A STUDENT who has spent £100,000 on his education and studied for ten years has been told he may not be allowed to finish his course unless he has a Covid vaccination.
David Shepherd, 28, is studying for his third Masters, an MSc in physiotherapy (pre-registration) at York St John University.
Unless he can complete 18 weeks of practical placements, he will be unable to graduate. He has currently finished 12 weeks.
He said: ‘I have been told that I cannot go to placements where I spend time with patients unless I have a Covid jab.
‘The Covid mRNA vaccine is an experimental vaccine which I will consider after the trials have finished in 2023. It is not like the hepatitis B vaccine mandated for health staff. That has years of safety data. There is no long-term safety data for Covid jabs but there is evidence it can cause the inflammatory heart conditions myocarditis and pericarditis in younger men.
‘Everything we do as health professionals hinges on being able to give our patients informed consent so that they know the risks of any procedure.
‘I have a scientific background and I don’t like being a guinea pig for mRNA vaccine technology.’
David is not alone in his concerns about lack of consent. A charity called Consent, set up by parents in 2018 to challenge doctors’ decisions for their teenagers and children, published a full-page advertisement in Metro insisting that the government stop coercing young people into having Covid vaccinations.
David is training to become a musculoskeletal practitioner attached to a GP’s surgery. Back problems account for 30 per cent of visits to the surgery so it is a job with a high demand and he has invested heavily preparing for it.
The money spent on his courses is secondary to his desire to contribute. He said: ‘I have got to the stage where I almost don’t care about the money. It’s the health principles I care about. And I do not want to be coerced into getting the jab.’
David completed a BSc (Hons) undergraduate degree in sports therapy at the University of Bedfordshire between 2012 and 2015. Then he took three Masters degrees receiving a scholarship from Bedfordshire for the first in 2015, which he failed.
He bounced back and between 2019 to 2020 he studied for an MSc at University College London – a Russell Group university – in Physical Therapy in Musculoskeletal Heathcare and Rehabilitation, a highly skilled and unique programme.
Now he is in his second MA year at York St John. Having seen a friend hospitalised after suffering two mini strokes caused by the vaccine, he does not want to take the risk.
He said: ‘Last year was fine, there was no discussion about mandatory vaccination and students got it when they wanted to. Two students in my bubble are from the Republic of Ireland and they got the vaccine just so that they could travel. They are very critical thinking so felt a bit coerced into it.
‘Then the head of our course began sending out emails last November saying how good it is to get vaccinated. She said it shows how much you care about yourself and everybody else. I hate that rhetoric.
‘I continued with the course and did two placements over 12 weeks, both attached to Hull Royal Infirmary. The first was in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease [COPD is a group of respiratory diseases including emphysema and bronchitis], going to people’s houses and helping them clear their lungs.
‘I was shadowing two facilitators; one completely understood my position, the second gave me a hard time and was very worried that patients might infect me, despite the fact I would be wearing a mask.
‘I wasn’t allowed to car share with them because I wasn’t vaccinated. It was a bit insulting, and it was “othering”. It made no sense because at that point we did understand that vaccination wasn’t halting the spread.
‘My second placement was predominantly remote, processing post-Covid outcome measures with a team. In one of the multi-disciplinary meetings, they were discussing a patient who had been injured by the vaccine. They were not convinced that she had been injured and thought she was making it out to be worse than it was. It was an interesting conversation to hear.’
In December, all York St John students received an email saying that due to mandatory vaccines being introduced for healthcare workers, students would need to have a vaccination and if they did not, it would affect their ability to finish the course.
‘I spoke to my new tutor; he’d been working in the NHS for 40 years, and he told me he understood my position,’ David said. ‘All changed after I came back after Christmas. I received an email from him that said I must give evidence of a vaccination by January 25.
‘Before Christmas, my tutor thought I would be able to continue with my placements; I need 1,000 hours practice to be able to register with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) and qualify.
‘I asked if I could finish the academic component and he said probably not, it wasn’t worth carrying on if I couldn’t do the placements.
‘I was trying to be pragmatic, but I was quite upset and very stressed about my future. If I got kicked off the course, I would still have to pay back my maintenance loan, but where would I work and what would I do?’
Since then, the Health Secretary has performed a U-turn on mandatory Covid vaccination for health care workers. Even though Sajid Javid scrapped the mandates, he has pushed back the decision to vaccinate to the regulators. He wants them to send a ‘clear message’ that health care workers should all be vaccinated.
David said: ‘Currently, our regulators, the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists and the Health and Care Professions Council, are against mandatory vaccination. So I’m safe for the time being.’
However government concessions can be short-lived, and we know that they want to bring in vaccination by the back door. So David could find that pressure is applied to his regulators behind the scenes, and he will be prevented from working unless he has a Covid jab.
In a letter to nine regulators, including the General Medical Council, Javid made his thoughts clear. He said that abandoning compulsory vaccines ‘in no way diminishes the importance that health and care workers are vaccinated. Indeed, it is the responsibility of all healthcare professionals to take steps to ensure the safety of patients. As the approach to ensuring vaccine uptake among health and care staff changes it is important that this personal professional responsibility is re-emphasised’.
February 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK |
Leave a comment
Western democracies have beckoned many of us, both its citizens, and those who looked across the way at their shining, seemingly self-evident example of relatively “enlightened” governance. Successful Asian powerhouses like Japan and Singapore, and of course Hong Kong (both Asia and Britain in many ways for so long), drew inspiration on how they should be structured, governed and led.
Those in developing countries, or countries where authoritarianism held sway, pined for the rule of law, hoping their leadership might take a cue from Western role models, yearning for the tonic of good leadership and sound social structures, rather than continuing to suffer under corrupt, incompetent, misrule.
And then these countries, unlike Western counterparts, had virtually no social safety nets. Progress, education, prosperity, safety and security, these were the enchantments portrayed across the world.
How Superficial Was It All?
Post COVID, and the fact-free, hysterical over-reaction and meltdown we have still not recovered from, “democratic” countries have been in free fall. Who can not be dismayed by how these “democratically elected” leaders behaved, manipulating and being manipulated by their own systems? How shattering to see the shallowness of character, where in a charade of “public health,” constitutional rules were compromised, fundamental societal norms ignored, and seeking unbridled power, apparently the prevailing narcotic.
The US has unraveled. Fauci is found tripping over his tongue, his “testimony” and his emails, and gross misrepresentations re the “origins” of the coronavirus (the once forbidden fruit of the “Lab Leak”, now a mainstream consideration), gain of function definition and taxonomy, as well as multiple varietals of “guidance” on masks to lockdowns to “vaccine efficacy”, and still, utterly immune to consequence or accountability.
And we have been treated to the rambling, well-nigh unintelligible proclamations and machinations of the US President, reading from “scripts” while the “case-demic” rages. While debasing the Constitutionally sacred right to skepticism, we have seen an ignominious departure from Afghanistan (where on our fourth President dealing with it, we have essentially “gifted” the Taliban a remarkable military arsenal), and the Southern border seems porous to illegal, at times, literally “criminal” migrants. And the Democratic party has become apologists for defunding the police, and ransacking through rampant lawlessness, more than one large American city.
And with all of Mr. Trump’s misadventures with the law, and family cronyism, we are also face-to-face with Hunter Biden, in the fine tradition of the Clinton influence machine, brazenly peddling political influence for massive personal (financial) gain. This happens routinely, though it is common sport in these circles to sneer at African despots, while socializing at country clubs, for their “outrages” on similar fronts.
US law enforcement “enforces” or not, corruption is comprehensive, and ruling junta agendas advance Party interests, not those of the people. The once proud Republic is tottering and teetering as selective use of the law, extra-legal “emergency” powers, massive “mandating” of legally indemnified experimental therapy posing as “vaccines”, endemic abuse of positions of power — all dances side by side with hypocritic injunctions (maskless leaders being served by “masked” servers). HCQ and Ivermectin are availed of by Fauci’s family and Congressional leaders, while the public is treated to gaslighting galore.
Across the pond, a once sane Boris Johnson, rightly proclaiming natural immunity, got spooked by SAGE, and capitulated to widespread nonsense. His large parliamentary majority should have immunized him, instead he retreated into ineffectual flailing as mobs tore down historical statues. Rather than lead a national conversation, “white guilt” was the easy default setting. Scientific charlatans, disproven again and again, brandishing a new population-decimating “plague” were enough to send PM and advisers scurrying towards hysteria and “lockdowns”.
The resulting economic disaster and undermining of the quality of life of millions of people, were apparently a small price to pay. However, their own lifestyles and outings and those of affluent sponsors bypassed the draconian legislation. And so, they knew it was all essentially tommyrot as Wimbledon and office parties were unrestrained in either physical proximity or passionate engagement.
And while the UK is, for now, “liberated” of COVID restrictions, France is “easing up” but without relinquishing the threat of possibly reinstating the “Stalinist” decrees about “vaccination” (though the shots provide no immunity), at the first flutter of Macron’s angst infused paranoia. When you begin to threaten the withdrawal of citizenship and promise brutal force, you know how adrift and panicked a proposition must be.
Other countries “shelving” COVID restrictions include Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy and Lithuania. Israel is retaining its infamous “Green Pass” for parties and weddings, and it is being abolished for restaurants, hotels, gyms and theaters.
Overall Madness
The stats shriek their testimony. Late January each of the last two years saw the COVID “peak” overall. With or without “lockdowns,” with or without the silly masks, or whatever absurd companion restrictions came with it, the same results. Two years of “expert remedies” provided primarily a cesspool of sunk costs, as new waves and variants came implacably forward. We were scammed by “approved” experts and Big Pharma, and officiously stripped of rights that were once considered “unalienable” (more on this below).
The “two weeks” to flatten the spread metastasized into endless restrictions on human movement and autonomy with nary an end point in sight. A new cloth mask wearing religion was enforced, and automatons even today walk in fresh air where we have zero evidence of spread, inhaling their own waste. Oh, we also received the “blessings” of fresh segregation (long after we hoped that had been consigned to the dustbin of history) via a biosecurity state, and billions paid out for sheer snake oil (a.k.a. “safety”) – for example the utterly unreliable “testing” regime which couldn’t even be globally harmonized, so the same standards applied. There was not even a pretense of “quality control.”
Anti-humane and economic wars have been waged on people around the world, hitting hardest the most impoverished of course. Constitutions have gone up in flames, and anyone who wished to speak out to preserve that which made life worth living, or interfered with the Big Pharma subsidized autocracy, was demonized as an ”enemy of the state” (more on this below as well).
People around the world saw livelihoods and businesses vanish and had to undergo the sheer humanitarian outrage of multiple rounds of experimental injections, for them, and then their children, just to be able to feed their families or operate in society at all. What does it take to get outraged?
In “advanced societies” (with notable exceptions like Sweden and then states like Florida), local academia made “schools” (when they were actually open, even though children were at virtually zero risk and did not pass on the infection either before the “vaccination” bedlam) virtual penal camps (children eating in the cold, forced spacing, muzzling) to advance political gains and aims while teeming concerts and sporting events made a mockery of these injunctions.
And then, we do not yet even know the magnitude of the adverse impact of these “vaccines.”
The Great Embalming Fiasco
Hats off to the indefatigable Steve Kirsch, entrepreneur and crusader for COVID data that showcases the realities we are dealing with. Steve has offered cash to anyone who can show him the key early treatments don’t work, he has offered to debate public health officials or doctors, and to field doctors and specialists if they don’t wish to debate a so called “layman.”
But he recently brought attention to an alarming finding that deserves to be highlighted. In the United States, fifteen embalmers are seeing odd “fatal clotting” that was first discovered in 2021. As the night follows the day, the mainstream media are scrupulously disinterested, not to mention CDC, and their acolytes.
Specifically, Steve interviews Richard Hirschman, Alabama embalmer, 20 years of experience, and a funeral director. Stew Peters interviewed Mr. Hirschman, generating 800,000 views on Rumble alone.
The facts are damning and well-nigh irrefutable. In the subsequent interview with Mr. Kirsch, Mr. Hirschman clarifies that he started noticing the clots around May or June 2021. They may have been evident earlier, but that’s when he became aware of them.
He knows of no instance of such clots in “unvaccinated” cases (except one instance, someone who had received a transfusion).
Currently, over 50% of the bodies he embalms have these strange clots which he believes are directly caused by “vaccines” and boosters. In January 2022, 65% of all cases he came across (37 out of 57) had these suspicious clots. He roughly handles 600 bodies a year, so this is not “small number” distortion. Also, being COVID recovered and being sane enough to realize he was not at risk, other funeral homes have been contracting his services. So, he truly, in saying “over 50%” is referring to a largely unfiltered group of people.
He says he’s spoken to 15 of his peers who all are seeing the same thing but refuse to speak out publicly. As Steve mentions, this phenomenon is fairly common given the reprisals against anyone speaking up and out, for example school officials being unwilling to reveal the high rates of myocarditis that are suddenly percolating in their schools.
While shunned by mainstream media, Hirschman was contacted by PolitiFact (oxymoronically named) seeking to discredit him, but they ditched the article as presumably nothing compromising was located even by their scavenging.
The line of causation, following Occam’s Razor, of taking the simplest explanation until and if its refuted, is clear. An experimental injectable “therapy” is first used in 2021, which we know results in blood clots, and over 50% of the population are so “injected.” And this coincides almost exactly with the “embalmer’s expose.”
If this is in the vicinity of the truth, then of the 65,000 that die every week in the US, and you discount Hirschman’s “60%” to “40%” to err on the side of caution, that would still be 26,000 dying from the adverse effects per week or 676,000 annual “vaccine” related deaths.
But let’s go further suggests Steve. Assume this analysis is off by 1000X. Then it would be a “mere” 676 annual deaths, which would be 3 times more deadly than the smallpox vaccine which is currently deemed to be too unsafe to use. With even the “possibility” on the other hand, of a 65% death rate, every health agency, every media outlet should be there vetting the data. Not one has.
How could they possibly know there’s nothing there? Not even a request for a tissue sample for analysis by a medical journal. It distils down to a simple conclusion: they don’t care, they don’t want to know. The mania is to “embalm” the truth and in a frenzy, jab away…no matter what.
The Frenzy
The truckers rolled up Parliament Hill in Ottawa, now having sparked parallel outbursts of “civil” and at times not so civil disobedience. They are described with frenzied disdain, as if they were a plague of locusts from scripture.
And their “blasphemies” were there for all to read: “United Against Tyranny,” “No Vaccine Mandates,” “Freedom to Choose.” What gall!
As CJ Hopkins put it,
“Yes, that’s right, New Normal Canada has been invaded and is now under siege by hordes of transphobic Putin-Nazi truckers, racist homophobes, anti-Semitic Islamophobes, and other members of the working classes!”
The media is painting portraits of swastika waving goons, stealing food from the mouths of homeless people, while taking time out to desecrate war memorials. CJ adds
“Rumor has it, a kill-squad of truckers has been prowling the postnatal wards of hospitals, looking for Kuwaiti babies to yank out of their incubators”
as was asserted for the vengeful hordes of “Satanic” Saddam.
And if with a few restoratives, you come to, and remind yourself this is Canada, and this seems rather fanciful, remember this characterization of the protestor’s motives has passed muster by the “fact checkers” who are been elevated to the tribunal of truth, and have showered us with such unimpeachable insight about masks, early treatments, “vaccine” safety and effectiveness, and so much more.
Truculent Trudeau in his own Twitter blessed words:
“Today in the House, Members of Parliament unanimously condemned the antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia that we’ve seen on display in Ottawa over the past number of days.”
Who’s the satirist, CJ or the prime minister of Canada? The latter has been hidden in a bunker, after his boosted self, tested positive for COVID, hurling epithets at these rascally, depraved truckers, who decided to draw a civilizational line in the sand – long overdue.
All over the world, all creeds, colors, ages, families with kids, working class and simply sane and humane citizens are flocking to the streets against this surreal Covidian cult charade. And their stance and presence is a powerful rebuke to the face muzzling, socially distancing against an airborne pathogen, double boosting with obsolete “therapeutics,” brigade.
Therefore, governments have to somehow “try” to declare victory and roll the nonsense back, before the edifice is shamed into confessing its absurdity. We have to pray their desperation does not boil over into even more acute manifestations of authoritarian distemper.
Woe Betide Any Accountability
Of course, the convoy was not even covered in the mainstream media, despite it representing the most important protest in modern times in Canada. Despite no coverage, public opinion in Canada swung 15% to create a solid majority against both restrictions and mandates.
Suddenly a new slogan is born, “living with COVID.” As epidemiology would have mandated from the outset.
But the sloganeering is pernicious, as it has been since Nixon’s Press Secretary Ron Ziegler intoned, “mistakes were made.” The chalice of responsibility thus escaped his lips, rather than a genuine acceptance and reckoning. Was the mistake the lies and illegality or “getting caught?” Kudos to Thomas Harrington of the Brownstone Institute for helping us to forage for this moral understanding.
The deliberately obfuscating language, now a cornerstone of political life, is a form of vandalism of the public trust. Mr. Ziegler was for some time the widespread prototype of the oily dissembler who should not be holding public office in a serious Republic.
However, today, he seems the grandfather of public communication, disgustingly so. When moral responsibility is diluted in this way, we have little clarity. How did the disgraceful Iraq war get mandated and how are war criminals who led it being recognized with honors today? Who caused the financial meltdown? Who is actually accountable?
The COVID saga has been made possible, in all its pervasive implausibility by this new reflex of “changing the subject” if moral accountability is asserted or challenging the “source” of ideas rather than actually engaging the ideas themselves.
So those who have been undermining our human dignity and freedom are being threatened with potential meltdown. Some key Democratic governors reading the tea leaves re possible electoral annihilation, are lifting the idiotic mask mandates in their states. The excuse? The mild Omicron variant. That’s easier than admitting two decades of science has been utterly consistent on the uselessness of face muzzles to alter the spread of respiratory viruses within the general population in any statistically significant way.
All the countries like Britain, Norway and others, who are dismantling COVID restrictions, claim that the “leaky” “vaccines” that don’t ward off reinfection nor prevent spread but suppress symptoms for a brief window of efficacy, were responsible for opening society back up after we faced the “terror” of a coronavirus with a 99%+ recovery rate for those not in the most vulnerable demographic (above 70 with multiple comorbidities, with an average age of death of 82, beyond life expectancy virtually everywhere). A sick, deluded stance, with shattered lives everywhere and the widespread debris of our constitutional protections and civil liberties, but hey, “let’s do a little sidestep” as the old song says.
When physical autonomy is up for grabs due to “non-science” then all other liberties are ornamental. So we must tell this tale straight on, lest “mistakes were made” becomes our pathetic hymnal as we lurch from one contrived crisis to another.
COVID as Trojan Horse
The real battle will not be about mandates, but our refusal to “normalize” the underlying legal and ethical outrages of this period. Already, in the US, Homeland “Insecurity” is claiming that spreading “misinformation” would be tantamount to a “terrorist act.” You have to gag when you read their assertion of “current heightened threat environment” being triggered by “The proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in US government institutions.”
Ah! The fount of “WMD” never runs dry. The founders of the American Republic, once a fragile revolutionary, embryonic experiment in self-government in the 18th century, enshrined free speech in the “first” Amendment.
By contrast, imagine elected cronies, on numerous payrolls, endowing themselves the right to determine what is “false” or “misleading.” And government that has lied about so much, distorted so much to perpetuate the jabbing mania, including subjecting children to it on no grounds whatsoever, believes it is just “entitled” to public trust?
Just as Macron has scant moral standing going against the tide of liberation washing over Europe to lecture Putin on “democracy” (hence 60% of those polled in France assessed the visit a “failure”), but even more so, seemingly benign Britain has announced plans to put an increased emphasis on “personal responsibility” and “duties to the wider society” as well as not “abusing” rights. And who will determine any of this? Music swells… the grand majesty of today’s crony riddled political parties, or at the very least, the one in current electoral ascendance.
This is to be an articulated “bill of rights” and veering away from those “unalienable rights” that no government could impugn or interfere with, we will have a parasitic “quid pro quo” with the state, now acting as ethical puppeteer. “Rights”, precisely as they sound, are “innate” and not a gift from callow, feckless politicians, or indeed anyone else.
This is what must really be stopped. The legalizing of the insulation from responsibility of those whose only legitimacy derives from serving the people and safeguarding (not editing) their rights.
Imagine if our worst fears about the longer-term immunosuppressive impact of these “vaccines” come to pass? I pray they don’t. Let’s hope they are just incompetent. But whatever is the case we must take stock, we must use the disinfectant of “facts” to deal with distortions, no matter of what type. But challenging these may get you thrown in with terrorists, allowing government wide latitude in addressing being jolted by such revelations.
March 2020 cannot happen again, when in panic, and ignoring mounting data, governments asserted themselves over individual rights by declaring an “emergency” (which it seems will not stop “emerging”). We ignored the impact on the vulnerable, the poor, on children, on those running personal businesses, those needing other medical care, and we never debated “cost-benefit” before blowing up society and shutting down the planet.
The world became an authoritarian police state. And it is reluctantly having to have that wrested from its grip. The unconditional nature of free speech and core rights are critical to keep governments from embarking on dubious “crusades” allegedly for the public good. It keeps scientific/medical bodies from claiming to be a “Ministry of Truth” and doubling down on grotesque mistakes to avoid accountability.
Self-anointed potentates and virtue signaling mobs have to be held in check by this scaffolding of rights we are fighting for, the right to interrogate narratives and do a deep dive into facts. How we live is our business to decide, not a privilege granted by government if you conform to their often-self-serving vision. Let us never again cede that.
It may be the world will have to take tuition from new exemplars, as our Western role models have sadly become so tarnished. Japan, for example, never fully locked down, has refused mandates and has actually been scientifically open to early treatments like Ivermectin. In a statistical repudiation of the science-free narrative that had been coming out of Western governments, Africa, with 6% “vaccination” has only 3% of the world’s COVID ascribed fatalities.
But wherever and however, all together, we must renew human traditions, and rediscover discourse, and commit to educating ourselves so our “voice” is meaningful.
Essential human needs beckon… to live, to contemplate, to take decisions, to love, to kick off enterprise, to adventure, to explore, and yes to both be “safe” and to trust our ability to navigate challenges and manageable dangers. If we don’t, we will find ourselves in a hell not suitable for human habitation. If we do, this debased chapter can give way to the glory of being radiantly, autonomously alive.
February 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
Leave a comment
I have been saying for nearly two years now, that if asymptomatic people stopped taking covid tests, then the scamdemic would end immediately. The UK government will announce next week, that if people want to continue to test themselves for covid, they will have to pay for it themselves. In theory, that should be game over.
According to The Times today:
Under proposals being finalised in Whitehall, healthy adults would no longer be eligible to order free lateral flow tests on the NHS. There are also plans to scale back PCR testing, with one option being to limit its availability to older adults and people considered to be clinically vulnerable.
The changes, which will be announced after months of speculation, will be announced as part of the government’s Living Safely With Covid strategy, which is due to be published next week. The new strategy could come into effect as soon as next month.
Ministers are facing pressure from the Treasury to reduce the multibillion-pound cost of continuing coronavirus testing on the NHS, with Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, understood to be calling also for the end of most PCR testing for people with Covid-19 symptoms.
The cost of living is skyrocketing. My guess is that most people who have been testing themselves regularly, won’t be as quick to order the tests when they have to pay for them out of their own pockets.
That will put a huge dent in the daily case numbers. In theory, that should be the end of the scam. I say in theory, because who knows what they are holding up their sleeves.
February 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, UK |
Leave a comment
Have you ever fancied being a contestant on a reality TV show? No? Me neither. This might change your mind. The BBC wants to get a bunch of vaccine sceptics into a house, study them (Dear God), challenge their beliefs and see if it’s possible to change their minds.
According to The Times :
It is understood that a diverse group who have refused the vaccine will live together for a period, during which the documentary will explore their views on the jab and their misconceptions about its origins and side effects.
The participants will be presented with evidence about the safety and success of the vaccine in the hope that they will soften their stance. At the end of the experiment they will be confronted with a question: do they want to get the vaccine?
STV Studios, an independent production company, has begun casting for the documentary before filming later this year. It is not yet known when the programme will be shown but it is likely to be broadcast on BBC1 or BBC2.
Hmmm…. they’ll present the sceptics with evidence will they? Whose evidence? Will the sceptics be permitted to introduce their own evidence? Will the anti-vaxxers be allowed to present the VAERS and Yellow Card data which demonstrates just how harmful the covid jabs really are?
I doubt it very much. The BBC you see, or STV studios, will be very, very careful when selecting the vaccine sceptics and of course the episodes won’t be live. They’ll be recorded and heavily edited.
I won’t hold my breath waiting for my invitation.
February 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | BBC, COVID-19 Vaccine |
Leave a comment
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
