Why won’t Chris Packham have a real debate on climate?
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | April 25, 2024
On Sunday, the BBC did something unusual. It invited Luke Johnson, a climate contrarian, to join a panel with Laura Kuenssberg to discuss net zero. As followers of this debate will know, the BBC’s editorial policy unit issued guidance to staff in 2018 saying: ‘As climate change is accepted as happening, you do not need a “denier” to balance the debate.’ Although it did allow for exceptions to this rule: ‘There are occasions where contrarians and sceptics should be included within climate change and sustainability debates.’ Presumably this was one such occasion.
The other two people on the panel – Chris Packham and Layla Moran – are members of the climate emergency camp, so there was no pretence of ‘balance’. At one point, the exchange between Johnson and Packham became heated and when the latter invoked the recent downpour in Dubai as well as extensive wildfires in the ‘global south’, as evidence of the effect of anthropogenic global warming, Johnson challenged him to come up with evidence that extreme weather was caused by carbon emissions.
‘It doesn’t come from Toby Young’s Daily Septic [sic], which is basically put together by a bunch of professionals with close affiliations to the fossil fuel industry,’ replied Packham. ‘It comes from something called science.’ This was hailed by Packham’s side as a slam-dunk rebuttal of Johnson’s argument. The Canary wrote up the exchange under the following headline: ‘Chris Packham just humiliated Kuenssberg’s preposterous climate-denying guest.’ The London Economic, which describes itself as ‘a digital newspaper with a metropolitan mindset’, summarised it as follows: ‘With science on his side, Chris Packham was able to deliver a devastating put-down when challenged on the evidence of climate change.’
I can’t help thinking Packham’s ‘devastating put-down’ would have been more effective if it had been true. The people who put together the Daily Sceptic, a news publishing site I’ve edited since 2020, have no connections to the fossil fuel industry. If Packham and his allies are so convinced of the rightness of their cause, why invent reasons to discredit their opponents? A clip from the show including this claim was posted on Twitter by BBC Politics and retweeted by Laura Kuenssberg, getting, at last count, 845,000 views. And to think the BBC launched a multi-million-pound department last year to ‘address the growing threat of disinformation’.
What about Packham’s claim that ‘something called science’ provides all the evidence we need that extreme weather events are caused by burning fossil fuels? There’s really no such thing as ‘the science’, as in a consensus viewpoint among scientists that’s so incontrovertible no serious debate is possible. All scientific theories are just hypotheses and, as such, subject to challenge. Indeed, if it were illegitimate to challenge these theories, progress in science wouldn’t be possible. To pretend that the science of what causes extreme weather is ‘settled’ when it’s the subject of ongoing dispute suggests that Packham and his pals aren’t capable of having a proper grown-up discussion.
Full story here.
Toby Young actually understates his complaint, as there is no evidence that weather is actually becoming more extreme – something the IPCC admit.
It is very easy for these conmen to claim it is, and simply justify it with a statement that “scientists say”. But as Toby points out, they are unable to back it up with actual data and evidence.
The idea, fraudulently circulated by grant funded climate scientists, that global warming means extreme weather has always been by definition absurd. After all, does this mean that the Earth’s climate was ideal during the Ice Age, which would be the logical conclusion?
The simple fact is that there has always been unpleasant weather, storms, floods, droughts, and glaciation. If Chris Packham can provide evidence that these have all gotten worse in recent times, then let him present it.
If he can’t, the BBC should apologise for broadcasting false statements, exclude him from all future debates on climate change, and ban him from making any further such political comments if he wishes to remain as an employee.
‘A Dangerous Vaccine for a Nothing Disease’: U.S. Stockpiling Bird Flu Vaccines
‘Why is it called a biodefense project?’
By John-Michael Dumais | The Defender | April 24, 2024
With the recent spread of H5N1 bird flu to dairy cows in eight states — and the infection of a Texas dairy worker marking the second known human case in the country — public health officials are raising concerns over the adequacy and safety of stockpiled vaccines meant to protect against a potential pandemic, according to Barron’s.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) maintains bird flu is a low risk to humans — the infected dairy worker only contracted a case of conjunctivitis (pink eye) — and that there is currently no known mechanism for human-to-human transmission.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), avian flu is responsible for 463 deaths worldwide over the past 20 years. The CDC reports only two U.S. cases of bird flu, and both were mild. No Americans have died from the virus.
Still, government agencies and Big Pharma manufacturers are building their capacity for bird flu vaccine production.
The U.S. government holds three U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved H5N1 vaccines in its National Pre-Pandemic Influenza Vaccine Stockpile.
The vaccines, manufactured by pharmaceutical giants Sanofi, GSK and CSL Seqirus, all contain mercury, a known neurotoxin, according to product inserts.
The same companies — plus Moderna — are working to develop new bird flu vaccines.
Federal officials said they supply several hundred thousand doses within weeks and 10 million more using materials on hand, and expect to produce 125 million doses within four months.
Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, suggested the agency has a “pretty low threshold” to deploy the stockpiled vaccines.
“We believe that, if we needed to, [our vaccines] would be reasonably good matches,” Marks said on April 1 at the World Vaccine Congress in Washington, D.C.
Given that all stockpiled vaccines were made for an earlier strain of H5N1, it’s uncertain how effective they would be against the strains that are circulating now, former FDA scientist Luciana Borio told STAT News.
“The FDA-approved H5N1 vaccines — licensed in 2013, 2017, and 2020 — do not elicit a protective immune response after just one dose,” Borio said. Even after two doses, “It is unknown whether the elicited immune response is sufficient to protect against infection or severe disease.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) program told Barron’s the agency could “ramp up production to make enough vaccine doses to vaccinate the entire U.S. population.”
A portion of the stockpile consists of “chunks” of premade antigens — good for training the immune system against specific strains — and adjuvants, the ingredients used to activate the human immune system when vaccines are administered.
However, despite its assurances of rapid vaccine delivery, ASPR did not detail its plans beyond claiming it could vaccinate about 68 million people, or one-fifth of the country’s population — using the two-dose regimen — within four months of an outbreak.
Internist and epidemiologist Dr. Meryl Nass, appearing with James Corbett on the April 20 episode of “Good Morning CHD,” said, “You’ve got a dangerous vaccine for a nothing disease,” noting the low number of human H5N1 cases reported thus far.
“It’s supposedly for a life-threatening illness,” she said. “Of course, pink eye is not life-threatening,” she said.
“The whole purpose of bird flu is to make you think the pandemics are out there, they’re coming for you all the time, and you need them [the health bureaucracy] to save you,” Nass said.
Sanofi vaccine contains thimerosol, PEG
Sanofi’s H5N1 vaccine, approved for adults in April 2007, was developed from a virus strain isolated from a Vietnamese patient in 2004.
“Our egg-based vaccine supply would well contribute to support a global influenza pandemic response should it arise either from A/H5N1 or any other influenza strain,” a Sanofi spokesperson told MedPage Today.
Each 90 microgram (µg) dose includes influenza virus hemagglutinin, 500 milligrams (mg) of porcine (pig) gelatin and approximately 98 µg of thimerosal, a mercury derivative (equaling approximately 50 µg of mercury/dose).
Other ingredients used in the development of the vaccine include embryonated chicken eggs, formaldehyde, polyethylene glycol and sugar.
Polyethylene glycol, or PEG, has been linked to the anaphylactic reaction in the COVID-19 vaccines.
The product warnings cited adverse events related to the 1976 swine flu vaccine, which included Guillain-Barré syndrome and other neurological disorders such as encephalopathy, optic neuritis/neuropathy, partial facial paralysis and brachial plexus neuropathy, as well as vasculitis and altered immunocompetence.
The initial clinical trial, conducted by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, featured an experimental group of 452 healthy adults ages 18-64, of which 103 were given two 90 µg doses administered 28 days apart, resulting in 44% of recipients developing a protective immune response.
The other adults in the vaccine group received 45 µg, 15 µg or 7 µg doses. The product information does not indicate their immune responses. However, given that the 90 µg/dose version is the one stockpiled, it’s likely the lesser amounts were ineffective.
Experts at the time expressed concern over the large doses, compared to the standard 15 µg dose used in seasonal flu vaccines, according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
The trials didn’t include anyone under age 18, which would indicate that the safety and efficacy of the vaccine for this age group are undetermined.
GSK vaccine approved for 6-month-olds
GSK’s H5N1 vaccine, approved in 2013 for people as young as 6 months, was made from the same virus strain as Sanofi’s.
According to GSK’s package insert, each adult dose also contains the adjuvant AS03, made of 11.86 mg DL-α-tocopherol (vitamin E), 10.69 mg squalene (wrongly blamed for Gulf War syndrome, according to Nass) and 4.86 mg of an emulsifier called polysorbate 80. The insert also lists 5 µg of thimerosal, which equates to less than 2.5 µg mercury.
Other elements used in the production of the vaccine — and still present in the doses — include ovalbumin or embryonated hen eggs (at least 0.083 µg), formaldehyde (at least 12.5 µg) and sodium deoxycholate (at least 3.75 µg).
Pediatric doses contain about half the adult amounts of each ingredient, according to the product information.
In the clinical trial of about 2,000 adults 18 and older, 91% of those between 18 and 64 and 74% of those over 65 who received a two-dose (0.5 milliliters each) regimen of the GSK vaccine developed an adequate level of antibodies, according to the FDA.
The package insert warns of adverse events like Guillain-Barré syndrome, fainting and “cerebral vascular accidents” and notes one case of pulmonary embolism.
Three subjects developed thyroid cancer on days 21, 29 and 223 after administration. Two subjects developed polymyalgia rheumatica, two developed psoriasis, and one of each developed autoimmune hepatitis, celiac disease, cranial nerve 4 palsy, Crohn’s disease, facial paralysis and other symptoms.
A pediatric age group of 838 subjects ages 6 months through 17 years participated in a clinical trial. In addition to frequently reported symptoms of injection site pain, swelling, muscle aches, headache, fatigue, gastroenteritis, fever and other symptoms, serious adverse events included one report of a febrile convulsion and one case of alopecia within seven days of administration.
In a randomized control trial in eight countries outside the U.S. for children 6 months through 9 years old, one death was reported (day 42) along with one case of hepatitis and nasopharyngitis (day 385), three cases of appendicitis (on days 8 or 9) and one case of thyroid cancer (day 84).
Other adverse events included alopecia areata (2 subjects), glomerulonephritis (2 subjects), hypothyroidism (2 subjects) and idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (1 subject).
GSK recently said it could provide at least 200 million doses to governments worldwide in the event of a pandemic, according to Barron’s.
CSL Seqirus vaccine: 1 in 200 died during clinical trials
The most recent addition to the U.S. government stockpile of bird flu vaccines is CSL Seqirus’ Audenz for H5N1, approved in 2020 for infants and adults 6 months old and up.
The vaccine contains CSL’s MF59 adjuvant, which includes 9.75 mg squalene, 1.175 mg polysorbate 80, 1.175 mg of sorbitan trioleate, 0.66 mg of sodium citrate dihydrate and 0.04 mg of citric acid monohydrate.
Nass considers MF59 dangerous because it can stimulate autoimmunity. “This adjuvant has not been approved for most other vaccines,” she said. She noted that the FDA is willing to take more risks for a vaccine needed in a dire emergency.
Other ingredients from the production process include MDCK cell protein (at least 3.15 µg) and MDCK cell DNA (at least 10 nanograms), both from dog kidneys, cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (at least 4.5 µg) and ß-propiolactone (at least 0.1 µg).
Each 5 milliliter (mL) multidose vial contains 0.5 mL of thimerosal as a preservative, providing 25 µg of mercury per dose.
Fatality from the clinical trials included 11 (0.5% or 1 in 200) from the experimental group, compared to 0.1% or 1 in 1,000 for the placebo group.
In a trial with children ages 6 months through age 17, 8% of vaccine recipients developed upper respiratory infections within 21 days of vaccination.
Among the adverse events noted in post-marketing reports were swollen lymph nodes, swelling, anaphylaxis, Bell’s palsy, convulsions, demyelination, encephalitis and Guillain-Barré syndrome.
“So 1 in 200 died [and] you want to take this vaccine for a case of pink eye,” Nass said. “This is an example of how … one bad decision sort of goes and rolls down a hill and snowballs to another.”
New bird flu vaccines in development
As concerns mount over the effectiveness of stockpiled vaccines, pharmaceutical companies and government agencies are racing to develop new H5N1 vaccines better matched to currently circulating strains.
Barron’s reported that the U.S. government has been working with GSK, CSL Seqirus, Sanofi and Moderna to develop vaccines that better match the latest H5N1 strains.
GSK, recipient of multi-year pandemic preparedness contracts to supply a bird flu vaccine to the U.S., Canada, the European Union and the WHO, said it would be ready to supply 200 million doses globally, “updated with the latest circulating strains,” according to MedPage Today.
In October 2022, CSL Seqirus announced it was developing another vaccine based on the “pre-pandemic” H5N8 A strain, as part of ASPR’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) program.
The new vaccine also uses the MF59 adjuvant.
One of the surface proteins of H5N8 is reportedly similar, according to Barron’s, to the strain of H5N1 that infected the Texas dairy worker.
According to MedPage Today, CSL Seqirus said it could scale up production at its California facility — built in a private-public partnership with BARDA — to deliver 150 million vaccine doses during an outbreak.
Sanofi also partnered with BARDA in 2019 to “expand pandemic influenza preparedness” using the same recombinant technology as Sanofi’s Flublok Quadrivalent vaccine. Leveraging its existing technology would allow the company to more rapidly deliver a pandemic vaccine.
Moderna said in March 2023 that it planned to develop a bird flu vaccine, stating its COVID-19 vaccine was developed from its H10N8 pandemic flu vaccine research. Moderna didn’t mention the bird flu vaccine in its March 2024 announcements.
However, the company reported on its seasonal flu vaccine, mRNA-1010, saying it had “demonstrated consistently acceptable safety and tolerability across Phase 3 trials.”
“Early studies done by mRNA vaccine companies on seasonal flu are promising, which could be good news here since mRNA vaccines can be made more quickly than vaccines using eggs or cells,” said Borio.
‘Why is it called a biodefense project?’
Linking to a 2023 Global Biodefense article discussing BARDA’s work with CSL Seqirus, Dr. Peter McCullough tweeted on April 23, “Why is the bird flu (highly pathogenic avian influenza, H5N1) human vaccine a US @NIH @BARDA project with CSL? Why is it called a ‘biodefense’ project?”
The Daily Mail raised similar concerns about the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) collaborating with the Chinese Academy of Sciences — which oversees biodefense labs like the Wuhan Institute of Virology — to develop more virulent strains of bird flu viruses, ostensibly to aid in the development of vaccines.
The White Coat Waste Project disclosed details of the USDA-China program in a February post showing numerous research project agreements beginning in April 2021.
A bipartisan group of Congress members on April 12 sent USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack a letter stating, “This research, funded by American taxpayers, could potentially generate dangerous new lab-created virus strains that threaten our national security and public health.”
Dr. Richard Bartlett, an emergency room director and former Texas Department of Health and Human Services advisory council member, in the April 10 episode of “The Defender In-Depth,” suggested gain-of-function research on bird flu viruses may be responsible for the current outbreak or could cause a future pandemic.
“After everything we just experienced and all the loss of life and bankruptcy and damage to the economy, families destroyed with COVID, why would you continue gain-of-function research?” he asked.
Nass told Corbett she was skeptical of the push for bird flu vaccines. “Every single time we’ve had an emergency and vaccines have been rolled out quickly, it’s resulted in disaster,” she said.
Nass cautioned against relying on centralized solutions pushed by public health authorities.
“They want you only to be able to get the solution they have made for you,” she said. “They don’t want it widely distributed where you have agency to decide whether you want it for yourself or not. … Don’t be scared. This is a scam.”
John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Rumble Defies Global Censorship Trends, Takes Stand Against New Zealand’s Free Speech Crackdown
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | April 25, 2024
The CEO of Rumble, a free-speech YouTube competitor, says that global censorship levels are on the rise, but that what’s particularly noticeable are censorship demands coming from Australia and New Zealand – who seem to be following in the controversial, to say the least, footsteps of France and Brazil.
On the one hand, this is surprising, given these countries’ formal democratic provenance.
On the other hand, their actions over the last years, including site blocking at ISP level, constant demands for more stringent regulation to facilitate social media content removal, and even the draconian Covid – and post-Covid era measures, tell a different story.
Chris Pavlovski told Mat Kim that the FreeNZMedia channel has now become a deplatforming target in New Zealand, for reporting about leaked data from the National Vaccination Database, that a whistleblower, former Health New Zealand IT employee Barry Young, made available.
And the data Young gave to reporters and activists concerns Covid vaccine-related deaths and claims that these facts are being covered up.
For referring to Young, and referring to the data he provided to the public, a letter has been sent to Rumble to remove FreeNZMedia. It came from the National Health Authority.
However, Pavlovski said that the company has decided to refuse to do that, or to withdraw from the country, and will instead “challenge it and see what happens.”
Pavlovski went on to refer to this particular New Zealand case as “absurd” and “disgusting” – in that it bears resemblance to the Pentagon Papers. At that time, journalist Daniel Ellsberg emerged as a hero of free speech that was protected by the courts in the US.
But that was nearly 50 years ago, and things have clearly changed not only in faraway lands, but in the US itself, and whistleblowers face anything from deplatforming to life in prison.
Speaking about the case of Young, and FreeNZMedia, Pavlovski said that the whistleblower “has a statistics background, went through all the data, found the different batches of vaccines that had an irregular high death rate and published that, and gave out different interviews on doing it.”
Screenshot
Pavlovski said that he saw nothing that merits censoring the Rumble channel for basing its reporting on Young’s data, and called on the US State Department to “get involved immediately and start protecting US assets and businesses around the world.”
That would be an interesting turn of events, seeing as how the US treats those “assets and business” at home, where censorship is rampant; nevertheless, Pavlovski in this way essentially challenged them to react.
Andrew Bridgen – UK Parliament Speech On Excess Deaths – April 18, 2024
You can watch the entire debate here.
Mr Bridgen’s speech in full
Thank you, Mr Speaker,
We are witnesses to the greatest medical scandal in this country in living memory and possibly ever.
The excess deaths in 2022 and 2023 is that scandal.
Its causes are complex but the novel and untested medical treatment described as a “covid vaccine” is a large part of the problem.
I have been called an anti-vaxxer as if I have rejected these vaccines based on an ideology.
I want to state clearly and unequivocally that I have not. I am, in fact, double vaccinated.
Intelligent people must be able to distinguish between being anti-vax and pro-vax but against a product that a) doesn’t work and b) causes enormous harm to a small percentage of people.
I am proud to be one of the few members of parliament with a science degree. It is a great shame there is not more intellectual diversity here. Maybe if there was, there would be less reliance on the Whips Office’s briefings, more independent research and less groupthink.
I am used to raising issues in this House that no one cares about and no one wants to know about.
Nothing has been learned from the Post Office scandal.
Only two of the five MPs in the room when the Second Sight team were appointed, on my recommendation, to investigate the post office are still in the House of Commons. I am one of them. Michael Rudkin, the national sub-postmaster Federation Chairman who famously saw the live Horizon terminals in the basement of Fujitsu HQ was my constituent.
I have been fighting his corner in this House for many many years. Long before that scandal became national news. Long long before. I was mostly ignored.
I am being ignored again, this time on the issue of excess deaths.
Yet again, the official narrative is to deny, obfuscate, ridicule and silence dissenting voices.
I say to the House, and I say it with seriousness, this debate – and others like it proposed by me and others – are going to be pored over by future generations.
They will be genuinely agog that the evidence was ignored, that genuine concerns were disregarded and that those raising it were gaslit, smeared and vilified.
The excess deaths scandal bears an uncanny resemblance to the Post Office catastrophe
Both involve:
- Complacent public bodies
- Ministers unable to understand the technicalities and mouthing platitudes
- Malevolent corporations with a vested interest in silencing questions
- Lives ruined by greed, lies and corruption
- Most damaging of all is a culture of denial, obfuscation, secrecy and denigration
- Much of the harm was avoidable
You don’t need to have any scientific training to be horrified by officials deliberately hiding key data in this scandal.
The Covid-19 experimental ‘vaccine’ is a scandal that is happening right now, today, and it must end.
The Office of National Statistics used to release weekly data on deaths per 100,000 in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.
Now it doesn’t. No one will explain why.
The public has a right to that data.
There have been calls – from serious experts whose requests I have amplified repeatedly in this House – for what is called “record-level data” to be anonymised and disclosed.
This data will allow meaningful analysis of deaths after vaccination and settle the issue of whether these experimental treatments are responsible for the increase in excess deaths.
Far more extensive and detailed data has been released to the pharma companies from publicly funded bodies. Jenny Harries, head of the UKHSA, said this anonymised aggregate death by vaccination status is “commercially sensitive” and shouldn’t be published.
The public is being denied this same data.
Yet again data is hidden with impunity. Just like the Post Office.
You may remember Professor Dame Jenny Harries, who in July 2022, said that masking was a good idea – and I quote, “If I’ve got any respiratory infection it’s a good thing to do, and I think it’s a new lesson for the country.”
She earlier gave the following totally contradictory advice: “The virus will not survive very long outside. Many outdoor events, particularly, are relatively safe.”
On 11th March 2020 on the issue of masks, she said, “It’s really not a good idea and doesn’t help,” and “in some ways, you may actually risk catching the disease rather than preventing it.”
She was right then. What made her do a U-turn on all these critical points?
Professor Harries has also endorsed a recent massive change in the calculation of the baseline population level used by the ONS to calculate ‘excess deaths’. It is incredibly complex and opaque and by sheer coincidence, it now appears to show a massive excess in deaths in 2020 and 2021 and minimal excess deaths in 2023.
Under the old calculation method, tried and tested for decades, the excess death rate in 2023 was an astonishing 5%, long after the pandemic was over and when you would expect a deficit in deaths because so many people died early in previous years.
20,000 premature deaths are now being airbrushed away in 2023 alone with the “new normal” baseline.
Fear
What is even more shocking is the sheer number of mistakes and scandals in this ongoing horror story.
For example, in March 2020, the government conducted a consultation exercise on whether people over a certain age or with disabilities should have Do Not Resuscitate orders imposed on them, known as DNRs.
A document summarising the proposals was circulated to doctors and hospitals. This was mistakenly treated as formal policy by a number of care homes and GPs up and down the country who enacted it.
At the same time, multiple hospitals introduced a policy that they would not admit patients with Do Not Resuscitate orders because they thought they would be overwhelmed.
Many people died as a result who did not need to, as nurses did TikTok videos while their hospitals lay empty.
Another example:
Fear kills. It kills because people don’t seek needed medical care for fear of the virus, a virus which has a 99.8% survival rate.
It kills because it has been proven that increased stress can suppress the immune system or even be fatal in vulnerable people.
It kills because people who were trying to get care were told to isolate.
It kills because frightened staff were too eager to ventilate to reduce aerosols in the ward.
It kills because isolated, vulnerable and elderly people are abandoned by family and friends.
It’s not just patients who are frightened. Doctors are frightened too. Frightened for their careers. Frightened for their reputation. Frightened of the GMC. Frightened to do anything not prescribed by the authorities who set the protocols.
There have been many doctors and scientists who have bravely spoken out on this, risking their careers and livelihoods, people like Dr Aseem Malhotra, Professor Norman Fenton, Dr David Cartland and Professor Angus Dalgleish to name but a few. Not to forget all of the team at the Hart Group including Dr Clare Craig, who has been so instrumental in helping me put together this speech today.
Another example is that during Covid, doctors failed to call out a dangerous change in protocol. The average time to death from covid symptoms starting was 18 days.
It is a little-known fact that the body clears all the virus within around 7 days.
What kills people is that some people, especially the vulnerable, have an excessive immune response.
Doctors have been treating this for decades with steroids, antibiotics for secondary pneumonia infections and other standard protocols.
But, not this time.
Even though the virus was long gone, doctors abandoned the standard clinical protocols because covid was a new virus.
They sent people home and told them to take paracetamol until their lips turned blue.
Then they sedated them, put them on ventilators and watched them die.
It gets worse, the protocol was a binary choice between two treatment tracks. Once admitted, ill patients were either to be ventilated in intensive care or, if they were not fit for that level of care, they were to be given end-of-life medication including Midazolam and Morphine.
The body responsible for this protocol – NG163 which was published on 3rd April 2020 – is called the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence – NICE.
Giving Midazolam and Morphine to people dying of cancer is reasonable but they have a side effect. The side effect is that these drugs have a respiratory depressant effect.
It is hard to imagine a more stupid idea than to give people struggling to breathe, drugs that do that. Yet that’s what they did.
Why was the warning letter regarding the use of Midazolam in NICE guideline NG163 to the British Medical Journal on 19th May 2020 signed by two Professors and nine Doctors ignored? Especially as it would seem it’s a replica of Abolished Liverpool Care Pathway in dosages and combined use of Midazolam plus an opioid.
NG163 stated that a blanket start dose of 2.5 mg of Midazolam should be injected regardless of age, body weight and comorbidities, how can this be medically acceptable as results show titration was not possible at such a dose for many elderly and who authorised it?
Why was Midazolam then removed from the same updated guideline NG191 on 30th November 2023? (As it was removed is it now considered and admitted it was a mistake to ignore the warning of the inclusion of that specific drug in NG163)?
It’s now been confirmed by subsequent letters from Ministers to families that doctors and nurses should have treated the individual patient with their own knowledge rather than strictly follow NICE guideline NG163 (as suggested by Quince and Stephenson) so if the warning letter from 11 experts to the BMJ was correct is the blame with NICE, NHS England or individual doctors and nurses, should legal action find verdicts of unlawful killing?
I would like to pay tribute to the Scottish Covid Inquiry which is hearing extensive, heartbreaking evidence of the effect of this alternative protocol on real people, real lives and sadly real and unnecessary deaths. People scared. People angry. People dying. People gasping for their lives away who might have been saved.
I very much hope that the eventual Scottish Inquiry Report addresses in detail the NICE decision making on the alternative protocols for those with Covid.
All these deaths were ascribed by the government to covid as if no other factors needed to be investigated.
But this is one example of a scandal that if it wasn’t for the Scottish Inquiry would never be investigated and never learned from.
Anyone who raised this problem during the pandemic was smeared as a covid denier.
Even worse
NICE has now removed these alternative protocols from its website. All other old protocols are still there for historical reference.
Why have NICE removed this protocol from their website? Are they ashamed of the harm they caused?
They certainly should be.
What can we learn from this? Doctors don’t challenge what they are told. Protocols with no authors are distributed and doctors fall in line.
We need doctors who are prepared to put their necks on the line for the sake of their patients, but we don’t have them and the whole system is broken as a result.
Here is another example.
Not a single death certificate was written saying that death was due to the rare brain clots caused by AstraZeneca until the MHRA said there was a link. Then the death certificates started to trickle in.
That’s not the scandal.
The scandal is that doctors wait for authorities to tell them they could label a death as vaccine-linked before they will do it. They are afraid of being smeared or reported to the GMC.
In the meantime, the MHRA relies on the evidence from death certificates in order to identify a problem.
That’s the scandal.
It wasn’t until other countries and public and political pressure FORCED the MHRA to admit the link between vaccines and blood clots causing death that they finally admitted it. And THEN doctors started putting it on death certificates.
There is a stark contrast in how deaths and illnesses after vaccination have been recorded compared to Covid. After a positive test, any illness and any death was attributed to the virus. After the experimental and emergency-use vaccine, no illness and no death occurred. Both are totally unscientific approaches. That is why we have to look to other data sources – excess deaths to determine if there is an issue.
Safe and Effective
The fear deliberately stoked by the government promoted the idea of being rescued by a saviour vaccine. The chanting of the safe and effective narrative began. The phrase seems to have hypnotised the nation.
“Safe and Effective” was the slogan used to market Thalidomide.
After that scandal rules were put in place to prevent such marketing in future. Pharma companies are prohibited from saying “safe and effective” without significant caveats.
That didn’t matter this time because the media, the government and authorities turned into the pharma marketing department.
It is hard to now hear the word safe without the echo of “and effective”.
But they are not safe and effective. In March 2021, when the majority of UK citizens had already received these novel products, Pfizer signed a contract with Brazil and South Africa in which they said, “the long-term effects and efficacy of the Vaccine are not currently known and … adverse effects of the Vaccine… are not currently known.”
These so-called vaccines were the least effective vaccines ever. Is there anyone left under the illusion that they prevented any infections?
Yet, even the Prime Minister now has one eye on history.
When he was at the dispatch box on 31st January at PMQs, following my question, he could not bring himself to add “and effective” to his “safe” mantra that the vaccines were safe.
Why is the Prime Minister gaslighting the 163 successful claims made to the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme totalling an incredible £19.5m in compensation for harm caused by the Covid vaccines? Haven’t they suffered enough already? Those 163 are the tip of the iceberg by the way.
It should be noted that the maximum payment is £120,000. So each of those 163 got the maximum possible award, which tells you something perhaps.
That same compensation scheme paid out a total of £3.5m between 1997-2005 with an average of 8 claims per year. That’s for ALL other claims in the entire country for all vaccines.
So much for ‘safe’.
How about effective?
Even by 25th October 2021, the former Prime Minister and Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip even admitted that, and again, I quote, “It doesn’t protect you against catching the disease, and it doesn’t protect you against passing it on.”
Looking at the levels of the virus in sewage shows that the post-vaccine wave was in the same order of magnitude and duration as the previous waves.
Vaccines changed nothing. They were not safe. And they were not effective.
Those who imposed these vaccines knew full well they could never prevent infections in this kind of disease.
An injection in the arm cannot do that. Only immunity on the surface of the airway and lungs can prevent viral infection. Antibodies in the blood cannot.
In Dr Anthony Fauci’s own words, “It is not surprising that none of the predominantly mucosal respiratory viruses has ever been effectively controlled by vaccines”
He continued, “This observation raises a question of fundamental importance: if natural mucosal respiratory virus infections do not elicit complete and long-term protective immunity against reinfection, how can we expect vaccines, especially systemically administered non-replicating vaccines to do so”
The mantra of “safe and effective” has so brainwashed some people that we now have the outrageous situation where the loving mother of a 24 year old man, who had the mental age of an 18 month old has been threatened in court with jail time, by a lawyer charged with representing her son’s best interests, because she does not want him vaccinated.
He has had covid meaning he has the optimum possible protection against a subsequent infection already.
The judge has used the argument that Tom would choose to be vaccinated for altruistic reasons but the court has a duty to act in his best interests not the interests of society.
Altruism means taking vaccinations to help others. But, these vaccines do not protect others! They do not prevent infection. Why is our system persecuting this mother? What are they hoping to achieve?
Only a few days ago, the ABPI, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry rapped Pfizer on the knuckles for the sixth time and said their marketing practices had brought the industry into disrepute. They were asked to pay £30,000 in administrative expenses with no fine on top. The person heading the ABPI at the moment is also the head of Pfizer UK. The MHRA have a statutory duty to carry out this work and has handed the responsibility over to the industry itself. This is an outrageous conflict of interest.
Another drug produced by Pfizer was Paxlovid designed to supposedly treat Covid. It was approved in December 2021.
Pfizer this week revealed the trial results for Paxlovid that had been hidden for two years.
The study showed that Paxlovid did not work to reduce illness.
Worse still, it caused rebound infections in 25% of those treated.
Worse still it causes serious drug interactions and other side effects.
Will Pfizer be held accountable for this? I am not holding my breath.
Australia
But let’s return to excess deaths. The Australian government has launched an Inquiry into their excess death problem.
Australia is almost unique as a case study for excess deaths. They had the vaccine before they had Covid.
Their excess deaths are not so easily blamed on the long-term effects of a virus. Like us, they saw a rise in deaths that began in May 2021 and has not let up since. The impact was evident on the ambulance service first.
South Australia saw a 67% increase in cardiac presentations of 15-44 year olds which peaked in November 2021 before covid hit.
We saw a similar deeply worrying effect here too:
Calls for life-threatening emergencies in the UK rose from 2000 per day to 2500 per day in May 2021 and it has not returned to normal.
Queensland doctors called the problem a “ticking time bomb” in April 2021 and described a “flood of patients.” 69
By October 2021, despite it being springtime in Australia headlines reported on ambulances unable to drop off patients in hospitals that were at full capacity.67
Mark McGowan, Premier of Western Australia, said he could not explain the overwhelmed hospitals, “Our hospitals are under enormous pressure. This has been something no one has ever seen before. Why it is, is hard to know.”68
By April 2022, Yvette D’ath Queensland health minister said about the most urgent ambulance calls (“code ones”), QUOTE: “I don’t think anyone can explain why we saw a 40% jump in code ones… We just had a lot of heart attacks and chest pains and trouble breathing, respiratory issues. Sometimes you can’t explain why those things happen but unfortunately, they do.”70
Omicron caused excess deaths in Australia from 2022 onwards, however, there is a huge chunk of excess deaths which doctors have not been able to blame on the virus.
Could these deaths be caused by the vaccine? Very few dare ask, Mr Speaker.
Remember the warning from Kate Bingham, head of the covid vaccine task force, who said in October 2020 that vaccinating healthy people who have little risk from covid “could cause them some freak harm.”
Has there been some freak harm? The data on disability claimants would suggest the answer is yes! Both here and in the USA there was a rocket in the number of working-aged people unable to work because of long-term sickness. The increase began in May 2021. Thankfully these figures have stopped climbing here and in the USA in 2023.
The timing, or temporal link, suggests vaccines as the cause rather than the virus.
A rise in sickness and a rise in deaths that both occurred from May 2021 in Australia and in the UK despite their seasonal differences and despite their different covid trajectories is highly suggestive that vaccines are the underlying problem here.
It is important to remember how these vaccines were made. Traditionally the key to making a vaccine is to ensure that the pathological parts of the virus or bacteria are inactivated so the recipient can develop an immune response without the dangers of the disease.
In stark contrast, these so-called covid vaccines used the most pathological part of the virus in its entirety.
The harm is systemic because, contrary to what everyone was told, the lipid nanoparticles spread throughout the whole body after injection, potentially affecting all organs. At the time everyone was being reassured that the injection was broken down within the arm at the injection site, regulators knew or ought to have known of these problems.
Furthermore, there is now plentiful evidence that the drug results in continued protein production for many months, even years, in some people. The deaths, thus far have been predominantly cardiac. but there may be more deaths to come.
Cancer
Dr Robert Tindle is the retired director of the Clinical Medical Virology Centre in Brisbane and Emeritus Professor in Immunology.
This month Dr Tindle published a paper highlighting the multiple potential harms from the vaccines including harm to the immune system which – as with anything which disrupts the immune system – can potentially increase the risk of cancer.
There are other reasons to be concerned about cancer being induced by these vaccines.
Cancer is a genetic disease that arises from errors in DNA allowing cells to grow uncontrollably.
Moderna has multiple patents describing methods for reducing the risk of cancer induction from their mRNA products.
This risk comes from material interrupting the patient’s DNA.
It turns out that what we were told was an mRNA injection actually had very high quantities of DNA in it. This massively increases the risk of disturbing a patient’s own DNA.
Worse still the DNA that was injected contained sequences that were hidden from the regulator. This was no accident. Yet again crucial information was hidden with impunity.
Conclusion
The evidence is clear that these vaccines have caused deaths.
Despite this, they have been described as safe and effective.
But, for a small proportion of people, the vaccines have caused serious harm including death.
Neither are they effective. The vaccine does not prevent infection or transmission and when the data is looked at objectively, it does not prevent serious illness and death.
These are hard truths to face.
We must face them if we want to learn the lessons from the last few years.
I’ve been right before.
At some point that will be evident. Let’s not wait as long as the post office scandal before we admit it.
It is time to take the politics out of science and put some actual science back into politics.
So, Mr Speaker, I offer Members of this House the same opportunity which I offered the Prime Minister: ‘To be on the right side of history, the right side of science and on the side of the people.’
Sadly, given the PM’s compromised position regarding his investments in big pharma, he only dug himself an even bigger hole!
I wish I was wrong about the experimental vaccines but the evidence was overwhelming 18 months ago it is absolutely unequivocal now.
I call on this House to do the right thing and protect our constituents, even if it means standing up to the most powerful vested interest in the world.
From Bird Flu to Climate Snakes
By Breeauna Sagdal | Brownstone Institute | April 24, 2024
Seasoned veterinarians and livestock producers alike have been scratching their heads trying to understand the media’s response to the avian flu. Headlines across every major news outlet warn of humans becoming infected with the “deadly” bird flu after one reported case of pink-eye in a human.
The entire narrative is predicated upon a long-disputed claim that Covid-19 was the result of a zoonotic jump—the famed Wuhan bat wet-market theory.
While the source of Covid is hotly contested within the scientific community, the policy vehicle at the center of this dialectic began years prior to Sars-CoV-2 and is quite resolute in force and effect.
In 2016, the Gates Foundation donated to the World Health Organization to create the OneHealth Initiative. Since 2020, the CDC has adopted and implemented the OneHealth Initiative to build a “collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach—working at the local, regional, national, and global levels—with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.”
In the aftermath of Covid-19, the OneHealth Initiative began taking shape, due largely in part to millions of tax dollars appropriated through ARP (American Rescue Plan) funding.
Through its APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Investigation System) the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) was given $300 million in 2021 to begin implementing “a risk-based, comprehensive, integrated disease monitoring and surveillance system domestically…to build additional capacity for zoonotic disease surveillance and prevention,” globally.
“The One Health concept recognizes that the health of people, animals, and the environment are all linked,” said USDA Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs Jenny Lester Moffitt.
According to the USDA’s press release, the Biden-Harris administration’s OneHealth approach will also help to ensure “new markets and streams of income for farmers and producers using climate smart food and forestry practices,” by “making historic investments in infrastructure and clean energy capabilities in rural America.”
In other words, the federal government is using regulatory enforcement to intervene in the marketplace, in addition to subsidizing corporations with tax dollars to direct a planned economic outcome—ending meat consumption.
Climate-Smart Commodities – Planning the Economy through Subsidized Intervention
Under the recently announced Climate-Smart Commodities program, the USDA has appropriated $3.1 billion in tax subsidies to one hundred and forty-one new private Climate-Smart projects, ranging from carbon sequestration to Climate-Smart meat and forestry practices.
Private investors such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – who just committed $1 billion to the development of lab cultured meat-like molds, and meat grown in petri dishes, to
Ballpark, formerly known for its hot dogs but is now harvesting python meat, is rushing to cash in on this new industry, and the OneHealth/USDA certification program.
Culling The Herd – Regulatory Intervention in the Marketplace
Meanwhile, the last vestiges of America’s food freedom and decentralized food sources are quietly being targeted by the full force of the federal government.
The once voluntary APHIS System is poised to become the mandatory APHIS-15, which among many other changes, “the system will be renamed Animal Health, Disease, and Pest Surveillance and Management System, USDA/APHIS-15. This system is used by APHIS to collect, manage, and evaluate animal health data for disease and pest control and surveillance programs.”
Among those “many changes” that APHIS-15 is undergoing, one should be of particular interest to the public—the removal of all references to the voluntary* Bovine Johne’s Disease Control Program.
“Updating the authority for maintenance of the system to remove reference to the Bovine Johne’s Disease Control Program.”
In addition to removing references to the once-voluntary herd culling program, the USDA is also implementing mandatory RFID ear tags in cattle and bison.
According to the USDA/APHIS-15, expanded authority places disease tracing in their jurisdiction and the radio frequency ear tags are necessary for the “rapid and accurate recordkeeping for this volume of animals and movement,” which they say “is not achievable without electronic systems.”
The notice clearly spells out that RFID tags “may be read without restraint as the animal goes past an electronic reader.”
“Once the reader scans the tag, the electronically collected tag number can be rapidly and accurately transmitted from the reader to a connected electronic database.”
However, industry leaders and lawmakers alike have said the database will be used to track vaccination history and movement, and that this data may be used to impact the market rate of cattle and bison at the time of processing.
Centralized Control of Processing/Production via Public-Private Partnership Agreements
In addition to the vast new authority of the USDA funded through the OneHealth Initiative, and the ARP, the EPA has also created its own unique set of regulatory burdens upon the entire meat industry.
On March 25, 2024, the EPA finalized a new set of Clean Water Act rule changes to limit nitrogen and phosphorus “pollutants” in downstream water treatment facilities from processing facilities. While the EPA’s interpretation of authority and jurisdiction over wastewater is concerning long-term, the broader context of consolidated processing under four multinational meat-packing companies is of much greater concern for the immediate future.
With few exceptions, in the United States it is illegal to sell meat without a USDA certification. Currently, the only way to access USDA certification is through a USDA-certified processing facility.
According to the EPA, the new rules will impact up to 845 processing facilities nationwide, unless facilities drastically limit the amount of meat they process each year.
With processing capabilities being the number one barrier to market for livestock producers, and billions of dollars in grants being awarded to Climate-Smart food substitutes, the amount of government intervention into the marketplace becomes very clear.
The United States, once a consumer-demand free market society, is currently witnessing the use of government force, and intervention tactics to steer and manipulate the marketplace. Similar to 1930’s Italy, this is being achieved by the state within the state, through the use of selectionism, protectionism, and economic planning between public-private partnership agreements.
The long-term and unavoidable problem with economic fascism is that it leads to authoritarian and centralized control, from which escape is impossible.
As each industry becomes centralized and consolidated under the few, consumer choice simultaneously disappears. As choice disappears, so does the ability of the individual to meet their specific and unique needs.
Eventually, the individual no longer serves a role outside of its usefulness to the state—the final exhale before the last python squeeze.
Stop Hassling the Hoffe
An Urgent Plea to All Readers for Help
BY JUSTUS R. HOPE | APRIL 23, 2024
Few stories are more compelling than the tale of Dr. Charles Hoffe. He is a Canadian small-town physician who clings to old-fashioned values. Dr. Hoffe enjoys treating patients even if he loses money doing so because Medicine is a calling for him, not a way to get rich.
His father came to visit and told him that he would never make a name for himself in this backwoods – yet charming – town of Lytton located in the heart of British Columbia. Charles explained that his goal was not to glorify himself, but instead to care for others. He enjoyed stitching the fingers of locals whose skill saws had slipped. He found satisfaction in bringing new life into this world, and he stood strong with the elderly until they departed. Dr. Hoffe was equally comfortable treating the town via its tiny emergency room.
Dr. Hoffe remained fiercely loyal to all under his care, and this was never truer than during the recent COVID-19 episode. While MSM stories abounded on the pandemic causing overflowing big-city hospitals, Hoffe recognized the disconnect between the reality in his small town. He did not see the pandemic materializing with his own eyes. The town of Lytton seemed relatively untouched by anything more serious than a mild flu.
Following the roll-out of the vaccine, Dr. Hoffe noticed a more extreme disconnect. Patients were showing up sick after vaccination. On one occasion he informed a vaccine-injured patient she would not require additional injections due to having sufficient immunity from previous virus recovery. A nurse reported him and despite 30 years of exemplary service without a single patient complaint, he was summarily fired from his position at the emergency department.
However, despite his income dropping by half without the emergency room, Dr. Hoffe persisted in keeping his patients’ safety first, even to his detriment. His first patient death from the pandemic came after vaccination, not from the virus.
Hoffe noticed mounting deaths, micro-clotting, and serious neurological events after the 2021 rollout, and this prompted him to write an email of concern asking his colleagues what they had seen.
Following this private email, he received a notice from the licensing authorities threatening him with disciplinary action should he cause any vaccine hesitancy through his communications.
Hoffe immediately recognized something seriously was amiss. Never in his experience had doctors been so threatened for simply asking questions. Scientific inquiry should not be punishable – and he would not be silenced – especially not when patients’ lives were on the line. The personal cost to him did not matter.
Although Dr. Hoffe found himself isolated in Lytton, a village of a mere 250 residents, he decided to conduct his own pilot study.
Tiny Lytton BC by Andrew Bowden – CC-BY-SA-2.0
He theorized that levels of D-Dimer would reflect micro-clot formation, and thus he measured these levels in his patients both before and after vaccination. To his horror, 5 of 8 patients turned positive for dangerous micro-clotting following the shots. Based on this safety signal, he informed his colleagues and warned that the vaccines seemed to be causing more harm than good.
Dr. Charles Hoffe, despite his tiny practice in this tiny British Columbia town, ironically had made a national name for himself. And bigger things were about to happen. His D-Dimer study began in early 2021, around April, and by June of 2021, his town of Lytton was extinguished in a massive wildfire that seemed to selectively torch the enclave while mysteriously sparing the surrounding wilderness.
Hoffe recalls the day of the inferno. He grabbed his laptop, and D-Dimer records, and fled his burning office. He drove the four hours to his family home, only to be greeted with the news that his wife was strategically planning a divorce. He was served with papers ousting him from his residence. Faced with banishment from his marriage, his profession, and his home, he sought refuge in a small vacation cottage located some six hours’ drive away. He made himself available to his patients via cell phone. But the licensing authorities quickly accused him of abandonment. Yet nothing could have been further from the truth. Like a good steward, Hoff watched over his flock with the utmost care.
Dr. Hoffe courageously stayed the course, keeping his patients first while brushing off the slings and arrows of the attack. The little income he earned following the loss of the emergency room position was about to be whittled down further as the Canadian government removed him from a previously favored physician payment list.
Meanwhile, the charred remains of the town of Lytton had been cordoned off by the authorities who blocked access – Maui style – to its displaced residents for some two years. Hoffe’s local Lytton home, in a positive twist of fate, was located upwind from the disaster, and he was able to move back in and treat the locals once again.
As if the situation could not grow worse, the Canadian Medical Authorities brought charges of misinformation spreading against Dr. Hoffe and sought to revoke his license to practice medicine.
Hoff hired a caring Christian attorney who vowed to fight this. For his defense, he recruited eight world-class expert witnesses, including Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Jessica Rose, and Dr. James Thorpe. They provided some 970 pages of compelling testimony, all pro-bono in light of Hoffe’s extreme financial circumstances.
Despite all this, the court used the tool of Judicial Notice to derail his defense. This meant that none of this expert witness evidence was admissible because as a matter of law the vaccines were by definition considered safe and effective – and this issue could not be legally contested.
To add further insult, the medical authorities sought to charge Dr. Hoffe with the costs of their investigation on top of revoking his license. These costs could easily exceed one or two hundred thousand dollars. In other words, the Canadian Medical Authorities are planning a one-two punch designed to bankrupt and silence Dr. Hoffe once and for all.
Which brings me to my request. If you value noble physicians like Dr. Hoffe who possess the moral fiber and strength of character to stand strong for their Hippocratic Oaths no matter the personal cost, then please reach out and help.
If everyone in our group contributed 10 dollars to Dr. Hoffe’s legal defense fund, we could send a message that patients care, and value physicians who stand for truth. We could spare Dr. Hoffe so he could help us fight another day. These payments are exclusively for defraying the costs of Dr. Hoffe’s legal fees, and not for his personal financial benefit.
All Donations are welcome to the Dr. Charles Hoffe Legal Defence Fund.
Fake Physician Allison Neitzel Caught Running Real Medical Misinformation Site
Medical clown for “disinformation reporters” at NBC and Mother Jones crashes her own disinformation circus
By Paul D. Thacker | The DisInformation Chronicle | April 3, 2024
Promoted to national prominence by a coterie of reporters tackling pandemic misinformation, physician Allison Neitzel took a hard fall last week when she was forced to atone for promoting misinformation and defaming medical experts—by posting an apology on her website, and pinning the same to the top of her social media X account. But unless you hang on every word of Democratic Party aligned reporters with a knack for labeling everyone they don’t like a “conspiracy theorist,” you likely don’t know physician Allison Neitzel.
If you haven’t heard of her, you should know her name and story.
Allison Neitzel’s story encapsulates everything that went wrong during COVID when self-defined “disinformation reporters” glommed onto anyone they tripped over on social media as an “expert” they could deploy to castigate those refusing to bend the knee to Big Pharma.
“I know of Allison because of the way she has targeted me,” says Tracey Beth Høeg, a physician researcher and associate professor of clinical research at the university of Southern Denmark. Neitzel has deleted many of her social media posts denigrating Hoeg, including one in which she labeled her “Hoeg hag.”
“The fact she has not nearly completed her training but has appointed herself as an expert physician in pointing out misinformation strikes me as both odd and ironic,” Hoeg continued. “For example, as you can see, she is really attacking me rather than anything substantive about what I have done or said.”
Allison Neitzel rocketed to national fame on CNN after graduating from the Medical College of Wisconsin and posting a letter on social media that accused Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers of spreading COVID misinformation. Rodgers said he was allergic to one of the vaccine ingredients and didn’t need to be vaccinated because he had already been sick with COVID, however, this was almost a year before the CDC stated that prior infection was no different than being vaccinated.
Despite spreading false information about Rodgers, Neitzel’s letter and purported medical bona fides proved catnip to reporters at MedPage Today, Mother Jones, and NBC, who quoted her as a physician exposing medical misinformation. Columns Neitzel has written for websites WhoWhatWhy and Science-Based Medicine also claim she is a physician focusing on disinformation.
And this is where the circus fun begins, because famed medical misinformation expert Allison Neitzel is not now, nor has she ever been, a physician.
Allison Neitzel did not respond to multiple requests for comment to explain.
COVID clown show
I began unraveling Allson Neitzel’s COVID circus act shortly after she posted the apology to her website with the ironic name “MisinformationKills” and pinned it to the top of her @AliNeitzelMD X account.
Neitzel’s apology details a long list of false statements she made against multiple physicians accusing them of a fraud and grift, along with weasel words that make clear this is a non-apology apology, in the vein of “I am sorry if you feel bad.”
“I regret if anyone understood the statements as accusations that any of them had engaged in fraudulent professional or business practices,” Neitzel writes.
You can read her apology, but the depth and particulars of Neitzel’s defamation of real medical experts is impossible to know because she has deleted many of her posts on social media and on MisinformationKills.
But particulars don’t matter.
Neitzel is one in a legion of medical clowns the media launched into prominence during the pandemic because they served as useful idiots for “disinformation journalists” needing a quotable “expert” to bash people who dared question conventional COVID wisdom, or who charged that the government made phony claims about a lab accident in Wuhan, overstated the efficacy of masks and lockdowns, or lied about the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines.
What makes Allison Neitzel unique from the COVID clown posse is that she was forced to retract and apologize for her lies and fake claims.
Interested, I dug into her background and discovered that all the outlets claiming Neitzel was a physician hadn’t bothered to do a modicum of due diligence before platforming her, because guess what? Allison Neitzel isn’t a physician.
Donning clown costume
The first social media trace I could find for Allison Neitzel is a 2019 Facebook post by the Medical College of Wisconsin. “Third-year med student Allison Neitzel helped teach young students how to use blood pressure cuffs, listen to heart and lung sounds through the use of a stethoscope, how to perform CPR and more.”
But when Neitzel jumped into the national conscience in 2021, she began claiming she was a “physician.” A group called the National Association of Medical Doctors (NAMD) posted Neitzel’s letter criticizing Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers in their Journal of Medicine, where she signed as “Allison Neitzel is a physician.” (Stay tuned: While researching the NAMD, I learned even more about COVID grift, which I will report in a future investigation.)
But when you look into Wisconsin law, you find the state defines a physician as “an individual possessing the degree of doctor of medicine or doctor of osteopathy or an equivalent degree as determined by the medical examining board, and holding a license granted by the medical examining board.”
So I looked up Neitzel in the National Provider Identifier Standard (NPI) which lists everyone licensed as a physician in the U.S. And guess what?
Allison Neitzel isn’t a physician.
Of course, her false claims of being a physician didn’t stop multiple media outlets from promoting Neitzel as a “physician” and misinformation expert. Let’s take a look.
COVID clown circus
Neitzel made two appearances as a “physician” in 2023 stories written by Kiera Butler at Mother Jones. Butler specializes in “COVID disinformation” stories that uncover “anti-vaxxers” and “right-wing” forces peeking out from every corner of America to harm the public with “misinformation.”
In one of her more amusing reporting incidents, Butler penned an article that claimed natural immunity from prior COVID infection was a “dangerous theory” spread by anti-vaxxers.
After California passed a law to discipline doctors for sharing “false COVID information” with patients that differs from the “scientific consensus” (whatever that is), Butler began attacking physicians who sued to stop the censorship, claiming that they were spreading medical lies. Linking to a tweet by Neitzel, who she labeled a “physician and disinformation researcher” Butler reported that “far-right rhetoric” and Nazi propaganda were supporting the lawsuits.
In fact, a California judge blocked the law for violating physicians’ First Amendment rights. Having first signed a bill that created the law, Governor Newsom then repealed it.
Neitzel was also featured in a story by NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny, another “disinformation reporter” who specializes in “extremism”—code in the disinformation world for “conservative” as people like Zadrozny never seem to find extremism among liberals.
In a story looking into anti-vaxxers—a favored topic for disinformation types—Zadrozny reported on aggressive online harassment against physicians and quoted Neitzel as an expert.
Online harassment has become increasingly common for doctors during the pandemic, according to Dr. Ali Neitzel, a physician researcher who studies misinformation.
“The targeting of individual physicians is a well-worn tactic,” Neitzel said. “But this cheaply done fake — trying to frame a doctor who is doing unpaid advocacy work — that’s a new low.”
Forget that Neitzel is not even a physician. The absurdity is that Zadrozny quoted Neitzel—forced to post an apology last week for fomenting years of misinformation, and years of harassing physicians—as an expert commentator on misinformation and harassment of physicians.
It’s that ludicrous.
Trying to understand Zadrozny’s reporting, I emailed her questions pointing out that Neitzel was never a physician, and asking if she had bothered to check into Neitzel’s credentials.
“Do you plan to correct your article?” I asked.
True to the disinformation journalism game, in which reporting errors are never admitted nor corrected, Zadrozny never responded.
Neitzel’s online persona as a misinformation expert also gained her entrée into three different articles at MedPage Today.
- Bebe Rexha’s Wound Care; ‘The System Is Broken’; Finding Nemo in a Blood Drain
- Ron Johnson and the COVID Disinformation Pipeline
- Should Doctors Worry About ‘Nuremberg 2.0?’ (MedPage Today labels this article an “exclusive special report”)
“Can you explain why MedPage Today ran so many stories featuring Allison Neitzel who falsely claimed to be a physician and has been forced to post an apology for defaming physicians?” I emailed MedPage Today’s editor-in chief Jeremy Faust, an instructor at Harvard Medical School.
“I’m trying to understand if such reporting meets the standards at MedPage Today and if you plan to run any corrections or clarifications.”
Faust refused to respond to questions sent to his Harvard email.
Neitzel’s claims of being a physician also garnered her a column at the nonprofit news organization WhoWhatWhy. “Allison Neitzel, MD, is physician-researcher and founder of the independent research group MisinformationKills, which has investigated the dark money and politics behind public health disinformation with a focus on the pandemic,” reads her author bio page.
“Why have you claimed Allison Neitzel is a physician?” I emailed WhoWhatWhy’s editor-in-chief, Russ Baker. “And do you plan to continue claiming Neitzel is a physician?”
Baker did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Neitzel also wrote a column for the site “Science-Based Medicine” where her bio states she is a physician. Science-Based Medicine is a marketing site for the biopharmaceutical industry run by David Gorski, a Wayne State University surgeon, self-described “misinformation debunker,” and ardent vaccine cheerleader.
After the European Medicines Agency concluded in April 2021 that unusual blood clots should be listed as a very rare side effect for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, Gorski called foul on the regulator. The UK government eventually stopped offering the AstraZeneca vaccine, and The BMJ reported last year that dozens of patients had launched legal action against AstraZeneca after suffering the same vaccine side effects that Gorski claimed were nonexistent.
In an email to Gorski, I asked why he lists Neitzel as a physician when she doesn’t meet the legal requirements for a physician in Wisconsin where Neitzel resides.
Gorski called the question “pedantic” and said he will ignore Wisconsin law in favor of a definition for “physician” that he found on the website for the American Medical Association.
“In general, ‘misinformation’ reporting seems to have certain ideas they are told are true/false and it’s about finding evidence to support what they have been told,” says Hoeg. “Also the ‘misinformation’ reporters often seem less qualified in terms of understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the scientific studies and domains than the people/scientists they are accusing of spreading ‘misinformation.’”
CORRECTION: In reporting on Allison Neitzel’s farcical rise to media glory, I mixed up the websites MedPage Today and Medscape. The Medscape articles featuring Allison Neitzel are Young Doc to Aaron Rodgers: Be a ‘Team’ Player on COVID Vaccine and Physicians Get Cyberbullied Over Vaccine Advocacy.
Shame on me for making this mistake. Shame on Medscape and MedPage Today for platforming COVID circus clown Allison Neitzel.
UPDATE: Following this exposé, Allison Neitzel changed her X account to be compliant with Wisconsin law and more honestly represent her credentials.
She’s a work in progress.
ABC fact checking is a ‘black box’
Who are the fact checkers, what are their qualifications and how do they decide what is true or false?
Maryanne Demasi, reports | April 22, 2024
Australia’s public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), proudly announced in 2022 that it had partnered with the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), an international alliance of major news corporations and Big Tech firms, to counter the growing threat of “fake news.”
It was part of sweeping reforms in the media to deliver ‘trusted’ news to global audiences and protect the public from the harms of misinformation and disinformation online.
Spearheaded by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), partners include Reuters, Associated Press, Financial Times, The Washington Post, and ABC Australia, along with social media and tech giants – Meta (Facebook/Instagram), Microsoft (LinkedIn) and Google (YouTube) to name a few.
When ABC announced its new alliance with TNI, Justin Stevens, ABC News Director said, “We’re pleased to join the Trusted News Initiative and, in the process, provide Australian audiences with a deeper and better-informed view of our region and the world.”
Justin Stevens appointed ABC News Director in April 2022
During the pandemic, the alliance promised to focus on preventing “the spread of harmful vaccine disinformation,” and “the growing number of conspiracy theories,” targeting online memes that featured anti-vaccine messaging or posts that downplayed the risk of covid-19.
But critics have grown increasingly uneasy about the alliance. They say governments are being protected by journalists, instead of being held to account for their pandemic policies and they’re concerned the alliance has shaped public discourse by controlling people’s access to information and censoring content that diverges from the status quo.
Weaponising fact checking
Deploying fact-checkers is one way that TNI members control the dissemination of public information. When they label a statement ‘false’, ‘wrong’, or ‘misleading’, it’s used by social media platforms to legitimise the censorship of that content by deprioritising, hiding, demonetising, or suppressing it.
Debunking content is time consuming and costly. Fact-checkers are invariably junior journalists or intern researchers, with little to no understanding of complex scientific issues or public health policies, and often appeal to governments for the ‘truth’.
When the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration opposed government enforced lockdowns, fact checkers ran hit pieces on the authors – the notable academics were then shadow-banned, censored and deplatformed from social media.
In the case of the ABC, its original in-house fact checking unit was axed in 2016 because of Federal budget cuts, but was revamped the following year when the ABC teamed up with RMIT University in Melbourne to form the RMIT ABC Fact Check and RMIT FactLab departments.
The ABC paid more than $670,000 to RMIT between 2020 – 2023 as part of its joint fact-checking venture but they quickly gained a reputation for being flawed. For example, concerns about the suppression of the lab leak theory were labelled as “false” even though they were true.
ABC’s fact checkers were also accused of being biased by SkyNews because they had used their influence to censor disfavoured political views in the Voice to Parliament referendum.
Queensland Senator Gerard Rennick grilled ABC’s Managing Director David Anderson at a Senate Estimates hearing about the network’s dodgy fact-checking practices last year.
“Who is fact-checking the fact-checkers?” asked Senator Rennick.
“You’ve made some outrageous claims on these fact-checks that aren’t correct, and you haven’t actually backed them up with any facts,” added Rennick, accusing the ABC of bias for predominantly fact-checking politically conservative voices in the media.
Sources say these controversies have prompted the ABC to cut ties with RMIT whose contract ends in June 2024.
New fact-checkers, same problems?
An ABC spokesperson said the network is now building its own internal fact-checking team, called “ABC NEWS Verify,” which appears to have similarities to the “BBC Verify” initiative.
“ABC NEWS Verify will be our centre of excellence for scrutinising and verifying information in online communities,” said the spokesperson outlining the various tasks of fact checkers. “Establishing a dedicated team will enhance and focus our efforts, creating a hub for verification best practice.”
I asked the ABC if it had any internal policy document outlining the criteria its fact-checkers would use to deem content as ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ but the spokesperson responded saying “no it doesn’t.”
Andrew Lowenthal, an expert in digital rights and a Twitter Files journalist, said the ABC’s failure to explain how it intends on fact-checking claims was “seriously ridiculous.”
“That the ABC is seeking to decide what is misinformation without laying out any criteria demonstrates just how farcical and political ‘fact-checking’ has become,” said Lowenthal.
“Without transparent and publicly available criteria the program will quickly turn into a partisan advocacy initiative,” he added.
Andrew Lowenthal, Twitter Files journalist
Lowenthal’s Twitter Files investigation confirmed the Australian government was monitoring Covid-related speech of its citizens and requesting that posts were flagged and censored if they deemed them to be misinformation.
“In that investigation, the government’s Department of Home Affairs was relying on Yahoo! News and USA Today, among others, to justify their take down requests or they’d hire journalists without scientific credentials. We need dialogue, not diktats, to determine what is true,” said Lowenthal.
Senator Rennick agreed, saying the ABC’s process lacks transparency. “Who are these people that claim to be the fact-checkers in the first place and what are their credentials? Sounds to me like it’s a black box,” said Rennick.
“Often when fact checkers come out with their reports, they don’t give the other person they’re fact checking, a right-of-reply. Also, they rarely disclose the conflicts of interest of the so-called ‘experts’ they use to fact check claims,” he added.
Michael Shellenberger, author, journalist and founder of Public, has written extensively on the “censorship industrial complex.”
“That’s what the trusted news initiative [TNI] was all about…a strategy to use fact checking initiatives to demand censorship by social media platforms,” said Shellenberger.
Michael Shellenberger, author of San Fransicko (HarperCollins 2021) and Apocalypse Never (Harper Collins 2020)
“They can pretend that’s not what it’s about, but the fact that the news media are participating in this, is grotesque. It’s a complete destruction of whatever reputation and integrity they used to have,” he added.
“Organisations like BBC and ABC… they used to have reputations for independence and integrity, but they’ve now decided to destroy their entire reputation on the mantle of them being the deciders of the truth. The Central Committee. That’s totalitarianism that’s not free speech.”
The ABC says its new ABC NEWS Verify will have no connection to TNI.
Impartiality and credibility?
TNI’s broad principles of working in lockstep towards a single narrative, has meant that legacy media operate largely as a mouthpiece for government propaganda, offering little critique of public health policies…and ABC has been no exception.
During the pandemic, the broadcaster repeatedly came under fire after its medical commentator Dr Norman Swan made countless calls for harsher lockdowns, mask mandates and covid boosters – policies that strongly aligned with the government but had little scientific backing.
Swan’s commentary rarely provided an impartial perspective and he was eventually called out for failing to publicly disclose his financial interest in seeking government contracts related to covid-19.
In addition, Ita Buttrose, who was ABC Chair until last month, was seen fronting Pfizer’s advertising campaigns for covid products. ABC defended Buttrose saying, “Given she was not involved in editorial decisions, there was no conflict of interest.”
Ita Buttrose, former ABC Chair, March 2019 – March 2024
The ABC denies its alliance with TNI has impacted its editorial independence but Shellenberger says the entire purpose of joining TNI is to ensure they become the single source of truth.
“They’ve stopped doing real reporting, and they’re just out there wanting to be paid to regurgitate and act like publicists for the government. It’s grotesque. It’s not journalism, it’s propaganda,” said Shellenberger.
Resisting the tyranny
Some journalists have been resisting what they perceive to be ‘tyranny’ in legacy media and the widespread suppression of free speech.
In June 2021, a group of around 30 journalists rallied together to denounce TNI’s “censorship and fearmongering” and accused the alliance of subjecting the public to a distorted view of the truth.
The group known as ‘Holding the Line: Journalists Against Covid Censorship’ shared concerns that reporters were being reprimanded by their superiors and freelancers were being blacklisted from jobs for not following the “one official narrative.”
Presidential hopeful Robert F Kennedy Jr has filed a lawsuit against TNI alleging that legacy media organisations and Big Tech have worked to “collectively censor online news” about covid-19 and the 2020 presidential election.
The lawsuit states:
“By their own admission, members of the “Trusted News Initiative” (“TNI”) have agreed to work together, and have in fact worked together, to exclude from the world’s dominant Internet platforms rival news publishers who engage in reporting that challenges and competes with TNI members’ reporting on certain issues relating to COVID-19 and U.S. politics.”
A group of 138 scholars, public intellectuals, and journalists from across the political spectrum have since published The Westminster Declaration.
In essence, it’s a free speech manifesto urging governments to dismantle the “censorship industrial complex” which has seen government agencies and Big Tech companies work together to censor free speech.
In Australia, the journalist’s union MEAA has called on ABC’s newly appointed Chair Kim Williams to “restore the reputation of the national broadcaster by addressing concerns about the impact of external pressures on editorial decision making.”
Kim Williams, current Chair, ABC Network Australia
Williams, who took over from Buttrose last month, has warned his journalists that “activism” is not welcome at the ABC and that if they fail to observe impartiality guidelines, they should consider leaving the network.
Will the ABC course-correct with Williams at the helm? Now that trust in legacy media is at historical lows, the ABC’s partnership with TNI does little to assuage fears that the network has passed the point of no return.
NB: I was a TV presenter/producer at ABC TV (2006-2016) and wrote about my experiences with censorship at the network here and here.
They Think We Are Stupid, Volume 8
By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | April 23, 2024
Everything you need to know about our ruling class’s opinion of you. As always, these headlines are presented without commentary.
The WHO and Pandemic Response – Should Evidence Matter?
REPPARE | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | APRIL 22, 2024
The Basics of Policy Development
All public health interventions have costs and benefits, and normally these are carefully weighed based on evidence from previous interventions, supplemented by expert opinion where such evidence is limited. Such careful appraisal is particularly important where the negative effects of interventions include human rights restrictions and long-term consequences through impoverishment.
Responses to pandemics are an obvious example. The world has just emerged from the Covid-19 event, which should have provided an excellent example, as broad new restrictive interventions were widely imposed on populations, while some countries offer good comparators by avoiding most of these restrictions.
The WHO calls such measures Public Health and Social Measures (PHSM), also using the largely synonymous term non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI). Even if we assume that countries will continue to enjoy full sovereignty over their national policies, WHO recommendations matter, if only because of epistemic authority or shaping of expectations. In 2021, the WHO established a PHSM Working Group which is currently developing a research agenda on the effects of PHSM. As part of this remit, it is expected that the WHO will re-examine their recommendations on PHSM rigorously to reflect the lessons from Covid-19. This process is envisaged to be completed by 2030.
It is therefore curious that the WHO, without providing any comparison of cost and benefit from Covid-19, concluded a 2023 meeting with public health stakeholders from 21 countries with a call to action on all countries “to position PHSM as an essential countermeasure alongside vaccines and therapeutics for epidemic and pandemic preparedness and response.” With Member States due to vote in late May to make WHO recommendations within the International Health Regulations (IHR) effectively binding, “undertaking to follow the Director General’s recommendations before they are given, one would expect these recommendations would be based on a thorough and transparent review that justifies their imposition.”
IHR Benchmarks
In 2019, the WHO defined ‘benchmarks for International Health Regulations (IHR) capacities,’ which did not include PHSM. Although the IHR are still being revised, the benchmarks have been updated in 2024 as ‘benchmarks for strengthening health emergency capacities.’ The update includes new benchmarks on PHSM, which are stated by the WHO to “play an immediate and critical role throughout the different stages of health emergencies and contribute to decreasing the burden on health systems so that essential health services can continue and effective vaccines and therapeutics can be developed and deployed with their effects maximized to protect the health of communities.”
In the new document, PHSM are said to “range from surveillance, contact tracing, mask wearing and physical distancing to social measures, such as restricting mass gatherings and modifying school and business openings and closures.” A new benchmark on PHSM has been included. For example, to meet the level of “demonstrated capacity,” States are now expected to “review and adjust PHSM policies and implementation based on timely and regular assessment of data” and to “establish whole-of-government mechanisms with well-defined governance and mandates to implement relevant PHSM.”
However, the document also acknowledges that PHSM can have “unintended negative consequences on the health and well-being of individuals, societies and economies, such as by increasing loneliness, food insecurity, the risk of domestic violence and reducing household income and productivity” [i.e. increase poverty]. Accordingly, another new benchmark has been introduced: “The protection of livelihoods, business continuity and continuity of education and learning systems is in place and functional during health emergencies.” Disruptions particularly to schooling now seem to be expected during health emergencies as reflected in benchmarks involving “policies for alternative modalities to deliver school meals and other school-linked and school-based social protection when schools are closed due to emergencies.” While potentially being rooted in an acknowledgement of the harms of the Covid-19 response, this benchmark also illustrates the extent to which the Covid-19 event now shapes the idea of what a pandemic response looks like. No other pandemic or health emergency was ever addressed through similarly prolonged disruptions to the economy or to education.
Furthermore, benchmarks on border control measures now expect States to “develop or update legislation (relevant to screening, quarantine, testing, contact tracing, etc.) to enable the implementation of international travel related measures.” To meet the “demonstrated capacity” benchmark, States must “establish isolation units to isolate and quarantine suspected human or animal cases of communicable diseases.”
Due Research
These new benchmarks illustrate a remarkable departure from WHO’s pre-Covid guidelines. The most detailed such recommendations were laid out in a 2019 document based on a systematic review of non-pharmaceutical interventions for pandemic influenza. Despite SARS-CoV-2 spreading similarly to influenza, these guidelines have been widely ignored since 2020. For example, the 2019 document stated that border closures, or quarantining healthy contact persons or travellers were “not recommended in any circumstances.” The isolation of patients was recommended to be voluntary noting that workplace closures of even 7-10 days may disproportionately harm low-income people.
Prior to 2020, most discussed PHSM now proposed by the WHO had never been implemented at large scale and data on their effects was accordingly scarce. For example, the 2019 review recommended wearing masks when symptomatic and in contact to others, and even “conditionally recommended” wearing masks when asymptomatic during severe pandemics purely based on “mechanistic plausibility.” Indeed, two meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of face masks published in 2020 found no significant reduction in influenza transmission or influenza-like illness.
Today, we have an abundance of evidence on the effects of PHSM during the Covid era. Yet, there could hardly be more disagreement regarding efficacy. A Royal Society report concluded that lockdowns and mask mandates decreased transmission and their stringency was correlated with their effectiveness. Meanwhile, a meta-analysis estimated the average lockdown in Europe and North America to have reduced Covid mortality by merely three percent in the short term (at high cost) and an updated Cochrane Review still found no evidence for the effectiveness of masks in community settings (let alone mask mandates) in RCTs. The lower level of restrictions in Nordic countries was associated with some of the lowest excess all-cause mortality in the world between 2020 and 2022, including Sweden which never resorted to general lockdowns or mask mandates.
New Recommendations
Notwithstanding the variable evidence of effectiveness and harm, and the ongoing 7-year WHO review process, the WHO has begun to revise recommendations on PHSM. The first publication of the WHO’s newly launched initiative Preparedness and Resilience for Emerging Threats (PRET), titled ‘Planning for respiratory pathogen pandemics,’ advocates for a “precautionary approach to infection prevention early in the event” that “will save lives” and tells policy makers to “be ready to apply stringent PHSM, but for a limited time period in order to minimize associated unintended health, livelihood and other socio-economic consequences.” These recommendations are not founded on any systematic review of new evidence, as was attempted in the 2019 influenza guidance, but largely on unstructured, opinion-based “lessons learned” compilations of committees convened by the WHO.
The 2023 version of the WHO’s ‘Managing Epidemics’ handbook, first published in 2018 and intended to inform WHO country staff and health ministries, illustrates this lack of evidence-base. Comparing both editions of the same document shows a marked normalization of Covid-19-era PHSM. For instance, the earlier version recommended sick people wear masks during severe pandemics as an “extreme measure.” The revised handbook now recommends masking everyone, sick or healthy, not merely during severe pandemics but even for seasonal influenza. Covering of faces is clearly no longer considered an “extreme measure” but normalized and portrayed as similar to hand washing.
Elsewhere, the 2018 version of ‘Managing Epidemics’ stated:
We have also seen that many traditional containment measures are no longer efficient. They should therefore be re-examined in the light of people’s expectations of more freedom, including freedom of movement. Measures such as quarantine, for example, once regarded as a matter of fact, would be unacceptable to many populations today.
The 2023 edition revises this to:
We have also seen that many traditional containment measures are challenging to put in place and sustain. Measures such as quarantine can be at odds with people’s expectations of more freedom, including freedom of movement. Digital technologies for contact tracing became common in response to Covid-19. These, however, come with privacy, security and ethical concerns. Containment measures should be re-examined in partnership with the communities they impact.
The WHO no longer considers quarantine inefficient and unacceptable, but merely “challenging to put in place and sustain” because it can be at odds with people’s expectations.
A new section on “infodemics” gives advice on how to manage people’s expectations. States are now encouraged to set up an “infodemic management team” that shall “debunk misinformation and disinformation that could have a negative health impact on people and communities, while respecting their freedom of expression.” Again, evidence is not provided as to why this new area of recommendations are needed, how ‘truth’ is arbitrated in such complex and heterogeneous situations, or how potential negative effects of stifling exchange of information and discussion of complex issues will be addressed.
Infodemic Management in Practice
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s Director-General recently reassured the world in a speech:
Let me be clear: WHO did not impose anything on anyone during the Covid-19 pandemic. Not lockdowns, not mask mandates, not vaccine mandates. We don’t have the power to do that, we don’t want it, and we’re not trying to get it. Our job is to support governments with evidence-based guidance, advice and, when needed, supplies, to help them protect their people.
This is not the only example of the WHO adopting a proactive strategy of “infodemic management” as it recommends States to do. The latest draft of the Pandemic Agreement includes a new paragraph:
Nothing in the WHO Pandemic Agreement shall be interpreted as providing the Secretariat of the World Health Organization, including the WHO Director-General, any authority to direct, order, alter or otherwise prescribe the domestic laws or policies of any Party, or to mandate or otherwise impose any requirements that Parties take specific actions, such as ban or accept travellers, impose vaccination mandates or therapeutic or diagnostic measures, or implement lockdowns.
The latter claim is particularly noteworthy because it ignores the proposed IHR amendments accompanying the pandemic agreement, through which countries will undertake to follow future recommendations on PHSM within a legally binding agreement, while the Pandemic Agreement does not include any such propositions.
The WHO promises to ‘support governments with evidence-based guidance’ but appears to be promoting PHSM recommendations that conflict with their own guidance without any apparent new evidence base. Given that countries did well without following highly restrictive measures, and the long-term impacts of reduced education and economic health on human health, the principle of “do no harm” would seem to demand more caution in applying such consequential policies. Policies need an evidence base to justify their adoption. Given the trajectory of natural outbreaks, contrary to WHO claims, is not increasing, it seems pertinent to expect one from the WHO before they push Member States to risk the health and economic well-being of their populations next time a pandemic or health emergency is declared.
REPPARE (REevaluating the Pandemic Preparedness And REsponse agenda) involves a multidisciplinary team convened by the University of Leeds.
‘Misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ in the pandemic treaty
European Parliament – 9.4.2024
Priority question for written answer P-001044/2024
to the Commission
Rule 138
Robert Roos (ECR), Angel Dzhambazki (ECR), Tom Vandendriessche (ID), Mislav Kolakušić (NI), Ivan Vilibor Sinčić (NI), Jorge Buxadé Villalba (ECR), Francesca Donato (NI), Margarita de la Pisa Carrión (ECR), Hermann Tertsch (ECR)
The Commission is negotiating an international agreement on ‘pandemic preparedness and response’ with WHO countries.
In the draft text as amended by the EU drafting suggestions[1] dated 27 February 2024, Article 18 on communication and public awareness relies on the concepts of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’.
Signatory countries should act ‘with the aim of countering’ (Article 18(1)) and ‘cooperate in preventing’ (Article 18(4)) misinformation or disinformation, with the Commission suggesting an amendment to oblige countries ‘to develop effective tools to identify and counteract misinformation and disinformation’ (Article 18(4)).
However, neither the draft agreement nor international law provide a definition of ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’.
- 1. Can the Commission define these concepts and explain how they should be understood, in the Commission’s view, taking into account the requirement to comply with the principle of legal certainty, which is an essential component of the rule of law principle and according to which the law must be certain, foreseeable and easy to understand?
- 2. In the Commission’s view, do the proposed obligations under Articles 18(1) and 18(4) entail restricting citizens’ fundamental right to freedom of expression, and if so, are these restrictions compatible with the applicable law, including the case law of the European Court of Human Rights?
Supporter[2]
Submitted:9.4.2024
Whooping Cough Boosters for Adults? The Vaccines Don’t Even Work for Kids, Experts Say
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 19, 2024
Cases of pertussis — or whooping cough — in the U.S. dropped during the pandemic and today continue to be lower than pre-pandemic levels, NBC News reported on Tuesday.
“We are not seeing anything unusual,” Jasmine Reed, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spokesperson, told the news outlet.
However, in the same article — “Whooping Cough Rising in Some Countries. Why You May Need a Booster” — NBC contributor Kaitlin Sullivan reported that “outbreaks in Europe, Asia and parts of the U.S. should be a reminder to get vaccinated, experts say.”
Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, told NBC the current situation “won’t turn into a pandemic because we have a highly vaccinated population.”
Schaffner added: “However, let’s make sure that pregnant people get vaccinated, that babies are vaccinated on schedule, and the rest of us take the Tdap vaccine every 10 years.”
This is especially necessary to protect infants, who are especially vulnerable to the otherwise typically mild illness, NBC reported.
Experts told The Defender they thought the NBC report was unnecessarily alarming, cited outdated methods for protecting babies, and failed to consider serious and well-known concerns with the safety and efficacy of DTaP and Tdap vaccines.
Pertussis vaccines don’t prevent transmission
Dr. Bob Sears, author of “The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child,” told The Defender that studies have shown the pertussis vaccine doesn’t prevent transmission.
“There’s no medical or scientific reason to advise giving the vaccine to any group of people for the purpose of preventing transmission to others,” Sears said.
He added:
“We have whooping cough in our society simply because this is one of several vaccines that doesn’t reduce the spread of its disease. The vaccine simply doesn’t work that way, and no amount of scientific hope or wishful thinking will change that.”
The United Kingdom saw an increase in whooping cough cases in January. According to The BMJ, the spike seen there also occurred in other European countries, but the outbreak primarily affected people ages 15 and older, who are not at high risk from the illness. Only 4% of cases in the recent spike were in infants.
NBC also reported that China had a 15-fold increase in cases in January, part of a variable epidemiology of the disease seen over the last 10 years. That increase amounted to 15,275 cases among a population of over 1.4 billion people.
Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told NBC that the outbreaks and mild isolated cases the agency reported in the San Francisco Bay area, Hawaii and New York are normal and something “we expect to see every year.”
Whooping cough is a highly contagious respiratory illness that manifests as a cold in most people, but it can be serious for newborns who have a very narrow trachea, Dr. Meryl Nass, an internal medicine physician, told The Defender.
Deaths from pertussis are extremely rare, averaging about 10 per year. About 85% of deaths happen in children under two months of age — before babies are even eligible to begin the pertussis vaccination.
Nass said pertussis is extremely common and endemic in the U.S. It tends to be misdiagnosed as cold or flu and medical attention is rarely sought, except for babies.
Current formula needs to be ‘scrapped or reworked’
Dr. Paul Thomas said the NBC article “completely ignores the risk of death from the vaccine, which is documented to be greater than the number of deaths prevented — even before you consider that 50-90% of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome occurs in the week after infant vaccines, of which the DTaP is the most concerning.”
Maternal-fetal medicine expert Dr. James Thorp told The Defender the pertussis vaccine has never been proven to be safe or effective in a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial.
And there have been no long-term studies examining all health outcomes related to the vaccine, Thorp said.
Babies and children currently receive the DTaP vaccine, designed to protect against pertussis, diphtheria and tetanus. People ages 7 and older receive the Tdap booster, designed to protect against diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis.
Thomas, author of “The Vaccine-Friendly Plan: Dr. Paul’s Safe and Effective Approach to Immunity and Health-from Pregnancy Through Your Child’s Teen Years,” said that both DTap and Tdap are old vaccines that rely on recognizing the pertactin protein to develop immunity.
About 85% of pertussis circulating in the U.S. is pertactin-negative making the vaccine at best 15% effective, he said.
The CDC has been tracking changes in the prevalence of bacteria causing whooping cough for years. The most recent CDC data, reported this month, found that the Bordetella parapertussis type of whooping cough has significantly overtaken B. pertussis in prevalence — and research published in Vaccines in March shows the existing vaccines “scarcely provide protection” against this strain.
“This pertussis vaccine needs to either be scrapped or reworked to provide one that is effective,” Thomas said.
“Those vaccinated are now getting pertussis at a much higher rate than those with natural immunity and not vaccinated for pertussis,” he added. “It is the vaccinated who are also most likely to bring pertussis to newborns and put them at risk.”
Vaccinated — not unvaccinated — more likely to give infants pertussis
NBC reported that although the disease poses no serious threat to most adults, adults ought to get vaccinated to protect infants.
The article quotes Schaffner as saying, “Anyone who comes to see the new baby should have had a recent inoculation with Tdap vaccine, to provide a cocoon of protection around that baby.”
But Thomas said the concept of cocooning, “where you vaccinate the adults and children and caregivers in the infant world to provide a cocoon of protection, has been long abandoned as it has failed to protect infants.”
“It turns out those vaccinated still get pertussis and because sometimes it is a less severe infection (a minor vaccine benefit) they are more likely to be around infants and put them at risk for pertussis.”
Nass noted that antibiotics provide some protection against whooping cough transmission, but not against symptoms. And because the disease is misdiagnosed in adults and very mild, few take them.
Thomas said the best approach for parents with an infant — because the disease is relatively harmless after one year — is to avoid indoor crowds and sick visitors.
“Even family and visitors who are not sick should wash their hands with soap and water before touching the baby and not kiss the baby on the face, hands or feet,” he said. “It is worth noting that the worst of the pertussis dangers was largely gone even before the vaccine was introduced to the masses.”
‘No vaccine should be given during pregnancy’
Nass told The Defender that another problem with pertussis vaccine efficacy is that it takes multiple shots — given at ages 2, 4, 6 and 15-18 months — for a child to develop some immunity.
However, children are only really at risk of death from the illness very early in life, before the shots provide any protection.
Thorp said that because the original goal of protecting infants with the vaccine in the first year of life was “a miserable failure” pharmaceutical companies began advocating to give the shots to pregnant women.
In 2012, the CDC first began recommending the TDap vaccine for pregnant women to protect newborn infants, despite the fact that they largely don’t need the diphtheria or tetanus components, Nass said.
“The CDC could have recommended manufacturers make just a pertussis vaccine for this purpose, but chose not to,” she added.
This was another example, Thorp said, “where this fable that the vaccine would provide immunity was forced down the throats of pregnant women with the backing of the medical-industrial-complex without a randomized double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial.”
No vaccine should be given during pregnancy, Thorp said. “But now the pharmaceutical industrial complex is pushing six vaccines including for influenza, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, RSV, and COVID-19.”
“From the fetus to the infant at 12 months of life, there are about 42 vaccines administered in 2024, compared with about 11 in 1986,” he added. “This is absurd and an abomination of science.”
Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., is a senior reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
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Paul Collits is a hero to me.
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- DNA Evidence Reveals Domestic Cats, Dogs, African Wildcats, Frogs Lived In The Arctic 9000 Years Ago
- -80°C: Antarctic Vostok Station Records “Extreme Winter Cold”…Not Even Winter Yet!
- The German E-Vehicle Nightmare, 2024 Q1 Sales Plummet 14%… “Graveyard” For Unsold Cars
- Newly Discovered 90,000-Year-Old Human Footprints Reveal How Much Higher Sea Levels Used To Be
- Germany’s Economic Bloodbath Worsens As Green Revolution Causes Economy To Bleed To Death
- Water Vapor Absorbs 84 Times More Radiation Than CO2 … Clouds Drove 89% Of 1982-2018 Warming
- The 97% Consensus Claim Is In Fact 97% Bogus
- Post-1980s Increases In Shortwave Radiation Explains Europe’s Warming Trends Far Better Than CO2
- “A Thing Where Every Part Of Your Life Just Confirms What It Is That You Want To Believe”
- Nature Publication: Researchers Find Arctic Region 10,000 Years Ago Warmer Than Today
Aletho News 
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