You will recall the Panorama edition last November, “Wild Weather- Our World Under Threat”. Presented by Justin Rowlatt, it attempted to show that the world’s weather was getting worse because of global warming:
The programme highlighted four weather disasters, yet failed to offer even the slightest evidence that they were either unusual or becoming worse.
One of the four concerned a drought in Madagascar, which Rowlatt described as “the world’s first climate change-induced famine.”
Shortly after the programme was aired, a scientific study proved that his claim was nonsense, and that equally severe droughts had occurred there in the past.
I filed a complaint about this, only to be fobbed off with the response that they had been told this by the World Meteorological Organisation,WMO. I have now escalated my complaint to the Executive Complaints Unit, ECU, pointing out that since this was a major segment of the programme, the failure to check the actual data, which is readily available, was extremely shoddy journalism. Regardless of their excuses, a full correction needed to be broadcast.
The Panorama edition also included this opening statement by Rowlatt:
“The world is getting warmer and our weather is getting ever more unpredictable and dangerous. The death toll is rising around the world”
This is another lie. According to the same WMO:
Deaths decreased almost threefold from 1970 to 2019. Death tolls fell from over 50 000 deaths in the 1970s to less than 20 000 in the 2010s. The 1970s and 1980s reported an average of 170 related deaths per day. In the 1990s, that average fell by one third to 90 related deaths per day, then continued to fall in the 2010s to 40 related deaths per day.
https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/weather-related-disasters-increase-over-past-50-years-causing-more-damage-fewer
Another reader complained about this, and received this astonishing reply:
In other words, the BBC justify their claim because the cumulative number of deaths is rising!
Needless to say, he too has escalated to the ECU.
It is clear that Rowlatt is facing big problems here. He has already been rebuked by BBC News bosses about his lies regarding offshore wind costs last year. He is now facing two complaints over this flagship Panorama edition.
Regardless of the ECU decision, it is crystal clear that Rowlatt is far too emotionally attached to climate issues on a personal level to be able to report accurately and objectively.
He should be removed from the climate brief.
March 30, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | BBC, UK |
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In 1990, a paradigm shift occurred in the development of new medicines and treatments. An idea so big, that it was supposed to encompass the whole of medicine. It was to start initially at the level of pre-clinical and clinical trials and work all the way through the system to the care and management of individual patients. This new concept for how medicine would be developed and conducted is called evidence-based medicine (EBM). Evidence-based medicine was to provide a more rigorous foundation for medicine, one based on science and the scientific method. Truly, this was to be a revolution in medicine – a non-biased way of conducting medical research and treating patients.
Evidence-based medicine
Evidence-based medicine is “the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients.” The aim of EBM is to integrate the experience of the clinician, the values of the patient, and the best available scientific information to guide decision-making about clinical management.
So, what the hell happened?
There is a big flaw in the logic of evidence-based medicine as the basis for the practice of medicine as we know it, a practice based on science; one that determines care down to the level of the individual patient. This flaw is nestled in the heart and soul of evidence-based medicine, which (as we have seen over the last two years) is not free of politics. It is naive to think that data and the process of licensure of new drugs is free from bias and conflicts of interest. In fact, this couldn’t be any farther from the truth. The COVID-19 crisis of 2020 to 2022 has exposed for all to see how evidence based medicine has been corrupted by the governments, hospitalists, academia, big pharma, tech and social media. They have leveraged the processes and rationale of evidence-based medicine to corrupt the entire medical enterprise.
Evidence based medicine depends on data. For the most part, the data gathering and analysis process is conducted by and for the pharmaceutical industry, then reported by senior academics. The problem, as laid out in an editorial in the British Medical Journal is as follows:
The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented. Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion.
This ideal of the integrity of data and the scientific process is corrupted as long as financial (and governments) interests trump the common good.
Medicine is largely dominated by a small number of very large pharmaceutical companies that compete for market share, but are effectively united in their efforts to expanding that market. The short term stimulus to biomedical research because of privatization has been celebrated by free market champions, but the unintended, long term consequences for medicine have been severe. Scientific progress is thwarted by the ownership of data and knowledge because industry suppresses negative trial results, fails to report adverse events, and does not share raw data with the academic research community. Patients die because of the adverse impact of commercial interests on the research agenda, universities, and regulators.
The pharmaceutical industry’s responsibility to its shareholders means that priority must be given to their hierarchical power structures, product loyalty, and public relations propaganda over scientific integrity. Although universities have always been elite institutions prone to influence through endowments, they have long laid claim to being guardians of truth and the moral conscience of society. But in the face of inadequate government funding, they have adopted a neo-liberal market approach, actively seeking pharmaceutical funding on commercial terms. As a result, university departments become instruments of industry: through company control of the research agenda and ghostwriting of medical journal articles and continuing medical education, academics become agents for the promotion of commercial products. When scandals involving industry-academe partnership are exposed in the mainstream media, trust in academic institutions is weakened and the vision of an open society is betrayed (BMJ ).
The corporate university also compromises the concept of academic leadership. No longer are positions of leadership due to distinguished careers. Instead, the ability to raise funds in the form of donations, grants, royalty revenue and contracts, dominates the requirements for University leaders. They are now must demonstrate their profitability or show how they can attract corporate sponsors.
As the US government, particularly NIAID, controls a significant amount of the grants and contracts of most academic institutions in the USA, NIAID employees also can determine what research is conducted and who is funded to conduct that research.
US government employees also control the narrative. Take for example the use of the media, CDC and the FDA to control the narrative about early treatment for COVID-19. By now we should all know about the corruption of the early clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine. On the basis of these faked studies, one of the safest drugs in the world was recommended to not be used in an out patient setting – most likely, in order to increase vaccine acceptance. Or how our government used propaganda to control the use of ivermectin by such tactics as calling it unfit for human use and labelling it as a “horse wormer.” All indications are that these efforts by the US government were to dissuade early treatment to stop vaccine hesitancy.
Beyond our government skewing evidence-based medicine for their own purposes, then there is the university system, which is more interested in generating income than creating a research program that is free from bias.
Those who succeed in academia are likely to be key opinion leaders (KOLs in marketing parlance), whose careers can be advanced through the opportunities provided by industry. Potential KOLs are selected based on a complex array of profiling activities carried out by companies, for example, physicians are selected based on their influence on prescribing habits of other physicians. KOLs are sought out by industry for this influence and for the prestige that their university affiliation brings to the branding of the company’s products. As well paid members of pharmaceutical advisory boards and speakers’ bureaus, KOLs present results of industry trials at medical conferences and in continuing medical education. Instead of acting as independent, disinterested scientists and critically evaluating a drug’s performance, they become what marketing executives refer to as “product champions.”
Ironically, industry sponsored KOLs appear to enjoy many of the advantages of academic freedom, supported as they are by their universities, the industry, and journal editors for expressing their views, even when those views are incongruent with the real evidence. While universities fail to correct misrepresentations of the science from such collaborations, critics of industry face rejections from journals, legal threats, and the potential destruction of their careers. This uneven playing field is exactly what concerned Popper when he wrote about suppression and control of the means of science communication. The preservation of institutions designed to further scientific objectivity and impartiality (i.e., public laboratories, independent scientific periodicals and congresses) is entirely at the mercy of political and commercial power; vested interest will always override the rationality of evidence (BMJ ).
Regulators (ergo the FDA) receive funding from industry and use industry funded and performed trials to approve drugs, without in most cases seeing the raw data. What confidence do we have in a system in which drug companies are permitted to “mark their own homework” rather than having their products tested by independent experts as part of a public regulatory system? Unconcerned governments and captured regulators are unlikely to initiate necessary change to remove research from industry altogether and clean up publishing models that depend on reprint revenue, advertising, and sponsorship revenue.
Some proposals for reforms include:
- Regulators must be freed from drug company funding. This includes the FDA funding -which must come directly from the government, as opposed to pharma fees, as now is the case. Tying employee salaries to pharma fees creates a huge conflict of interest within the FDA.
- The revolving door between regulators like the FDA, the CDC and big pharma (as well as tech/media) must stop. Employment contracts for regulatory government positions must have “non-compete” clauses whereby employment opportunities are limited upon leaving these regulatory agencies. Likewise, big pharma executives should not fill leadership positions at regulatory agencies.
- Taxation imposed on pharmaceutical companies to allow public funding of independent trials; and, perhaps most importantly, anonymised individual patient level trial data posted, along with study protocols. These data to be provided on suitably accessible websites so that third parties, self-nominated or commissioned by health technology agencies, could rigorously evaluate the methodology and trial results.
- Clinical trial data must be made public. Trial consent forms are easily changed to make this anonymized data freely available.
- Publication of data must be open and transparent. The government has a moral obligation to trial participants, real people who have been involved in risky treatment and have a right to expect that the results of their participation will be used in keeping with principles of scientific rigor.
- The government and it’s employees has a moral obligation to the public to conduct clinical trials in ways that are non-biased by industry.
- The Foundation for the CDC and the Foundation for the NIH, which runs clinical trials and studies for these organizations (while their boards are made up of pharma industry executives and employees) must be decommissioned. We have laws in this country whereby the government does not accept volunteer labor, or direct donations to influence government decisions. These NGOs are doing just that. These practices must be stopped. They are intentionally using these organizations to bypass federal laws concerning exertion of undue influence on federal decision making.
- Off label drugs must continue to be used by the medical community. The early treatment protocols, which have saved countless lives, have documented the important role that physicians have played in finding cheap and effective treatments for COVID as well as many other diseases. Let doctors be doctors.
- Scientific and medical journals must be stopped from taking monies from big pharma. This includes the sales of reprints, banner ads, print ads, etc.
- Government must stop interfering with the publishing of peer reviewed papers and social media. A free press must remain free from coercion from government. We all know countless examples, such as the Trusted News Initiative (TNI) and White House meetings with big tech to influence what is allowed to be printed. And the billion dollars spent by the US Government to promote these EUA/unlicensed “vaccine” products that do not prevent infection or transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This is a direct assault on our first amendment rights. It also skews evidence based medicine.
- Informed consent, one of the foundations of modern medicine, has been stymied by the FDA, NIH, the CDC hospitalists, big tech and social media. They have been hiding data and skewing results. When people can not get the information they need to make an informed decision, evidence-based medicine can not function correctly.
- The government and it’s employees must stop picking winners and losers. Evidence-based medicine requires a non-biased playing field.
- Industry concerns about privacy and intellectual property rights should not hold sway.
If we are ever trust and support the concept of evidence based medicine again, significant changes to the system must be enacted. The only question is… is our government and our HHS bureaucrats up to the job?
March 30, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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During the Covid-19 pandemic, tribal politics have pushed scientific discourse into the back seat. Scientists who provide their honest assessment of medical and public health data have often been subject to ad hominem attacks and slander.
When Left-leaning journalists defend the government’s pandemic strategies by falsely classifying opponents as Right-wing, it hurts the Left while boosting the Right. The latest example is an article in the New Republic with one of the most far-fetched personal attacks we have seen since March 2020 — a true accomplishment during a pandemic filled with logical somersaults.
The target is Urgency of Normal, a group of physicians and medical scientists arguing against the masking of toddlers and children. The group includes Dr Vinay Prasad, a physician, epidemiologist, and associate professor at the University of California in San Francisco. With colleagues at Harvard and the University of Colorado, he wrote the most thorough scientific review of the efficacy of masks against Covid. They concluded that “data to support masking kids was absolutely absent.”
The New Republic article is called ‘Why Is This Group of Doctors So Intent on Unmasking Kids?’ The straightforward answer is that the doctors concluded that there is no reliable scientific evidence that masks on children reduce disease spread alongside a strong presumption that they may harm some children. The New Republic dismisses this possibility, claiming that “the science is strong” that masks help to “quell the pandemic”, and that there is “‘little scientific disagreement”. The last point is self-evidently untrue given the participation by many eminent scientists in the Urgency of Normal itself.
The essay then goes full ad hominem, attempting to link Dr. Prasad to “libertarian” efforts by the Koch family to unmask children via a convoluted chain of supposed associations, each of which is weak and the combined effect of which is simply conspiracy (see below). It appears that the New Republic, once a fierce critic of Sen. Joe McCarthy, has now embraced McCarthy’s guilt-by-association techniques.
Dr. Prasad is an excellent epidemiologist, but to paraphrase the New Republic, it seems “that the days of listening to the epidemiologists are over”. They are not alone. The Daily Poster/Lever and Jacobin magazine have used similar ad hominem arguments to falsely “connect” lockdown opponents with the Koch network, falsely claiming that the two of us are “connected to Right-wing dark money”. Our closest and only financial “connection” to the Koch Network is to have worked for universities, Stanford and Harvard, which have received millions of dollars from Koch foundations, although unrelated to any of our own work.
In the summer of 2020, Jacobin magazine interviewed one of us about lockdowns and their devastating effects on children and the working class. Their reader’s reactions were illuminating. The public criticism from high-profile individuals was harsh, calling us Trumpian, among other things. But, we also received many private letters from Jacobin readers, thanking us for saying what they were thinking but did not dare to say in public.
Views on pandemic strategies do not map onto a simple Left/Right binary. In the United States, Dr Anthony Fauci’s lockdowns were implemented by both Republicans and Democrats, generating enormous collateral damage to education, cancer, cardiovascular disease, vaccination rates, mental health, and hunger, to name a few malign outcomes. More often than not, members of the working class were the hardest hit. In Europe, the social democrats in Sweden chose not to copy Fauci’s response to the pandemic. One contributing factor may have been that its prime minister came from the working class, having started his career as a welder.
Classifying those like Dr Prasad as “Right-wing” for taking different views on pandemic restrictions is only damaging to the Left. Instead of permitting the Right to claim full credit for opposing misguided Covid policies, the Left should rightly claim some of that credit — Dr Prasad is, after all, on the Left himself. Instead, publications like the New Republic seem intent, not merely on smearing scientists instead of learning from them, but on driving reasonable men and women to the Right.
The New Republic’s convoluted attempt to associate Dr Prasad with the Koch family, in full:
- Prasad ‘writes for the Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research.’ (The Brownstone Institute, with no Koch connections, has republished Dr. Prasad’s Substack articles without payments.)
- The Brownstone Institute’ advocates for a more libertarian approach to the pandemic’. (Brownstone is not a libertarian organisation. It advocates for a more scientific approach to the pandemic based on basic principles of public health. It has attracted writers from across the political spectrum.)
- The Brownstone founder ‘consults for the American Institute for Economic Research’ (AIER). (He is a former employee without current ties.)
- AIER ‘receives funding from the Charles Koch Foundation.’ (One grant only, which paid <1% of AIER expenses in 2018.) AIER ‘receives funding’ from the ‘Koch-funded public relations firm Emergent Order and Emergent Order which also aided the Great Barrington Declaration.’ (Neither is true.)
- ‘One Koch-backed group has been linked to school unmasking efforts.’ (A mother’s anti-mask letter was circulated by a women’s group with some Koch funding. In contrast, a Koch-backed group have funded the pro-lockdown Covid work of Prof. Neil Ferguson at Imperial College.)
Martin Kulldoff, Ph.D., is an epidemiologist, biostatistician, and a former professor of medicine at Harvard University. Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., is an epidemiologist, health economist, and professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Both are senior scholars at the Brownstone Institute and founding fellows at the Academy for Science and Freedom.
March 30, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | Human rights, United States |
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A civil rights group is suing the U.S. surgeon general and the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on behalf of three men who allege the government violated the First Amendment by directing Twitter to censor them for spreading COVID “misinformation.”
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) on March 24 filed a complaint against Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Columbus Division.
NCLA describes itself as “a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group founded by prominent legal scholar Philip Hamburger to protect constitutional freedoms from violations by the Administrative State.”
According to the complaint, between May 2021 and December 2021, Twitter temporarily or permanently suspended the accounts of the three plaintiffs — Mark Changizi, Daniel Kotzin and Michael P. Senger.
The lawsuit states:
“Mark Changizi, Daniel Kotzin, and Michael Senger each had or have Twitter accounts with tens of thousands of followers or more.
“Their Twitter platforms provided them with a social network, and an outlet to express their views, to hear the views of others, and to engage with detractors and fans alike.”
Twitter permanently suspended Senger’s account. Senger is a San Francisco-based attorney who was openly critical of COVID-related policies and of what he called “pro-lockdown propaganda” from China.
Twitter only temporarily suspended the accounts of Changizi and Kotzin. Visitors to the Twitter account belonging to Changizi, a well-known theoretical cognitive scientist, now see a warning stating “Caution: This profile may include potentially sensitive content.”
Kotzin’s Twitter account is active as of this writing, despite prior suspensions. A stay-at-home father, Kotzin is married to Jennifer Sey, the former president of Levi’s who recently stepped down from her position, alleging Levi’s executives bullied her after she spoke out against some COVID-related policies.
The lawsuit alleges the suspensions of the three men’s accounts are a result of the policies against “misinformation” announced by the surgeon general and HHS.
The lawsuit states:
“Outrageously, the U.S. surgeon general and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have directed social media platforms including Twitter to censor alleged ‘misinformation’ about Covid-19.
“The speech ban has included information the Government later conceded was true but that conflicted with the Government’s messaging on Covid-19 at the time.”
As reported earlier this month by The Defender, the Biden administration and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recently made statements contradicting earlier official statements and public pronouncements regarding COVID policies.
The lawsuit provides a timeline of federal government “intimidation tactics” aimed at stifling so-called “misinformation” about COVID on social media:
“On March 3, the surgeon general demanded that the tech companies turn over information about individuals who spread such ‘misinformation,’ a clear intimidation tactic that HHS has labeled a ‘Request for Information’ (RFI).
“Adding insult to injury, on March 3, the surgeon general issued his RFI, demanding that technology platforms turn over ‘information about sources of Covid-19 misinformation’ to the Government by May 2, 2022.
“In response to Government pressure, Twitter has permanently banned Mr. Senger, and temporarily suspended Mr. Changizi and Mr. Kotzin.”
According to the RFI, social media companies must submit such information posted on their platforms dating back to January 2020.
The complaint alleges Murthy and Becerra lack the statutory authority to issue such a request to private social media platforms.
The Defender previously reported on attempts by the federal government to combat alleged “misinformation.”
As stated in the RFI:
“Health misinformation — health information that is false, inaccurate, or misleading according to the best available evidence at the time — has been a challenge during public health emergencies before, including persistent rumors about HIV/AIDS that have undermined efforts to reduce infection rates in the U.S. and during the Ebola epidemic.
“But the speed, scale, and sophistication with which misinformation has been spread during the COVID-19 pandemic has been unprecedented.
“Recent research shows that most Americans believe or are unsure of at least one COVID-19 vaccine falsehood.”
The RFI outlines social media’s purported contribution to the spread of such “misinformation,” and the role such platforms can play in future pandemics:
“The digital information environment is a phenomenon that requires further research and study to better prepare for future public health emergencies. This RFI seeks to understand both the impact of health misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic and the unique role that technology and social media platforms play in the dissemination of critical health information during a public health emergency.
“The inputs from stakeholders will help inform future pandemic response in the context of an evolving digital information environment.”
According to the lawsuit, this RFI comes as part of a broader White House effort to stop the spread of “health misinformation” dating back to spring 2021, threatening Big Tech with antitrust proceedings over their enormous market share if companies did not provide the requested information to the government:
“In May 2021, the White House began a coordinated and escalating public campaign to stop the flow of purported “health misinformation” related to Covid-19.
“In a May 5, 2021 press briefing, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki stated that the President believed social media platforms have a responsibility to censor health ‘misinformation’ related to Covid-19 vaccinations, that by not doing so they were responsible for American deaths, and that the President believed ‘antitrust’ programs were in order to effectuate this end.
“In other words, if tech companies refused to censor, they would face antitrust investigations—or worse.”
The surgeon general and HHS later joined these efforts, according to the lawsuit:
“By July, the surgeon general and HHS ratcheted up the pressure by issuing an advisory on the subject, commanding technology platforms to collect data on the ‘spread and impact of misinformation’ and ‘prioritize early detection of misinformation ‘super-spreaders’ and repeat offenders” by ‘impos[ing] clear consequences for accounts that repeatedly violate platform policies’.”
It was during this period that Twitter banned or suspended the three plaintiffs.
Commenting on the lawsuit, Senger said:
“It’s difficult to overstate the federal government’s cynicism in pretending to respect the First Amendment rights of American citizens while explicitly working with a company whose CEO says it ‘is not to be bound by the First Amendment’ in silencing American citizens on the most widely-used platform for political discourse.”
According to the NCLA, the censorship advocated by Murthy and HHS strikes at the heart of what the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect — free speech, especially political speech, much of which has since been vindicated and proven accurate.
“[B]y instrumentalizing tech companies, including Twitter — through pressure, coercion, and threats — to censor viewpoints that the federal executive has deemed ‘misinformation,’ the surgeon general has turned Twitter’s censorship into state action,” the NCLA said.
The nonprofit said the government’s policy of “pressuring Twitter and other tech companies to censor the Plaintiffs” should be halted immediately, adding:
“The surgeon general does not have the authority to issue this demand. The statute only gives him the authority to implement measures to stem spread of communicable disease. The statute cannot reasonably be interpreted to allow him to order tech companies to censor individuals with whom he disagrees on COVID policy, or to demand that Twitter hand over information about such account holders without a warrant based on probable cause.
“Demanding social media platforms, including Twitter, to turn over information about users that the Government deems problematic constitutes a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
Civil rights attorney, writer and activist Jenin Younes, litigation counsel for this case, said, “The surgeon general apparently believes he can do whatever he wishes, even going so far as to commandeer technology companies to stifle the perspectives of those who differ from the government on COVID policies.”
Younes said Congress did not give Murthy the authority to “coerce social media platforms into censoring the voices of those with whom he disagrees,” and in fact, it could not have given him this power.
“The surgeon general’s demand has turned Twitter’s censorship into government action,” Younes said. “Thus, this viewpoint-based suppression of speech violates our clients’ First Amendment rights to free speech.”
Mark Chenoweth, NCLA executive director and general counsel, said:
“Surgeon General Murthy’s RFI is really a Request for Intimidation. HHS is a serial violator when it comes to abusing its statutory power.
“Incredibly, HHS is relying on the exact same statute to issue the RFI here that it relied on the past two years to justify its unlawful nationwide eviction moratorium.
“The Supreme Court finally shot down the illegal moratorium. NCLA hopes lower courts are quicker to act on this latest unconstitutional outrage.”
Incidents of social media censorship stemming from purported COVID-related “misinformation” have been plentiful over the past two years.
For instance, last year, Twitter banned former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson for publishing “COVID misinformation,” leading him to file a federal lawsuit against the platform.
The NCLA lawsuit does not directly target Twitter, instead, it goes after HHS and the surgeon general for strongly encouraging — or indirectly mandating — censorship policies on the part of social media platforms.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
© 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.
March 30, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, HHS, United States |
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For the past two years, I and many others have detailed the ways in which COVID-19 deaths have been overcounted to create the illusion of the pandemic being far worse than it actually is.
Now, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and individual states are backtracking on their death statistics, showing we were right all along. Deaths were initially exaggerated for political purposes, and now they’re being downplayed for the same reason.
CDC Removes More Than 72,000 COVID Deaths
As reported by The Defender,1 March 14, 2022, the CDC had removed 72,277 “COVID deaths” from the tally, including 24% of those attributed to children under 18.2,3 They claim a “coding logic error,” a faulty algorithm, had “accidentally” counted deaths that weren’t related to COVID. As reported by Udumbara:4
“Some of the pediatric deaths attributed to COVID-19, according to a search of the CDC’s Wonder system, include deaths where drowning or drug use was listed as the primary cause of death.”
Meanwhile, the CDC used the false death statistics among children to push for COVID shots for 5- to 7-year-olds. In November 2021, CDC director Rochelle Walensky cited that data to justify the recommendation to issue emergency use authorization for the Pfizer shot for this age group.5
Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that it took the CDC two years to realize this error. It’s simply not believable, and The Epoch Times has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for internal communications relating to the data change.6
Ironically, the adjustment comes on the heels of fact-checking articles “debunking” claims that COVID deaths have been overcounted. For example, in early March, Health Feedback claimed there’s “no evidence COVID deaths have been overcounted,” and that “the evidence suggests the opposite.”7 Yet here we are. Deaths were clearly overcounted, not undercounted. That fact check didn’t age well.
CDC Has Been Turned Into a Propaganda Agency
According to Dr. Meryl Nass, a member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee, the CDC is cherry-picking data to justify its public health policies, and when it gets caught, it simply blames its “outdated IT systems.” In a March 19, 2022, article, she wrote:8
“CDC is not a public health agency. It is a public propaganda agency that collects a massive amount of data. CDC marshals its huge data library to create presentations that support the current administration’s public health policies …
A 2007 Senate oversight report on the CDC noted the agency spent $106 million on the Thomas R. Harkin Global Communications (and Visitor) Center, and summarized its 115-page report with the following:
‘A review of how an agency tasked with fighting and preventing disease has spent hundreds of millions of tax dollars for failed prevention efforts, international junkets, and lavish facilities, but cannot demonstrate it is controlling disease.’”
Health Officials End Reporting COVID-19 Deaths
Curiously, three months before the CDC started changing its mortality statistics, the U.S. Health and Human Services stopped collecting data on hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 altogether. The HHS announced9 changes to the reporting requirements for hospitals and acute care facilities January 6, 2022. The new guidelines, which took effect February 2, note “The retirement of fields which are no longer required to be reported,” which include the “previous day’s COVID-19 deaths.”
What are they trying to hide? Are they stopping the flow of data to prevent examination and analysis? According to some, the HHS hospital data are among the best we have in the U.S., so ending that data collection doesn’t make sense. January 2021, Alex C. Madrigal, co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project, wrote:10
“In a series of analyses that we ran over the past several months, we came to nearly the opposite conclusion of other media outlets. The hospitalization data coming out of HHS are now the best and most granular publicly available data on the pandemic.”
An unnamed federal health official spoke with a reporter from WSWS,11 calling the move to stop reporting COVID-29 hospital deaths “incomprehensible.” The official added:
“It is the only consistent, reliable and actionable dataset at the federal level. Ninety-nine percent of hospitals report 100% of the data every day. I don’t know any scientists who want to have less data.”
Changing Definitions Justify the COVID Narrative
From the start of the pandemic, changing definitions have allowed authorities to manipulate data in whatever way they needed. Now, states are starting to change the way they define a “COVID death,” resulting in lowered mortality rates. In Massachusetts, for example, COVID deaths dropped by 3,700 after the state changed its definition to be in alignment with that of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists.12
As reported by CBS Boston:13
“The state said currently the COVID death definition includes anyone who has the disease listed as a cause of death on their death certificate. It also includes anyone who had a diagnosis within 60 days but did not have it listed as a cause on their death certificate. Under the new definition, the timeframe is changed to 30 days for people without a COVID diagnosis on their death certificate.”
For the record, counting someone who died of any cause as a COVID death simply because they tested positive within 30 days of their death is still a grossly inaccurate way of determining the true death toll from this virus, because we know PCR tests have a false positive rate of about 97% when run at 35 cycles or greater,14 as was the norm from the start.
Results From At-Home Tests Aren’t Reported
Case counts are also being adjusted downward. In mid-January 2022, the Biden administration started distributing half a billion at-home COVID tests to the American public,15 and the results from those are not being reported anywhere.16 As a result, case counts will be skewed downward. According to 13NewsNow:17
“… the fallibility of case counts is the reason health officials track several COVID-19 metrics, like hospitalizations, deaths, and now, even viral samples in the wastewater18 — metrics that do not necessarily rely on people to go get tested or report the results they get at home.”
And yet the HHS is no longer requiring hospitals to report COVID deaths, which is one of the metrics health officials are supposedly focusing on in lieu of tracking cases. Don’t get me wrong, PCR testing was a scam from the start and I’m not suggesting we should pay much attention to those data. The point here is that the tracking of COVID data has been fatally flawed from the start.
What they’re really trying to do is shift toward passive monitoring, starting with wastewater sampling.19 Eventually, the goal is to monitor every person’s biological processes in real-time, and this is part and parcel of the transhumanist Fourth Industrial Revolution and The Great Reset.
CDC Hides Data
To make matters even murkier, the CDC is also hiding data on COVID hospitalizations and the COVID jab. The stated justification for not making certain data public is that people are “misinterpreting” the data. In other words, the data show that the COVID jabs don’t work, and the CDC doesn’t want that to be widely known.
It has also collected data on the effectiveness of COVID-19 boosters, but for some reason has not included the data for 18- to 49-year-olds in any of its publications. “Coincidentally,” this is “the group least likely to benefit from extra shots,” the New York Times pointed out, adding:21
“Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots.”
COVID Has Served a Purely Political Agenda
Over the past two years, the pandemic has been used to usher in a range of radical changes that would never have been accepted were it not for widespread panic. It was used to implement illegitimate voting rules, which appear to have had an impact on the 2020 elections.
It was used to announce the urgent need for a “Great Reset” and a Fourth Industrial Revolution. It’s been used to strip people of basic human rights, and to justify radical environmental policies that will result in lower standards of living.
It was also used to abruptly transition the vaccine industry from conventional vaccine manufacturing using eggs to the use of risky gene transfer technology. The only thing the pandemic has not been used for is to make recommendations that actually improve public health. And throughout, data have been massaged and manipulated to justify the unjustifiable.
Now, it appears data are being manipulated yet again — this time to artificially end the COVID crisis so that the Biden administration can take credit for it during the upcoming elections. As stated in a February 24, 2022, letter from Impact Research, titled “Taking the Win Over COVID-19”:22,23
“It’s time for Democrats to take credit for ending the COVID crisis phase of the COVID war, point to important victories like vaccine distribution and providing economic stability for Americans, and fully enter the rebuilding phase that comes after any war. Below we lay out some strategic thoughts for Democrats positioning themselves on COVID-19 …”
Strategic positioning includes declaring the crisis phase over; pushing for “feeling and acting more normal;” and taking the side of people who are burned out on COVID and don’t want to hear about it anymore. Not setting a standard of zero COVID as the “victory condition,” and to “stop talking about restrictions and the unknown future ahead.”
“If Democrats continue to hold a posture that prioritizes COVID precautions over learning how to live in a world where COVID exists, but does not dominate, they risk paying dearly for it in November,” the letter states.24
Dr. Anthony Fauci perhaps did not receive this memo, as he is out there signaling that we can expect a return to COVID restrictions at any given point. In a mid-March CNN interview, he stated that “we need to be flexible” and “if we see a resurgence, we have to be able to pivot and go back to any degree of mitigation that is commensurate with what the situation is. We can’t just say ‘We’re done, now we’re going to move on.’”
Based on what we’ve seen so far, I wouldn’t be surprised if this “pivot” back into COVID crisis mode were to occur right before the midterm elections.
Sources and References
March 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, Covid-19, United States |
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In January 2020, at the very start of the pandemic, the New England Journal of Medicine published a letter that suggesting the possibility that covid could be spread by people who did not show any symptoms of the illness. This article was based on a single case report.
Germany’s public health agency, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), later spoke with the person mentioned in the case report, who was supposedly the asymptomatic spreader, and she clarified that she did have symptoms encountering the second person mentioned in the article. So, this case report, published in one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, was a false alarm. But no matter, the myth of asymptomatic spread was born.
On June 8, 2020, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that asymptomatic people could transmit covid. That same day, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead for the covid pandemic, clarified that people who have covid without any symptoms “very rarely” transmit the disease to others.
WHO then backtracked on their original alarmist statement one day later. Weeks later, Kerkhove was pressured by the public health establishment, including Harvard’s Global Health Institute, to backtrack on her statement that asymptomatic spread was very rare, claiming that the jury was still out.
Her original claim that asymptomatic spread was not a driver of the pandemic was correct, as is now clear. Given that no respiratory virus in history was known to spread asymptomatically, this should not have surprised anyone.
But the damage was already done. The media ran with the asymptomatic threat story. The specter of people with no symptoms being potentially dangerous—which never had any scientific basis—turned every fellow citizen into a possible threat to one’s existence.
We should notice the complete reversal that this effected in our thinking about health and illness. In the past, a person was assumed to be healthy until proven sick. If one missed work for a prolonged period, one needed a note from a doctor establishing an illness. During covid, the criteria was reversed: we began to assume that people were sick until proven healthy. One needed a negative covid test to return to work.
It would be hard to devise a better method than the widespread myth of asymptomatic spread combined with quarantining the healthy to destroy the fabric of society and to divide us. People who are afraid of everyone, who are locked down, who are isolated for months behind screens, are easier to control.
A society grounded on “social distancing” is a contradiction—it’s a kind of anti-society. Consider what happened to us, consider the human goods we sacrificed to preserve bare life at all costs: friendships, holidays with family, work, visiting the sick and dying, worshipping God, burying the dead.
Aaron Kheriaty, former Professor of Psychiatry at the UCI School of Medicine and Director, Medical Ethics at UCI Health, is a Senior Scholar of the Brownstone Institute.
March 28, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights, New England Journal of Medicine |
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Climate alarm is based on ambulance chasing commonplace events, making up fake statistics about them, and never permitting an honest scientist to weigh in on the discussion.
March 28, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video |
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I hate sleeping pills. I really hate them. The negative emotional response I get when I see them in a patient’s chart is much stronger than what I feel when I see pretty much any other drug. In particular, there is one class of sleeping pill that I really hate, and that is the weirdly named “nonbenzodiazepine”, which is basically a benzodiazepine (a highly addictive sedative drug) but which as been marketed instead as a sleeping pill. Common examples of nonbenzodiazepines are Imovane and Ambien.
Why do I hate them so much?
Well, because they’re used so irresponsibly by both doctors and patients. The big problem with these drugs is that they are absurdly addictive, and that tolerance develops after just days of use. So, while Imovane or Ambien may help you fall asleep a little bit faster, and sleep a little bit longer initially (the effect is actually quite marginal, less than half an hour), that beneficial effect is completely gone after just a few days or weeks of use.
What that means is that the amount of sleep you are getting is equivalent, after just a few weeks, to what it would have been if you’d never taken the drug in the first place. On top of that, you’ve now developed an addiction – if you don’t take the drug, your sleep will be much worse than it would have been if you’d never taken the drug in the first place. And once an addiction to a nonbenzodiazepine has developed, it is very hard to stop. Which is why so many people end up addicted to these drugs.
An elderly colleague once said to me that if you want to have a good life as a doctor, then you should refuse to ever prescribe addictive drugs to anyone, especially addictive sleeping pills. That way, the addicts will soon realize that they won’t get anywhere with you, and they’ll go elsewhere. Of course, that doesn’t remove the problem, it just shifts it on to someone else’s plate. But at least then you’re not contributing to the problem by producing new addicts.
Sleeping pills are basically band-aids. They do nothing to solve the underlying problem. If you have a sleeping problem and you take a sleeping pill, then even if the pill works, you still have a sleeping problem. Nothing has changed. What people need to realize is that there is no magic pill that can fix your problems for you. That is true for everything, not just sleep. A statin won’t fix your heart disease, a blood pressure lowering drug won’t fix your high blood pressure, and a glucose lowering drug won’t fix your diabetes. They’re all band-aids, and pretty ineffective band-aids at that. What you need to do, if you have a health issue, is to start taking responsibility for your own health.
There are antihistamine-based sleeping pills that aren’t addictive, it’s true, but they’re still just band-aids, and while they may help somewhat with sleep (the effect is pretty marginal, as it is for most other types of drugs), they interfere with sleep architecture and worsen cognitive performance, just like the addictive sleeping pills do.
If you have a sleeping problem, then first you need to ask yourself, what is causing it?
Is the problem alcohol? Well, then you need to cut down your alcohol consumption. Is the problem that you’re not physically active enough? Well, again, the solution is simple. Start moving more. Tire yourself out enough during the day that your body is ready to sleep at night. Is the problem anxiety about having to go to a job you hate in the morning? Change jobs!
And make sure you have good sleep hygiene. Avoid screens close to bed time. Sleep in a dark, cool room. Don’t get in bed until you’re truly tired enough to fall asleep, and if you can’t fall asleep naturally within 15 minutes, get up again and read a book until you are tired enough to sleep. Set an alarm and get up at the same time every day (even weekends).
If you have a sleeping problem and your doctor tries to prescribe you a sleeping pill, ask why they are prescribing it and if they think it’s really necessary. Most likely the reason is that they think you expect/want a prescription, and they don’t think it’s really necessary. Then ask if you can get a referral for sleep therapy instead. Unlike sleeping pills, sleep therapy really does work to improve sleep over the long term.
March 27, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular |
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This past week two left-leaning media outlets, MSN (via The Washington Post aka WaPo), and the always alarmed UK based The Guardian ran stories saying the Arctic and Antarctic, had experienced “unprecedented” high temperatures. These claims can’t be verified since they were the results from a set of weather model simulations, indicating variations of above normal temperatures for the regions, not actual surface temperatures measured by ground-based weather stations.
The Guardian headline was full of worry courtesy of author Fiona Harvey:
Heatwaves at both of Earth’s poles alarm climate scientists
Antarctic areas reach 40C above normal at same time as north pole regions hit 30C above usual levels
She writes:
Startling heatwaves at both of Earth’s poles are causing alarm among climate scientists, who have warned the “unprecedented” events could signal faster and abrupt climate breakdown.
At the same time, weather stations near the north pole also showed signs of melting, with some temperatures 30C above normal, hitting levels normally attained far later in the year.
At this time of year, the Antarctic should be rapidly cooling after its summer, and the Arctic only slowly emerging from its winter, as days lengthen. For both poles to show such heating at once is unprecedented.
They key phrase here is: “weather stations near the north pole.” The northernmost weather station is Alert, Nunavut and it is 817 km (508 mi) from the North Pole. That’s like trying to gauge the temperature in Indianapolis from a warmer temperature reading in Atlanta.
MSN/WaPo authors Jason Samenow and Kasha Patel had this flabbergasting headline:
It’s 70 degrees warmer than normal in eastern Antarctica. Scientists are flabbergasted.
The coldest location on the planet has experienced an episode of warm weather this week unlike any ever observed, with temperatures over the eastern Antarctic ice sheet soaring 50 to 90 degrees above normal. The warmth has smashed records and shocked scientists.
“This event is completely unprecedented and upended our expectations about the Antarctic climate system,” said Jonathan Wille, a researcher studying polar meteorology at Université Grenoble Alpes in France, in an email.
“Antarctic climatology has been rewritten,” tweeted Stefano Di Battista, a researcher who has published studies on Antarctic temperatures. He added that such temperature anomalies would have been considered “impossible” and “unthinkable” before they actually occurred.
Both articles mentioned “climate” in the context of blame or contribution to these weather events.
To the uninitiated reading about these “events,” it must surely seem like evidence the planet is on its way to being wrecked from global warming aka “climate change,” and that the polar icecaps are in danger of melting away to nothing.
The reality is entirely different.
The MSN article includes this graphic:
Figure 1 – the image that has scientists “flabbergasted.”
It always pays to read the fine print, and in this case the MSN caption for that Figure 1 image (when you click on it at MSN to enlarge it) is telling:
Simulation of temperature differences from normal centered over Antarctica from the American (GFS) model.
That’s right, it isn’t temperature that actually measured at the surface of that forlorn icecap, it’s a model simulation of temperature from a single climate model, the GFS model.
If we look at that same “model simulation” today, from the same source, all of the sudden that “flabbergasting” image is gone, and temperatures are frigid again as seen in Figure 2 below.
Figure 2 – The same model simulation, just 4 days later.
Once again, the media proves itself incapable of differentiating between short-term model simulations of a weather event from long-term evidence climate change. Indeed, the “flabbergasting” spike in temperature may very well have been nothing but a glitch of mathematics in the model, and not actual weather.
Verifying actual weather is difficult. There are very few actual surface weather stations on the eastern Antarctic icecap, and none at all at the North Pole. See more at this map.
In the Arctic, it is a similar story after last week’s alarming model simulated “heat wave,” temperatures are back to their frigid normal as seen in Figure 3 below:
Figure 3 – North pole temperatures on Tuesday March 22nd are at -30 to -40°C
Surface weather stations in both the Arctic and the Antarctic are relatively recent developments in meteorology. In the Arctic, the ice floats on the ocean. It is unstable, moves, and breaks up in the spring making it nearly impossible to keep a weather station in one place, much less operational. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) started deploying floating weather stations and web cams in 2002 at the North Pole, but gave up due to “funding constraints” in 2015.
In Antarctica, due to the extremely harsh conditions of temperature, blowing snow, and lack of sunlight to power solar cells, Automated Weather Stations (AWS) are few and far between. Plus, such weather stations have only been present in Antarctica since 1978. The harsh environment often buries these weather stations in snow, leaving them with faulty temperature data, or completely inoperable due to solar panels being covered. The AWS’s have to be dug out of the snow each year.
This is why meteorologists often rely on mathematical simulations of the atmosphere to “guess” the temperatures of the air at the north and south poles – they can’t always trust the actual data to be there or be accurate.
So, in summary we have these points to consider about Arctic and Antarctic weather data:
- We don’t have actual weather data in many places at the North and South poles.
- The weather data we do have may be compromised or intermittent due to harsh weather conditions affecting ground based weather stations.
- Compared to larger 100+ years of climate data for the globe, we have maybe 40 years of data for the poles at best.
Since we have at best 40 years of data and observations from the poles, is science capable of determining if weather events like the one modeled in Antarctica are “unprecedented” or not?
We simply don’t know if they are, because we haven’t been looking that long.
Indeed, science can’t say for sure if the brief spikes in temperature at the poles last week were real or simply a product of one flawed model’s simulation, a glitch in the numerical model output. Even if it were real, one brief spike in temperature is not the same as a long-term climate change, which is defined as a trend of 30 or more years of data.
Yet, somehow, climate scientists are “alarmed” and “flabbergasted” at a single day weather event simulated from a computer model.
Scientists (and journalists) that use those terms might be better off keeping a lid on their opinions until they have real data to confirm their “unprecedented” claims. Carl Sagan rightly opined, paraphrasing Laplace’s principle, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
These researchers, and the corporate media outlets which uncritically parroted their claims, have presented no extraordinary evidence that either Antarctica or the Arctic experienced an unusual spike in warming. Model simulations simply aren’t evidence.
March 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science |
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PATRICK Benham-Crosswell’s excellent article in TCW on Thursday stimulated a need to consolidate a few thoughts.
The concept of ‘man-made climate change’ has always been a complete falsehood. I used to think it was a simple scam that enabled governments to raise taxes and levies on prosperous Western societies; but it is now a much bigger, and more complicated, matter. Whether or not, back in 1992, with Al Gore’s book Earth in the Balance, our current situation was the planned destination, or whether or not other agendas have been piggy-backed on to environmentalism, we don’t know.
Two years ago we were presented with another ‘inconvenient truth’, that the government – indeed governments almost everywhere – were suspending our liberties ‘for a few weeks’. As March 2020 dragged into April and May, stuck in their homes, people began to do their own research. It became obvious to me that what was happening was not about a ‘deadly virus’, and I stated my belief was that vested interests were working to ensure that the temporary socialisation of our society and economy became permanent. Expressing this belief cost me many relationships.
In spring 2020, despite Johnson’s effective parliamentary coup to rule by decree, I did not believe that our government’s C-19 strategy represented those vested interests. By autumn though, I did. Dr Mike Yeadon and friends demolished the Corman-Drosten Paper on PCR tests. This dishonest paper asserted that PCR testing for C-19 was both valid and necessary, and we know that Hancock based his whole act and legal authority on there being legions of ‘infectious’ people around, all procured by PCR tests. Two of the signatories of the Corman-Drosten Paper, Maria Zambon (also a senior Sage member) and Joanna Ellis, are senior staff of Public Health England, so the British government knew full well that their strategy was based on scientific fraud.
At Christmas 2021 we learned that in spring 2020 our government certainly did not believe that C-19 was a deadly illness: they worked in offices together, celebrated birthdays and Fridays together, all in the face of the ‘worst viral pandemic since 1919’.
Nothing about C-19 has made any sense whatsoever. It was a purposely manufactured ‘crisis’ and entirely sustained by propaganda and massive government over-reach. For the past 25 years various viruses created problems that were dealt with quite quickly, and emergencies were normalised swiftly. Isn’t that one of the principal functions of government? To keep society calm, stable, well-managed and productive? So why was a cold virus, fatal only to 0.1 per cent of those who caught it, allowed to dominate our lives for two years? Two years in which the democratic values and legal freedoms that took centuries to generate have been well and truly stomped on, and the integrity of science trashed. Why have governments, health services and academics all around the world wilfully ignored the undeniable damage that the jabs have done? Why have they ignored the fact that the jabs never worked as advertised? Why have the media been complicit in this?
In WWII governments came down very hard on defeatism and fear-mongering. Anyone claiming the nation was doomed was arrested and faced a possible death penalty. With C-19, governments went out of the way to generate fear. With our own money, they bought the media, and created the illusion of a devastating ‘crisis’ needing radical solutions that only governments could provide.
Foolish people and lazy thinkers accepted this without question, especially as governments paid people not to work, and/or allowed them to ‘work from home’. What was for them not to like? In 2020 and 2021 a lot of people saved a lot of money – but they never questioned the true cost of submitting to regulation.
Governments abused their powers and trampled on freedoms, and in parallel, without too many people noticing, they proceeded to create digital systems that will enable them to keep the people subdued and manipulated for ever. In all probability, digital ID, health records and currency are nearly ready to be implemented; they are just waiting for the ‘right time’. What the signal will be and who will give it are interesting questions to ponder.
Governments’ responses to C-19 also created significant economic problems, all of which have been and will be disproportionately borne by small businesses and lower income households while making big business much, much richer. These economic issues have been compounded by what is happening in Ukraine. Nothing about this ‘crisis’ makes any sense either. It is clear that the West has been manipulating Ukrainian politics for over 20 years.
So, together with ‘pestilence’ and ‘war’, the other ‘crisis’ that has been rolling along for 25 years is ‘climate change’, or more accurately, the West’s source(s) of energy. Once again, there’s not much about the West’s renewable energy strategy that makes sense. That carbon dioxide is a ‘problem’ makes no rational sense. Power generation by means of nuclear technology [?], fracking and even creating energy from burning household waste makes perfect sense; yet all have been eschewed in favour of more expensive and damaging options, windmills and solar energy, the construction, maintenance and operation of which costs far more than the alternatives. They desecrate the environment and provide nowhere near as much energy as is required.
It is clear that we are all going to have to consume less energy than we do now. How this will be managed is another interesting question. It seems it will be possible only with coercion. Coercion? Impossible? Not at all – how easy was it for governments to ‘persuade’ people to get jabbed? How easy was it for them to get people to turn on their neighbour for not being jabbed? How easy was for them to make useless face masks a symbol of virtue and integrity? How easy has it been for governments to get people to believe that the Ukrainian government is a squeaky-clean ‘victim’?
When the power cuts come – and they will: why else has the government been pushing ‘smart meters’ for ten years? – watch out for the signs in windows that proudly claim, ‘Happy to sit in the cold and dark to save polar bears’ or ‘Don’t drive, save the world’ or ‘Proud to eat raw food so we don’t have to buy Russian gas’.
It’s been so easy for them to make new truths, which in turn must create deniers, who are unequivocal demons.
Ever wondered why we are being continually told that ‘racism’ is a huge stain on the world, and that footballers must kneel before every game? Why are we constantly being made to feel bad about being white? Why were Britons not allowed to continue the good progress in race relations that commenced in the mid-1980s, and saw Britain morph into a nation that was very comfortable with itself in the 1990s? Why has racism become a ‘devastating problem’, when we all know that our society is tolerant and benevolent?
Because governments use ‘racism’ as a method of dividing and conquering. Similarly, all the tripe about LBGTQ. It easy for governments to accomplish their prime task of economic devastation and the socialisation and total control over society, if people are too busy arguing about ‘micro-aggressions’, not feeling ’safe’, the ‘right to choose gender’ and why there aren’t enough black people playing cricket for England.
Those who ‘went green’ are the same people who insist that Britain is a ‘racist country’, the same people who voted ‘remain’ and demanded the result of a democratic referendum be overturned, the same people who hated Trump, declared that he would bring about disaster and were happy when a senile man became leader of the free world. They are the same people who wear masks and demand that you get jabbed, the same people who demanded lockdown regulation and cheered the £400billion spent on it all, the same people who are holding fundraisers for Ukraine. They are the same people who believe in the ‘toxic privilege of white males’ and the same people who believe that gender is not a matter determined by nature and science.
These are people who believe in the ‘greater good’; they are no doubt genuinely nice people, but they are wrong about almost everything. They have believed everything that the BBC and Guardian have told them for 25 years. Has anyone else noticed how every vox pop and interview with a sports star involves questions about ‘emotions’? Emotion is now the sole currency of television, it has become far, far more important than reason. Emotions can be manipulated, and so can people – think about all of those who spent Thursday evenings banging pots for the NHS (which had shut down). These people ceased to do their own reading and research, they stopped thinking critically and rationally, they feel guilty about being comfortably off and they have no qualms at all about sacrificing individual freedom and democracy if doing so justifies their beliefs and helps ’their side’ win.
The very fact that society – even the Royal Society – can entertain unscientific, and totally uneconomic, ideas about the climate, about viruses and the basic biology of gender, tells us everything about the situation we are in. Governments are manipulating everything, and a huge section of society has swallowed, or is too polite or afraid of being controversial, to stand against it.
In the not-too-distant future, it is highly likely that the ‘crises’ of pestilence, war and energy will create economic devastation. I guess that this will be the point where they impose their systems of control and universal basic income, and if you want your ‘income’, you’d better get a jab – yes, it will kill you at age 70, but it’s for the greater good. Our society will be socialised permanently, our lives will change for ever, and this will be cheered to the rafters by people whose mindset has been trained to ‘care’ about things other than their basic freedoms.
March 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, UK, United States |
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One of the most troubling aspects of the Government’s response to the pandemic was its complete disregard for ethics. It seems not to have occurred to the decision-makers that the instant removal of fundamental civil liberties required – and must always require – the most comprehensive ethical justification.
During the largely self-made crisis, the Government passed sweeping mandates with barely any serious reflection on the impacts on millions of people’s lives, and stubbornly refused to listen to a multitude of far more thoughtful, well-informed alternatives.
Inexcusably, it appears that the main reason the Government and its advisors neglected to consider ethics was brute ignorance – they didn’t think about ethics because they have no idea why it is important. To them ethics is at best a scarcely relevant adjunct to ‘following the science’.
Had they understood ethics – or bothered to ask people who do – they would have been able to approach policymaking in a properly balanced and effective manner.
There are several ways to include ethics in decision-making. Two of these are 1) to apply ethical standards and principles and 2) to deliberate holistically. Both can be undertaken simultaneously.
Ethical standards
A range of carefully considered ethical standards has been developed and fought for in the Western world over the past 70 years and more. Arguably the most fundamental of these is the principle of informed consent to interventions, established in both ethical theory and health care law. It is now regarded as essential that any health care professional – including public health professionals – must fully explain the range of possible interventions available and disclose the reasoning behind any recommendation they make. Anything less is either negligent or coercive.
Holistic deliberation
Beyond the application of fundamental principles, ethics may be seen as a thoughtful, wide-ranging decision-making approach which seeks to balance a variety of factors to reach reasonable conclusions. These conclusions will aways include both evidence and values. Taking one without the other is bound to lead to inadequate choices: the evidence cannot speak for itself and value judgements alone quickly become dogma.
The Government and its advisors failed woefully to take account of either understanding of ethics.
Any robust analysis of a personal or social problem requires the consideration of a range of ideas. However it seems that where public health is concerned, policies are routinely drawn up according to a single imperative – ‘we must reduce disease and therefore save lives’ – but of course this imperative itself requires ethical standards and ethical deliberation because, as we have tragically witnessed, trying to save lives in one way risks lives in other ways.
As soon as you start to think beyond the fear of infection to consider the bigger picture, there is a flood of specific ethical issues.
- Is it ethical to force businesses to close their doors?
- Is it ethical to cause so many people to lose their livelihoods?
- How is it acceptable to override basic human rights with so little public involvement?
- Is it ethical to close schools, particularly when the evidence that this will help control the spread of the virus is unclear? (In 2022 it is now clear that this made little or no difference to ‘stopping the spread’.)
- Do restrictions heighten social inequalities (it is easier to self-isolate in a comfortable home, it is easier to cope if you have a pleasant garden, it is easier to weather financial uncertainty if you have a secure career and savings)?
- Given that governments have borrowed many billions to weather the crisis, and this debt will have to be repaid, is it ethical to cause hardship and suffering to future generations in the interest of existing generations?
There are many other measurable harms that should have been considered. ‘Minimising death’ was only one of many possible rationales. Consequently, the Government’s stubborn failure to reflect in a professional, balanced way caused massive, avoidable damage.
Ethics is ultimately a matter of respecting thoughtful traditions grounded in compassion and human rights, and thinking as deeply as possible about the many effects your choices will have on other people. Ethics is the essence of civilised human co-existence. Over the past two years a handful of people, quite out of their depth, were able to dismiss ethics – along with previous well-documented Government pandemic planning – with what seemed like a mere wave of the hand.
We must ensure that this can never happen again.
Dr. David Seedhouse is an Honorary Professor of Deliberative Practice at Aston University.
March 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK |
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All this is a digression. The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men. How does one man assert his power over another? … By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?
George Orwell, “1984”
“We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld, or CNN.“
B.W. Powe
COVID-19 has magically disappeared.
After more than two years of non-stop bombardment with Covid “news”, there has been none at all in mainstream headlines for over a week. The media giveth and the media taketh away.
Through the immaculate erasure of the ‘Covid Crisis,’ those responsible for these harms are attempting to make us forget what they did to us, our families, and the permanent damage they caused to society.
Think back to what life was like two years ago and imagine if someone told you that a “health emergency” would require a crackdown on all social and economic life.
Remarkably, the public health orders moved quickly from “flattening the curve” and “slowing the spread” to containment, suppression, contact tracing, social isolation, quarantine, face coverings, de facto house arrest aka “lockdowns” (a prison/slave camp term), and mandated experimental injections.
In order to “keep us safe” government policies mushroomed from innocuous instructions into draconian decrees.
The limitation of the right to engage in basic economic transactions; the limitation of the right to freedom of movement; limitations on the right to practice religion; the suspension of the right to an education; the denial of the right to a livelihood; the removal of the right to receive or refuse medical attention; suspension of public meetings; suspension of juries; suppression of the right to freedom of expression; denial of the right to assembly; and much else became the new operating principles of “The Covid World.”
The institution of a bio-security police state was birthed according to health authorities and others the power to quarantine someone considered “infected” or simply to have been in contact with a purported “case.”
To make this appear necessary and acceptable, an intensive full-spectrum psychological assault on our sensibilities was implemented. Covid-19 was hyped as the ‘New Black Death’.
We were told by ‘important-looking people’ that millions will die, the entire planet is in danger, a global response is required and everyone must get in line with the program whilst “heroes” and “experts” take charge of this new global war to keep us safe.
Illogical catchphrases designed to hypnotize the public into a malleable mental state were repeated over and over in every media outlet, across virtually every social institution, and plastered throughout all walks of the public sphere.
“Flatten the Curve”, “The New Normal”, “Social Distancing” and “Follow the Science“ became the nation’s Covid shibboleths. Media bullhorns relentlessly blasted the doublespeak into the public psyche. Oxymorons and euphemisms dominated the contours of any and all “Covid-related” discourse.
Such linguistic manipulations were readily absorbed and seamlessly adopted by much of the public and became the Doublethink phraseology of the Covid Era.
Mantras of the Covid Era were followed by a fleet of psychologically disorienting and arbitrary ‘regulations’, ‘advice‘, and ‘guidelines’ which were quickly put in place, selectively enforced and subsequently changed.
No one was spared.
Children came under sustained psychological attacks, branded ‘super spreaders’, and were told to keep away from the grandparents lest they “kill granny.”
Operating in a fog of psychological trauma, everyone moved through a world devoid of smiles and laughter where faces were hidden by masks and smothered in cloth.
This barrage of brutalizing manipulations was designed to condition us to accept the tyrannical impositions of “The New Normal.” The emotional toll, because of COVID fear-mongering and media hysteria, caused the citizenry to become mentally tamed like institutionalized prisoners who would come begging for “a way out.”
The preordained and only “allowed” exit from this viral nightmare demanded that society embrace the magical “cure” of the “miracle” inoculation. A medical miracle promised to be so effective that it would be required year after year after year.
When not embraced it would be enforced.
One of the striking characteristics of the media blitzkrieg surrounding the Covid “pandemic” – or, to be more precise, the reporting of the “pandemic” – is how it so easily resembled the “War on Terror” or indeed, any war, when considered purely in terms of its effect.
Mask wearing became a patriotic duty. “Security theater” became a feature of everyday life. The vast carnage of Covid policies was sloughed off as “collateral damage.”
Lost in the sound and fury of this media bombardment were evidence, observation, and measurement– 3 of the key pillars of science.
These were replaced by make-believe forecasts, computer-generated estimates, or other not to be questioned ‘scientific metrics’ that hospitals would be over-run, mortuaries would spill into the streets and crematoriums would run out of fuel disposing of all the bodies.
Even as direct observation and real scientific data showed none of this to be true, the public health apparatus and media juggernaut ensured the public would not be exposed to such heresy.
A digital curtain of mass McCarthyite-like censorship descended upon this “Brave New World” of fact-free hysteria.
No amount of evidence could slow the propaganda machine which remained in high gear spitting out a non-stop stream of sanctimonious slogans and exaggerated death tallies.
The intended effect was widespread panic, resulting in a collective psychosis that negated all thought.
“We don’t have time!”
“We must act now!”
“Listen to the “experts!”
“Follow the science!”
“We don’t have the “luxury” of critical thinking!”
And most importantly:
“All who question the “official” narrative must be condemned.”
Put simply, Covid-19 was not an epidemiological event, it was a psychological operation.
Two years later, as bureaucrats and politicians wind down the Covid restrictions in order to quell growing unrest, we can be assured they will insist on retaining the “right” to re-impose them at will.
As long as “new variants lurk right around the corner”, public health bureaucrats and pandemic profiteers can invent the next “health emergency” to impose more shutdowns for any “viral event” that conveniently suits their political and financial aims.
While the Covid propaganda has vanished it is imperative we keep the mountain of lies under scrutiny and continue unveiling the massive corruption that defines the “Covid Era.” This is the only path towards justice and is necessary to defend against future episodes of “pandemic” hysteria.
Ultimately there can be no comprehensive debate and complete understanding of the devastating consequences of the ‘Covid Crisis’ policies without a historical and up-to-date analysis of the Medical Industry’s role in pushing socioeconomic and political agendas which benefit the ruling elites.
It is vital to understand that the public health industry is now directly tied to global markets and operates based on the demands of those financial conglomerates. Manufactured pandemics are now mammoth investment opportunities that increase the wealth of billionaires and further consolidate their power.
It is also necessary to recognize that the primary purpose of the medical industry is no longer the “art of healing”, rather as a financial instrument benefiting investors.
‘We the people‘ must also recognize that the Medical Industry has now been fully weaponized as a punitive system designed to process, dehumanize and control every single person in the system. Before our very eyes, we have seen up close how mere biological existence is criminalized by that system.
The magic act of Covid vanishing from media view and public perception is not due to any medical miracle or the natural trajectory of a virus losing its potency. It was performed by those who manufactured this reality and committed countless crimes, coordinated in an attempt to slip out the back door, avoid further public inquiry and escape any legal consequences.
Though the story of the virus is nearly over, the sorcery that created it has not been exorcised.
The urgent message that we must take from these past two years is that we are under sustained psychological warfare and have been for quite some time.
We won’t have truly won until it is universally established that Medical Freedom is not a negotiable commodity controlled by state bureaucrats, political opportunists, or the medical cartel.
Nothing has been won until the ideology that the state controls our bodily autonomy has been thoroughly repudiated.
This story is not finished until the individuals and institutions that deceived the public and censored and persecuted dissenting voices over the past two years are publicly held accountable.
This fight is not over.
Michael Bryant is a freelance journalist/activist and researcher who presently focuses primarily on issues surrounding health freedom. His work has appeared on HealthFreedomDefense.org
March 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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