US Republican lawmakers have sent a letter pressing chief White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci for answers about his alleged silencing of concerns that the Covid-19 virus originally came from a Chinese lab.
The letter, sent on Monday by three US House members, cited emails suggesting that Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), tried in early 2020 to quash speculation among scientists that the virus may have originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Instead of alerting national security officials to the pandemic’s potentially unnatural origin, Fauci and Collins sought to shut down the debate, the GOP lawmakers said.
The emails, which were obtained by media outlets under Freedom of Information Act requests, reportedly showed that some virology experts saw reason to believe that the virus was lab-created. Some of the messages made reference to a February 2020 conference call in which many scientists leaned toward the lab-leak theory. For instance, Tulane Medical School professor Robert Garry said he could see no “plausible natural scenario” for some aspects of Covid-19 otherwise.
“However, those same email communications, particularly when viewed in light of other publicly available information, demonstrate an apparent effort by you and Dr. Collins not only to cover up the concerns those virologists raised, but to suppress scientific debate about the origins of Covid-19,” the letter said.
Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington), Brett Guthrie (R-Kentucky) and Morgan Griffith (R-Virginia) signed the letter.
They demanded that Fauci provide details on how those conversations with scientists were initiated and who consulted him and Collins on Covid-19’s likely origins. The lawmakers also requested information on any communications by Fauci and Collins with Chinese scientists, as well as documents related to US funding of the research in Wuhan.
Even as scientists were speculating about Covid-19’s potentially manmade origins, Fauci told reporters in April 2020 that the sequencing of the virus was “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” Earlier that same day, Collins sent him a message of concern about the lab leak theory, asking how NIH might “put down this very destructive conspiracy.”
Republican lawmakers have accused Fauci of directing taxpayer funding to gain-of-function research that could potentially make organisms more transmissible or lethal. In Monday’s letter, the House members claimed the efforts to quell the lab-leak theory may have stemmed at least partly from fears of those grants being exposed. “It appears you and Dr. Collins may have done so to protect China and avoid criticism about incredibly risky research that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was funding at the Wuhan lab,” the legislators said.
February 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Anthony Fauci, Covid-19, Francis Collins, NIH, United States |
Leave a comment
An 1871 dataset of sea temperatures across the Great Barrier Reef in Australia has been compared to recent measurements logged at the same reef areas. No differences in temperature were found by Dr. Bill Johnson, leading him to conclude: “Alarming claims that the East Australian Current has warmed due to global warming are therefore without foundation.”
The 1871 temperatures were taken by the SS Governor Blackall steamship on a voyage around the Australian east coast to observe a total eclipse of the sun in the north of the continent. Hourly measurements were made between 6am and 6pm every day in the voyage from Port Stanley, north of Sydney, to Cape York and repeated on the journey back. Dr. Johnson, a former research scientist at the New South Wales Department of Natural Resources, allowed for the considerable seasonal variations in temperature across the reef but concluded that nothing much had changed. He said there was no evidence that the system regulating temperature had broken down “or is likely to break down in the future”.
Needless to say, such stories do not tend to appear in the media, most of which is firmly wedded to the notion that human-caused global warming is destroying the coral reefs around the world. In October 2020, the BBC reported that the Great Barrier Reef had lost half of its coral since 1995, citing a report that said it was due to “warmer seas driven by climate change”. But Professor Peter Ridd, who has spent 40 years observing the reef, noted recently that it was in robust good health. Coral growth rates have if anything “increased over the last 100 years”. The graph below, compiled by Ridd from Australian Institute of Marine Science records, illustrates recent growth.
Agence France-Presse‘s award-winning reporter Marlow Hood recently quoted a University of Leeds paper that said coral reefs anchoring a quarter of marine wildlife will “most likely” be wiped out, even if the rise in global warming from pre-industrial times is capped at 1.5°C – which amounts to future warming of just 0.4°C, as 1.1°C has already occurred since 1820. Mr. Hood describes himself on his twitter feed as the “Herald of the Anthropocene” and was recently given €100,000 by the Spanish bank BBVA , which is heavily involved in Net Zero finance. In his commendation, Mr Hood was praised for his ability to “synthesize complex scientific models and studies and explain them in simple terms”. Certainly, Mr Hood went to the heart of the Leeds paper by further reporting that with an increase of 2°C, reef mortality “would be 100%”. This finding is said to have come from a “new generation of climate models”.
Corals have long occupied an exalted place in the climate tablets of doom. Their demise is commonly projected from the natural bleaching that occurs when they expel symbiotic algae, suggested to occur in reaction to sudden changes in water temperature. However, most bleaching – which also appears to have an important evolutionary function – occurs around weather oscillations, such as the El Niño event. These happen on a regular basis and once localised conditions have been stabilised, the coral usually recovers. Tropical coral thrives in temperatures between about 24°C and 32°C and sometimes grows quicker in warmer waters. Any change in long term global temperatures is unlikely to be a threat and certainly not one as small as 0.4°C. In any case, according to Dr. Johnson’s discoveries, there hasn’t been any change in such conditions on the Great Barrier Reef for at least 150 years.
A more practical threat to coral reefs is the less discussed practice of blowing them up and using them for building materials, jewellery, calcium health supplements and marine aquarium decorations. According to Big Blue Ocean Cleanup, an environmental non-profit organisation, this trade is worth $375 billion a year. This is an astonishing sum. Across the Pacific, Blue Ocean identifies two techniques of destruction. The first is small-scale mining using crowbars and sledgehammers to break off the coral branches. The second involves the use of dynamite.
Needless to say, this has an enormous impact on the surrounding eco-system, killing marine life and leaving a barren ocean behind. Indiscriminate destruction also causes sand erosion and removes coastal protection. Ironically, much of the coral has been used to build airports and resorts in places like the Maldives to house tourists who come to marvel at the reefs.
Coral reefs need protecting. It is not a good idea to drench them in untreated sewage, douse them with toxic chemicals, smash up their habitat with reckless fishing or rearrange the ocean floor with high explosives. But this is relatively mundane environmental housekeeping work. It is a world away from using unproven science statements and climate models to spout ‘save the planet’ rhetoric and push for an unrealistic control-and-distribute Net Zero project.
In the run up to COP26, one of Prince William’s £1 million “Earthshot” gifts was handed to a small Bahamian company called Coral Vita that says it grows coral to replant in the ocean. Writing in the Spectator Australia, the biologist Jennifer Marohasy noted that the Australian government permitted the mining every year of 200 tonnes of coral from the Great Barrier Reef. At the same time, $1 billion Australian dollars was provided to save the ‘dying’ reef. Some of this money, she noted, will be used to replant corals.
She added: “[T]here will be jobs for scuba divers, and it will be filmed by underwater videographers, marine scientists will collect data around the programme and boats will be chartered. There will be money for almost everyone who wants to participate – if they are vaccinated, believe in human-caused climate change and believe the Great Barrier Reef is dying.”
February 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Environmentalism, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular |
Leave a comment
Last year, cartoons began to appear depicting an endless cycle of variants and government responses. They call to mind the definition of insanity (misattributed to Einstein) as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Or perhaps the less well known line from a 1990s Stephen King miniseries “Hell is repetition.”
The direction of public health policy over the past two years has been difficult to understand. It may be a fool’s errand to use logic and reason for something that by design makes no sense. But coming at it as I do with no prior education in medicine or epidemiology, crude tools such as logic and common sense may still be useful: The basic principles of reality are true for all endeavors. For a plan to work, it must work within a finite time; for every on ramp, there must be an exit.
We started out with “Two weeks to flatten the curve.” If nothing else can be said in favor of this plan, credit must be given for how well it was explained. Pictures like this were clear enough. With my university-level education in math and physics, I understood that the area under the curve was expected to remain equal under both alternatives: the one with and the other without “precautions” (as the label in the diagram euphemistically refers to life under communism). The peak of the curve would be lower, at the cost of the epidemic being extended in duration.
While the plan might or might not work, it is possible to state the premise without contradicting laws of logic or common sense. The flattening plan does accept that nearly everyone will eventually be exposed and the contagion will exhaust itself. If the plan enables some people to delay their exposure, up to a point, that could buy doctors some time to better learn how to treat them. Or perhaps a miraculous vaccine will be introduced that would create sterilizing immunity and halt the outbreak in its tracks enabling those who had delayed to avoid infection entirely.
And doctors did learn how to treat the disease, but treatment is actively fought by the medical establishment. The FDA – the drug regulator in the US – tweeted you should only get treated for covid if you are a horse. Even today, you can get banned from social media for suggesting that it is possible to treat the disease. So any possible advantage in developing a treatment was wasted.
While the plan was clear, it was not guaranteed to work. Subtle effects could undermine the simple story told by the picture. Perhaps everyone staying at home will not help because people will get infected at home. Or perhaps too many people must leave home because essential critical infrastructure workers such as marijuana dispensaries must remain open to keep society running.
Some suggested then a policy that postpones population immunity would give the virus more time to mutate. Given enough time, people who were infected and have developed natural immunity to an earlier variant would face a virus sufficiently different that they might become infected again. Along these lines, biotech executive Vivek Ramaswamy and medical professor Dr Apoorva Ramaswamy MD, writing in the Wall Street Journal, question whether we should even try to slow the spread when “Speeding It May Be Safer.” Cognitive scientist Mark Changzi suggests “slowing the spread among the healthy not-at-risk, which just raises the frail’s chances of getting infected.” “Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, who have been asserting that you can’t vaccinate your way out of a pandemic for months” believe that vaccination during an outbreak accelerates the evolution of the virus away from the version targeted by the vaccine.
Quite likely the “precautions” did nothing to make the curve flatter. With the benefit of hindsight we can observe that outbreaks of the virus in proximate US states (or neighboring nations that are similar in size and demographics in other regions of the world) rise and fall side by side in cyclical surges, regardless of when or if efforts to slow the spread were made. There is no impact on the variability of any public health metric based on when a “precaution” was undertaken.
After the hospitalizations peaked and then declined to near zero in the spring of 2020, I naively expected that we had done what we could, and it was over. Whether we had flattened the curve, or, the virus did what it would have done anyway, was at that point irrelevant. Instead of ending the precautions, there was an unstated shift from the original strategy to a new one. Unlike the original, the new policy was not clearly explained. I suspect the reason is that it could not have been explained without it becoming obvious that it did not make any sense.
“Flatten the curve” assumes contagions come to an end – either through immunity or viruses burn themselves out for reasons we do not fully understand. All things come to an end. Even the plague of the Black Death ran out of gas before it wiped out the entire human race. If an outbreak ends when most of us have been exposed (and either died or developed immunity), how can slowing it down be said to save lives? Is it not the best we can hope for that some people are exposed and suffer the consequences later rather than sooner?
Evidence of the new reality appeared to me one day when I was stuck in a traffic jam, on a trip I (and many of my neighbors) made in violation of my locality’s “shelter in place” order. As I puzzled over this new reality, I noticed overhead digital signage (paid for by my governor’s massive ad spend on Covid propaganda), stating: “Stay at home: save lives.” This was the initial wave of a propaganda tsunami imploring us to “slow the spread.”
A story about a superspreader who went to a party and infected multiple people who subsequently died attributed the deaths to the careless person who probably did not wear a mask. Was there some alternate version of reality in which the dead partygoers lived out the rest of their natural life never being exposed to a virus to which they were vulnerable? Should the superspreader be held responsible for their exposure, or was it only a matter of time until the virus found them, one way or another?
Sanctimonious lockdowners heaped scorn and ridicule on countries that did not slow the spread. A small industry of curve-fitting explanations were offered to explain the “success stories:” they locked down, they wore face masks, they tested, they quarantined, they contact-traced, they social distanced. They did as they were told. They obeyed authority. And we should do likewise.
According to Dr. Anthony Fauci MD, it was the time for us ornery Americans to do as we were told. In retrospect every one of the virtuous nations had its own spike or two, or three, often after getting fully vaccinated, taking a victory lap, and dislocating both of their shoulders by patting themselves on the back overly vigorously.
Consider testing. Some virtuous nations tested. Based on the long lines of cars to get into the popup centers, the United States tested a lot too. When former president Donald Trump suggested that – perhaps – we were overtesting, he was subjected to enormous ridicule. Yet how could testing help slow the spread of a virus? By itself testing does nothing other than identify sick people.
Can a test do a better job at identifying sick people than they can do on their own simply by noticing whether they have symptoms? If testing once a week does not help, does testing twice a week? And if so, then why do we care about a test result, if asymptomatic people are not contagious? In reality testing produced too many false positives to be useful.
Testing could in theory help if combined with contact tracing and quarantines to isolate the infected people. Contact tracing was another ritual of the success stories – yet contact tracing could not possibly work if someone could be infected by coming within six feet of a sick person or walking down the same side of the street because the second-order contacts of contacts would rapidly explode to include everyone in an entire city or region. This was another instance of Yogi Berra’s observation that “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”
I wondered what the goals of the new policy of “slow the spread” could be. Was it zero-covid? Zero-covid was the objective of a small cult of fanatics that never gained much traction in the US. A serious go at it would require a country to permanently ban inbound international travel. This was done in a small and tightly controlled nation where a friend of mine lives. According to my friend, they had very low levels of infection; however, the nation’s economy was tourism-based and the continued success of the policy requires that travelers not enter the country. The operation was a success, the patient died.
Several other countries tried and failed zero-covid. Antarctica, which should have been a slam dunk, could not pull it off. Nor could an isolated island in the Pacific. In one hilarious story from the zero-aspiring nation of Australia, the virus escaped from jail when a Covid security guard hooked up with a detained person at a quarantine facility.
We were not flattening the curve, nor did it look like a strategy of total eradication. We were in a strange middle ground. At best we were pushing the pain into the future but with no plan to ever deal with it. The goals and exit conditions of the plan were not clearly explained. I did at one point find a statement by Dr. Fauci that preventive measures could drive the disease down to a very low level. Was it assumed to remain low forever? If not, then from that low base, outbreaks could be somehow contained?
University of California Professor Dr. Vinay Prasad MD wrote about a similar message from President Biden:
So when people heard in Summer 2020 that Biden aimed to “get covid under control,” some people imagined an optimistic state of affairs whereby, once we all got vaccinated or wore masks for just 100 days (link), covid might be suppressed to such a permanently low level that most of us could forget about it, just as we forget about polio. Such people imagined a one-time, short-term effort to “get covid under control,” like unlocking a door.
If we are to believe that a worldwide pandemic grew from an outbreak of twelve people in Wuhan, China to infect nearly the entire world (even indigenous tribes in the Amazon jungle who are by definition quarantined) why would it not do the same when we emerged from our underground fallout shelters? What if through assiduously standing in small circles painted on the floor in grocery stores and wearing underwear on our faces, we succeeded in driving the number of Covid infections down to a very small number? To pick a number, for example, twelve people. Why would the contagion not, in the absence of broader acquired immunity, spread again from that new base of twelve, until eventually reaching all of those remaining uninfected?
It took me some time to give it a name. I settled on “suppression.” The fundamental reason that suppression is not a policy is that it has no exit. For a thing to work it must work within a limited time. If the measures to slow the spread succeeded in slowing it, then what? The nature of the off ramp is the answer to the question, “What happens when we stop doing it?” If the answer is, “It would go right back to what it was doing before,” then there is no exit.
During 2020 I had people tell me that we could not end the lockdown because the epidemic would pick up right where it left off and millions would die AND (sometimes the same people ) that if we keep up the restrictive measures for a while then we could stop because the virus would not come back. A bit of logic rules out the possibility that the virus could both come back and not come back.
Do we then spend the rest of our lives acting out Covid theater? Dr. Fauci said that he would never shake hands again. Blue check marks fret about quarantining their children. Jenin Younes reflected on a survey in which hypochondriac epidemiologists who are afraid to open their mail explain that they now consider a normal life to be dangerously reckless. Substack author Eugyppius writes about a medical journal editor who “can’t work out what we’re even doing here, but he wants us to keep doing it.”
Dr Prasad explained the difference between finite and infinite strategies:
Even if most of Biden’s voters agreed with his campaign promise to “get covid under control” in the abstract, this slogan does not specify whether the state of being “under control” involves a one-time effort, or a sustained effort over time. If you unlock a door, you do it once and you can forget it; if you lift an overhead hatch, maybe you have to keep holding it up so that it doesn’t fall back down again.
Slowing the spread – if such a thing is even possible – means we get to the same place later rather than sooner. Flat or not, it is over when you reach the right tail of the curve. The strange middle ground of slowing the spread with no exit condition, would, if tried, ruin our lives forever. Are you willing to live under covid restrictions for the rest of your life? And your children for the rest of their lives and all subsequent generations? For some measures that slow the spread of disease, such as indoor plumbing, garbage removal and better diet, the answer is yes. But if our forebears during the plague of the Black Death had adopted a covid-like attempt at suppression, no one would have gone outdoors since the 15th century.
During this time of insanity, some of us went about our lives as best we could and ignored the restrictions. The rest of the world is now coming to terms with the understanding that the “precautions” don’t do much. At best what is going to happen anyway, happens. If there is no off ramp then the change is either permanent or it will go on until failure is evident and people stop caring. Then they will go back to normal one by one.
Robert Blumen is a software engineer and podcast host who writes occasionally about political and economic issues.
February 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights |
Leave a comment
Former Premier of Newfoundland expresses pure passion for his country.
OTTAWA – The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms today filed a lawsuit in Federal Court seeking to strike down the federal government’s mandatory Covid-19 vaccine requirements for air travellers. The court action is on behalf of several Canadians from across Canada whose Charter rights and freedoms have been infringed.
On October 30, 2021, the federal government announced that anyone travelling by air, train, or ship, must be fully vaccinated. The travel vaccination mandate has prevented approximately 6 million unvaccinated Canadians (15% of Canada’s population) from travel within Canada and prevents them from flying out of Canada. Some of the Canadians involved in the lawsuit cannot travel to help sick loved ones, get to work, visit family and friends, take international vacations, and live ordinary lives.
The main applicant in the case is former Newfoundland Premier, The Honourable A. Brian Peckford. Mr. Peckford, pictured, is the only surviving drafter and signatory 40 years after the 1982 Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted.
“It is becoming more obvious that being vaccinated does not stop people from getting Covid and does not stop them from spreading it”, says the former Premier. “The government has not shown that the policy makes flying safer—it simply discriminates”, he notes. “When I heard Prime Minister Trudeau call the unvaccinated ‘racists,’ ‘misogynists, ‘anti-science’ and ‘extremist’ and his musing ‘do we tolerate these people?’ it became clear he is sowing divisions and advancing his vendetta against a specific group of Canadians—this is completely against the democratic and Canadian values I love about this country”, adds Mr. Peckford.
“The federal travel ban has segregated me from other Canadians. It’s discriminatory, violates my Charter rights and that’s why I am fighting the travel ban,” explains Mr. Peckford.
The Justice Centre’s legal challenge cites violations of Charter rights including mobility, life, liberty and security of the person, privacy, and discrimination. The lawsuit also challenges whether the Minister of Transportation has the jurisdiction to use aviation safety powers to enforce public health measures.
In discussing effective border control measures at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, Canada’s chief medical officer, Dr. Tam, said: “As you move further away from that epicentre, any other border measures are much less effective. Data on public health has shown that many of these are actually not effective at all… WHO advises against any kind of travel and trade restrictions, saying that they are inappropriate and could actually cause more harm than good in terms of our global effort to contain.” (Canada House of Commons, Standing Committee on Health Meeting, February 5, 2020)
The World Health Organization (“WHO”) continues to maintain that position and on January 19, 2022, urged all countries to: “Lift or ease international traffic bans as they do not provide added value and continue to contribute to the economic and social stress experienced by States Parties. The failure of travel restrictions introduced after the detection and reporting of Omicron variant to limit international spread of Omicron demonstrates the ineffectiveness of such measures over time.” The WHO repeated that countries should: “not require proof of vaccination against COVID-19 for international travel.” (World Health Organization, Statement on the tenth meeting of the International Health Regulations (2005) Emergency Committee regarding the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, January 19, 2022.)
“Despite the confirmed science that the vaccine does not stop people from getting or spreading the virus and the repeated warnings from the WHO, it’s clear the federal government is out of step and arbitrarily restricting Canadians fundamental rights and freedoms,” says Keith Wilson, Q.C., lead counsel for the legal challenge. “It is profoundly disturbing that a marginalized group in Canada—the unvaccinated—are essentially prohibited from leaving the country,” he adds.
“Canadians have been losing hope in the Charter and our courts. We are going to put the best arguments and evidence forward so that the court can clarify where governments overstep,” concludes Mr. Wilson.
The court will be asked to hear the case on an expedited basis given the serious infringement on Canadians’ mobility and other rights. Canada is the only country in the developed world that has banned Covid vaccine-free travellers from air travel.
Notice of Application, Filed and Served
February 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Canada, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
Leave a comment
Fifteen years ago, writers schooled in computer science began to imagine various totalitarian schemes for pandemic control. Experienced public health officials in 2006 warned that this would lead to disaster. Donald Henderson, for example, went through
Still, a decade and a half later, governments all over the world tried lockdowns anyway. And sure enough, since April of 2020, scholars have observed that these lockdown policies haven’t worked. The politicians preached, the cops enforced, citizens shamed each other, and businesses and schools did their best to comply with all the strictures. But the virus kept going with seeming disregard for all these antics.
Neither oceans of sanitizer, nor towers of plexiglass, nor covered mouths and noses, nor crowd avoidance, nor the seeming magic of six feet of distance, nor even mandated injections, caused the virus to go away or otherwise be suppressed.
The evidence is in. Restrictions are not associated with any particular set of virus mitigation goals. Forty studies have shown no connection between the policy (egregious violations of human liberty) and the intended outcomes (diminishing the overall disease impact of the pathogen).
You can forget about “causal inference” here because there is an absence of correlation of policy and outcomes at all. You can do a deeper dive and find 400 studies showing that the impositions on basic freedoms did not achieve the intended result but instead produced terrible public-health outcomes.
The two years of the hell into which hundreds of governments simultaneously plunged the globe achieved nothing but economic, social, and cultural destruction. Very obviously, this realization is shocking, and suggests a crying need for a reassessment of the power and influence of the people who did this.
This reassessment is happening now, all over the world.
A major frustration for those of us who have denounced lockdowns (which goes by many names and takes many forms) is that these studies have not exactly rocked the headlines. Indeed, they have been buried for the better part of two years.
Among the ignored studies was a December 2020 examination of light and voluntary measures (discouraging large gatherings, isolating the sick, generally being careful) vs. heavy and forced measures. This piece by Bendavid et al. observes some effects on spread from light measures but nothing statistically significant from heavy measures such as stay-at-home (or shelter-in-place) orders.
We do not question the role of all public health interventions, or of coordinated communications about the epidemic, but we fail to find an additional benefit of stay- at-home orders and business closures. The data cannot fully exclude the possibility of some benefits. However, even if they exist, these benefits may not match the numerous harms of these aggressive measures. More targeted public health interventions that more effectively reduce transmissions may be important for future epidemic control without the harms of highly restrictive measures.
The most recent meta-analysis from Johns Hopkins University (Jonas Herby of the Center for Political Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark, Lars Jonung of Lund University, and Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins) seems to have achieved some measure of media attention. It focuses in particular on the effects of heavy interventions on mortality, finding little to no relationship between policies and severe disease outcomes.
The attention given to this meta-analysis seems to have annoyed the small cabal of academics who still defend lockdowns. A website called HealthFeedBack blasted the methods of the study while citing biased sources and not seriously grappling with the results. This lame effort has been thoroughly smashed by Phil Magness.
Also seeking to reverse the bad press against lockdowns, the Science Media Centre, a project that appears mostly funded by The Wellcome Trust (Britain’s major funding source for epidemiological studies), published a rebuttal of this paper by top lockdown proponents.
Among the comments were those of Oxford’s Seth Flaxman, a major figure in this realm, who is not trained in biological science or medicine but computer science with a specialization in machine learning. And yet it has been his work that has most often been cited in defense of the idea that lockdowns achieved some good.
In opposition to the JHU study, Flaxman writes:
Smoking causes cancer, the earth is round, and ordering people to stay at home (the correct definition of lockdown) decreases disease transmission. None of this is controversial among scientists. A study purporting to prove the opposite is almost certain to be fundamentally flawed.
See how this rhetoric works? If you question his claim, you are not a scientist; you are denying the science!
These sentences are surely penned out of frustration. The first time in modern history or perhaps all of history when nearly all governments undertook “ordering people to stay home” (which amounts to a universal quarantine) to “decrease disease transmission” was in 2020.
To say that this is not controversial is ridiculous, since such policies had never before been attempted on this scale. Such a policy is not at all like an established causal claim (smoking increases cancer risk) nor a mere empirical observation (the earth is round). It is subject to verification.
There are plenty of reasons one might expect disease transmission to be higher in enclosed spaces with sustained close contact, such as homes, versus shops or even well-ventilated concert settings. As Henderson himself said, it could result in putting healthy non-infected people in close settings with infected people, worsening disease spread.
Indeed, by December of 2020, the governor’s office of New York found that “contact tracing data shows 70 percent of new COVID-19 cases originate from households and small gatherings.” It was also true with New York hospitalization: two thirds of them had contracted Covid at home.
“They’re not working; they’re not traveling,” Cuomo said of these recently hospitalized coronavirus patients. “We were thinking that maybe we were going to find a higher percent of essential employees who were getting sick because they were going to work — that these may be nurses, doctors, transit workers. That’s not the case. They were predominantly at home.”
That Flaxman would still claim otherwise after all experience shows that he is not observing reality but inventing dogma from his own intuition. Flaxman might say that he is sure that transmission might have been higher had people not been ordered to stay home, and there might be settings in which that is true, but he is in no position to elevate this claim to the status of “the earth is round.”
In addition, even under ideal conditions, reduction in disease transmission might only be short-term, kicking the can down the road. A glance at the wild infection increases of Winter 2021 suggests that. The orders might result in worse outcomes overall, due to all that such an order implies for people’s lives. Turning people’s homes into their own jails, in other words, has a downside for the quality of life. And surely that must factor into any social welfare analysis of pandemic policies.
Finally, it is not possible to order everyone to stay home, not even for a day or two. The groceries have to get to the store or be delivered to homes and apartments. People have to staff the hospitals. The electrical plants still need staff. Cops still have to be on the beat. There is literally no option available to “shut down” society in real life as versus in computer models.
Stay-at-home orders in real life become a class-protection scheme to keep high-end laptop professionals shielded from the virus while imposing the burden of exposure on people who have no option but to be out and about. In other words, the working classes are effectively forced to bear the burden of herd immunity, while the rich and financially secure stay safe and wait for the pandemic to pass.
For example, early in the pandemic, the messaging of the New York Times was to instruct its readers to stay home and get their groceries delivered. The paper knows its reader base well: it did not suggest any of them actually deliver groceries! As Sunetra Gupta says, “Lockdowns are a luxury of the affluent.”
And what, in the end, is the point of the stay-home orders? For a widespread virus such as this one, everyone will eventually meet the virus anyway. Only once the winter wave of 2021 finally swept the Zoom class did we start to see a shift in media messaging that 1) there is no shame in sickness, and 2) perhaps we need to start relaxing these restrictions.
The dogma that ordering people to stay home – for how long? – always reduces the spread comes not from evidence but from Flaxman-style modeling plus a remarkable capacity to ignore reality.
Lockdown policies are easily marketed to political players who might get a power rush from the exercise. But, in the end, Henderson’s prediction was correct: these interventions turned a manageable pandemic into a catastrophe.
It’s a sure bet, however, that lockdown proponents will be in denial at least for another decade.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
February 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, Human rights, Wellcome Trust |
Leave a comment
National media regulators are hoping the upcoming speech laws will give them power to censor “misinformation” on Spotify.
Spotify has been attacked heavily in recent months, mostly for hosting the Joe Rogan Experience, which doesn’t always go along with the mainstream narrative.
“We should hold them accountable not as a publisher but just like any other online platform in the Digital Services Act,” Frédéric Bokobza, deputy director general of France’s media regulator, Arcom, told POLITICO.
The EU is finalizing the Digital Services Act (DSA), a law focused on content moderation on online platforms. The bill might also empower national media regulators to regulate a broader list of tech platforms, including Telegram and Spotify.
“As of now, we do not have regulatory tools in the French law which would enable us to oversee audio streaming companies, on top of the fact [Spotify] is not based on our territory,” said Roch-Olivier Maistre, president of France’s audiovisual regulator.
For long, Spotify escaped public scrutiny as it mostly hosted music. But in recent years it has become a popular podcast platform, with more than 400 million users globally and a new avenue for ideas that the establishment wants censored.
Despite the backlash, Spotify has refused to cut ties with Joe Rogan, whose show is the most popular podcast on the platform.
February 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | European Union |
Leave a comment
FROM our unique perspective in New Zealand there is probably no more twisted tale of the pandemic than the transformation of medical ethics. Due to our closed borders, NZ has so few Covid cases (18,000 at the time of writing) and almost no Covid deaths (53), that our pandemic medical history so far has been largely about isolation, vaccination and testing.
The political history of the pandemic has been about control of our borders, the creation of fear, and public assurances of the absolute safety of mRNA vaccines. In contrast, the official count of adverse effects of Pfizer Covid vaccination stands at 50,000 and the death toll at 130-plus. Both these figures are known to be huge underestimates. The excess all-cause non-Covid deaths during the vaccine rollout has been reliably measured at 2,000-plus.
Despite this, booster shots are being heavily advertised and mandated. At no point has there been any admission of our lack of knowledge of the long-term effects of mRNA vaccination. Certainly there is increasing evidence of harm from the jab. For example, data from the US military points to massive rises in disease rates including a threefold rise in cancers. There has been a concerted effort to keep this story out of the mainstream media. The cover-up is almost a bigger story than the actual data.
Along with reports of vaccine injury, a steady stream of papers published recently are beginning to elucidate very worrying mechanisms underlying vaccine injury. Initial expectations were that after stimulating spike protein production sufficiently to induce an immune response, mRNA genetic sequences in the vaccines would dissipate rapidly, and therefore safely. A study published in the journal Cell on January 24 shows that the mRNA sequences can persist in lymph node germinal centres for weeks causing greater spike havoc than Covid infection itself.
The official reports of vaccine adverse effects in NZ are running at 30 times the rate of reported injuries from previous flu vaccines. The fact that this has not rung alarm bells is incomprehensible. The fact that the government has persisted with its saturation advertising announcing the safety and necessity of Covid vaccination is doubly concerning. It is apparent from the failure to investigate alarming data that the practice of medical ethics has transformed to become almost unrecognisable.
A common framework used when analysing medical ethics is the ‘four principles’ approach postulated by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress in their textbook Principles of Biomedical Ethics. It recognises four basic moral principles, which are to be judged and weighed against each other, with attention given to the scope of their application. The four principles are:
Autonomy – the patient has the right to refuse or choose his or her treatment. This is rooted in society’s respect for individuals’ ability to make informed decisions about personal matters with freedom.
Beneficence – a practitioner should act in the best interest of the patient and family. In other words, healing is the aim of medicine.
Non-maleficence – not to be the cause of harm. Many consider this should be the primary consideration, that it is more important not to harm your patient than to do him good, which is part of the Hippocratic oath that doctors take.
Justice – concerns the fair distribution of scarce health resources, and the decision as to who gets what treatment.
In practice, however, many treatments carry some risk of harm. In some circumstances, for example in desperate situations where the outcome without treatment will be grave, risky treatments which stand a high chance of harming the patient could be justified. This is because the risk of not treating is also very likely to do harm. So the principle of non-maleficence (non-harm) is not absolute, and balances against the principle of beneficence (doing good). This has particularly affected debates around the promotion to doctors by drug companies of strong narcotics such as Oxycodone which is highly addictive and whose overuse commonly leads to respiratory failure and death.
It can readily be appreciated that the debate around how to apply ethics to medical practice has some grey areas and deficiencies. Medical misadventure is now the third-leading cause of death in the USA. Has this led to an acceptance of risk which should in fact be avoided? In large part the rules applied to drug approval are very strict. Double blind trials are required. Lengthy periods of assessment are mandated. Deaths following treatment are investigated and usually trials are suspended when these occur. Generally for vaccinations, assessment takes around ten years and two deaths per million recipients would be the maximum allowed in a finally approved product.
In contrast, the pre-approval trial periods for Covid-19 vaccines have been of the order of six months. The critical assessments of secondary effects have not been undertaken. These are aimed to check that general health outcomes for trial participants such as cardiac conditions and cancers do not exceed population norms. Note the US military data here. Clearly serious injury and deaths associated with Covid-19 vaccinations have exceeded the traditional limits by a massive margin. Moreover outcomes reported cover a wide range of conditions. Have professional medical bodies raised the alarm? No. Why?
Initially there were reports that Covid-19 was a very serious illness with mortality rates as high as 5 per cent. Figures as high as 180,000 deaths in NZ were predicted.
This alarmist assessment rapidly dissipated. Published studies put mortality rates well under 1 per cent and there was a realisation that serious Covid outcomes and deaths primarily occurred among those who were already seriously ill or physically weak due to other causes including advanced age. During the early months of 2021, it was also apparent that mRNA vaccines waned in effectiveness rapidly and did little to stop transmission. The only principles of medical ethics that seemed still to be appropriate were those of justice and beneficence. Reports suggested that Covid vaccination reduced the severity of illness; might it not be beneficial to the individual and save our over-stretched health service from becoming overwhelmed by unvaccinated Covid patients, thereby helping patients requiring treatment for other conditions? Despite doubts about the outcome data and mounting evidence of vaccination harm, the answer given to this by the NZ government was a big YES. It decided to mandate vaccination to the extent that the unjabbed would lose their right to employment. It thereby overruled the first principle of medical ethics, autonomy orpatient choice, a degree of coercion which ensured vaccination rates in NZ rose above 90 per cent among those eligible.
The Health Forum NZ is a Facebook, Telegram and MeWe site with 50,000-plus members which has served as a meeting and information place for the vaccine-injured. NZ has a population of 5million so HFNZ members comprise 1 per cent of the population. HFNZ has received reports of 600-plus deaths proximate to vaccination. More than 300 of these have been investigated and confirmed by the voluntary group NZ Doctors Speaking Out on Science.
The most common among the thousands of reports of vaccine injury are chest pain, arrhythmia, shortness of breath and persistent extreme fatigue and debility. Sometimes these develop as cardiac events, clotting, stroke and death. There are many experiences of patients being assured that they were over-anxious and being sent home with an aspirin, only to suffer immediate complications necessitating hospital admission. Sometimes sufferers find that the doctor is uninterested and dismissive when he hears that the injury followed vaccination.
Our government decided early on not to take the reporting of adverse effects following vaccination seriously. It denied repeated requests to make reporting adverse events mandatory with the result that there is no way of knowing the extent of vaccine injury. The health authorities already knew that the voluntary had a history of catching only 5 per cent of adverse events. Their decision flouted the most important principle of medical ethics – do no harm. It also enabled the government and the whole medical establishment to avoid any public discussion of adverse events. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern arranged for the hurried deletion of over 30,000 reports of adverse events from her Facebook account.
Why did our authorities do this? The government opted for a stand-alone vaccination strategy because it believed assurances of safety and efficacy from Pfizer. Almost immediately, and before any decision on mandates, we found out vaccine effectiveness waned rapidly and did little to reduce transmission, directly contradicting Pfizer trial results. The government and the Ministry of Health switched arguments – ‘millions of people have received the vaccine worldwide so it must be safe and effective’, a vacuous argument from a scientific point of view. Almost a hundred thousand people were prescribed thalidomide before it was realised that it was unsafe.
The medical ethics criteria of public good and patient well-being are not usually weighed in the absence of considerations of maleficence and autonomy. Thus the stance of the government, to sweep vaccine injury under the carpet, departed radically from previous ethical practice. This kind of departure has previously been entertained only in times of war when the threat to the nation is judged to be sufficient to mandate military service call-up and tolerate the inevitable heavy casualties of conflict. This condition was of course not met in any way by the Covid pandemic.
The mounting numbers of individuals reporting vaccine injuries should have rung alarm bells to a point that detailed investigation of their extent became a priority. Instead and inexplicably, hiding their occurrence rose to the top of the government’s agenda. Jacinda Ardern lashed out at a journalist asking questions about the death of a 17-year-old girl who had a stroke immediately following vaccination, labelling the journalist as irresponsible and denying any relationship with vaccination before there had been any time to assess causation. A few medical professionals were disciplined for raising similar questions. This was enough to discourage any public consideration of the ethics involved.
The government decided further to reverse ethical practice. Dr Ashley Bloomfield, Director General of Health, has personal responsibility for granting vaccine exemptions to those injured by the first shot. In almost all cases, he refuses exemptions including among those hospitalised and still ill, even when there is supporting documentation from specialists.
Now that extensive research has concluded that the outcomes for Omicron patients are similar for both the vaccinated and unvaccinated, there is no longer a valid scientific argument for justice and beneficence. All ethical arguments for mandates are moot, but why is there still no move to protect individuals from the adverse effects of vaccination?
As mounting evidence has been ignored, government decisions verge towards the criminal. There are floundering attempts by the media to label mandate protesters as variously Right-wing extremists and uneducated Luddites. The arguments in support of mandated vaccination are still being presented to the public through strident political rhetoric unsupported by science publications. The government must realise that there are serious scientific and ethical failings involved. It must mount an honest attempt to change the debate from politics to science, and adjust public policy accordingly. At this stage, anything less is culpable.
February 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, New Zealand |
Leave a comment
The UK’s Durham University has lost its biggest individual donor, multimillionaire Mark Hillery, who pulled his financial support over Covid-19 rules he slammed as “ridiculous.”
A former hedge fund manager and university alumnus, Hillery donated almost £7m to the university’s Collingwood College between 2015 and 2021. He has funded a number of facilities, including a new arts center that bears his name, according to the student newspaper Palatinate, which was the first to reveal Hillery’s decision to withdraw his support.
The alumnus has actively supported the university for more than 20 years, hosting various events, and even sometimes paying for the students’ drinks in a college bar. He expressed deep regret over what he called “a very depressing state of affairs.”
In an interview with Palatinate he revealed that, prior to his decision to “step back,” he several times contacted the university to express his disagreement over the anti-Covid measures. However, this year the university chose to adopt policies which he said were even stricter than the government’s, including a temporary return to online teaching and face-mask mandates.
“Urgency that should have been displayed to fully normalize [the university] to the same status as the rest of society has not been there,” Hillery said.
He complained that the same “pedantic and ineffective policies that place the priorities of the paying students at the bottom of the pile are simply continued and refined,” adding that he would not visit Durham again “while there is a single Covid-related rule imposed on the students.”
Hillery, who is worth a reported £165 million and ranks 743rd on the Sunday Times Rich List 2020, did not rule out that in the future he might resume his support, underlining, however, that “it’s all far too little too late.”
The university expressed gratitude for Hillery’s “support in many initiatives” but said that the health and safety of its students and staff have always been a priority.
“We have been guided at all times by the local trajectory of the pandemic which varied at different times across the UK,” a spokesperson added.
February 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK |
Leave a comment
February 9, 2022
VIA FEDERAL EXPRESS and EMAIL
Dear Dr. Janet Woodcock:
We write to you on behalf of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), a non-profit organization devoted to the health of people and the planet. We have actively followed your work to evaluate, authorize and approve vaccines for the American public, and particularly children.
We are aware that you are likely to grant Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of Pfizer’s BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 vaccine for children aged six months up to five years old following your upcoming meeting on February 15, 2022. We are writing to put you on notice that should you recommend this pediatric EUA vaccine to children under five years old, CHD is poised to take legal action against you. CHD will seek to hold you accountable for recklessly endangering this population with a product that has little, no, or even negative net efficacy but which may put them, without warning, at risk of many adverse health consequences, including heart damage, stroke and other thrombotic events and reproductive harms.
We briefly outline why such a recommendation would be reckless for nearly 20 million children in the United States, and millions more around the world.
-
There is no COVID emergency for children under five years old. Children have a 99.995% recovery rate and a body of medical literature indicates that almost zero healthy children under five years old have died from COVID.
-
A large study conducted in Germany showed zero deaths for children under 5 and a case fatality rate of three out of a million in children without comorbidities.
-
A Johns Hopkins study monitoring 48,000 children diagnosed with COVID showed a zero mortality rate in children under 18 without comorbidities.,
-
A study in Nature demonstrated that children under 18 with no comorbidities have virtually no risk of death.
-
Data from England and Wales, published by the UK Office of National Statistics on January 17, 2022 revealed that throughout 2020 and 2021, only one (1) child under the age of 5, without comorbidities, had died from COVID in the two countries, whose total population is 60 million.
-
Another study in Nature from April, suggests children’s bodies clear the virus more easily than adults.
-
This study published in December in Nature demonstrated how children efficiently mount effective, robust and sustained immune responses.
-
Over one third of all children are estimated to have natural immunity to COVID, according to CDC’s own data. There is no ethical justification for superfluous vaccination that will put children at elevated risk of vaccine harm.
-
The risks demonstrably outweigh the benefits of COVID vaccination in young children. A study out of Hong Kong, showed one out of every 2,700 12-17 year old boys being diagnosed with myocarditis following the 2nd dose of Comirnaty vaccine, or 37 per 100,000 vaccinated. A study from Kaiser found the same rate of myocarditis in 12-17 year old American boys, 1/2700.
-
While the CDC is saying that myocarditis is a mild disease, cardiologists know otherwise. CDC’s own preliminary data, reported at the February 4 ACIP meeting, revealed that nearly half of the young people diagnosed with myocarditis still had symptoms 3 months later, and 39% had their activity restricted by their physician. We know this serious adverse event occurs frequently in teenagers. But no one knows how often it occurs in younger children. This is of major concern for babies and younger children.
5. The clinical trials for children 2 through 4 years old failed., You’re proposing to use a product and schedule that failed in its clinical trials, and you may potentially add a third dose later in the spring. This is an unprecedented proposal not backed by science. It does not meet the risk-benefit standard of 21 U.S. Code § 360bbb–3 “the known and potential benefits of the product, when used to diagnose, prevent, or treat such disease or condition, outweigh the known and potential risks of the product.”
6. Some children likely will die and others will be permanently injured from these vaccines based on reporting to the current VAERS database. The latest data shows a total of 1,088,560 reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID vaccines, including 23,149 deaths and 183,311 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020, and Jan. 28, 2022.
7. The pediatric clinical trials for the COVID vaccines were too small to detect safety signals–especially for a population in the tens of millions.
8. There are a) no long-term safety data for COVID vaccination of young children, and b) the proposal is to vaccinate children under the Emergency Use Authorization. Both a) and b) establish that vaccinating small children for COVID will be an experiment, not a standard medical procedure.
9. Unethical coercive pressure will be applied to children and their parents, as has occurred with older children and adults. To grant authorization is to abet this unethical coercion that violates the Nuremberg Code’s first principle.
10. There is no available care for children injured by COVID shots. There is no way to remove the spike protein and other toxic byproducts of vaccination, which may be produced for a considerable period of time following inoculation of messenger RNA. The science and medicine have not yet developed, and most families will be unable to cover the costs of potential catastrophic injuries.
11. First, do no harm. You are a physician who owes a duty to patients and medical ethics. If you recommend these shots to this age group, given all you know, will you be upholding your oath? If not, is it possible that your acts could later be seen as reason to remove your medical licenses?
12. The liability-free nature of your deliberations may not stand the test of time. In the fullness of time, your decisions may not have the liability protection that they currently enjoy. Under the PREP Act of 2005, all actors advancing an EUA agenda for medical countermeasures enjoy liability protection, absent willful misconduct., Nonetheless, if at a later point these shots are deemed non-therapeutic gene products that you knowingly and recklessly recommended, and which were then distributed to children as a direct result of your decision, it is possible that liability could later attach.
13. There are safer drugs that could be used prophylactically and therapeutically for COVID in children. There is extensive and compelling medical evidence for this assertion; and the choice to eschew use of these drugs in favor of a demonstrably dangerous vaccine is arbitrary and capricious.
14. The vaccines do not prevent transmission. They do not prevent infection. There is no statistically valid evidence that they prevent severe disease or deaths in children. Which begs the question: what are you actually trying to accomplish by vaccinating small children? What is your goal?
15. On August 23, 2021, FDA’s letter to BioNTech explained that neither the VAERS nor the VSD surveillance systems were adequate for FDA to determine the risk of myocarditis resulting from the Pfizer vaccine. Therefore, Pfizer and BioNTech were instructed by FDA to carry out a series of studies of myocarditis to ascertain the risk in different groups, including children. These studies were scheduled to produce final reports to FDA over the next five years. If the FDA is willing to wait until 2027 to learn the actual risks of myocarditis from the vaccine for children, shouldn’t it be required to wait until 2027 before inoculating millions of small children with a vaccine anticipated to provide them no benefit and possibly substantial risks?
16. An important Cell article in press, written by scientists from Stanford, has shown that, based on lymph node sampling after mRNA vaccination, spike protein and its mRNA remain present in the germinal centers of draining lymph nodes for up to 60 days, which is when sampling ceased. This was not supposed to happen. The demonstration of vastly prolonged spike protein production has revealed that the dose of spike protein produced in vivo by mRNA vaccines is unpredictable. FDA, however, requires uniformity of dosing. This fact alone should disqualify all authorizations and approvals of mRNA COVID vaccines.
We ask that you carefully consider all the information above before making any recommendation for Pfizer’s vaccine in the 6 months to under 5 year age group at your meeting on February 15, 2022.
_____________________________________
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Meryl Nass, M.D.
Unfortunately, the footnotes are missing from this version. They can be found at:
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/CHD-Letter-to-FDA__EUA-Under-5_2-9-2022-1.pdf
February 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, United States |
Leave a comment
in the age of government sponsored science driven by grants, sinecure, and sponsorship, scientists face a difficult set of choices.
they must, if they wish to continue receiving the largess of the gold-givers toe the party line of state or commercially sponsored science. he who has paid the piper demands to call the tune and producing work that does not suit “the narrative” is career suicide. your funding will dry up. so may your position, your prospects for advancement, and even your tenure. you will not be asked to join committees, interviewed for articles, citied, or supported. you may be outright attacked. i discuss this in more depth HERE.
but scientists also face another constraint: they need to be accurate. they need to run good experiments, collect good data, and relay it faithfully. if they do not, they will get called out and revealed as incompetents or frauds. this too will end one’s career as it means that not only are you doing no useful work (apart from to propogandists) but will reveal that you have sold out integrity for lucre and that is the end of peers taking you seriously. you play for team lysenko now.
the need to thread this needle and appease and please both demands has led to an odd practice:
many times, the claims made in the abstract or in the conclusions are not supported by the actual data.
i know this sounds a little bizarre, but as someone who reads perhaps 1000 such papers a year, allow me to assure you, it is stunningly common in any politically loaded sphere. (and you would be amazed how many are politically loaded. it need not be government pushing it. watching geneticists tie their conclusions in knots to claim that you can breed horses for speed and endurance or dogs for intelligence but that of course there is no such thing as eugenics in humans because that would be unspeakable despite your having just proved that there is in fact, eugenics in humans is really quite something. they go to astounding lengths in the introductions of their books to disavow what they are about to prove.)
this odd compromise sort of works, but mostly, it doesn’t.
it gives those who fund studies and the journals who curate them for ideological purity their bone. the abstract says “X means Y.” this is what they want for the press releases and for waving around.
it also puts the actual data out into the world. this is what researchers, both those who did the work and those who will read it in detail, actually need. they can see the facts and will not be gulled in by the claims in the conclusion as they are adept at drawing their own conclusions.
this leads to the weird outcome of the public and the politicians frequently having one idea about what a study says and the experts in the field having more or less the opposite take.
the “experts” all know what the data means and why they are not allowed to say it. it works a bit like the foils used by renaissance dialogue writers to ape at being fools while presenting the actual case being made while the “authorities” presented the “narrative” and were made fools of by those able to read between the lines.
in the age of the internet, this sets up a bizarre and deeply frustrating conflict: those who can and do really read studies are constantly having to pick them apart and explain to the “google and spam” crowd who just selectively confirm their biases and skim the lead paragraph of a study why the study they just cited does not, in fact, say what they are claiming it does.
and, of course, trying to convince someone that the authors deliberately misstated the facts in the summary is like trying to teach a new trick to the very oldest of dogs. they are just not having it.
this has created a rancorous and dangerously stupid level of debate and an impossible burden for any one individual to carry. it takes 10 seconds to search, skim, and spam with a study you never read and start yelling “peer review!” over and over as if that means something.
it can take hours to pick the study apart and see if it really does support the conclusions stated in the summary and then hours more to convince someone who has not even read it (and probably does not know how). that’s unwinnable. it’s like sisyphus getting and additional rock to push back up the hill every time he reaches the top. pretty soon it’s 20 boulders and nothing is going anywhere.
fortunately, the internet age has produced a large group of folks interested in picking these studies apart and publishing their takes. and we form communities and help one another. so no one has to do ALL the work when the CDC publishes yet more self refuting “wave around” data.
this is, in fact, what real peer review is. it’s supposed to be hostile and to pick holes.
the upshot here is that you should be very careful taking studies you have not actually read at face value.
you need to read them. thoroughly. waving them around as if you did when you have not is a recipe for being wrong.
let’s take a simple and straightforward recent example:
this article is being used to push boosters. this is because the authors said this:
i have not spoken to them. perhaps they believe this, perhaps they do not but felt they had to say it or be pariahs. i have no special insight there. but i can read data.
so let’s see what the data says.
this was a big study, but also a retrospective study with post facto matching. the matching was by age, sex, and municipality. it is tainted by the ever present “we counted no one as vaccinated until 14 days post dose 2” issue which will inevitably deeply favor vaccine efficacy through a mathematical rig job (especially in the short run) and can even produce it from zero VE and looks to have had large effects in canadian data.
so we have some ingrained bayesian issues with our cohorts that may inject serious bias toward making vaccines look effective.
the data itself was rendered quite challenging to read. (heavy text, few graphics)
it was also truncated in a somewhat misleading fashion.
if you read it closely, you’ll see that even the longest follow ups on infection data were lumped after 210 days, several were 180 (before it really gets bad) others were 120.
this is just typical bayesian datacrime and presentation bias as we’ve seen so many times before. and it does not really speak to the interesting issue of “are the vaccines preventing severity?”
this is, in fact, omitted from the study. but they did collect the data, they just made it REALLY difficult to find. you need to go HERE to the supplemental materials page. you then need to download the actual PDF as the data is not on the webpage. then you need to go to the very last page of that supplement.
those who do so (and i’m guessing we’re down to a very few folks by then) will be rewarded with this graph:
and this one has profound and powerful implications.
- it shows that efficacy against severe outcomes like hospitalization and death also wanes very rapidly
- it shows that this efficacy keeps waning over time
- it shows that it could easily be strongly negative based on the huge downside bias to the error range (gray shaded area)
- and it shows that this data is of very low quality in terms of error magnitude.
at 9 months, midline expectation is ~15% reduction. (i’m eyeballing) but look at the confidence interval: it runs from (ballpark) +63% to -90%. that is not a useful range upon which to base anything. it implies that there is a very strong chance that vaccination is associated with greatly increased risk of severe outcomes for a great many people.
this pattern implies that boosters are likely, at best, a treadmill that will need constant refreshing, likely 3X a year or so, if you want to sustain efficacy. vaccine fade after 4 months degrades rapidly. (and frankly, the first 4 could well be an illusory halo generated by the dose 2 +14 vaccinated definition as linked above)
given the adverse events profile and the lack of severity of omicron this seems a truly odious proposition that looks likely to fail for most people on any sort or risk/benefit analysis. it is telling that the researchers here did not even attempt to take risk reward into account before claiming:
“The results strengthen the evidence-based rationale for administration of a third vaccine dose as a booster.”
what is also telling is the other part of the data required to make this claim:
do boosters work? do they refresh clinical immunity and mitigate severity? could they ever have done so and is this data even relevant with the emergence of omicron that seems to be at least an escape variant and far more likely a full blown hoskins effect/OAS variant that is enhanced, not mitigated by the vaccines.
because the evidence there looks quite persuasive that they do not.
note that all this data is from before oct 4th 2021, so it has no omicron impact whatsoever in it. claiming it bolsters the case for boosters without presenting evidence of booster efficacy on this new variant makes their claim feel like a rote bolt on, placed there to mollify and placate patrons and authorities.
there is absolutely no data here to validate that point.
the study does not even speak to the data that would be needed to make such a claim.
“efficacy wanes, so boost” is not a valid argument unless we know that boosters work, yet any evidence that boosters actually do anything to help is absent and all past data shows such rapid fade on efficacy vs severity as to make boosters a poor appearing proposition.
there is no data whatsoever on the new variant.
and boosters are sure not seeming to help in the UK. omi is driving rates of infection in the boosted at roughly double the rate of the unvaxxed.
the swedish study uses possibly irrelevant data and not only fails to prove out the ostensible interpretation, but winds up far more consistent with the conclusion that boosters are a waste of time and will provide ephemeral, at best, protection.
having seen this, go back and read the “interpretation” again.
now do you see my point about “the abstract says one thing while the data says another?”
i mean, they literally buried the lede at the very end of a hard to find supplement. it’s like putting the actual object of a video game inside of an easter egg.
most vexing, this easter egg also shows that vaccines may be making immunity to severe covid outcomes significantly worse.
call me mister suspicious, but i have a hunch that’s WHY they put it there.
let’s explore that a bit further:
what would be REALLY interesting is to see how this population distribution looks.
if it barbells then we likely have a serious confound going on. we really have no idea what the prior incidence of covid was in those who got vaccinated. one could expect it to be quite meaningful.
if vaccines look like they are working well in some and are strongly negative in others with not much in the middle (this is suggested but not proven by the skew in the confidence interval) then i would posit that the most likely explanation is that what looks like VE is actually naturally acquired immunity.
if you had covid then got vaxxed, vaccines look like they work, especially as the high risk groups got vaxxed more and these same groups likely had higher risk of prior infection. this gets magnified by the 2 week worry window of TLR suppression post vaccination that results in well documented decreases in immune function and a doubling of the rate of covid contraction in that period vs unvaxxed.
but if you got vaxxed without having had covid, it could be acting as an immunosuppressant or driving hoskins effect/OAS antigenic fixation that makes you more vulnerable.
this, along with all cause deaths in vaxxed vs unvaxxed measured from the moment you got your first jab is some data i’d really like to see.
it’s continuing non-availability certainly frustrating and likely telling. this data absolutely exists.
why we are not getting to see it is fast becoming a question too big to ignore.
February 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine |
Leave a comment
In lockstep in multiple countries
As with so many things that are happening at the moment, the attack on free speech is happening in multiple countries at the same time.
Firstly in the UK.
A draft Online Safety Bill was first presented to Parliament in May 2021 but has been strengthened in the last few weeks. Originally the draft Bill focussed on large web companies but the government has recently announced that more changes would be made and new criminal offences added.
One of these new offences would be spreading Covid-19 disinformation under a crime of sending a false communication. This offence would be committed if a person sends a communication they know to be false with the intention to cause non-trivial emotional, psychological or physical harm. The maximum sentence is 51 weeks.
The average person might think it is reasonable to imprison somebody for communicating something they know to be false with the intention to cause harm. However, what is “false” and what is “harm”? The last few years have shown us that these are now very subjective topics. Information that was true in 2019 became false in 2020 and is starting to be true again in 2022. A truth that is communicated to somebody who believes it to be false may cause them emotional or psychological harm. Intention is necessary for the crime to take place but if something is deemed to be false and deemed to cause harm then it could be argued that if the person who communicated the information, knew the information was on the “harmful list” then intention was there.
And who is deciding what information is false? The government? That almost sounds like a punchline to a joke. We’ll just end up with news articles such as the one below – Sponsored by the UK Government (see the text in blue).
The Bill was already censorial enough, making online companies remove content which was deemed to be harmful but not illegal. As we have seen in recent times, corporations’ misinformation policies have been arbitrary enough, which will only worsen with governments deciding what is true and what is false. Now, in a step one-removed from pre-crime, these companies will be made to proactively “prevent people being exposed in the first place”.
The government press release on the strengthening of this bill says that “to proactively tackle the priority offences, firms will need to make sure the features, functionalities and algorithms of their services are designed to prevent their users encountering them and minimise the length of time this content is available. This could be achieved by automated or human content moderation, banning illegal search terms, spotting suspicious users and having effective systems in place to prevent banned users opening new accounts”.
In almost Orwellian double-speak the press release says the Bill “will better protect people’s right to free expression online”. What this means is, it will better protect people’s free expression of government approved material. It continues by saying “it will have to be proven in court that a defendant sent a communication without any reasonable excuse and did so intending to cause serious distress or worse, with exemptions for communication which contributes to a matter of public interest”. So the government says something is a matter of public interest (e.g. vaccines) and suddenly intention doesn’t have to be proven.
Please sign this online petition to remove requirements that specifically target lawful speech from the Bill.
Next to the US.
At almost the same time, the US sent out a bulletin “Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland”.
This states that “the United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence”.
According to the bulletin, “the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions” has “increased the volatility, unpredictability, and complexity of the threat environment”.
Key factors contributing to the current heightened threat environment include “widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19”.
Furthermore, “as COVID-19 restrictions continue to decrease nationwide, increased access to commercial and government facilities and the rising number of mass gatherings could provide increased opportunities for individuals looking to commit acts of violence to do so, often with little or no warning. Meanwhile, COVID-19 mitigation measures—particularly COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates—have been used by domestic violent extremists to justify violence since 2020 and could continue to inspire these extremists to target government, healthcare, and academic institutions that they associate with those measures”.
So in a step up from the UK’s response, the US is labelling individuals who produce any MDM as terrorists. Obviously, any language that incites violence is unacceptable but to confuse people encouraging unrest with those discussing whether Ivermectin could help save lives is completely unacceptable.
And finally in Canada.
Again, as if in lockstep, Justin Trudeau is trying to revive his controversial Internet legislation bill. Once known as Bill C-10, to fool those unintelligent Covid deniers, it has been changed to Bill C-11.
There are concerns that the legislation could be used to censor social media. The government have denied this but experts hold the opposite view. Who to believe, hmmm? The Toronto Sun reports that Trudeau is using the current national tensions as a smokescreen to let them slip in unpopular pieces of legislation. Never let a good crisis go to waste!
When we remove freedom of speech and censorship of controversial topics becomes common place, we turn into a dangerous society. Not only can authors be imprisoned for airing their views but, just as importantly, debate becomes restricted resulting in truths being hidden and novel and radical ideas supressed.
But if they can’t censor you, maybe they’ll just give you a morality pill so you don’t produce the stuff in the first place!
February 12, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Canada, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK, United States |
Leave a comment
A Professor of Surgery at John Hopkins, Dr. Marty Makary, said that a research letter he helped author was censored by LinkedIn for violating the platform’s “Professional Community Policies.” The post was reinstated later “after a friend complained to the CEO.”
The censored post contained a link to a research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The letter is a study Makary conducted about the “prevalence and Durability of SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies Among Unvaccinated US Adults.”
According to the screenshots Makary shared on Twitter, LinkedIn removed the letter “because it goes against Professional Community Policies.”
The policies prohibit users from sharing “false or misleading content.”
They also forbid users, including researchers and scientists, from posting “content that directly contradicts guidance from leading global health organizations and public health authorities.”
It is not clear how the study Makary posted violated any of LinkedIn policies.
February 12, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
Leave a comment
Aletho News 