males and athletes? It has been speculated that in young males, muscle blood flow may be higher, which may cause higher biodistribution of vaccine mRNA or spike protein. The mRNA or spike protein may then be absorbed by the heart muscle and cause inflammation.
But Brazilian investigator Flavio Cadegiani, who previously looked into the role of androgens (male sexual hormones) in covid, recently proposed a new and highly intriguing theory: Based on autopsy findings, Cadegiani noted that post-vaccination myocarditis appears to be very similar not to typical myocarditis (e.g. viral myocarditis), but rather to adrenergic myocarditis or catecholamine-mediated stress cardiomyopathy (i.e. heart muscle injury caused by catecholamines).
Catecholamines are a group of hormones that include, most notably, dopamine, adrenaline and noradrenaline. These hormones drive the “fight-or-flight response”, and their concentration is highest in young adults, especially in young males and athletes. Cadegiani notes that the adrenal glands (located on top of the kidneys) are amongst the tissues with highest production of spike protein from mRNA covid vaccines, which can cause local inflammation and may lead to a “catecholamine storm”, which is known to have a toxic stress effect on heart muscle cells.
Prior to covid mRNA vaccinations, this type of heart injury was seen almost exclusively in patients with a rare tumor of the adrenal gland (called pheo-chromo-cytoma). Cadegiani suspects that mRNA vaccination is more likely to affect adrenal glands than a mild coronavirus infection, especially in young and healthy adults.
Cadegiani (February 2022): Catecholamines are the key trigger of mRNA SARS-CoV-2 and mRNA COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis and sudden deaths. (ResearchGate)
New CDC study on myocarditis
In a newly published study covering data from 40 US health care systems and about 15 million people, the US CDC purports to show that “the risk for cardiac complications was significantly higher after SARS-CoV-2 infection than after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination for both males and females in all age groups”, which “supports the continued use of recommended mRNA COVID-19 vaccines among all eligible persons aged ≥5 years.”
But the actual data provided by the CDC tells a very different story.
First, the US CDC confirms that among males aged 12 to 17, the rate of diagnosed myocarditis or pericarditis after the second vaccine dose is 1 in 4,500 to 1 in 2,700, and in males aged 18 to 29, the rate is 1 in 15,000 to 1 in 6,600.
These values are significantly higher than anything previously acknowledged by the CDC, but they still only include cases diagnosed by a doctor or in a hospital. If undiagnosed and unrecognized (subclinical) cases of myocarditis and pericarditis are taken into acccount, the rate will likely reach about 1 in 1,000 in young males. Even an undiagnosed case of myocarditis can turn out to be fatal, as the many recent cases of athletes with sudden cardiac arrest have shown.
However, the CDC argues that the risk of diagnosed myocarditis and pericarditis is still higher after SARS-CoV-2 infection, viz. 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 1,500 in males aged 12 to 17, and 1 in 1,800 to 1 in 1,000 in males aged 18 to 29. But previous studies, both in the US and in Europe, have already shown that the incidence of myocarditis remained normal or even below average during major covid waves in 2020 and early 2021 and only increased during vaccination campaigns in 2021 (see chart below).
So what did the CDC get wrong? It’s a classic mistake (or trick): while the CDC speaks of “SARS-CoV-2 infections”, they in fact only captured positive tests and only within the health care system (i.e. at a doctor’s office or in a hospital). SARS-CoV-2 infections were not captured “if testing occurred in homes, schools, community sites, or pharmacies”, or, one may add, if no testing at all occurred. Thus, the CDC captured only a fraction of actual infections (perhaps 10% or even less), and they likely captured only the most severe infections (i.e. young adults who visited a doctor or a hospital).
(In a somewhat related development, the CDC recently reduced US child covid deaths by 25%, as these deaths, while testing positive, had nothing at all to do with covid.)
But the CDC made another basic mistake: not only is the risk of myocarditis/pericarditis after vaccination in young males higher than after infection (as already shown by several other studies), but vaccination doesn’t prevent infection, either, and there is still no evidence that vaccination reduces the risk of post-infection myocarditis in young adults. In other words, the risk after vaccination simply increases the already existing risk after infection.
To make matters even worse, the CDC study considered only the first two doses of covid vaccination, whereas some US colleges and universities have already mandated a third dose for their students, adding even more risk. In fact, a booster dose may well increase the total risk of myocarditis and pericarditis to more than 1 in 1,000 in otherwise perfectly healthy young males. And as a recently published cardiac MRI study has shown, heart abnormalities in adolescents with mRNA vaccine myopericarditis may persist for at least several months.
In conclusion, the forced covid vaccination of young and healthy adults and children may constitute the largest medical scandal, or medical crime, in modern history. Based on the currently available evidence, covid vaccination is only appropriate in people at significant risk of severe acute covid.
CDC (April 2022): Cardiac Complications After SARS-CoV-2 Infection and mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination (CDC/MMWR)
Figure: Myocarditis and Covid Vaccination in the Western US
eugyppius | April 4, 2022
On Tuesday, 29 March, virologist and foremost German Corona astrolger Christian Drosten went on indefinite hiatus from Coronavirus Update, his noxious state media podcast. The show was introduced on 26 February 2020, with Drosten as its centre. He starred in about 80 of its 113 episodes; from September 2020, he began alternating appearances with virologist Sandra Ciesek. Lest the oracular pronouncements of these luminaries be lost to history, Norddeutsche Rundfunk lovingly transcribed their utterances into a downloadable 1446-page document. There is every reason to fear that, one day, this monstrosity will be issued in print for the Scientific Faithful as a boxed set.
I confess that I’ve only listened to about 20 episodes of this bizarre exercise in propaganda. I can’t imagine how anybody could handle more than that. Probably never before in history, has there been a radio show so heavily promoted by the national media, that is simultaneously so devoid of content, and also so destructive to the cult of expertise, as something that can ever exist outside of politics or culture. For in all the ponderous hours that I listened, I never heard Drosten say anything that fashion-forward Twitter accounts, media pundits´and Tomas Pueyo hadn’t already said a little bit earlier.
Drosten was initially agnostic about the wisdom of closures, but after Merkel bought into containment, he preached the necessity of non-pharmaceutical interventions at every opportunity. In the earliest days, he didn’t think children and schools were all that important to infection dynamics; when school closures became policy, he developed a deep obsession with the virus spreading of children. No sooner had Germans elected a new, more containment-hesitant government in September 2021, than Drosten discovered a fresh interest in naturally acquired immunity, and suggested that infections in the vaccinated would be essential to building more robust immune protection.
Plainly, Drosten’s celebrity has been little more than a publicity exercise, arranged to provide scientific endorsement of whatever pandemic policies the German government alights upon. This what, in the end, all that following the science amounts to: Governments get to do whatever they want, so long as they first find some well-credentialed scientists to say that whatever they’re doing is what the science demands. This turns out to be a lot easier than securing popular or parliamentary support for policies.
Now, for follow-the-science government, not just any scientist will do. You need an especially authoritative Media Scientist, who meets public and journalistic preconceptions of how scientific authority is enacted and embodied. Thus, the German press has spared no effort in establishing Drosten in the minds of the regime faithful as one of the world’s most eminent scientists. A deceptively worded paragraph in Zeit, for example, gave rise to the pervasive myth that Drosten discovered the SARS virus in 2003:
Drosten completed his training at the Hamburg Tropical Institute, where he managed a scoop in spring 2003: In Frankfurt, a virologist friend gave him cell material from a doctor in Singapore who had contracted SARS. Drosten raced back to Hamburg in his old Opel Omega with the cell culture in a salt block and worked for 14 days, on hardly more than three hours of sleep per night, to identify the previously unknown coronavirus – thus making it possible to fight the deadly lung disease.
Drosten did not discover SARS. He thought the pathogen was a metapneumovirus; by the time he worked out he was wrong, American scientists at the CDC had published an electron micrograph of the coronavirus responsible. He was left to create primers for PCR tests to identify the new virus. Drosten mysteriously reprised his role as test developer in January 2020, when he developed the first PCR test for the novel Coronavirus responsible for viral pneumonia cases in Wuhan – precisely as China needed infection statistics that Westerners would find credible. This shady work laid the foundations for mass testing in the West, and remains his most significant contribution to science around the pandemic. He has also loudly resisted suggestions of a lab leak, going so far as to co-author an openly misleading paper about the likelihood that the furin cleavage site in SARS-2 originated naturally.
Like many people granted an artificial renown, Drosten has proved unworthy of it, and over the past two years he has given us many odd moments.
Very early, for example, he confessed to a strange fear of draft beer; to avoid viruses, he said, you should stick to bottles. More recently, he revealed a bizarre lack of metaphorical aptitude, claiming that anyone who believes he can train his immune system with infection, must necessarily also believe that he can train his digestive tract by eating steak.
In May 2020, he threw together a sloppy study arguing that children are just as infectious as adults. The purpose was to provide Merkel’s government with some “research” that would speak against reopening schools, but the paper was so bad, it drew critique from other virologists as well journalists at BILD, and couldn’t be formally published for a full year. As the controversy unfolded, Drosten avoided any open exchange with his critics and defended himself dishonestly on sympathetic media platforms.
Some months later, Drosten was invited to give the Schillerrede, a speech on the occasion of Friedrich Schiller’s birthday, where he embarrassed himself anew, claiming that Schiller would’ve been an avid mask wearer; and proposing, in an awkward allusion to Kant’s Categorical Imperative, a Pandemic Imperative, according to which everyone should live his life as if he had just tested positive for Corona and all his contacts are old and vulnerable.
While Drosten is a state media scientist who will say almost anything, on a few points he has been constant. Nothing has angered this small man more, than the Great Barrington Declaration, drafted by Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya. In the year and a half since its publication, he has resorted to various slurs, not always veiled, on the qualifications and abilities of its authors. His last tweet, posted on the day he recorded his final podcast episode, equates its publication with sabotage. Given the relative unimportance of the GBD, and its failure to end the catastrophic policies that Drosten and the other Corona astrologers have supported, his animus seems strange. I can only imagine that when you have been paid to lie, it is a humiliating experience, to find yourself confronted by more honourable colleagues, who can afford to speak the truth.
Now, Drosten will not podcast anymore. He says it is because he needs time for his research. I incline to the optimistic interpretation, that he is being deliberately retired from public view, lest he persist any longer as an eternal advocate of lockdowns and vaccination mania whenever the Corona news takes a turn for the worse. Whatever the case, it can be no accident that this happens precisely as most of the other restrictions Germans have endured for the past two years have come to an end. Masking, green passes, closures, and Drosten too – all of them were part of the same political program, the same system of social, cultural and intellectual strangulation, from which we have now been released.
By Robert Carnaghan | The Daily Sceptic | April 1, 2022
The addition of a fluoride, such as hexafluorosilicic acid or disodium hexafluorosilicate, to public water supplies has been recommended in a joint statement by the four Chief Medical Officers of the U.K. The Government’s Health and Care Bill, which has reached its final stages in Parliament, includes a small section to facilitate water fluoridation, which is now expected to be spread throughout the U.K.
Although water is already fluoridated in a few parts of the U.K. (mainly Birmingham), for nearly forty years no new schemes have been implemented since local opposition has managed to defeat them all. The Government is now determined to impose its wishes.
A recent press release said that “higher levels of fluoride are associated with improved dental health outcomes”, and that the “Health and Care Bill will cut bureaucracy and make it simpler to expand water fluoridation schemes”. The Bill’s explanatory notes state: “Research shows that water fluoridation is an effective public health intervention to improve oral health for both children and adults and reduces oral health inequalities.”
For about 70 years it has been claimed that fluoridation reduces dental decay, and that it is safe. Although there is abundant evidence showing that in fact it is neither effective nor safe, the proponents of fluoridation have long had the advantage of far greater funding than that available to sceptics.
Trials of fluoridation started in 1945 in the U.S. and Canada but, before any had been completed, and without any comprehensive health studies, fluoridation was endorsed as safe and effective by the U.S. Public Health Service. The American Dental and Medical Associations soon added their approval, as later did their equivalents in the U.K.
The original trials were studied by Dr. Philip Sutton in Australia who graduated with honours in Dental Science. Asked to examine them, he found they were of low quality, full of errors and omissions.
In Austria, Rudolf Ziegelbecker also studied the original fluoridation trials and found they did not show what had been claimed. Professor Erich Naumann, Director of the German Federal Health Office, said of him: “Your results have been accepted everywhere in Germany with the greatest interest and have increased the grave doubts against drinking water fluoridation.” Prof. Naumann added: “It is regrettable that the existing data on water fluoridation had not been examined earlier using mathematical-statistical methods. Otherwise the myth of drinking water fluoridation would have already dissolved into air long ago.”
In the U.K., pilot schemes started in the mid-1950s in four areas, all of which sooner or later abandoned the practice: Andover (1955-58), part of Anglesey (1955-92), Kilmarnock (1956-62), and Watford (1956-89). In 1957, Dr. Geoffrey Dobbs wrote in New Scientist that they “are now officially described as demonstrations of the benefits of fluoridation, not experiments, so the results are a foregone conclusion” and their purpose quite openly “promotional”. He added that the studies would gain enormously in value if those responsible were willing to submit them to impartial scientific assessment.
When the UK pilot studies started, it was officially stated that they should include “full medical and dental examinations at all ages”, but no medical examinations were done, and neither short-term nor long-term possible harms were explored. This lack of concern continues, with a general failure in fluoridated countries to monitor fluoride exposure or side effects.
In 2000, a major report by the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at the University of York concluded that, despite many studies over 50 years, “We were unable to discover any reliable good-quality evidence in the fluoridation literature world-wide”. Even among the 26 better studies on fluoridation and tooth decay, not one was evaluated as “high quality, with bias unlikely”.
In 2015, a Cochrane review added: “There is very little contemporary evidence, meeting the review’s inclusion criteria, that has evaluated the effectiveness of water fluoridation for the prevention of caries.”
When Israel ended fluoridation in 2014-15, partly because of health concerns, its Ministry of Health pointed out that WHO data indicated no significant difference in the level of tooth decay between countries that fluoridate and those that do not fluoridate.
A trial in Hastings in New Zealand was apparently so successful that it was widely reported as a classic case of the benefit of fluoridation, with tooth decay reduced by at least half. However, when New Zealand passed freedom-of-information legislation, two university researchers were able to access the original records, which revealed that the published results were fraudulent. One of those involved in running the trials was asked for an explanation but he did not even try to justify the published results.
Not only is there a great absence of good quality evidence that fluoridation significantly reduces tooth decay, there has, especially in recent years, been growing evidence that it is harmful.
In 2006, a major report by the U.S. National Research Council said that fluoride exposure is plausibly associated with neurotoxicity, gastrointestinal problems, endocrine problems and other ailments. It was also unable to rule out an increased risk of cancer and of Down’s syndrome in children.
In 2017, a team of experts in Chile, supported by the Medical College of Chile, concluded that fluoridation is ineffectual and harmful.
Fluoride occurs naturally in a few water supplies, but so does arsenic. A recent study from Sweden shows an increased prevalence of hip fracture in post-menopausal women associated with long-term exposure to natural fluoride at levels in water in the same range as used in some parts of the U.K. for artificial fluoridation.
About half a century passed before the declassification of hundreds of U.S. Government documents provided clues to the real reason for fluoridation. Much meticulous research by an award-winning investigative journalist, Christopher Bryson, resulted in his thoroughly documented book, The Fluoride Deception, showing beyond doubt the extensive fraud involved.
Bryson’s research revealed the strong connection between fluoridation and the Manhattan Project to create the first atomic bombs. Huge amounts of fluorine were used to extract the isotope of uranium needed. Workers suffered hundreds of chemical injuries, mostly from the gas uranium hexafluoride.
In 1943 and 1944, farmers reported workers made ill, crops blighted and livestock injured, with some cows so crippled they could not stand. When the war was over, farmers in New Jersey sued DuPont and the Manhattan Project for fluoride damage. In response the Government mobilised officials and scientists to defeat the farmers.
In 1946, the United States had begun full-scale production of atomic bombs, and the New Jersey farmers’ legal action was seen as a threat, because of the potential for enormous damages and a public relations problem, with more trouble likely if they won. The farmers’ legal action was blocked by the Government’s refusal to reveal how much hydrogen fluoride DuPont had vented into the atmosphere.
Dr. Harold Hodge defended the nuclear programme against the legal threat from farmers. He had the idea of calming the public’s fears by talking about the usefulness of fluorine in tooth health. In January 1944, a secret conference on fluoride metabolism took place in New York. Organised by President Roosevelt’s science adviser, James Conant, documents from it are among the first that connect the atomic bomb programme to water fluoridation and to the Public Health Service.
Manhattan Project scientists were ordered to help the contractors. They also played a prominent role in the fluoridation of the public water supply in Newburgh, New York, an experiment that began in May 1945. In 1947 the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission took over from the Manhattan Project.
Dr. Harold Hodge, the Project’s senior wartime toxicologist, became the leading promoter of fluoridation. He announced it was so safe that it would take a massive dose of fluoride to cause harm. (Some 25 years later, in 1979, he quietly admitted in an obscure paper that he had been wrong.)
A Committee to Protect Our Children’s Teeth was formed, with powerful links to U.S. military-industrial interests and their determined effort to escape liability for fluoride pollution. The aim was to transform the public image of fluoride from that of a dangerous pollutant to a beneficial prophylactic medicine.
This aim was achieved with the help of Edward Bernays, an expert in the use of psychological techniques to achieve “manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses” and “the engineering of consent”. Bernays advised the avoidance of debate: fluoridation was to be presented as indisputably beneficial; only the ignorant could object to it.
Reviews of Bryson’s book included one in the scientific journal Nature, noting that he “raises the stakes by reporting a great deal of relevant and often alarming research”, and describing the book as “thought-provoking and worthwhile”.
Publishers Weekly wrote: “Bryson marshals an impressive amount of research to demonstrate fluoride’s harmfulness, the ties between leading fluoride researchers and the corporations who funded and benefited from their research, and what he says is the duplicity with which fluoridation was sold to the people.”
Chemical & Engineering News stated: “We are left with compelling evidence that powerful interests with high financial stakes have colluded to prematurely close honest discussion and investigation into fluoride toxicity.”
Bryson found that, while the American Dental Association had previously opposed fluoridation, it changed its tune after receiving a large donation from an industrialist with a stake in the commercial use of fluoride.
A study of workers at a chemical company in Cleveland was used to promote the idea that fluoride reduces tooth decay. It said workers exposed to fluoride had fewer cavities than those not exposed to it. The report helped to shift public opinion. The secret version of the report, discovered decades later, stated that most of the men had few or no teeth, and that corrosion affected such teeth as they had.
As early as 1951 a confidential gathering of State Dental Directors in the U.S. was advised by Dr. Frank Bull, “We have told the public it works, so we can’t go back on that”. If it was difficult then, it must be very difficult now for prestigious dental and medical organisations to admit that the assurances of effectiveness and safety they have given for so long were at best mistaken and at worst fraudulent.
Among the various methods used to suppress adverse evidence and dissent have been mocking, silencing, sacking and denigration of scientists who threatened the official story. One of the earliest to suffer was Dr. George Waldbott, an eminent U.S. physician who was viciously maligned after reporting fifty cases of people made ill by fluoridated water, as established by double-blind tests.
Dr. John Colquhoun, a former supporter of fluoridation in New Zealand, was Chief Dental Officer for Auckland when he discovered and reported that fluoride was damaging children’s teeth. This was not what the authorities wanted to hear and he was sacked.
Dr. William Marcus was Senior Science Adviser in the Office of Drinking Water in the Environmental Protection Agency. He was sacked when he warned that research by the famous Battelle Institute showed that some forms of cancer could be caused by fluoride.
Dr. Phyllis Mullenix was the Chief Toxicologist at the prestigious Forsyth Dental Center, who discovered that fluoride is a neurotoxin that can adversely affect the brain. Following publication of her peer-reviewed study, U.S. Government pressure resulted in her being sacked and the institute’s toxicology department closed.
Often those whose research gave results unfavourable to fluoridation found that medical journals were hostile. Dr. Albert Schatz was a co-discoverer of streptomycin, the first effective drug for tuberculosis. When he found that infants in Chile had much higher death rates in fluoridated areas he sent a report in 1965 to the editor of the Journal of the American Dental Association who returned it unread.
The reluctance of many medical journals to publish adverse findings on fluoride resulted in the foundation of the International Society for Fluoride Research and its quarterly journal Fluoride. However, MEDLINE, the bibliographic database published by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, declined to index the peer-reviewed journal’s contents.
Dr. Richard Foulkes chaired a committee that recommended fluoridation in British Columbia. Later, a friend urged him to do his own research, after which he changed his mind and said: “My initial belief was based on information given to me by those in authority rather than on the basis of my examination of the facts.”
Dr. Hardy Limeback was Head of Preventive Dentistry at the University of Toronto when in 1999 he apologised for having promoted fluoridation. “I did not realise the toxicity of fluoride,” he said. “I had taken the word of the public health dentists, the public health physicians, the USPHS, the USCDC, the ADA, the CDA that fluoride was safe and effective without actually investigating it myself”.
It used to be claimed that fluoride works on the teeth from within and therefore that pregnant mothers should take fluoride for the sake of unborn children’s teeth. Now it is said that fluoride’s main effect is from the outside (topical, not systemic). Therefore, there is no need to imbibe it.
Water fluoridation is a blunderbuss that hits far more than the intended target. About a third to a half of fluoride that is ingested remains in the body where it accumulates, not only in the teeth and bones but also in the kidneys, pineal gland and the cardiovascular system. Kidney patients are particularly at risk from fluoridation.
The dose of fluoride a person gets in water is haphazard since people consume widely differing amounts. Bottle-fed babies get very much more fluoride than breast-fed ones, and the American Dental Association conceded in 2006, with little publicity, that “using water that has no or low levels of fluoride” should be considered when preparing formula milk for infants. However, neither an ordinary water filter nor boiling can remove fluoride.
Recent research also finds that fluoride damages children’s brains. For example, studies show a loss of IQ and increased symptoms of ADHD in offspring when pregnant women are exposed to fluoride at doses commonly experienced in fluoridated communities in Canada.
Leading scientists concerned about fluoride’s toxicity, and willing to speak out, include Dr. Philippe Grandjean (Harvard University: “Fluoride is causing a greater overall loss of IQ points today than lead, arsenic or mercury”); Dr. Kathleen Thiessen (“The principal hazard at issue from exposure to fluoridation chemicals is IQ loss”); Professor David Bellinger (Harvard Medical School: “It’s actually very similar to the effect size that’s seen with childhood exposure to lead”); Professor Bruce Lanphear (“Fluoride exposure during early brain development diminishes the intellectual abilities in young children”); and Dr. Howard Hu (“Fluoride is a developmental neurotoxicant at levels of exposure seen in the general population in water-fluoridated communities”).
No less important is the fact that fluoridation is treatment without consent. People without the resources needed to obtain alternative supplies of water for drinking and cooking are chemically treated, in effect compulsorily.
For more information see Fluoride Free Alliance U.K., Fluoride Action Network and Stop Fluoridation U.K.
The Defender | April 1, 2022
Moderna last week said it will seek Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for its COVID-19 pediatric vaccine, after announcing its two-dose regimen reduced cases of symptomatic disease by 43.7% in children 6 months to 2 years old and by 35.7% in children ages 2 to 6.
The company said its Phase 2/3 KidCOVE study of its mRNA-1273 in children “successfully met its primary endpoint.”
However, as Politico reported Wednesday, and as experts told The Defender, some doctors and scientists question whether Moderna’s clinical trial data will be sufficient for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to grant EUA for the vaccine.
Experts cited the trials’ low efficacy rates, small sample size and reliance on a research workaround called immunobridging as weaknesses that could hinder Moderna’s case.
“Given the other data that surrounds it, I don’t know that it’s a slam dunk that the FDA will move forward in terms of releasing it for emergency use,” Peter Hotez, professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology at the Baylor College of Medicine, told Politico.
“We’re still learning about the relationship between virus-neutralizing antibodies and effectiveness,” Hotez said, adding the FDA might need to raise its standards.
Experts also raised questions about the risk-benefit ratio of the COVID vaccines for an age group with a statistically insignificant risk of severe illness.
The FDA recently tabled Pfizer’s petition for EUA of its pediatric vaccine for infants and children 6 months to age 5, citing insufficient data on a third dose for children 2 to 4 years old.
Small trials hide injuries, experts say
Moderna’s trial was designed to analyze the safety, immunogenicity and tolerability of two vaccine doses in healthy children who were administered two 25-microgram doses 28 days apart, according to Clinical Trials Arena.
The sample size was small. Approximately 6,700 children were enrolled in the trial’s 6-and-under age group, including about 4,200 children between the ages of 2 and 6 and 2,500 children between 6 months and 2 years.
The trial also encompassed children in the 6- to 12-year-old age group, bringing the total to nearly 11,700 children.
According to Dr. James Campbell, professor of pediatrics and physician-scientist at the Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, adult vaccine trials typically look at larger sample sizes.
Campbell, who tackled dosage studies for children for the Moderna study, said, “Instead of having 30,000 to 45,000 people — half who get the vaccine and half the placebo — we’re enrolling more like a few thousand in each of these age groups.”
Toby Rogers, Ph.D., an expert in statistics and how they relate to vaccine trials, told The Defender that 6,700 participants makes for an undersized trial.
“Researchers would call this ‘intentionally undersized to hide harms,’” Rogers said. “And this is a standard trick that pharmaceutical companies do.”
For the Moderna study, there were about 3,350 participants each in the treatment and placebo groups. An adverse event such as myocarditis might happen one out of 5,000 times, Rogers said.
“If you have only 3,300 in the treatment group, you are unlikely to see that particular harm in the clinical trial,” he said. “And, if you do see it in the treatment group, the company has ways to kick that person out of the trial.”
Rogers added:
“Say you experience myocarditis and you call the hospital at midnight and get in the car and go to the hospital, you get kicked out of the trial because you are breaking their protocols. They want you to call their doctors and not the hospital. They do that pretty regularly.”
In context, trials for the polio vaccine had a million participants.
“And now we have trials that are coming in with just a few thousand participants. It’s bad faith. This is just the tip of a large iceberg,” Rogers said.
Moderna trials show vaccine fails to meet FDA 50% efficacy standard for EUA products
Moderna’s claim that two shots of its vaccine reduced cases of symptomatic disease by 43.7% in children 6 months to 2 years old and by 35.7% in children ages 2 to 6 means the vaccine falls below the FDA’s 50% efficacy threshold for EUA products.
“No one would argue that 40 percent protection is great,” Dr. Chandy John, a pediatrician at Indiana University, told The Atlantic.
According to Politico, Moderna officials said the regimen met a metric called immunobridging, meaning the pediatric doses produced the same immune response that’s been seen in young adults.
Bridging studies are used in lieu of duplicating large-scale efficacy trials. Researchers extrapolate efficacy results from one population to predict drug efficacy in another population, according to Bernard Fritzell in a paper published in Developing Biological Standards.
In practice, using immunobridging means that pediatric vaccine researchers looked at an older group from a previous trial, who received a different dose of a vaccine with different ingredients, and decided what level of antibodies in that group were enough to ward off COVID.
They then looked at the younger children’s group to see how many of those participants had that same level of antibodies — a process that is not predictive of an individual’s ability to fight off infections, Rogers said.
Rogers added:
“So moving forward, into this mythical future, we predict that this many kids with antibodies will be protected. If this was a legitimate way to do science, you’d never have to do clinical trials in kids, because you could just immunobridge from any population under the sun whenever you wanted to. If you get a clinical trial with zero effect, you are going to finesse it with immunobridging.”
Dr. Meryl Nass, an internal medicine physician with expertise in anthrax and bioterrorism and member of the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) scientific advisory committee, also criticized the practice.
“The term ‘immunobridging’ is simply a fancy way of saying we are going to use antibody titers instead of actual cases of disease prevented as our benchmark,” Nass told The Defender.
“And we will compare the antibody level in one age group to that in another, and if they are comparable, we will say the vaccine works in the new age group,” Nass said.
Nass said the FDA began accepting surrogate markers of efficacy in vaccines years ago for vaccines intended for rare conditions in which there were not sufficient cases to determine actual efficacy in the real world.
Nass said:
“This is simply not the case with COVID. There is plenty of COVID going around. For Moderna to claim the FDA should authorize its vaccine in babies and preschool children because the vaccine led to high antibody levels, when its real-world efficacy (and only against mild symptoms) was only 40% is a bad joke.
“The efficacy level tells you that antibody levels are a poor surrogate for efficacy and should therefore be ignored. Other parts of the immune system contribute to immunity besides neutralizing antibodies.”
Dr. Elizabeth Mumper, pediatrician, CEO of The RIMLAND Center and member of CHD scientific advisory committee, echoed Nass’ concerns.
“Emergency Use Authorization typically demands a 50% threshold of efficacy for approval,” said Mumper.
“Here, Moderna tries to get around their less-than-50% efficacy results by using a concept called immunobridging, meaning to show that children develop the same immune antibody response as young adults,” Mumper said.
“However, there are problems with assuming antibody response numbers correlate with clinical outcomes.”
Moderna also admitted its study was unable to assess the vaccine’s efficacy against severe disease, hospitalization or death for ages 6 and younger, as participants’ infections were mild or moderate.
The only adverse events the study reported were fevers — 15% of children had fevers higher than 100.4 degrees and 1 in 500 experienced a fever higher than 104 degrees.
Moderna did not disclose if any of the children who participated required hospitalization as a result of the fevers. It did reveal that adverse reactions were more frequently reported after the second dose.
Trials’ short duration, plus evolving variants raise questions
Critics also cited the study’s short duration, though Moderna said it will continue to monitor its participants for 12 months.
“Long-term adverse effects of the vaccine remain an open question,” said Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., senior research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
“Are we prepared to booster children every three or four months, since the protection from the vaccine is short-lived?” Seneff asked.
The Omicron variation affected the Moderna’s efficacy rates in children, an outcome the company claimed was “as expected.”
But the fact that the virus continues to mutate at a fast rate and the fact that kids 6 and younger are at low risk from COVID makes the vaccine’s use in healthy children questionable, Hamid A. Merchant, subject leader in pharmacy at the University of Huddersfield, UK, said in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Policy and Practice.
Merchant said:
“Currently deployed COVID vaccines were designed using the variant that was prevalent in early 2020 and the virus has significantly mutated since then; the breakthrough cases from [the] recent Omicron outbreak is a good example of the rapidly evolving nature of this virus.”
Research in the UK indicates more than 85% of children ages 5 to 11 years have already contracted COVID and have acquired natural immunity, Merchant added.
Kids at low risk of severe disease
Politico reported that even though the 5-and-under age group was more likely to be hospitalized for Omicron, children in this age group account for only 0.1% of the deaths from COVID and 3% of COVID cases in the U.S., according to CDC’s own data.
“According to data from most countries, practically no children under the age of 5 have died from COVID,” Nass said. “In the UK and Wales, over two years of the pandemic, only one child without comorbidities (a chronic illness) died from COVID.”
Nass added:
“While CDC claims over 1,000 children have died with COVID, CDC responded to a FOIA request from Informed Consent Action Network that it does not collect and analyze data on healthy children who have died from COVID in the U.S.
“This is hard to believe, but since the New York Times revealed that CDC hides the bulk of the data it collects on COVID, in part to avoid providing tinder to ‘antivaxxers’ regarding poor vaccine efficacy, it may be that CDC did in fact choose not to look at such data.”
A Johns Hopkins’ study that monitored 48,000 children under 18 who were diagnosed with COVID showed there were zero deaths in those without comorbidities. Another study in Nature came to much the same conclusion.
“Infants and toddlers do surprisingly well with Omicron,” Mumper said, adding:
“We know they have fewer ACE2 receptors in their noses, which may be protective. We know they have cross-protection from other infant viruses. We know the jab-generated B cell-specific spike protein antibody response is a very specifically targeted response, and not as broad as the natural symphony of well-orchestrated immune responses children usually mount.”
Rogers this week wrote the harms from COVID vaccines are catastrophic, and benefits are questionable:
“There are now 44,975 [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] reports of adverse events in children following Covid shots, a few of which led to deaths. These reports likely understate harms by a factor of 41 to 100.”
Nass also called out the issue of risk versus benefit for the young age group:
“If we are vaccinating kids to protect grandma, which a Moderna official suggested, it should be noted that that is not considered ethical under U.S. law. You cannot vaccinate kids, and have them take a risk for a marginal benefit to themselves because you are hoping to provide a great benefit to adults.”
Apparently, the majority of parents agree. The Hill reported only 25% of children ages 5 to 11 are vaccinated, even though the FDA authorized vaccines for their age group last October.
“I hope the FDA holds Moderna’s feet to the fire and demands very robust results,” Mumper said.
“The basic concept is: First do no harm. If a baby’s background risk with COVID is not significantly changed by an mRNA jab, then the shot is not justified. If the jab just prevents mild to moderate infections, is it necessary or desirable?”
EVEN IF THOSE MESSAGES CONTRADICT INDEPENDENT RESEARCH ON WHAT IS BEST FOR PATIENTS
By Alex Berenson | Unreported Truths | April 2, 2022
Australia’s march toward medical authoritarianism continues.
Doctors are now being told they could face discipline for saying anything that contradicts “public health messaging,” even if what they are saying is “evidence-based.”
They may even face investigations for “authoring papers” that health authorities do not like.
Unfortunately, I am not exaggerating.
Like all physicians, Australian doctors can face disciplinary investigations for medical errors or other problems. In Australia, those investigations are called “notifications,” a nicely Orwellian euphemism. Ahpra, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulatory Agency, oversees them.
On Feb. 28, a big Australian medical insurer warned physicians that to avoid Aphra notifications, they needed to “be very careful” not to contradict “public health messaging” in social media comments.
But the warning – although first mentioning social media – went even further. It also warned against “authoring papers” that contradicted the authorities’ favored views.
Further, even “views… consistent with evidence-based material” could lead to problems if they contradicted “public health messaging.”
The warning came from the Medical Indemnity Protection Society, which provides professional insurance coverage for doctors. Although these insurers do not speak officially for government agencies, doctors effectively cannot practice without professional insurance, so their pronouncements are powerful.
In other words, only a very brave physician in Australia would consider offering advice that’s not “consistent with public health messaging” anytime soon.
No worries, though, the public health authorities know best!
or go to
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More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
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