In Fauci’s absence as Covid’s public health media mouthpiece, an ironic twist of transparency has chosen a puzzling replacement – Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.
Welcome to the next generation of possible vaccine harms. From mouth blisters to debilitating nervous system disorders, scientists are reporting troubling side effects from COVID-19 vaccines.
All eyes are on the coming French elections as the world watches the first political choice to vote out those who forced lockdowns, mandates and purposely made life miserable for much of their population. Opposing French PM Macron who’s trying for his 2nd term is Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour, both siding with the unemployed healthcare workers’ plight due to vaccine refusal.
The past two days have seen sorties from scientists desperate to shore up the lockdown version of history. Lockdowns were necessary, and anyone who disagrees does not care about society or equality. This version of history is so fraudulent that it cannot be allowed to triumph.
Writing in the Guardianyesterday, Devi Sridhar asks: ‘Why can’t some scientists just admit they were wrong about Covid?’ Why indeed? Sridhar notes that scientists have divided into opposing camps, taking ‘particular pandemic positions… eventually building a base of followers that organise around that position and defend it viciously.’ She just doesn’t seem to recognise that this neatly describes her own approach.
Sridhar’s piece is a craven attempt to rewrite history by claiming that the Zero Covid position was only ever intended for the pre-vaccine era. Can this be the same Sridhar who said in a New Statesmaninterview in January 2021 that ‘the better option is to eliminate the virus’ – even after vaccines had started to be rolled out? Or who tweeted in June 2020 that ‘the fastest way to get economy & normal life back is to push for a ZERO Covid Britain. Clear virus, build domestic economy’? Still, as far as Sridhar’s concerned, if anyone got anything wrong, it wasn’t her.
Sridhar’s efforts to rewrite history were joined by a prominent member of Independent SAGE, Kit Yates. Writing in the British Medical Journal on Wednesday, Yates penned an op-ed on the theme “Was lockdown necessary?” Lockdowns, according to Yates, were necessary to protect the NHS and the vulnerable members of society — and yet at the same time ‘no one is in favour of lockdowns’. This sleight of hand followed his tweet in February that ‘everyone is lockdown sceptic’.
Have we all been dreaming about the vituperative onslaught on sceptical voices in the last two years? The answer becomes clearer in the last paragraph of the BMJ piece, where Yates concludes:
Whether you view [lockdowns] as necessary depends on your value system. Many people would place the lives of the most vulnerable high on their list of priorities. Many people would value a functioning NHS with equal access for all at the point of need. Many would place a high worth on the long term health of their population. But not everyone. – KIT YATES, BMJ
Sadly for Yates, his article was published on the very day that Sir Chris Whitty admitted that the long-term health of children had suffered and their life expectancies were lower through increasing obesity brought on by lockdowns. With NHS cancer backlogs projected to last for a decade, it doesn’t seem that this “long-term health of the population” and “protecting the NHS” works out very well for Yates and his ilk.
This is why the strongest advocates of lockdowns such as Sridhar and Yates cannot be allowed to set the tone of the debate as we move away from the pandemic. Strong lockdowns promoted policies that were utterly uncaring of the young, the elderly in care homes, women in abusive situations, the poor whose work disappeared, let alone the hundreds of millions of people whose livelihoods have been destroyed in the Global South.
Meanwhile, 40% of Covid deaths in the West took place in care homes. Far from protecting the vulnerable, lockdown policies did not even protect the most vulnerable. Meanwhile, they have rendered hundreds of millions of people newly vulnerable. That is their legacy, and those who advocated hardest for them must not be allowed to escape it.
Yes, Fauci has never worried about consistency or even contradicting himself one day to the next, often without explanation. Too often his doling out “the science” has felt like performance art. Still, the record is that Fauci and all his compatriots either downplayed or denied natural immunity for two years. That has been the source of vast confusion.
In fact, this might have been the most egregious science error of the entire pandemic. It amounted to giving the silent treatment to the most well-established point of cell biology that we have. It was taught to every generation from the 1920s until sometime in the new century when people stopped paying attention in 9th-grade biology class.
After the pandemic broke, Fauci said nothing on this topic for a year and a half. The John Snow Memorandum, written to counter the Great Barrington Declaration, claimed “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection.” Mandates and passports have excluded it. Academic, medical, and corporate enforcers have generally refused to recognize it.
When CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked him specifically, September 13, 2021, Fauci quickly demurred.
“I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that. That’s something that we’re going to have to discuss regarding the durability of the response,” Fauci said. “I think that is something that we need to sit down and discuss seriously.”
Earlier, the WHO even backed up this denialism, going so far as to change their own definition of immunity in the middle of a pandemic. They eliminated the old sentence on natural immunity and replaced it with a claim that immunity comes from “protecting people from the virus” and not “exposing them to it.” That’s some clever rhetoric right there!
There’s no question that this effort to deny natural immunity was systematic and pushed from the top.
How has this changed? In February 2022, the CDC finally published on the topic that they could not forever deny. And now, Fauci himself let the following slip in an interview on March 23, 2022:
“When you look at the cases they do not appear to be any more severe [than Omicron] and they do not appear to evade immune responses either from vaccine or prior infection.”
What’s critical here is not his debatable claim about vaccines but rather his offhand remark about prior infection. It was tossed off as if: “Everyone knows this.” If so, it is no thanks to him, the CDC, or WHO.
To be sure, everything we’ve known since two years ago – if not 2.5 thousand years – is that immunity from prior Covid infection is real. Vaccines have traditionally been a substitute version of exactly that. Brownstone has assembled fully 150 studies that demonstrate that immunity through infection is effective, broad, and lasting.
Had that messaging been around during lockdowns, the attitude toward the virus would have been very different. We would have clearly seen the present reality from the beginning, namely that endemicity generally arrives in the case of a new virus of this sort due to exposure-induced population immunity. This is how humankind evolved to live in the presence of pathogens.
If we had widespread public awareness of this, the public-health priority would not have been locking down people who can manage exposure but rather alerting those who cannot to be careful until herd immunity in one’s own circle of contacts has been realized via meeting the virus and recovering.
To those who say that is dangerous, consider that mass exposure is precisely what happened in any case, stretched out over two years rather than occurring in a single season. This delaying of the inevitable might be what allowed for variants to emerge and take hold in successive rounds, each new one hitting naive immune systems in ways that were difficult to predict. Flatten the curve amounted to “prolonging the pain,” exactly as Knut Wittkowski predicted in March 2020.
A widespread understanding of natural immunity would have changed the entire calculus of public perception of how to manage one’s life in the face of a new virus. Instead of just running and hiding, people might have considered tradeoffs, as they had always done in the past. What is my risk of infection and under what conditions? If I do get the thing, what happens then? It might also have changed the priorities from disease avoidance and vaccine subsidies and mandates to thinking about the crucial thing: what should people do if they get sick? What should doctors recommend and prescribe?
The neglect of therapeutics figures into this very highly. If people believe that locking down, staying away, masking up, stopping travel, and generally giving up all choices in life were the right way to make a pathogen magically disappear, plus they are under the impression that the risk of severe outcomes is equally distributed across the whole population, plus they believe that 3-4% of the population is going to die from Covid (as was suggested in the early days), you end up with a much more compliant people.
If natural immunity had been rightly seen as the most robust and broad form of immunity from the beginning, and we instead followed the idea of focused protection, the vaccine mandates would have been out of the question.
In other words, the silence of this topic was critical to scaring people all over the world into going along with an unprecedented attack on rights and liberties, thus losing up to two years of childhood education, closing millions of small businesses, and denying people basic religious liberties, in addition to the collapse of public health that resulted in record-breaking alcohol and opioid-related deaths, not to mention lost cancer screenings, childhood vaccinations, and general ill-health both physical and mental.
This stuff is not without consequence. One might expect some contrition. Instead we get a passing comment and nothing more. After all, frank talk about this subject might be risky: it would imply that their entire mitigation strategy was wrong from the beginning and should never be attempted again.
IF YOU are British and of a certain age, you’ll remember the doomily portentous 1986/7 Aids warning campaign promoted by the UK government.
The slogan ran ‘Aids: Don’t Die of Ignorance.’
Here’s the most memorable ad. It featured the gravelly voice of John Hurt warning: ‘There is now a danger that has become a threat to us all. It is a deadly disease and there is no known cure. The virus can be passed during sexual intercourse with an infected person. Anyone can get it, man or woman. So far it has been confined to small groups. But it’s spreading . . . so protect yourself.’
I remember it well because I was at exactly the right age – early twenties – for it to mess up my sex life. It didn’t kill sexual activity, quite. But it definitely put a dampener on it. You still did the deed, when you could find a willing partner. But you worried about it afterwards especially if, like me, you had hypochondriacal tendencies. Clearly there was a serious risk: there had to be! Why else would the government spend millions on this lavish, in-your-face campaign if Aids wasn’t a major problem?
But it wasn’t. Every word of that campaign was either a lie, an exaggeration or a misdirection. ‘Don’t die of ignorance!’ it declared. Yet ignorance was exactly what it was promoting.
How do I know this? Well, it has been a long, long journey.
The first stage was gentle cynicism. After the initial shock of those ads, it became increasingly clear that the government had been overstating the case. Yes, Aids did indeed appear to be taking a terrible toll among those ‘small groups’: haemophiliacs, intravenous drug users and homosexual men, primarily. But there was no evidence that the disease was spreading significantly to the broader community.
At the time, those of us who realised this tended to give the government the benefit of the doubt. Yes, the government had, strictly speaking, been lying to us. But it was a good lie. A noble lie. It was pretending Aids affected everyone in order to spare the blushes of those it did affect. If you were gay or a haemophiliac or an intravenous drug user you wouldn’t feel isolated, marginalised. You could feel that the whole country was united with you, sharing some of your pain and anxiety.
I can’t remember how far I subscribed to this argument myself. Probably, knowing me, not greatly. I’ve never been a fan of ‘unless one of you owns up you’re all going to suffer’ collective punishments. And this felt very much like one of those: as if we were being treated like children who couldn’t be trusted to be told the whole truth lest we misuse that information for our own selfish ends. It was collectivism, communism basically, and I’ve never been into any of that, not even in my youthful idealism phase.
The second stage of my Aids awareness didn’t come till much later. It’s so recent, in fact, that if you had told me two years ago that Aids didn’t really exist and wasn’t caused by a virus called HIV, I would probably have rolled my eyes and changed the subject. What converted me was first my experience of the ‘pandemic’ and my recognition of the obvious parallels with the ‘Aids crisis’, which – from the Fauci connection to the suppression of effective drugs and the promotion of dodgy ones – was a dry run for Covid-19. And secondly, the informed wisdom of Robert F Kennedy Jr and of my most recent podcast guest Jon Rappoport.
Rappoport is the author of a 1988 book we all should have read (it would have spared us so much bother) called AIDS Inc. He began his researches in good faith, assuming – as any rational person would – that Aids was a genuine phenomenon. Little by little, though, he came to realise – as his subtitle put it – that this was the Scandal of the Century: a scam, effectively concocted by Big Pharma, the US Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, to push unnecessary, expensive and dangerous medical treatments on desperate, captive victim groups in the guise of ‘public health’.
Unless you’re very open-minded, impossibly cynical or irredeemably red-pilled, it’s a hard thesis to swallow. Among the obvious questions it raises are: ‘So what were all those people dying of?’ and ‘C’mon, if Aids was a fiction, surely we’d all know by now?’
The answer to the first question is it depends what victim category you are talking about. In Africa, for example, ‘Aids’ was – and still is – rebadged malnutrition. Its original nickname (as fans of Bob Mould and Sugar will know) was ‘The Slim’. With the diabolical genius we’ve since come to expect of Big Pharma, millions upon millions of starving Africans were turned into a problem the industry could lucratively solve simply by pretending that their emaciation was the result of a deadly new virus (probably spread from having sex with monkeys: nice dose of cheap racism there, Big Pharma liars!) rather than from not getting enough to eat.
With gay men, according to Rappoport (who was told this by front-line community workers) it was the bath houses. These were the orgiastic dens of iniquity, popular at the time, where you could take any number of drugs, have sex with any number of men, and stay up partying any number of hours till your immune system finally gave up the ghost and left you prey to all manner of fatal infections.
But what about the gay men who didn’t go to the bath houses? This is where the story gets truly shocking. Many of them were killed by the very drug that was supposed to save them, the much-lauded AZT. Designed as a cancer drug (but abandoned because it was so toxic, killing more people than it cured), AZT was heavily pushed by Anthony Fauci as the solution to the Aids crisis. In fact it made it much worse. As RFK Jr reports in his book The Real Anthony Fauci, once AZT was introduced the death rate ‘from Aids’ rose precipitously.
What’s particularly sad is that a lot of these victims were not even sick before they moved on to their fatal courses of AZT (the average survival time for those taking it was four months). They’d simply taken the test, been found to be ‘HIV-positive’ and had been frightened by the general hysteria into imagining that this would save their life. Among those who made this mistake were ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev and tennis player Arthur Ashe.
A treatment more dangerous than the disease itself. Shrill public health campaigns dispensing misinformation. More effective, cheaper treatments being deliberately suppressed. An obsession with case numbers over fatality rates. Whistleblowing scientists, such as Peter Duesberg and Claus Köhnlein, silenced and proscribed by a corrupt medical establishment. So much of what happened during the Aids crisis seems with hindsight so eerily familiar. And with good reason: it was organised by the same people.
What’s frustrating is that even when you lay out the information as clearly as RFK Jr and Rappoport have done, there will be those – and perhaps they are even the majority – who prefer to believe the fabricated narrative to the uncomfortable truth. This is understandable. To comprehend fully what happened during the Aids crisis you must inevitably abandon many of the cosy assumptions that make our world seem nicer and friendlier than it actually is. These assumptions include some of the following notions: that doctors are all in the healing business; that the regulatory authorities are there to protect you; that drugs are not released on to the market without rigorous testing. The idea that medical doctors and scientists, in collusion with government agencies and the pharmaceutical industry, would make up a disease in order to push a cure which killed you but made them rich is such a hard thing for most of us to grasp that we find it easier to believe the reassuring lie than accept the reality.
There’s another reason too, why the inventors of Aids have never been properly found out, let alone brought to justice: gaslighting. We’re talking about an entire system – the media, Hollywood, publishing, TV, schools, academe, the scientific institutions, big business, the political class, finance etc – all pushing the same message. Try questioning the Aids/HIV narrative as a specialist science or health journalist and see how far you get: you’ll find that ‘experts’ will no longer wish to speak to you, institutions no longer prepared to co-operate with you. Or try to get funding for a movie blowing the whistle on what really happened . . .
No one likes to think that they’re the hapless dupe of a massive psy-op. But the evidence is all around us, if only you know where and how to look. For example, I suspect it’s probably not coincidental that, at the height of the ‘pandemic’, the BBC treated us to a period drama series about the UK experience of Aids, written by Doctor Who showrunner/reviver Russell T Davies, called It’s A Sin.
Now I happen to think Davies is a hugely talented and watchable screenwriter, brilliant at creating likeable, believable characters, snappy, memorable dialogue and entertaining story arcs. But this, where an issue such as Aids is concerned, is what makes his fiction so dangerous. Of course, as an Establishment figure, Davies is going to promote the Establishment narrative. It’s A Sin achieved various nefarious objectives: it reinforced the notion that Aids was a thing; it got audiences talking once more about their memories and experiences of that era; it enabled politicians and commentators to pontificate about the period, drape themselves in rainbow flags and so on; and it hinted at contemporary parallels – that Covid-19 too is a genuine health crisis that we would do well take seriously and which the government really should do more to address . . .
When you analyse how the system works it just sounds like yet more conspiracy theorising. But it’s precisely this level of attention to detail by the progenitors of the Aids scam which explains why so many of us still think, against all the evidence, that it wasn’t a scam.
Sadiq Khan has urged Londoners not to exercise outside because warm weather in Europe is leading to high pollution levels in the capital. According to The Telegraph :
As temperatures reached 20C in the capital on Wednesday, older people and those with heart and lung problems were told to limit “strenuous physical exertion” due to high pollution levels.
Anyone else “suffering discomfort” should also consider reducing their activity, official advice said.
A forecast from Imperial College London said that levels of fine particulate pollution, or PM2.5, would reach “high” levels on Wednesday and Thursday, causing health problems for vulnerable people.
The alert was the first issued by the Met Office since August 2020. Alerts were also broadcast in London train stations and to travellers at bus stops around the capital.
Despite the health warning, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, also urged people to walk or cycle to limit the air pollution from vehicles…
Mr Khan said: “I’m urging Londoners to look after each other by choosing to walk, cycle or take public transport, avoiding unnecessary car journeys, stopping engine idling and not burning wood or garden waste, all of which contributes to high levels of pollution.
“This is particularly important in order to protect those who are more vulnerable to high pollution.
“While this alert is in place people with heart and lung problems should avoid physical exertion.”
Did you note the use of the term “vulnerable people” by Imperial College? Did you note the language used by Sadiq Khan?
The Mayor said that he’s urging Londoners “to look after each other by choosing to walk, cycle, take public transport and avoid unnecessary car journeys.” Londoners should do this, said Khan, to “protect those who are more vulnerable to high pollution.”
The message is a stark one.
“Citizens! Driving your car is affecting the most vulnerable in society! Walking or cycling saves lives and protects the NHS!” Exercising indoors protects you and protects the NHS!”
I said it two years ago didn’t I? Climate lockdowns featuring initiatives like personal driving allowances are coming soon. I predicted that at some point the government would attempt to place legal limits on driving.
I imagined a day when people would be told that they could only take their cars out on the first and third Sunday’s of the month depending on their postcode. Others would be permitted to drive on the second and fourth Sunday’s.
SKY News ran a hit-piece on me for predicting climate lockdowns.
I’ve emailed the journalist to ask her if she still thinks the notion is preposterous.
A reader sent me this opinion piece published in the British Medical Journal last week. The authors argue that evidence based medicine (EBM) has been corrupted by corporate interests, failed regulation and commercialisation of academia.
The article begins by discussing how EBM was meant to improve medicine but as pharmaceutical documents have been released we realise that this remains an illusion.
The advent of evidence based medicine was a paradigm shift intended to provide a solid scientific foundation for medicine. The validity of this new paradigm, however, depends on reliable data from clinical trials, most of which are conducted by the pharmaceutical industry and reported in the names of senior academics. The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented. Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion.
They then look at how large corporations have dominated the market and in doing so have slowed scientific progress by supressing information and data and failing to report adverse events.
The philosophy of critical rationalism, advanced by the philosopher Karl Popper, famously advocated for the integrity of science and its role in an open, democratic society. A science of real integrity would be one in which practitioners are careful not to cling to cherished hypotheses and take seriously the outcome of the most stringent experiments.5 This ideal is, however, threatened by corporations, in which financial interests trump the common good. Medicine is largely dominated by a small number of very large pharmaceutical companies that compete for market share, but are effectively united in their efforts to expanding that market. The short term stimulus to biomedical research because of privatisation has been celebrated by free market champions, but the unintended, long term consequences for medicine have been severe. Scientific progress is thwarted by the ownership of data and knowledge because industry suppresses negative trial results, fails to report adverse events, and does not share raw data with the academic research community. Patients die because of the adverse impact of commercial interests on the research agenda, universities, and regulators.
Universities were once respected institutions but by seeking funding from the pharmaceutical industry, they have become corrupted.
The pharmaceutical industry’s responsibility to its shareholders means that priority must be given to their hierarchical power structures, product loyalty, and public relations propaganda over scientific integrity. Although universities have always been elite institutions prone to influence through endowments, they have long laid claim to being guardians of truth and the moral conscience of society. But in the face of inadequate government funding, they have adopted a neo-liberal market approach, actively seeking pharmaceutical funding on commercial terms. As a result, university departments become instruments of industry: through company control of the research agenda and ghostwriting of medical journal articles and continuing medical education, academics become agents for the promotion of commercial products.6 When scandals involving industry-academe partnership are exposed in the mainstream media, trust in academic institutions is weakened and the vision of an open society is betrayed.
Academics no longer succeed because of their achievements but because of what they can offer to the pharmaceutical industry.
The corporate university also compromises the concept of academic leadership. Deans who reached their leadership positions by virtue of distinguished contributions to their disciplines have in places been replaced with fundraisers and academic managers, who are forced to demonstrate their profitability or show how they can attract corporate sponsors. In medicine, those who succeed in academia are likely to be key opinion leaders (KOLs in marketing parlance), whose careers can be advanced through the opportunities provided by industry. Potential KOLs are selected based on a complex array of profiling activities carried out by companies, for example, physicians are selected based on their influence on prescribing habits of other physicians. KOLs are sought out by industry for this influence and for the prestige that their university affiliation brings to the branding of the company’s products. As well paid members of pharmaceutical advisory boards and speakers’ bureaus, KOLs present results of industry trials at medical conferences and in continuing medical education. Instead of acting as independent, disinterested scientists and critically evaluating a drug’s performance, they become what marketing executives refer to as “product champions.”
Ironically, industry sponsored KOLs appear to enjoy many of the advantages of academic freedom, supported as they are by their universities, the industry, and journal editors for expressing their views, even when those views are incongruent with the real evidence. While universities fail to correct misrepresentations of the science from such collaborations, critics of industry face rejections from journals, legal threats, and the potential destruction of their careers. This uneven playing field is exactly what concerned Popper when he wrote about suppression and control of the means of science communication. The preservation of institutions designed to further scientific objectivity and impartiality (i.e., public laboratories, independent scientific periodicals and congresses) is entirely at the mercy of political and commercial power; vested interest will always override the rationality of evidence.
They discuss how the regulators have been captured without any questions raised by governments.
Regulators receive funding from industry and use industry funded and performed trials to approve drugs, without in most cases seeing the raw data. What confidence do we have in a system in which drug companies are permitted to “mark their own homework” rather than having their products tested by independent experts as part of a public regulatory system? Unconcerned governments and captured regulators are unlikely to initiate necessary change to remove research from industry altogether and clean up publishing models that depend on reprint revenue, advertising, and sponsorship revenue.
Their suggested reforms are probably what most naïve people already think happens but unfortunately doesn’t.
Our proposals for reforms include: liberation of regulators from drug company funding; taxation imposed on pharmaceutical companies to allow public funding of independent trials; and, perhaps most importantly, anonymised individual patient level trial data posted, along with study protocols, on suitably accessible websites so that third parties, self-nominated or commissioned by health technology agencies, could rigorously evaluate the methodology and trial results. With the necessary changes to trial consent forms, participants could require trialists to make the data freely available. The open and transparent publication of data are in keeping with our moral obligation to trial participants—real people who have been involved in risky treatment and have a right to expect that the results of their participation will be used in keeping with principles of scientific rigour. Industry concerns about privacy and intellectual property rights should not hold sway.
Overall, a scathing opinion piece which highlights some truths which many of us recognise but which the majority would call you crazy for suggesting. Whenever I have tried to discuss how the pharmaceutical companies “mark their own homework”, the common response I get is “rubbish, the regulators conduct their own trials to see how safe and effective the vaccines are”.
If more people understood how the system worked then we wouldn’t be in the situation we are today. However, that is easier said than done when governments and the media have also been captured along with the regulators and academia.
The Biden administration last week launched an advertising campaign urging parents to vaccinate their young children against COVID.
The campaign, funded by taxpayers through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, features emotional pleas from leaders of some of America’s largest professional healthcare associations.
The ads — a pair of 60-second spots titled “Oath” and “Trust” — were posted to social media March 18, and are scheduled to appear on TV screens beginning this week.
“You can trust us” is the underlying message of the campaign, which relies heavily on professional credibility and emotional appeal — rather than data — to make the case for childhood COVID vaccination.
The healthcare professionals offer heartfelt testimonials implying that because they trust the vaccines for their kids and grandkids, so should the viewer.
In one spot, the three doctors and one nurse state:
“COVID vaccines are safe and effective for kids … What’s not safe is getting COVID. So we want you to know we trust the COVID vaccine for ourselves, for our patients, for our kids. So should you.”
The ads also point out that some of the doctors are grandparents.
There is no mention in any of the ads of the potential risk of injuries or death associated with the vaccines.
Emotional claims versus factual data
One of the few factual claims used in the ads to support vaccination in pre-teens references raw case numbers:
“We know that millions of cases of COVID have been in kids … in kids … in kids,” says a chorus of three of the healthcare professionals.
While this statistical reference may technically be correct, it also may not give an accurate picture of the risks for children. That’s because the data on cases don’t differentiate between asymptomatic or mild cases and those that involved serious infection or hospitalization in children.
At the height of the Omicron surge, Professor Mark Woolhouse, an infectious disease expert at Edinburgh University, Edinburgh, Scotland, told The Guardian :
“This is a very discriminatory virus. Some people are much more at risk from it than others. People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15.”
Research shows many cases of COVID in pre-teen groups are asymptomatic and the vast majority of children experience nothing more than mild symptoms.
Perhaps because of this, many parents have chosen not to vaccinate their young children. More than four months after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first recommended the vaccine for children as young as 5, just upwards of a quarter of kids 5 to 11 have received both shots. Close to two-thirds of children 12 to 17 years old are “fully vaccinated.”
The latest data from CDC surveys show 33% of parents of children aged 5 to 11 said they would “probably [not] or definitely will not” vaccinate their children against COVID. Another 26% said they would probably get their children vaccinated or were still unsure.
Benefits don’t outweigh risks, data show
According to COVID-NET data, as of the end of 2021, the weekly rate of COVID-associated hospitalization in the 5 to 11 age group ranged from zero to a peak of 1.1 per 100,000.
However, as The Defender reported Monday, the CDC on March 14 removed from its data tracker website tens of thousands of deaths linked to COVID-19, including nearly a quarter of the deaths it had attributed to children.
In a statement to Reuters, the CDC said it made adjustments to the mortality data because its algorithm was “accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19-related.”
“Data on deaths were adjusted after resolving a coding logic error,” the CDC’s website states. “This resulted in decreased death counts across all demographic categories.”
At the time of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) December 2021 risk-benefit assessment, used to recommend the vaccine for children 5 to 11, the overall weekly average COVID-associated hospitalization rate for this age group was approximately 0.4 per 100,000 children.
Before the CDC made its adjustments to COVID mortality rates, the total number of COVID hospitalizations for children under 18 in 2021 was 2,100. The total number of COVID-related hospitalizations for children under 5 was 920.
By comparison, the CDC reports that on average 58,000 children younger than 5 are hospitalized each year with respiratory syncytial virus.
The CDC also published a study on March 11 in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report estimating that two shots of the Pfizer vaccine were only 31% effective against Omicron variant infections in children ages 5 to 11 in an analysis of data from July 2021 to February 2022.
This followed a study released February 28 that found the Pfizer vaccine was only 12% effective against Omicron in children 5 to 11 and adolescents 12 to 17 in an analysis of data from Dec. 13, 2021, to Jan. 30, 2022.
Despite the low numbers, there remains a strong push for the FDA to authorize COVID vaccines for the last remaining age group: infants and preschoolers.
Originally, Pfizer had expected to submit its authorization request for this group to the FDA as early as last month, but then delayed it until next month due to initial results showing no clear benefit for this group.
The lack of evidence proving the vaccines are of more benefit than risk was underscored by Pfizer’s latest trial for children 5 to 11, in which both the vaccinated and the placebo groups showed no incidents of hospitalization or death.
Last week, Florida followed Norway in recommending against COVID vaccines for young children.
Yes, this happened. That I would not call out Bourla again. Of course no one would put this in writing but of course this was to silence me. Of course if I worked for Pfizer I would be muted complete from that moment on. That is how they silence you, put you on payroll.
To me, the battle is so huge, so transformational, that a POTUS could be so mislead that decisions were made Feb/March 2020 that shaped the next 2 years in the US and world and negatively so. Of course I cannot be part of that nor would ever consider it. I am in the fight for my peoples, my family, my children and the world I will leave behind one day. I have lost enough that I cannot go back now. As they say “balls to the wall”!
And I will say again, Bourla and Bancel and all at FDA, all at NIH, Fauci et al., all who have acted in this COVID fraud, must be allowed to defend their decisions and policies as we live in good governance etc. and we function with laws (though many argue the judicial system is corrupted) but if we show in proper legal inquiring and public inquiries that their actions costed lives, that their decisions killed people, that people and children died as a result, then they must be held to account with jail time! Financial penalties and jail time.
I am hurt financially, personally, as are a core 12-15 of us globally who have stood up, but the fight we are in is beyond money. Those of us who have been cancelled have been hurt, name wise, career, slandered etc. But for each person there is a time in life that we chose to stand up or not… we rise or shrink away, and most scientists, universities, doctors, public health officials, technocrats, governments, COVID Task Forces etc, chose to sell the people out for money, their grants, their salary was more important, so their silence was bought…so yes, we are hurt as our careers and income were hurt, I being one of them and I was stunned at what I was told on the phone twice in the call with the ask on a trip to TO…would have changed my life, but I said no, shove it, and so be it… money can come again and we will survive. Money is not the key in life. There is something called a line of integrity that must not shift based on money etc.
I joined with the Canadian truckers and now the US truckers to help stop the unscientific mandates and emergency powers, and I will remain fighting… its that critical.
These vaccines by Pfizer, Moderna et al are criminal, because they were non-sterilizing, and they knew it like how Pfizer knew there were 1,223 deaths that they and FDA hid from the public (see recent tranche of released documents, and 1290 special adverse effects etc., all hidden and they hoped for 55 or 75 years) it would have only driven infectious variants and more likely more virulent, more lethal ones. This is happening now. We are at this point where not only is the sub-optimal non-neutralizing Abs driving increased infectiousness of the virus via new variants, but it is driving increased virulence.
A reader was disturbed this week by a visit from an official from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). What the official said appears to bode ill for the idea that the U.K. is ‘living with Covid’ insofar as that means moving away from all the Covid theatre and regulations of the past two years.
I work in a London hospitality business. This week an official from the HSE came in to do a Covid compliance spot check. Despite the Government making noises about Covid regulations being binned, the HSE person informed us that from April businesses with more than five employees will still be required to adhere to general ‘Covid safe’ practices, under the threat of enforcement proceedings (and fines) by the HSE.
Overhearing what the HSE official told the General Manager, it sounded to me as though it will involve keeping a Covid risk management plan in place and ensuring ventilation, access to sanitiser for customers and so on.
Most of it was asking questions about Covid management actions we have taken and are still taking. It implied that, so far as the HSE is concerned, Covid is a now a ‘standard’ risk which needs to continue to be managed alongside others.
So briefly, it appears:
– they are doing Covid spot checks insofar as they apply to employees;
– they will be increasing spot checks from April.
This suggests the perpetuation of Covid regulations will be enforced under the guise of general health and safety law. Not as advertised by the Government at all if so, and hardly reflects ‘living with Covid’ like we live with other mostly mild respiratory viruses.
Runs counter to the official narrative of a bonfire of Covid restrictions.
If the Government is serious about moving on from the pandemic then it needs to rein in the HSE and withdraw its guidance that treats COVID-19 as a special threat.
Mendacity is worse than dishonesty. According to one essay on mendacity, “Mendacity connotes a mixture of dishonesty, hypocrisy and audacity.” Mendacity is an important theme of the play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams. “What’s that smell in this room? Didn’t you notice it? Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity? There ain’t nothing more powerful than the odor of mendacity!” I recently encountered this powerful and obnoxious odor in my email inbox with the arrival of a Medical News and Perspectives from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
The title of this bit of medical mendacity is: “When Physicians Spread Unscientific Information about COVID-19.” Scientific information is curiously absent from the commentary. Instead, the words misinformation and disinformation in the body of the work are equated with unscientific information in the title. A number of people are accused of spreading misinformation, but no specific examples of scientifically incorrect statements are provided. The first specific claim of wrongdoing is “Ladapo continued to publicly contradict CDC recommendations on vaccines, masks, and testing.” The reader is required to accept that CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) recommendations are necessarily statements of scientific truth. This is religious dogma rather than the practice of the scientific method. The scientific method requires the free and open dissent from any scientific hypothesis by either empiric evidence contrary to the hypothesis or the logical extension of the hypothesis to an absurd conclusion. It is only by successful defense against dissenting opinions that scientific hypotheses become accepted as truth. By claiming that any dissent from CDC opinion is misinformation or scientific falsehood, JAMA has elevated the CDC to a divine source of infallible truth. JAMA further requests that medical boards become a new Inquisition to root out heresy and apostasy.
The JAMA commentary reserved special criticism of the organization America’s Frontline Doctors for the sins of opposition to “vaccination and mask mandates” and the promotion of “ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for prevention and early treatment of COVID-19.” The JAMA commentary is dishonest by conflating opposition to mandates with opposition to the action being mandated. It is quite possible to agree with the decision to vaccinate yet be opposed to forcing others to agree with that decision. Furthermore, claims about vaccine efficacy and safety are always debatable, given that data have been withheld from the public and are necessarily incomplete about future events. The JAMA commentary is further dishonest in its implication that promotion of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine is beyond the pale. The National Library of Medicine includes citations supporting the efficacy of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for covid-19. While the quality of the scientific information is always debatable, it is mendacious to claim that promotion of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine is unscientific. The JAMA commentary is hypocritical in failing to note that CDC—the oracle of Delphi—has changed its position on the efficacy of masks multiple times during the course of the covid-19 pandemic. The JAMA commentary is dripping with audacity in asserting that anyone contradicting the CDC deserves excommunication from the practice of medicine.
Another specific citation of sin in the JAMA commentary noted: “A widely publicized January 23, 2022, march against COVID-19 vaccine mandates in Washington, DC, included physicians among its sponsors and speakers. A livestream of the event showed attendees shoulder to shoulder in front of the Lincoln Memorial, vanishingly few wearing masks.” Perhaps JAMA inquisitors should keep up with “The Science,” which currently questions the wisdom of masks during outdoor events. The history of science is full of examples where heresy and apostasy become generally accepted scientific truths.
The JAMA commentary is a typical authoritarian response to dissent. Authoritarians insist that people practice the logical fallacy known as appeal to authority. In this case, JAMA asserts that any statement from the CDC must be true, so any contradiction of CDC policy must be unscientific or misinformation. In this way, authoritarians relieve themselves of the difficult task of persuading people about the truth of their claims. The most common reason why people reject statements from authority is recent memory of lies from the same authority. The CDC has damaged its own credibility by admissions that it has withheld significant data on vaccines because the data might be misinterpreted. Rather than correct the mendacity of authority to increase trust in authority, the authoritarians demand that disagreement with authority be punished by some form of excommunication from civil discourse. In this case, rather than recognizing that the prevalence of people who disagree with statements made by the CDC is based on previous false or misleading statements by the CDC, JAMA asserts that any dissent from the CDC statements must be purged or silenced. True science with a small s welcomes dissent and agrees to debate dissent on the merits of the arguments rather than ad hominem attacks on the dissenters. The medical establishment is afraid to debate dissenters on the merits of the arguments demonstrating the weakness of the establishment narrative. JAMA does not even pretend to demonstrate that the heretics and apostates have made false statements. Instead, JAMA asserts that the CDC is infallible and any contradiction of CDC policy by physicians is de facto proof of heresy and should be punished by excommunication. The stench of mendacity emanating from the medical establishment has become powerful and obnoxious.
Gilbert Berdine is an associate professor of medicine at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and an affiliate of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University.
A new poll finds that vaccinated people are far more likely to risk World War III over Ukraine by supporting aggressive measures against Russia, while unvaccinated people are more likely to support diplomatic measures.
The revealing results of the survey, which was conducted by EKOS, were published by the Toronto Star.
Canadians who have received “three or more shots” massively supported expanding sanctions (86%), seizing Russians assets (85%), cutting off shipments of Russian oil (81%) and sending additional military equipment to Ukraine (82%). Over half (52%) supported providing Ukraine with fighter jets.
On the flip side, unvaccinated Canadians were far less likely to support measures that would serve to escalate the conflict.
Indeed, a majority of unvaccinated (52%) don’t support any of the measures listed at all.
“The overwhelming majority probably would have said “use diplomacy” if it was an option but the warhawks behind the poll left it off the list,” comments Chris Menahan.
The insightful poll results back up the claims of many, that the COVID narrative was switched for ‘support Ukraine’ virtually overnight by the media and the unthinking masses immediately displayed their ideological subservience.
NPCs were able to seamlessly transfer from zealous support for vaccines and vitriolic denunciations of anyone who didn’t get one, to zealous support for Ukraine and vitriolic denunciations of anyone who didn’t fully swallow the war narrative.
It seems that mass support for whatever ‘current thing’ the political class and culture demands has become a form of cognitive addiction.
Humanity is seemingly dependent on defining itself by lurching from one crisis to another and weaponizing it to ostracize, publicly shame and deplatform dissidents who suggest all may not be as it seems.
Samizdat adds:
The poll also revealed how the two groups feel about the reasons for the conflict, with 88% of vaccinated respondents saying the repression of Russian speakers in the Donbass region does not justify Russia’s actions in Ukraine. The unvaccinated, however, are more split on the question, with 26% saying Russia’s military operation is justified, 27% saying it isn’t, and 35% saying they neither agree nor disagree with it.
The vaccinated also say, almost unanimously (88%), that Russia is guilty of war crimes in Ukraine, while only 32% of unvaxxed respondents agree, and 42% say they don’t believe it is happening at all.
EKOS President Frank Graves said he found the poll results alarming, suggesting that vaccine refusers were “much more sympathetic to Russia,” and that it showcased the “highly corrosive influences of disinformation.”
“This is definitely a new and bluntly insidious force that’s contributing to polarization and disinformation and poor decision-making. And it doesn’t seem to be going away. Things are getting worse,” Graves said, as reported by the Toronto Star.
“I don’t think this is because those people had an ingrained sympathy to the Russians. They’re reading this online, they’re consuming this from the same sources that were giving them the anti-vax stuff.”
The US Democratic Party has embraced a transgender agenda that amounts to “the normalization of sadism,” author A.J. Rice has said, warning that radical trans policies would return if the party is allowed to regain power.
Speaking to RT’s America First host Scotty Nell Hughes about his new book, ‘The Curse of the Bearded Lady: How the Trans Mafia Whacked American Sanity’, Rice argued that activists have gained significant influence in schools, medicine, and corporate America while people who questioned the agenda have faced pressure to stay silent.
The author described the “trans mafia” as the sprawling network of people and institutions that have helped the movement gain influence. He singled out parts of academia, wealthy backers, and corporations, and stated that providers of transition-related treatment also have a financial incentive to keep young people in their care indefinitely.
Rice argued that the consequences of these policies ultimately fall on children who are being drawn toward gender-affirming medical treatments and on girls who are expected to share locker rooms or compete in sports with biological males.
He noted that while voters rejected the Democrats’ approach to gender in 2024, the party, which has been “captured by madness,” has since only doubled down and is seeking what is effectively “the normalization of sadism.” … Full report
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