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Macron Says, “No Vaxx, No Citizenship” as France Unveils New, Stricter Vaccine Passports

By Josie Appleton | The Daily Sceptic | January 24, 2022 

The French Government is introducing a tougher vaccine passport regime today. Now, only vaccination (and not natural immunity or covid tests) will count to allow access to cafes, libraries, sports facilities, and long-distance trains.

The near-hysterical arguments made by the French political class justifying this new pass are strikingly unguarded and reveal the inner dynamics behind the vaccine passport drive. These debates show that vaccines are no longer a simple medical product. Instead, the vaccine has become a way in which states are establishing their authority, and creating a new QR-code citizenship based on regular compliance with medical procedures.

Vaccination has become a test for entry into the civic body. The ‘test’ of the vaccine is not your degree of medical immunity, or the degree to which you stand to suffer personally from COVID-19 infection. (The vaccine pass goes down to the age of 12 in France, while in New York it applies to those aged five and above).

Instead, the new meaning of vaccination is an act of compliance; it is a matter of doing what is asked and expected of you. The French Prime Minister Jean Castex said that the vaccinated have “played the game”, they have done what is asked of them. President Emmanuel Macron said that the vaccinated, “near-totality of people”, have “adhered” or “subscribed” to what they were asked to do. These people are “responsible”. By contrast, it is a “very small” that is “refractory” or “resistant”. They are “irresponsible”, says Macron, and “a irresponsible person is longer a citizen”.

Here, the state claims the right to set conditions for entry to civic life. The question of being part of social life is not a right, but something provisional; it is a permission that is granted by the state. The new gatekeepers of civil society are the waiter at a cafe, the head of a sports club, the door staff at the theatre, who from Monday will not only scan QR codes but check people’s ID cards too.

“To be a free citizen means to be a responsible citizen,” says Macron. “Duties come before rights.” You can only have rights (enter society) once you have done your duty (been vaccinated). The idea that duties come before rights means, at base, that the state comes before the citizen: the citizen only takes his place in society at the behest of the state.

This is not a matter of two shots and you are done. There is an ongoing demand for compliance, whereby your citizenship – and claim to ‘responsibility’ – is continually renewed. France has followed Israel in requiring a booster shot for vaccine passes to remain valid. Currently, you have seven months to get a booster, but this will shorten to four months in February. A French Government guide sets out the exact timetable expected of you: this is a jurisprudence of medically based citizenship. Every injection gives a ‘valid QR card’ that you can use to access social life; if you don’t get the booster in the required window then this QR code will expire. France has also followed Israel with a special offer (available until February 15th) allowing first-time jabbers to “benefit from a valid vaccine pass” after their first dose, so long as they get their second jab within 28 days.

The discounting of natural immunity is very telling. Natural immunity yields a wider spectrum of anti-bodies than vaccination and is likely to confer longer protection against infection and against new variants. And yet natural immunity has no political meaning. It is a strength that your body has gained through its own efforts, without involving the state or wider society. The ‘pass sanitaire’ that had been in operation in France since last summer recognised natural immunity and negative covid tests, alongside vaccination; the new ‘pass vaccinal’ recognises vaccination alone. The French Prime Minister now claims that natural immunity provides “only very little immunity”, while the source of genuine immunity is a “full course of vaccines”. This claim reflects more about the different political value placed upon these two routes to antibodies. One route is deemed “protective”, robust, and the other very weak, as something that “wanes”, only because one has a robust relationship with the state and the other relates to the state “only very little”.

(Indeed, as we saw with the Novak Djokovic saga, natural immunity – and the claim to exemption based on natural immunity – in fact now poses a threat, so dangerous that a person must be imprisoned and deported. Natural immunity poses a threat not to actual public health, but to the new social order based on vaccination that is being built by the Australian government.)

The fetishism of Covid vaccination is at base a fetishism of bureaucracy. The vaccinated person has a pass, they have a QR code; they are on these grounds judged safe. You can feel ‘reassured’ when you are in a public space and everybody has passes on their phones. The unvaccinated person has no card or QR code and therefore they are seen as risky and posing a danger to others. In declining to be vaccinated, they are not merely refusing a medical procedure – with its attendant benefits and risks – but they are refusing to relate to bureaucracy. The absolute power attributed to a vaccine card – to show that someone is safe, to show that they care for others, and are willing to protect themselves and others – owes less to the medical effects of vaccination than to vaccination as an insignia for bureaucracy.

This is why it is repeatedly asserted that only the unvaccinated are infectious. The French prime minister says that the unvaccinated cannot be allowed to go around “infecting others with impunity”. He even claims that the unvaccinated intend to infect others, that they think to themselves, “I’m going to infect others.” This belief persists in the face of sky-high vaccinated case rates; in the face, even, of the Prime Minister’s own recent Covid infection.

There is a long history of blaming dissident elements for infectious disease – as with the expulsion of beggars, Jews and prostitutes from medieval plague towns, or in the nineteenth century the association between cholera and revolutionary urban uprisings. Infectious disease has often been associated with elements outside the system or that cut against social or religious hierarchy. Michel Foucault said that the absolutist state saw the plague as “a form… of disorder”, a disease of “rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder”.

Now too, the unvaccinated are seen as the source of all ills of society. The Italian Prime Minister said that “most of the problems we are experiencing today are due to the fact that there are unvaccinated people”, as he introduced a new tougher vaccine pass for Italian citizens on January 10th. The unvaccinated are even, perversely, presented as the cause of repressive instruments designed by politicians. Emmanuel Macron said that the unvaccinated didn’t merely put other people’s lives at risk, but they also “restricted the liberty of others”, which was “unacceptable”. The French Prime Minister said the unvaccinated “put in danger the life of the whole country and restrict the daily life of the immense majority of French people”.

The eight per cent or so of people who have not been vaccinated in France appear to be the single focus of state authority. Macron recently said that his primary aim was to “piss off the unvaccinated”, and that he will continue to do this “until the end”. In his New Year’s message, he urged the unvaccinated to join the fold, telling them that “all of France is counting on you”, as if the course of the pandemic – indeed the very fate of France – depends upon them agreeing to the jab.

The project of improving national health has been replaced by a project of integrating the population into a bureaucracy by means of health status. The health of the nation has become confused with the proportion of the population that has a valid health pass.

The pursuit of the ideology of vaccination at the expense of health outcomes is shown most vividly in the imposition of vaccination mandates upon healthcare professionals. Here, we see the sheer blindness of sacking of experienced medical staff in the midst of a pandemic on the basis of a vaccine that has no bearing on the risk they pose to patients. It also shows how far the notion of the ‘irresponsible’ unvaccinated person is from the reality, given that healthcare workers have given and contributed more than anyone. In French Guadeloupe, vaccine mandates led to a 30% reduction in staff at the main hospital and the reduction of services to a skeleton operation. The scene there now is colonial: black healthcare staff picketing the hospital were removed by white mobile gendarme units, and now there is an armed police checkpoint at the hospital entrance. Vaccination mandates are a test of allegiance for healthcare professionals. Authorities show that they are prepared to run hospitals into the ground, to risk lives, to protect the ideology.

The vaccine passport is a citizenship test for a morally and politically vacuous age. It is entirely passive – it is the simple act of consenting to a medical procedure, after which you are crowned with a civic virtue. This is a citizenship test that occurs on the level of what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”; that is, it is a question of merely biological existence, rather than a question of how a life is lived. Receiving a vaccine pass is mute; there are no words, there is no oath of allegiance to party, country or leader. You offer your body and receive a QR code in return: this is the nature of the new social contract between citizen and state. “Vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate” is the mantra for reconstituting authority and society in an age where this authority cannot be grounded on a substantial social basis.

The vaccine is being treated as a mystical state or collective substance that incorporates people into the collective body. Vaccination now is like a sacrament, a transubstantiation ritual; through the vaccine we are receiving the body of the state into our body and therefore joining the community.

One casualty in this is vaccination itself. Considered scientifically, a vaccine – as with any drug – is not a protective talisman or means for membership of a community. It is a medical product with particular qualities and uses, and particular side effects and risks. It may be useful for some groups but not others, and in some contexts but not in others. The rational use of a drug is as important as the drug itself, to ensure that it is directed towards the appropriate ends.

The ideological weaponisation of vaccines distorts these cost-benefit judgements. The vaccine is forced upon people who have little or no need of it, such as children and those with natural immunity, while ignoring those who have need of it. (The older and more vulnerable someone is, the less they are affected by vaccine passports.)

This episode is violating the very basis of health and medical ethics. Through vaccination passports and mandates, it has become acceptable to force someone to take a medical treatment, even a treatment that is not really in their medical interest. When Jean Castex boasted that the vaccine passport led to a rise in people getting their first vaccination, the interviewer pointed out “but they were forced”. Castex shrugged. In normal times, medical force is unacceptable; medical force means the Nazis. When France began vaccinating a year ago, it insisted upon consent forms and pre-vaccine interviews to ensure that people were really consenting. Now, the use of force has become entirely acceptable, it has become ethical in fact. It is the duty of the state to get people to do their duty.

And in this, the state is claiming rights over our bodies, the right to say what we put in them and what we don’t. A citizen under the vaccine passport regime is not in fact a citizen at all, but rather a chattel: you sign your body over to the state, and agree to take the latest required treatments in order have your QR code renewed. You sell your rights over your body for the price of drinking a cup of coffee in a cafe.

Josie Appleton is the author of Toxic Sociality – Reflections on a Pandemic and Officious – Rise of the Busybody State. She writes at notesonfreedom.com.

January 25, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

How Billions in COVID Stimulus Funds Led Hospitals to Prioritize ‘Treatments’ That Killed, Rather Than Cured

The Defender | January 24, 2022

As reported last week by The Defender, federal monies from the 2020 and 2021 COVID stimulus bills dramatically reshaped K-12 educational priorities, turning American school officials into lackeys for federal agencies more intent on masking and vaccinating every last child than on supporting meaningful education.

So, too, with the stimulus-induced reshaping of hospital priorities.

In the second half of a January interview on Del Bigtree’s “The Highwire” — “COVID-19: Following the Money” — policy analyst A.J. DePriest reported on the untoward consequences set into motion as a result of COVID funds provided to hospitals.

Managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the federal government allocated a total of $186.5 billion to the Provider Relief Fund (PRF), with two-thirds ($121.3 billion) disbursed as of January 2022.

The first tranche of $50 billion for hospitals and other Medicare providers — “for healthcare-related expenses or lost revenues … attributable to COVID-19” — began flying out the door in April 2020.

Almost immediately, alert doctors and astute journalists warned the Medicare add-on payments built into the relief package created perverse incentives unfriendly to patients’ interests.

As summarized by Dr. Scott Jensen — former Minnesota state senator and current gubernatorial candidate — “anytime healthcare intersects with dollars it gets awkward.”

Nearly two years down the road, the “awkwardness” is increasingly difficult to hide.

In the view of DePriest and many others, HHS’s stimulus slush fund has been every bit as dangerous for hospital patients as the U.S. Department of Education’s handouts have been for the nation’s schoolchildren.

Making out like bandits

Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet and Ali Shultz, J.D., who wrote a widely distributed op-ed in late 2021 for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), summed up the disturbing situation prevailing in hospitals. The AAPS’s professional calling card is its “dedication to the highest ethical standards of the Oath of Hippocrates.”

Not mincing their words, the two argued that Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) payment directives turned hospitals and medical staff into “bounty hunters,” and COVID patients into “virtual prisoners.”

Highlighting the slew of CMS add-ons and other incentives established with the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act — and also the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act (PPPHCEA) — they emphasized the payments hinge on hospitals’ willingness to slavishly follow the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) guidelines “for all things related to COVID-19.”

As itemized by Vliet and Shultz, compliant hospitals garner CMS payments for:

  • Each completed diagnostic test (required in the emergency room or upon admission).
  • Each COVID-19 diagnosis.
  • Each COVID admission.
  • Use of the intravenously administered Gilead drug remdesivir (brand name Veklury), which yields a 20% bonus payment on the entire hospital bill.
  • Mechanical ventilation.
  • COVID-19 listed as cause of death.

Citing a Becker’s Hospital Review breakdown, published in April 2020, of CARES Act payments to different states, DePriest told Bigtree payments ranged from $166,000 per COVID patient in Tennessee hospitals, for example, to far higher payments in states such as North Dakota ($339,000), Nebraska ($379,000) and West Virginia ($471,000).

In addition, for hospitals ascertained to be in COVID “hotspots,” HHS distributed special “high-impact” funds — $77,000 per admission initially, later downsized to $50,000 per admission.

HHS explained it used COVID admissions “as a proxy for the extent to which each facility experienced lost revenue and increased expenses associated with directly treating a substantial number of COVID-19 inpatient admission [sic].

The remdesivir ruse

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spent $79 million developing remdesivir for Gilead, which itself dished out $2.45 million during the first quarter of 2020, to lobby for the drug’s use with COVID patients.

On May 1, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized remdesivir for emergency use in individuals hospitalized with severe COVID illness, and members of an NIH expert panel (many with financial ties to Gilead) added the drug to the agency’s treatment guidelines.

A scant five months later, FDA granted full approval to remdesivir for hospitalized COVID patients over age 12.

The World Health Organization (WHO), in contrast, advised against remdesivir, stating the drug has “no meaningful effect on mortality or on other important outcomes for patients.”

Remdesivir sailed through regulatory hoops in the U.S. despite an abysmal track record of “adverse effects serious enough to kill” any individual hapless enough to take it.

Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. discusses remdesivir’s toxicity in his best-selling book, The Real Anthony Fauci, outlining the lethal problems — multiple organ failure, acute kidney failure, septic shock, hypotension and death — experienced by participants in NIAID’s clinical trial of remdesivir as an Ebola therapy.

When the trial, which compared remdesivir against three other drugs, killed more than half (54%) of the remdesivir recipients within 28 days — the highest mortality rate among the four groups — an oversight board forced the NIAID to end the prong of the study focused on remdesivir.

As if remdesivir alone weren’t bad enough, Vliet and Shultz estimate mechanical ventilation kills anywhere from 45% to 85% of COVID patients. Moreover, NIH’s skimpy treatment guidelines prescribe dexamethasone concurrently with ventilators.

Dexamethasone, often described as a “double-edged sword,” is a highly potent corticosteroid that suppresses the innate immune system.

Like remdesivir, dexamethasone’s potentially significant adverse impacts include kidney damage. Additional side effects include interference with the normal function of other organ systems such as the cardiovascular, digestive, endocrine, musculoskeletal and nervous systems.

Ironically, dexamethasone can also increase the need for mechanical ventilation as well as for blood pressure intervention.

Therapies like these are a large part of why, as Vliet and Shultz note, the U.S. COVID mortality rate is so “shockingly high” compared to the rest of the world.

Remdesivir’s trail of destruction could get worse — on Jan. 21, FDA expanded use of remdesivir to “high-risk” adult and pediatric outpatients (age 12 and older) “for the treatment of mid-to-moderate COVID-19 disease,” permitting administration of the intravenous drug in various outpatient facilities.

FDA’s side effects warnings include possible liver injury and allergic reactions such as “changes in blood pressure and heart rate, low blood oxygen level, fever, shortness of breath, wheezing, swelling …, rash, nausea, sweating or shivering.”

Getting involved and bringing transparency

Referring to the 20% add-on payment that hospitals receive for administering remdesivir to COVID patients, DePriest commented that a “bonus” is a “weird thing to call something when you’re murdering people.”

Journalist Jon Rappoport agreed, preferring to characterize hospitals’ behavior toward COVID patients as “a federally incentivized protocol for murder” — or “cash for death.”

All of the above parties concur that the best-case scenario is to treat COVID early at home and avoid hospitals — “because we know from experience what happens there.”

In cases where hospitalization is unavoidable, DePriest encourages communities to get more involved:

“[W]hen you know these hospitals are doing that, the people of that community need to show up at that hospital en masse and start telling them that you, as a community, are going to be advocating for every single COVID patient that walks through those doors, and you are going to hold that hospital accountable — to their patient bill of rights, to their stated visitation policies — and if your state is not in a state of emergency anymore, there shouldn’t be any reason why patients are medically kidnapped and separated from their families and isolated.

“There’s absolutely no reason for it, but the communities have to get involved and they have to confront these hospitals and tell them, ‘We’re done, you’re not killing any more of us.’”

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

January 25, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

It’s time to end the mandates

By Steve Kirsch | January 24, 2022

Boris Johnson recently declared an end to the COVID restrictions in the UK. He said, “We will trust the judgment of the English people.”

Why can’t we do that in the US? Isn’t it time to trust the judgment of the American people?

Whether you ask a red or blue pill person, it’s clear that both sides have compelling rationales to end the mandates and the State of Emergency.

Interestingly, the rationale for each side is completely different, but the conclusion is the same. Here’s how they stack up.

Blue pill rationale

  1. We don’t need mandates for the vaccine or masks because we know they work. No need to sell us! Mandate or not, we will comply.
  2. We no longer fear those who are not compliant: we are all boosted up the wazoo using safe and effective vaccines with virtually no side effects AND we are wearing N95 or P100 masks at all times. And we always stay 6 feet from any other person. So there is basically no way to infect us.
  3. We have nothing to fear. Virtually none of us will be hospitalized, and none of us risk death. And the prevalence of Omicron makes our risk even lower.
  4. We think people who are not compliant are evil and deserve to die. Why force them to take life-saving medical interventions? We are better off as a society if these people are gone. Permanently.
  5. We trust our doctors to deliver quality medical advice. Our doctors always follow the CDC guidance which has been uniformly excellent. We all should be treated the same, no matter what our medical histories are. If the doctors follow the CDC guidelines, almost nobody dies. All the hospitals are filled with unvaccinated people.
  6. Just to be safe, we test ourselves every day using antigen tests for COVID. If we have a positive test result, we now have two new safe and effective drugs from the most trusted drug companies in the world so that in the rare chance that we get COVID, we can treat it with nearly 100% success.

Red pill rationale

  1. Mandates aren’t needed because we won’t comply with them anyway. They just create division and animosity in society. They divide us.
  2. We don’t fear the vaccinated.
  3. Cloth, surgical, and N95 masks don’t work so why should we wear them? P100 masks do work, but they are pretty cumbersome and not worth the trouble for a COVID variant that can’t hurt us.
  4. Social distancing is useless and doesn’t work. The 6 foot rule is not based on any science. Why isn’t it 5.2 feet? Nobody has seen the science justifying 6 feet so we aren’t going to comply with silly non-scientific rules.
  5. The current COVID vaccines are more likely to kill people than save them. In the Pfizer trial, 24% more people died in the group taking the vaccine! So it’s clear. If the vaccines don’t kill us, they will actually make the pandemic worse because they depress our immune system making us twice as likely to be infected with COVID as well as susceptible to other diseases (like reoccurrence of cancer). They also cause serious side effects. They are the most dangerous vaccines in human history. There is no way we will take them. Mandating them is just going to piss us off and hurt the economy. You will not get us to take them.
  6. Why would we take a drug that could kill us to prevent a variant that cannot? You’d have to be nuts. We will not comply so the mandates won’t make us.
  7. The primary variant is Omicron which if it happened today, we’d just ignore it since it is like getting a cold.
  8. If we get sick, we have very effective early treatment protocols using existing safe repurposed drugs like ivermectin, HCQ, aspirin, vitamin D, NAC, and Prozac. These protocols are 100% successful in preventing death from COVID when given early. We would never use Molnupiravir or Paxlovid; those drugs are both super dangerous.
  9. We use symptoms to determine if we have COVID. If we are unsure, we can use antigen tests. There is no need to test if we aren’t symptomatic because we know there is virtually zero asymptomatic spread and because the antigen tests almost never work reliably unless you are symptomatic so it’s a complete waste of money to test asymptomatic people. The testing companies don’t want anyone to know that, but we do.
  10. If we do get sick with COVID symptoms, we stay home and rest.
  11. Even if we had a truly safe vaccine, those of us who are recovered from COVID wouldn’t need it. A uniform mandate for everyone makes no sense.
  12. We believe doctors should be allowed to be doctors and that medical care should always be delivered by our healthcare professional we trust to use his professional judgement on our individual case. The CDC guidance is just awful.

January 25, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Flashback: Fauci Spread False Information on AIDS

Martin Armstrong | January 24, 2022

Here is a flashback of Dr. Anthony Fauci spreading false information about AIDS transmission. Fauci claimed that people could become infected by simply being near someone with AIDS. “[I]f the close contact of a child is a household contact, perhaps there will be a certain number of cases of individuals who are just living with and in close contact with someone with AIDS, or at risk of AIDS, who does not necessarily have to have intimate sexual contact or share a needle, but just the ordinary close contact that one sees in normal interpersonal relations,” Dr. Fauci advised. Obviously, we know this is a complete lie.

This false narrative led to gay men being ostracized from society. Democratic politician Pete Buttigieg’s husband Chasten is offended that people are comparing the disinformation on AIDS to COVID disinformation. A Newsmax reporter asked, “During the AIDS crisis, can you imagine if gay men and intravenous drug users . . . had they been pariahs the way the non-vaccinated are?” Chasten replied on Twitter, “AIDS patients died because people feared simply touching them would lead to infection. Families abandoned their own children to be buried in unmarked graves.” Sadly, AIDS patients were treated in a horrific way due to people like Anthony Fauci painting them as dangerous to society. Yet, the masses continue to trust this man who has spent his entire career altering “the science.”

January 25, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

How You’ve Been Misled About Statins

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | March 11, 2020

Statins are HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors; that is, they block the enzyme in your liver responsible for making cholesterol (HMG-CoA reductase). According to Drugs.com, more than 35 million Americans are on a statin drug, making it one of the most commonly prescribed medicines in the U.S.1

National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data suggest 47.6% of seniors over the age of 75 are on a statin drug.2 Lipitor — which is just one of several brand name statin drugs — is one of the most profitable drugs in the history of medicine.3,4

Collectively, statins have earned over $1 trillion since they were introduced.5 This, despite their being off patent. There is simply no doubt that selling them is big business with major financial incentives to distort the truth to continue their sales.

Statin recommendations have become fairly complex, as they’re recommended for various age groups under different circumstances, and whether they’re used as primary prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD), or secondary prevention. Guidelines also vary slightly depending on the organization providing the recommendation and the country you’re in.6

In the U.S., the two guidelines available are from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF),7 and the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association.8,9 The USPSTF guidelines recommend using a statin for the primary prevention of CVD when a patient:10

  • Is between the age of 40 to 75
  • Has one or more CVD risk factors (dyslipidemia, diabetes, hypertension or smoking)
  • Has a calculated 10-year risk of a cardiovascular event of 10% or greater

In secondary prevention of CVD, statins are “a mainstay,” according to the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.11 Secondary prevention means the drug is used to prevent a recurrence of a heart attack or stroke in patients who have already had one.

Regulators’ Role Questioned

A February 2020 analysis12 in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine (paywall) brings up the fact that while the use of statins in primary prevention of CVD “has been controversial” and there’s ongoing debate as to “whether the benefits outweigh the harms,” drug regulators around the world — which have approved statins for the prevention of CVD — have stayed out of the debate. Should they? The analysis goes on to note:

“Our aim was to navigate the decision-making processes of European drug regulators and ultimately request the data upon which statins were approved. Our findings revealed a system of fragmented regulation in which many countries licensed statins but did not analyze the data themselves.

There is no easily accessible archive containing information about the licensing approval of statins or a central location for holding the trial data. This is an unsustainable model and serves neither the general public, nor researchers.”

Have We Been Misled by the Evidence?

In her 2018 peer-reviewed narrative review,13 “Statin Wars: Have We Been Misled About the Evidence?” published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., a former medical science major turned investigative health reporter, delves into some of these ongoing controversies.

“A bitter dispute has erupted among doctors over suggestions that statins should be prescribed to millions of healthy people at low risk of heart disease. There are concerns that the benefits have been exaggerated and the risks have been underplayed.

Also, the raw data on the efficacy and safety of statins are being kept secret and have not been subjected to scrutiny by other scientists. This lack of transparency has led to an erosion of public confidence.

Doctors and patients are being misled about the true benefits and harms of statins, and it is now a matter of urgency that the raw data from the clinical trials are released,” Demasi writes.14

While Demasi’s paper is behind a paywall, she reviews her arguments in the featured video above. Among them is the fact that the “statin empire” is built on prescribing these drugs to people who really don’t need them and are likely to suffer side effects without getting any benefits.

For example, some have recommended statins should be given to everyone over the age of 50, regardless of their cholesterol level. Others have suggested screening and dosing young children.

Even more outrageous suggestions over the past few years include statin “‘condiments’ in burger outlets to counter the negative effects of a fast food meal,'” and adding statins to the municipal water supply.

Simple Tricks, Big Payoffs

Medical professionals are now largely divided into two camps, one saying statins are lifesaving and safe enough for everyone, and the other saying they’re largely unnecessary and harmful to boot. How did such a divide arise, when all have access to the same research and data?

Demasi suggests that in order to understand how health professionals can be so divided on this issue, you have to follow the money. The cost of developing and getting market approval for a new drug exceeds $2.5 billion. “A more effective way to fast-track company profits is to broaden the use of an existing drug,” Demasi says, and this is precisely what happened with statins.

By simply revising the definition of “high cholesterol,” which was done in 2000 and again in 2004, millions of people became eligible for statin treatment, without any evidence whatsoever that it would actually benefit them.

As it turns out, eight of the nine members on the U.S. National Cholesterol Education Program panel responsible for these revisions had “direct ties to statin manufacturers,” Demasi says, and that public revelation sowed the first seed of suspicion in many people’s minds.

Skepticism ratcheted up even more when, in 2013, the American College of Cardiology and AHA revised their statin guideline to include a CVD risk calculation rather than a single cholesterol number. U.S. patients with a 7.5% risk of developing CVD in the next 10 years were now put on a statin. (In the U.K., the percentage used was a more reasonable 20%.)

This resulted in another 12.8 million Americans being put on statin treatment even though they didn’t have any real risk factors for CVD. Worse, a majority of these were older people without heart disease — the very population that stand to gain the least from these medications.

What’s worse, 4 of 5 calculators were eventually found to overestimate the risk of CVD, some by as much as 115%, which means the rate of overprescription was even greater than previously suspected.

Industry Bias

While simple revisions of the definitions of high cholesterol and CVD risk massively augmented the statin market, industry-funded studies have further fueled the overprescription trend. As noted by Demasi, when U.S. President Ronald Reagan cut funding to the National Institutes of Health, private industry moved in to sponsor their own clinical trials.

The vast majority of statin trials are funded by the manufacturers, and research has repeatedly found that funding plays a major role in research outcomes. It’s not surprising then that most statin studies overestimate drug benefits and underestimate risks.

Demasi quotes Dr. Peter Gøtzsche, a Danish physician-researcher who in 1993 co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration and later launched the Nordic Cochrane Centre:

“When drug industry sponsored trials cannot be examined and questioned by independent researchers, science ceases to exist and it becomes nothing more than marketing.”

“The very nature of science is its contestability,” Demasi notes. “We need to be able to challenge and rechallenge scientific results to ensure they’re reproducible and legitimate.” However, there’s been a “cloud of secrecy” around clinical statin trials, Demasi says, as the raw data on side effects have never been released to the public, nor other scientists.

The data are being held by the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists (CTT) Collaboration at CTSU Oxford, headed by Rory Collins, which periodically publishes meta-analyses of the otherwise inaccessible data. While the CTT claims to be an independent organization, it has received more than £260 million from statin makers.

Inevitably, its conclusions end up promoting wider use of statins, and no independent review is possible to contest or confirm the CTT Collaboration’s conclusions.

Tricks Used to Minimize Harms in Clinical Trials

As explained by Demasi, there are many ways in which researchers can influence the outcome of a drug trial. One is by designing the study in such a way that it minimizes the chances of finding harm. The example she gives in her lecture is the Heart Protection Study.

Before the trial got started, all participants were given a statin drug for six weeks. By the end of that run-in period, 36% of the participants had dropped out due to side effects or lack of compliance. Once they had this “freshly culled” population, where those suffering side effects had already been eliminated, that’s when the trial actually started.

Now, patients were divided into statin and placebo groups. But since everyone had already taken a statin before the trial began, the side effects found in the statin and placebo groups by the end of the trial were relatively similar.

In short, this strategy grossly underestimates the percentage of the population that will experience side effects, and this “may explain why the rate of side effects in statin trials is wildly different from the rate of side effects seen in real-world observations,” Demasi says.

Deception Through Statistics

Public opinion can also be influenced by exaggerating statistics. A common statistic used to promote statins is that they lower your risk of heart attack by about 36%.15 This statistic is derived from a 2008 study16 in the European Heart Journal. One of the authors on this study is Rory Collins, who heads up the CTT Collaboration.

Table 4 in this study shows the rate of heart attack in the placebo group was 3.1% while the statin group’s rate was 2% — a 36% reduction in relative risk. However, the absolute risk reduction — the actual difference between the two groups, i.e., 3.1% minus 2% — is only 1.1%, which really isn’t very impressive.

In other words, in the real world, if you take a statin, your chance of a heart attack is only 1.1% lower than if you’re not taking it. At the end of the day, what really matters is what your risk of death is the absolute risk. The study, however, only stresses the relative risk (36%), not the absolute risk (1.1%).

As noted in the review,17 “How Statistical Deception Created the Appearance That Statins Are Safe and Effective in Primary and Secondary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease,” it’s very easy to confuse and mislead people with relative risks. You can learn more about absolute and relative risk in my 2015 interview with David Diamond, Ph.D., who co-wrote that paper.

Silencing Dissenters and Fear-Based PR

Yet another strategy used to mislead people is to create the illusion of “consensus” by silencing dissenters, discrediting critics and/or censoring differing views.

In her lecture, Demasi quotes Collins of the CTT Collaboration saying that “those who questioned statin side effects were ‘far worse’ and had probably ‘killed more people’ than ‘the paper on the MMR vaccine'” … “Accusing you of murdering people is an effective way [to] discredit you,” she says.

Demasi also highlights the case of a French cardiologist who questioned the value of statins in his book. It received widespread attention in the French press, until critics started saying the book and resulting press coverage posed a danger to public health.

One report blamed the book for causing a 50% increase in statin discontinuation, which was predicted would lead to the death of 10,000 people. On this particular occasion, however, researchers analyzed the number of actual deaths based on national statistics, and found the actual death toll decreased in the year following the release of the book.

The authors, Demasi says, noted that it was “‘not evidence-based to claim that statin discontinuation increases mortality,’ and that in the future, scientists should assess ‘real effects of statin discontinuation rather than making dubious extrapolations and calculations.'”

Trillion-Dollar Business Based on Flimsy Evidence

Statins, originally introduced three decades ago as secondary prevention for those with established CVD and patients with congenital and familial hyperlipidemias, have now vastly expanded thanks to the strategies summarized above.

Tens if not hundreds of millions of people are now on these drugs, without any scientific evidence to show they will actually benefit from them. As noted in the EBM analysis, “Statins for Primary Prevention: What Is the Regulator’s Role?”:18

“The central clinical controversy has been a fierce debate over whether their benefits in primary prevention outweigh their harms … The largest known statin usage survey conducted in the USA found that 75% of new statin users discontinued their therapy by the end of the first year, with 62% of them saying it was because of the side effects.

Regardless of what level of prevention statin prescription is aimed at, the proposed widening of the population to over 75s de facto includes people with multiple pathologies, whether symptomatic or not, and bypasses the distinction between primary and secondary prevention …

The CTT Collaboration estimates the frequency of myopathy is quite rare, at five cases per 10,000 statin users over five years. But others have contended that the CTT Collaboration’s work ‘simply does not match clinical experience’ … [Muscle-related adverse events] reportedly occur with a frequency of … as many as 20% of patients in clinical practice.”

Regulators Have a Duty to Create Transparency

Considering the discrepancy in reported side effects between statin trials, clinical practice and statin usage surveys, what responsibility do regulators have?

According to “Statins for Primary Prevention: What Is the Regulator’s Role?”19 regulators have a responsibility to “engage and publicly articulate their position on the controversy and make the evidence base underlying those judgments available to third parties for independent scrutiny,” none of which has been done to date. The paper adds:

“Regulators holding clinical trial data, particularly for public health drugs, should make these data available in searchable format with curated and dedicated web-based resource. If national regulators are not resourced for this, pooling or centralizing resources may be necessary.

The isolation of regulators from the realities of prescribing medications based on incomplete or distorted information is not enshrined in law but is a product of a subculture in which commercial confidentiality is more important than people. This also needs to change.”

Do Your Homework Before Taking a Statin

There’s a lot of evidence to suggest drug company-sponsored statin research and its PR cannot be trusted, and that few of the millions of people currently taking these drugs actually benefit from them.

Some of the research questioning the veracity of oft-cited statin trials is reviewed in “Statins’ Flawed Studies and Flawed Advertising” and “Statins Shown to Extend Life by Mere Days.”

To learn more about the potential harms of statins, see “Statins Double Diabetes Rates,” “Statins Trigger Brain Changes With Devastating Effects,” and “5 Great Reasons You Should Not Take Statins.”

Sources and References

January 25, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

13% of US hospitals critically understaffed, 22% anticipate shortages: Numbers by state

By Marissa Plescia and Kelly Gooch | Becker’s Hospital Review | January 24, 2022

Almost 13 percent — or 772 of 6,004 — of hospitals reporting staffing levels in the U.S. are experiencing critical staffing shortages, according to HHS data posted Jan. 23.

This is about 2 percentage points less than figures released Jan. 20.

A critical staffing shortage is based on a facility’s needs and internal policies for staffing ratios, according to HHS. Hospitals using temporary staff to meet staffing ratios are not counted among those experiencing a shortage.

Meanwhile, almost 22 percent — or 1,305 of 6,004 — of hospitals reporting staffing levels in the U.S. are anticipating shortages in the next week.

About 30 percent of hospitals did not report if they’re currently experiencing shortages, and about 21 percent did not report if they anticipate shortages.

Below are two lists showing current staffing shortages and anticipated shortages.

Percent of hospitals in each state and the District of Columbia experiencing critical staffing shortages, ranked in descending order:

1. Vermont: 58.82 percent

2. West Virginia: 47.62 percent

3. New Mexico: 47.27 percent

4. Wisconsin: 33.33 percent

5. North Dakota: 32.65 percent

6. Arizona: 29.52 percent

7. Michigan: 29.38 percent

8. Kentucky: 29.06 percent

9. South Carolina: 28.05 percent

10. Louisiana: 25.33 percent

11. Georgia: 24.71 percent

12. Indiana: 23.95 percent

13. Nebraska: 22.22 percent

14. Tennessee: 22.14 percent

15. Delaware: 20 percent

16. Pennsylvania: 19.03 percent

17. Minnesota: 17.14 percent

18. Montana: 16.92 percent

19. Washington: 16.5 percent

20. Virginia: 15.24 percent

21. Oklahoma: 13.1 percent

22. New Jersey: 12.5 percent

23. Hawaii: 12 percent

24. Missouri: 10.95 percent (tie)

24. Kansas: 10.95 percent (tie)

26. Wyoming: 9.68 percent

27. Oregon: 9.38 percent

28. Maryland: 9.09 percent

29. California: 8.71 percent

30. Colorado: 8.6 percent

31. North Carolina: 7.69 percent

32. Mississippi: 7.41 percent

33. New Hampshire: 6.67 percent (tie)

33. Rhode Island: 6.67 percent (tie)

35. Nevada: 6.56 percent

36. Arkansas: 5.61 percent

37. Maine: 5.41 percent

38. Alaska: 4.17 percent

39. Illinois: 3.96 percent

40. Idaho: 3.77 percent

41. Florida: 3.56 percent

42. Iowa: 3.17 percent

43. New York: 2.48 percent

44. Texas: 2.36 percent

45. Ohio: 0.86 percent

46. Alabama: 0 percent (tie)

46. District of Columbia: 0 percent (tie)

46. South Dakota: 0 percent (tie)

46. Utah: 0 percent (tie)

46. Connecticut: 0 percent (tie)

46. Massachusetts: 0 percent (tie)

Percent of hospitals in each state and the District of Columbia anticipating critical staffing shortages within the next week, ranked in descending order:

1. Vermont: 70.59 percent

2. Rhode Island: 53.33 percent

3. West Virginia: 52.38 percent

4. New Mexico: 47.27 percent

5. Kentucky: 41.03 percent

6. California: 40.3 percent

7. Alabama: 35.9 percent

8. Tennessee: 35.71 percent

9. Wyoming: 35.48 percent

10. Wisconsin: 35.33 percent

11. Michigan: 33.75 percent

12. Delaware: 33.33 percent

13. Missouri: 32.85 percent

14. North Dakota: 32.65 percent

15. Massachusetts: 32.35 percent

16. Nebraska: 32.32 percent

17. Arizona: 30.48 percent

18. Kansas: 29.93 percent

19. South Carolina: 29.27 percent

20. Oklahoma: 28.97 percent

21. Georgia: 28.82 percent

22. Indiana: 27.54 percent

23. Louisiana: 24.44 percent

24. Mississippi: 23.15 percent

25. Arkansas: 22.43 percent

26. Virginia: 21.9 percent

27. Pennsylvania: 21.68 percent

28. Washington: 20.39 percent

29. New Hampshire: 20 percent

30. Montana: 18.46 percent

31. Maryland: 18.18 percent

32. Minnesota: 17.14 percent

33. New Jersey: 16.67 percent (tie)

33. Alaska: 16.67 percent (tie)

35. Florida: 16.6 percent

36. Colorado: 13.98 percent

37. Idaho: 13.21 percent

38. Illinois: 12.87 percent

39. Hawaii: 12 percent

40. Oregon: 10.94 percent

41. North Carolina: 10.77 percent

42. South Dakota: 9.38 percent

43. Maine: 8.11 percent

44. Utah: 7.14 percent

45. Nevada: 6.56 percent

46. New York: 6.44 percent

47. Iowa: 4.76 percent

48. Texas: 3.54 percent

49. Connecticut: 2.56 percent

50. Ohio: 0.86 percent

51. District of Columbia: 0 percent

January 24, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

100s of Published Reports of Post-Vaccine Medical Distress (Part 1)

By Donna Laframboise | No Fracking Consensus | January 17, 2022

COVID-19 vaccines are harming people. This fact is now extensively documented in the peer-reviewed medical literature.

We’re told these events are rare. So what’s the magic number? How many reports of alarming medical outcomes are necessary before we admit the ‘cure’ might be worse than the disease?

Most people who contract COVID don’t develop serious medical issues. But the small percentage who do can overwhelm the health care system.

Most people who receive a COVID vaccine don’t develop serious medical issues. But the small percentage who do can also overwhelm the health care system. Everyone wants to talk about the first problem. No one wants to talk about the second.

Last week, an extensive list of articles from the peer-reviewed medical literature was posted on Reddit by someone known only as xxyiorgos. More than 400 articles are on that list (backup link here).

Here are the first 100. I’ve numbered, and verified them. In some cases, I’ve updated the hyperlink. This research is emerging from numerous countries including Belgium, Canada, Germany, Greece, Italy, Norway, Qatar, South Korea, Spain, the UK, and the US.

Comments in brackets added by me.

1. Cerebral venous thrombosis after COVID-19 vaccination in the UK: a multicentre cohort study [stroke, Lancet, Aug. 2021]
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01608-1/

2.  Vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia with disseminated intravascular coagulation and death after ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccination: [fatal blood clots, Journal of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Diseases, Sept. 2021]
https://www.strokejournal.org/article/S1052-3057(21)00341-4/fulltext

3. Fatal cerebral hemorrhage after COVID-19 vaccine: [fatal brain bleed, Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association, Apr. 2021]
https://tidsskriftet.no/2021/04/kort-kasuistikk/fatal-hjerneblodning-etter-covid-19-vaksine

4. “Myocarditis after mRNA vaccination against SARS-CoV-2, a case series:” [heart inflammation, American Heart Journal Plus: Cardiology Research & Practice, Aug. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666602221000409

5. Three cases of acute venous thromboembolism in women after vaccination against COVID-19: [blood clots, Journal of Vascular Surgery: Venous and Lymphatic Disorders, Jan. 2022]
https://www.jvsvenous.org/article/S2213-333X(21)00392-9/fulltext

6. Acute coronary tree thrombosis after vaccination against COVID-19: [blood clots, Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Interventions, May 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1936879821003988

7. US case reports of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis with thrombocytopenia after Ad26.COV2.S vaccination, March 2 to April 21, 2020: [stroke, Journal of the American Medical Association, June 2021]
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2779731

8. Portal vein thrombosis associated with ChAdOx1 nCov-19 vaccine: [blood clots, Lancet, June 2021]
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(21)00197-7/

9. Management of cerebral and splanchnic vein thrombosis associated with thrombocytopenia in subjects previously vaccinated with Vaxzevria (AstraZeneca): position statement of the Italian Society for the Study of Hemostasis and Thrombosis (SISET): [blood clots, Blood Transfusion, July-Aug. 201]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC8297668/

10. Vaccine-induced immune immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis after vaccination with COVID-19; a systematic review: [blood clots, Journal of the Neurological Sciences, Sept. 2021]
https://www.jns-journal.com/article/S0022-510X(21)00301-4/fulltext

11. Thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome associated with COVID-19 vaccines: [blood clots, American Journal of Emergency Medicine, Nov. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735675721004381

12. Covid-19 vaccine-induced thrombosis and thrombocytopenia: a commentary on an important and practical clinical dilemma: [blood clots, Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases, July-Aug. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0033062021000505

13. Thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome associated with COVID-19 viral vector vaccines: [blood clots, European Journal of Internal Medicine, July 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0953620521001904

14. COVID-19 vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia: an emerging cause of splanchnic vein thrombosis: [blood clots, Annals of Hepatology, July-Aug. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1665268121000557

15. The roles of platelets in COVID-19-associated coagulopathy and vaccine-induced immune thrombotic immune thrombocytopenia (covid): [blood clots, Trends in Cardiovascular Medicine, Jan. 2022]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1050173821000967

16. Roots of autoimmunity of thrombotic events after COVID-19 vaccination: [blood clots, Autoimmunity Reviews, Nov. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1568997221002160

17. Cerebral venous sinus thrombosis after vaccination: the United Kingdom experience: [brain blood clots, [stroke, Lancet, Sept. 2021]
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01788-8/fulltext

18. Thrombotic immune thrombocytopenia induced by SARS-CoV-2 vaccine: [blood clots, New England Journal of Medicine, Apr. 2021]
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejme2106315

19. Myocarditis after immunization with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in members of the US military: [heart inflammation, Journal of the American Medical Association, June 2021]
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2781601

20. Thrombosis and thrombocytopenia after vaccination with ChAdOx1 nCoV-19: [blood clots, New England Journal of Medicine, Apr. 2021]
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2104882

21. Association of myocarditis with the BNT162b2 messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccine in a case series of children: [heart inflammation, Journal of the American Medical Association Cardiology, Aug. 2021]
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2783052

22. Thrombotic thrombocytopenia after vaccination with ChAdOx1 nCov-19: [blood clots, New England Journal of Medicine, June 2021]
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2104840

23. Post-mortem findings in vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia (covid-19): [fatal blood clots, Haematologica, Aug. 2021]
https://haematologica.org/article/view/haematol.2021.279075

24. Thrombocytopenia, including immune thrombocytopenia after receiving COVID-19 mRNA vaccines reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS): [blood clots, Vaccine, June 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X21005247

25. Acute symptomatic myocarditis in seven adolescents after Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccination: [heart inflammation, Pediatrics, Sept. 2021]
https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/148/3/e2021052478/179728/Symptomatic-Acute-Myocarditis-in-7-Adolescents

26. Aphasia seven days after the second dose of an mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. [brain bleed, Brain Hemorrhages, Dec. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589238X21000292

27. Comparison of vaccine-induced thrombotic episodes between ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 and Ad26.COV.2.S vaccines: [blood clots, Journal of Autoimmunity, Aug. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0896841121000895

28. Hypothesis behind the very rare cases of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome after SARS-CoV-2 vaccination: [blood clots, Thrombosis Research, July 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049384821003315

29. Blood clots and bleeding episodes after BNT162b2 and ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccination: analysis of European data: [blood clots, Journal of Autoimmunity, Aug. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896841121000937

30. Cerebral venous thrombosis after BNT162b2 mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccine: [stroke, Journal of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Diseases, Aug. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1052305721003098

31. Primary adrenal insufficiency associated with thrombotic immune thrombocytopenia induced by the Oxford-AstraZeneca ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine (VITT): [blood clots, European Journal of Internal Medicine, Sept. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0953620521002363

32. Myocarditis and pericarditis after vaccination with COVID-19 mRNA: practical considerations for care providers: [heart inflammation, Canadian Journal of Cardiology, Oct. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0828282X21006243

33. “Portal vein thrombosis occurring after the first dose of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine in a patient with antiphospholipid syndrome”: [blood clots, Thrombosis Update, Dec. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666572721000389

34. Early results of bivalirudin treatment for thrombotic thrombocytopenia and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis after vaccination with Ad26.COV2.S: [blood clots, Annals of Emergency Medicine, Oct. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196064421003425

35. Myocarditis, pericarditis and cardiomyopathy after COVID-19 vaccination: [heart inflammation, Heart, Lung and Circulation, Oct. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1443950621011562

36. Mechanisms of immunothrombosis in vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT) compared to natural SARS-CoV-2 infection: [blood clots, Journal of Autoimmunity, July 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0896841121000706

37. Prothrombotic immune thrombocytopenia after COVID-19 vaccination: [blood clots, Blood, July 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006497121009411

38. Vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia: the dark chapter of a success story: [blood clots, Metabolism Open, Sept. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589936821000256

39. Anti-PF4 antibody negative cerebral venous sinus thrombosis without thrombocytopenia following immunization with COVID-19 vaccine in an elderly non-comorbid Indian male, managed with conventional heparin-warfarin based anticoagulation: [stroke, Diabetes & Metabolic Syndrome: Clinical Research & Reviews, July-Aug. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871402121002046

40. Thrombosis after COVID-19 vaccination: possible link to ACE pathways: [blood clots, Thrombosis Research, Oct. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049384821004369

41. Cerebral venous sinus thrombosis in the U.S. population after SARS-CoV-2 vaccination with adenovirus and after COVID-19: [stroke, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, July 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735109721051949

42. Middle-age Asian male with cerebral venous thrombosis after COVID-19 AstraZeneca vaccination: [stroke, American Journal of Emergency Medicine, Jan. 2022]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735675721005714

43. Cerebral venous sinus thrombosis and thrombocytopenia after COVID-19 vaccination: report of two cases in the United Kingdom: [stroke, Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, July 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S088915912100163X

44. Immune thrombocytopenic purpura after vaccination with COVID-19 vaccine (ChAdOx1 nCov-19): [blood clots, Blood, Sept. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006497121013963

45. Antiphospholipid antibodies and risk of thrombophilia after COVID-19 vaccination: the straw that breaks the camel’s back?: [blood clots, Cytokine & Growth Factor Reviews, Aug. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359610121000423

46. Vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia, a rare but severe case of friendly fire in the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic: What pathogenesis? [blood clots, European Journal of Internal Medicine, Sept. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0953620521002314

47. Diagnostic-therapeutic recommendations of the ad-hoc FACME expert working group on the management of cerebral venous thrombosis related to COVID-19 vaccination: [stroke, Neurología, Spanish Neurology Society, July-Aug. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2173580821000754

48. Thrombocytopenia and intracranial venous sinus thrombosis after exposure to the “AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine Astrazeneca” exposure: [stroke, Journal of Clinical Medicine, Apr. 2021]
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/10/8/1599/htm

49. Thrombocytopenia following Pfizer and Moderna SARS-CoV-2 vaccination: [blood clots, American Journal of Hematology, Feb. 2021]
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajh.26132

50. Severe and refractory immune thrombocytopenia occurring after SARS-CoV-2 vaccination: [blood clots, Journal of Blood Medicine, Feb. 2021]
https://www.dovepress.com/severe-refractory-immune-thrombocytopenia-occurring-after-sars-cov-2-v-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-JBM

51. Purpuric rash and thrombocytopenia after mRNA-1273 (Modern) COVID-19 vaccine: [blood clots, Cureus, Mar. 2021]
https://www.cureus.com/articles/54984-purpuric-rash-and-thrombocytopenia-after-the-mrna-1273-moderna-covid-19-vaccine

52. COVID-19 vaccination: information on the occurrence of arterial and venous thrombosis using data from VigiBase: [stroke, European Respiratory Journal, July 2021]
https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/58/1/2100956

53. Cerebral venous thrombosis associated with the covid-19 vaccine in Germany: [stroke, Annals of Neurology, July 2021]
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ana.26172

54. Cerebral venous thrombosis following BNT162b2 mRNA vaccination of BNT162b2 against SARS-CoV-2: a black swan event: [stroke, American Journal of Hematology, June 2021]
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajh.26272

55. The importance of recognizing cerebral venous thrombosis following anti-COVID-19 vaccination: [stroke, European Journal of Internal Medicine, May 2021]
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34001390/

56. Thrombosis with thrombocytopenia after messenger RNA vaccine -1273: [blood clots, Annals of Internal Medicine, Oct. 2021]
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/L21-0244

57. Blood clots and bleeding after BNT162b2 and ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccination: an analysis of European data: [blood clots, Journal of Autoimmunity, Aug. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896841121000937

58. First dose of ChAdOx1 and BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccines and thrombocytopenic, thromboembolic, and hemorrhagic events in Scotland: [blood clots, Nature Medicine, June 2021]
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01408-4

59. Exacerbation of immune thrombocytopenia after COVID-19 vaccination: [blood clots, British Journal of Haematology, June 2021]
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjh.17645

60. First report of a de novo iTTP episode associated with a COVID-19 mRNA-based anti-COVID-19 vaccine: [blood clots, Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis, June 2021]
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jth.15418

61. PF4 immunoassays in vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia: [blood clots, New England Journal of Medicine, July 2021]
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2106383

62. Antibody epitopes in vaccine-induced immune immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia: [blood clots, Nature, July 2021]
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03744-4

63. Myocarditis with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines: [heart inflammation, Circulation, July 2021]
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.121.056135

64. Myocarditis and pericarditis after COVID-19 vaccination: [heart inflammation, Journal of the American Medical Association, Aug. 2021]
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2782900

65. Myocarditis temporally associated with COVID-19 vaccination: [heart inflammation, Circulation, June 2021]
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.121.055891

66. COVID-19 Vaccination Associated with Myocarditis in Adolescents: [heart inflammation, Pediatrics, Nov. 2021]
https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/148/5/e2021053427/181357/COVID-19-Vaccination-Associated-Myocarditis-in

67. Acute myocarditis after administration of BNT162b2 vaccine against COVID-19: [heart inflammation, Revista Española de Cardiología, Spanish Society of Cardiology, Sept. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S188558572100133X

68. Temporal association between COVID-19 vaccine Ad26.COV2.S and acute myocarditis: case report and review of the literature: [heart inflammation, Cardiovascular Revascularization Medicine, Aug. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1553838921005789

69. COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis: a case report with review of the literature: [heart inflammation, Diabetes & Metabolic Syndrome: Clinical Research & Reviews, Sept.-Oct. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871402121002253

70. Potential association between COVID-19 vaccine and myocarditis: clinical and CMR findings: [heart inflammation, Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Imaging, Sept. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1936878X2100485X

71. Recurrence of acute myocarditis temporally associated with receipt of coronavirus mRNA disease vaccine 2019 (COVID-19) in a male adolescent: [heart inflammation, Journal of Pediatrics, Nov. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002234762100617X

72. Fulminant myocarditis and systemic hyper inflammation temporally associated with BNT162b2 COVID-19 mRNA vaccination in two patients: [heart inflammation, International Journal of Cardiology, Oct. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167527321012286

73. Acute myocarditis after administration of BNT162b2 vaccine: [heart inflammation, Infectious Disease Cases, 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214250921001530

74. Lymphohistocytic myocarditis after vaccination with COVID-19 Ad26.COV2.S viral vector: [heart inflammation, International Journal of Cardiology: Heart & Vasculature, Oct. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352906721001573

75. Myocarditis following vaccination with BNT162b2 in a healthy male: [heart inflammation, American Journal of Emergency Medicine, Dec. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735675721005362

76. Acute myocarditis after Comirnaty (Pfizer) vaccination in a healthy male with previous SARS-CoV-2 infection: [heart inflammation, Radiology Case Reports, Nov. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1930043321005549

77. Myopericarditis after Pfizer mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in adolescents: [heart inflammation, Journal of Pediatrics, Nov. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002234762100665X

78. Pericarditis after administration of BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 mRNA vaccine: [heart inflammation, Revista Española de Cardiología, Spanish Society of Cardiology, Dec. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1885585721002218

79. Acute myocarditis after vaccination with SARS-CoV-2 mRNA-1273 mRNA: [heart inflammation, Canadian Journal of Cardiology: Open, Nov. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589790X21001931

80. Temporal relationship between the second dose of BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 vaccine and cardiac involvement in a patient with previous SARS-COV-2 infection: [heart problems, International Journal of Cardiology: Heart & Vasculature, June 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352906721000622

81. Myopericarditis after vaccination with COVID-19 mRNA in adolescents 12 to 18 years of age: [heart inflammation, Journal of Pediatrics, Nov. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022347621007368

82. Acute myocarditis after SARS-CoV-2 vaccination in a 24-year-old man: [heart inflammation, Portuguese Journal of Cardiology, July 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0870255121003243

83. Important information on myopericarditis after vaccination with Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA in adolescents: [heart inflammation, Journal of Pediatrics, Nov. 2021]
https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(21)00749-6/fulltext

84. A series of patients with myocarditis after vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 with mRNA-1279 and BNT162b2: [heart inflammation, Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Imaging, Sept. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1936878X21004861

85. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy after vaccination with mRNA COVID-19: [heart problems, Heart, Lung and Circulation, Dec. 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1443950621011331

86. COVID-19 mRNA vaccination and myocarditis: [heart inflammation, European Journal of Case Reports in Internal Medicine, June 2021]
https://www.ejcrim.com/index.php/EJCRIM/article/view/2681/2723

87. COVID-19 vaccine and myocarditis: [heart inflammation, American Journal of Cardiology, July 2021]
https://www.ajconline.org/article/S0002-9149(21)00639-1/fulltext

88. Allergic reactions after COVID-19 vaccination: putting the risk in perspective: [allergic reactions, JAMA Network Open, Aug. 2021]
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2783633

89. Anaphylactic reactions to COVID-19 mRNA vaccines: a call for further studies: [allergic reactions, Vaccine, May 2021]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X21003777

90. Risk of severe allergic reactions to COVID-19 vaccines among patients with allergic skin disease: practical recommendations. An ETFAD position statement with external experts: [allergic reactions, Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, June 2021]
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jdv.17237

91. COVID-19 vaccine and death: causality algorithm according to the WHO eligibility diagnosis: [fatal blood clots, Diagnostics, May 2021]
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4418/11/6/955

92. Fatal brain hemorrhage after COVID-19 vaccine: [fatal brain bleed, Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association, April 2021]
https://tidsskriftet.no/en/2021/04/kort-kasuistikk/fatal-cerebral-haemorrhage-after-covid-19-vaccine

93. A case series of skin reactions to COVID-19 vaccine in the Department of Dermatology at Loma Linda University: [skin problems, Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology: Case Reports, Aug. 2021]
https://www.jaadcasereports.org/article/S2352-5126(21)00540-3/fulltext

94. Skin reactions reported after Moderna and Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccination: a study based on a registry of 414 cases: [skin problems, Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, Apr. 2021]
https://www.jaad.org/article/S0190-9622(21)00658-7/fulltext

95. Clinical and pathologic correlates of skin reactions to COVID-19 vaccine, including V-REPP: a registry-based study: [skin problems, Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, Sept. 2021]
https://www.jaad.org/article/S0190-9622(21)02442-7/fulltext

96. Skin reactions after vaccination against SARS-COV-2: a nationwide Spanish cross-sectional study of 405 cases: [skin problems, British Journal of Dermatology, July 2021]
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjd.20639

97. Varicella zoster virus and herpes simplex virus reactivation after vaccination with COVID-19: review of 40 cases in an international dermatologic registry: [herpes, Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, Sept. 2021]
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jdv.17646

98. Immune thrombosis and thrombocytopenia (VITT) associated with the COVID-19 vaccine: diagnostic and therapeutic recommendations for a new syndrome: [blood clots, European Journal of Haematology, May 2021]
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ejh.13665

99. Laboratory testing for suspicion of COVID-19 vaccine-induced thrombotic (immune) thrombocytopenia: [blood clots, International Journal of Laboratory Hematology, June 2021]
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijlh.13629

100. Intracerebral hemorrhage due to thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome after COVID-19 vaccination: the first fatal case in Korea: [brain bleed, Journal of Korean Medical Science, Aug. 2021]
https://jkms.org/DOIx.php?id=10.3346/jkms.2021.36.e223

January 24, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

What The Climate Scare And Pandemic Fearmongering Have In Common

Issues & Insights | January 7, 2022

Climate alarmists have said it’s necessary to ratchet up the fear about global warming to get the public’s attention. It’s the same story with the coronavirus outbreak. Authorities wanted to strike fear in the people, so they exaggerated the lethality of a virus deadly to only a narrow demographic segment.

Compare and contrast:

Global warming, 1988. “​​We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have,” about global warming, said Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider. (In the interest of full disclosure, the entire quotation ends with Schneider saying “each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” We’re leaving it up to readers to decide if he was advocating dishonesty to further the narrative or telling researchers and activists to cool it with the deceptive rhetoric. Either way, someone was pushing the agitprop.)

Pandemic, 2020. Britain’s ​​Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior warned “that ministers needed to increase ‘the perceived level of personal threat’ from Covid-19 because ‘a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened,’” the London Telegraph reported last year in its coverage of “A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponized fear during the Covid-19 pandemic,” by Laura Dodsworth.

Global warming, 2014. The academics who wrote a paper published in ​​the American Journal of Agricultural Economics said their article “provides a rationale for” the tendency of “news media and some pro-environmental organizations” to ​​accentuate or even exaggerate “the damage caused by climate change.”

“​​We find,” they wrote, “that the information manipulation has an instrumental value.”

Pandemic, 2020. The Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior recommends the perception of fear regarding the coronavirus needed to “be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.”

Global warming, circa 2001. University of Alabama in Huntsville climatologist John Christy, lead author on the 2001 United Nations’ climate report, had lunch with three European colleagues who talked about “how they were trying to make the report so dramatic that the United States would just have to sign that Kyoto Protocol.”

Pandemic, 2021. The New York Times’ “overblown” warnings “must be viewed in context of the Gray Lady’s wider lock-down-the-world agenda,” says the New York Post’s Steve Cuozzo. “The paper rarely reports unqualified hopeful news about taming the virus.”

Global Warming, 2004. NASA scientist James Hansen, who is the godfather of climate alarmists, wrote in Scientific American, that an “emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue.” In the next sentence, he added that, “now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate-forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic under current conditions.” So objective science was not good enough to advance the narrative, then it was?

Pandemic, 2021. “I did a simple Google search of ‘recent coronavirus news reports,’” says psychologist Ilisa Kaufman in Psychology Today. “The first random five headlines had the words, ‘death toll rising,’ ‘new infections,’ and ‘thousands of COVID cases, hundreds of deaths.’ Those were the first five. Also, it is May of 2021, a full 14 months since the beginning of the pandemic. Absolutely nothing reassuring, hopeful, or non-alarming.” She goes on to suggest “some ways to help correct or prevent mental health consequences from the ‘fear porn’ industry.”

We’re not fully convinced the lockdowns were conspiratorial dry runs to accustom the world to future restrictions handed down under the guise of “fighting” global warming. But as we said when the lockdowns were still relatively new, “observant and cunning politicians have gone to school” and were thinking over the possibility they could “use the pretext of a climate emergency to control Americans and break the back of capitalism.”

The ingredients are all present. A teen activist whose name isn’t Greta Thunberg has put down on paper what many are thinking when she wrote “if we can shut the world down to stop a virus, that also means it is possible to do the same for climate change.” It’s the sort of superficial statement that earns her points from a puerile media, ever-mugging politicians, and the adults among us who haven’t outgrown their insecure high school aspirations to be popular. And an idea many will run with.

The chilling fact there is much to be afraid of – not of a falling sky or a virus that we hope is on the wane, but of those eager to stir up dread and anxiety so they exercise the raw power they covet.

January 24, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Maori Science Beats Woke Myths

By Jennifer Marohasay | January 21, 2022 

Every community has those who are designated wise — sometimes able to anticipate imminent catastrophe.  For example, back in the 1500s, some in rural England and France would suspend dead birds — specifically kingfishers — from silken threads that purportedly acted as natural weathercocks. It was thought that the dead kingfisher was able to anticipate approaching storms and turn its breast into the wind. This is an unfortunate example, though, because Thomas Browne showed it to be nonsense. He suspended two dead kingfishers, side by side, and they pointed in different directions, thus demolishing the myth. I can’t imagine that all the wise ones took their dead birds down immediately, but Browne’s book Pseudodoxia Epidemica of 1646 championed a new kind of evidence-based science that relied on simple experiment.

For a period of some few hundred years, science came to replace superstition and key zoological texts including, for example, Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, were penned by the curious who tried hard to sort fact from fiction through observation. Browne and Darwin’s works followed Nicolaus Copernicus’ book On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, published in 1543, that explained humankind was not at the centre of the universe.

Before evidence-based science, natural historians and even astronomers, relied on the work of Aristotle who thought mankind was at the centre of the universe. In the twelfth century, Aristotle was a major source of information for the medieval encyclopaedias of animals, known as Bestiaries, with moral biblical lessons added.

We have somehow returned to this practice where natural history is once again interwoven with moralising. Worse, many of those designated as wise are full of hubris and carry on as though humankind can affect the weather and climate. This extends to projects at universities, where, even in zoology departments the ‘research’ must lament the trace gas carbon dioxide and its perceived impact on the distribution and abundance of species.

Even in The Spectator Australia, James Allan in ‘Decline and Fall of New Zealand’ (11 December) remonstrates about how woke our universities have become but then lauds the superiority of Western science relative to Maori mythology. But is woke science superior to Maori myths? Arguably the most significant climate event since satellites began measuring global temperatures in 1979, was the very strong El Niño of 2015/16. It caused global temperatures to spike in February 2016, corals to bleach, and so on. This hottest period – according to the UAH satellite record – was forecast some years earlier by long range weather forecaster Ken Ring relying on Maori mythology. It was not forecast by Western meteorological bureaus that run simulation models on super computers.

In 1974, Ring, then a high school mathematics teacher ‘dropped out’ to home school his children. He moved his family to the remote East Coast of the North Island of New Zealand and over a period of six years befriended local Maori fishermen. He returned to ‘civilization’ six years later with what he has described as ‘the rudiments of a weather prediction system’ based on traditional Maori knowledge. Sometime later he began publishing weather almanacs for Australia, New Zealand and Ireland with rain, frost and snow maps including fishing calendars and gardening guides.

I’ve no doubt that the forecasts in those almanacs could be vastly improved, including through the mining of historical weather data using artificial neural networks, a form of machine learning that uses artificial intelligence. John Abbot and I showed its application to monthly rainfall forecasting in a series of research papers published from 2012 to 2017, including in the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Advances in Atmospheric Sciences (Abbot J. & Marohasy J., 2012. Vol. 29, No. 4, Pgs. 717-730).

What has made Ken Ring’s long-range forecasts often more accurate than those from our bureaus of meteorology is their reliance on lunar cycles, uncorrupted by simulation modelling that misguidedly insists atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are relevant to weather and climate forecasting.

It is possible to forecast El Niño and other key weather events years in advance because the passage of the Moon overhead is regular and cyclical. A 2019 technical paper by Jialin Lin and Taotao Qian entitled ‘Switch Between El Niño and La Niña is Caused by Subsurface Ocean Waves Likely Driven by Lunar Tidal Forcing’ explains the underlying physical mechanisms in terms of Newtonian physics.

In fact, observations of the Moon’s changing trajectory were a main test of the theories detailed in Isaac Newton’s The Principia,  published in 1687 and recognised as a highlight of the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century.

If we open our eyes to the evidence – as Thomas Browne implored a few hundred years ago – we would notice that the very hot year globally of 2016 immediately followed a year of minimum lunar declination, as did the super El Niño exactly 18 years earlier, in 1998, that also caused mass coral bleaching. It is now well understood, beyond Maori mythology, that there is an 18.6-year lunar declination cycle.  But this is wilfully ignored by mainstream meteorologists lest such extra-terrestrial influences on weather and climate detract from the moralising about humankind’s influence.

More than ever, Westerners who claim to respect science —could benefit from a return to simple observation as practiced by Maori fishermen who see the weather patterns created by the passage of the Moon and its changing declination. Browne’s contemporary, John Ray wrote, ‘Let us not suffice to be book-learned, to read what others have written and to take on trust more falsehood than truth, but let us ourselves examine things as we have the opportunity, and converse with Nature as well as with books …’

In meteorological bureaus, simulation modelling has replaced observation and Heads of state are urged to sign international treaties absurdly pledging to stop climate change. The true nature of this woke western climate forecasting would be better appreciated if it was evaluated against other methods.  Forecasts from different systems could be placed next to each other, in much the same way that Thomas Browne strung up dead kingfishers – side by side.

This article was first published in The Spectator Australia magazine.

Since the article was published, I’ve received a note from Ken Ring with the following comment:

I’ve since learned that the Tuhoe fishermen of the East Coast were descended from Celtic peoples. They weren’t Maori at all, but originally pale skinned and red hair. There’s a whole political argument going on re-Treaty funds. Money seems to guide and hide our true prehistory …

Truth is, the Maori Fishing Calendar (which I published each year in the 2000s) was exactly the same as the Canadian Rockies Hunting Calendar, and Hindu writings, and harkened back to a time when the lunar laws were universal knowledge …

There are remnants of stone circles in New Zealand, but they are almost certainly pre- Maori.

I agree with the school of thought that says Aborigines were in New Zealand 40,000 years ago, based on rock drawings, and were only one of 100 or so cultures living peacefully side by side. At our closest point, we are only 900 nautical miles from Australia, and it is daft to think that for 60,000 years we were unknown to them. The ancient Chinese, too, settled on the east coast of Australia, and established a greenstone industry in New Zealand, but all this is completely shunned by historians. It means that indeed there may have been towns of 1000 people in Australia, but they were probably Asian, not Aboriginal.

You may be interested in this documentary, Skeletons in the Cupboard part 1  and  Skeletons in our Cupboard part 2

I would like to thank Barry Goldman for the link to the article by Ben Finney et al. entitled ‘Wait for the West Wind’ that explains something of the complexity of navigating the South Pacific and the importance of understanding wind direction and its seasonality.  It concludes with comment that:

Without the ability to sail over long distances, to find islands strewn over many thousands of miles of open sea, and to carry enough people, tools, plants and animals to found viable colonies on the islands discovered, there would have been no Polynesian culture, no vast triangular section of ocean occupied by closely related neolithic peoples. That the large, stable, and seaworthy double-canoe was the critical artefact of this cultural development and expansion is generally accepted, just as the ability to make one’s way across the ocean and find distant islands by reading the stars, the winds, the swells, the flight of birds, and other clues provided by nature is often cited as the skill most crucial to this process. To the double-canoes, and ways of navigating them without instruments, we would add a third main element of this oceanic adaptation that made the colonisation of so many far-flung islands possible: knowledge of the winds of the sea and the skill to exploit spells of westerly winds to sail far to the east.

While the more intermittent character of the westerlies in the tropical south-eastern Pacific may have slowed the momentum of eastward expansion across the Pacific, the ethnographic and experimental evidence suggests that early Polynesian voyagers were able to adapt to this wind regime and to use periodic episodes of westerly winds to find and settle all the oceanic islands to the east of their mid-Pacific homeland. The evidence further suggests that they would have been able to make the multiple landfalls throughout central East Polynesia, and that, once settled on the various islands and archipelagos, they and their descendants would have been capable of exploiting the alternating rhythm of monsoonal and subtropical westerlies with easterly trade winds to maintain some communication ties within the central East Polynesia region, and also to some extent between East and West Polynesia. The actual history of East Polynesia colonisation may, therefore, turn out to be much more complex than suggested by broad arrows commonly drawn on maps to indicate migration paths.

Instead of searching for a single island or archipelago as the sole site of first settlement in East Polynesia, and of assuming one-way population dispersal from there to all the other eastern archipelagos, perhaps we should think of early East Polynesian colonisation in terms of a large multi-archipelago, intercommunicating region with some two-way links back and forth between there and West Polynesia. Although the camp-sites and settlements made by the first people to reach the islands of East Polynesia may be sparse and difficult to find, and evidence of interisland communication even harder to discern, the archaeologists should keep looking for evidence of early colonies and their interrelations throughout the islands and archipelagos lying to the east of the Polynesian homeland.

The feature image was taken at dawn at Lake Wanaka under the Milky Way and a rising Full Moon.

January 24, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

The Political Economy of Autism

By Toby Rogers | September 14, 2021

Autism is an epidemic and a pandemic by any reasonable definition of those words. J.B. Handley in, How to End the Autism Epidemic, produced the best chart showing the growth in autism prevalence in the U.S. over the last 50 years:

Increase in Autism Prevalence in the U.S. 1970 to 2017

Source: Handley (2018).

Darold Treffert at Winnebago State Hospital in Wisconsin was one of the first people to attempt to measure autism in the general population. His study, published in Archives of General Psychiatry in 1970, showed an autism rate of less than 1 in 10,000 children.

Then, sometime around 1987, the autism rate in the United States began to skyrocket. By 2017, the autism rate in the U.S. was 1 in 36 kids (Zablotsky et al., 2017). So the U.S. has experienced a 277-fold increase in autism prevalence in the last 50 years.

In some places and populations the rates are even higher: in Tom’s River, NJ, the state’s largest suburban school district, 1 in 14 eight-year-olds is on the autism spectrum; in Newark, NJ, 1 in 10 Black boys is on the spectrum (forthcoming).

The United States is in the midst of a genocide.

Genetic theories of autism never made much sense because “there is no such thing as a genetic epidemic” — the human genome just does not change that fast. An early twin study by Susan Folstein and Michael Rutter at the Institute of Psychiatry in London in 1977 suggested a strong genetic component to autism. More recent scholarship shows that this was likely overstated; the study only had 21 twin pairs and did not effectively control for environmental factors (twins usually grow up in the same family and are thus likely exposed to the same toxicants).

As the autism rate exploded throughout the U.S., the state of California hired eleven of the best geneticists in the country to examine the role of genes in autism. They concluded that genetics explains at most 38% of autism cases and in two places they explained that this was likely an overestimate (Hallmayer et al., 2011). Whatever is driving the surge in autism prevalence, it is not primarily genetics.

Well perhaps the increase in autism prevalence is just the result of better awareness (and what’s called “diagnostic expansion and substitution”)? That theory of the case does not check out either. The state of California funded two multimillion dollar studies to examine sharply rising prevalence in the state and whether it was the result of social factors. The first study was led by pediatric epidemiologist Robert S. Byrd at UC Davis who directed a team of investigators at UC Davis and UCLA. The investigators concluded that, “The observed increase in autism cases cannot be explained by a loosening in the criteria used to make the diagnosis” and “children served by the State’s Regional Centers are largely native born and there has been no major migration of children into California that would explain the increase in autism” (Byrd et al., 2002).

The state of California revisited this question in 2009 with a study led by the top environmental epidemiologist in the state — Irva Hertz-Picciotto at the UC Davis Mind Institute. This study concluded that changes in diagnostic criteria, the inclusion of milder cases, and earlier age at diagnosis explain about a quarter to a third of the total increase in autism (Hertz-Picciotto & Delwiche, 2009). In a subsequent interview with Scientific American, Hertz-Picciotto explained that these three factors “don’t get us close” to explaining the sharp rise in autism over that time period and she urged the scientific community to take a closer look at environmental factors (Cone, 2009).

There are now seven good ‘societal cost of autism’ studies (Jarbrink and Knapp, 2001; Ganz, 2007; Knapp et al., 2009; Buescher et al., 2014; Leigh & Du, 2015; Cakir et al., 2020; Blaxill, Rogers, & Nevison, 2021). They all show that the U.S. and much of the developed world is heading for economic and social collapse as a result of surging autism costs.

Autism increases poverty and inequality. Lifetime care costs for autism range from $1.4 to $2.4 million. Mothers of kids with autism earn 35% less than mothers of kids with other health limitations and 56% less than mothers of kids with no health limitations (Buescher et al., 2014).

In 2015, autism cost the U.S. an estimated $268 billion a year in direct costs & lost productivity; given current rates of increase, autism costs will reach $1 trillion a year (3.6% of GDP) by 2025 (Leigh & Du, 2015). As a point of comparison, the U.S. Defense Department budget is “just” 3.1% of GDP.

All of the more recent studies show autism costs surpassing $1 trillion a year in the near future. There is no plan by any level of government to raise revenue to meet these costs or prevent autism to mitigate these costs. Elected officials are frozen like a deer in the headlights.

In the last decade, three groups of top epidemiologists have published consensus statements declaring that neurodevelopmental disabilities including autism are caused by toxicants in the environment (The Collaborative on Health and the Environment, 2008; Mount Sinai Hospital, 2010; Project TENDR, 2016).

This is good news because it means that autism is likely preventable. The bad news is that the leading mainstream toxicologists do not want to lose their jobs so they generally avoid mentioning pharmaceutical products (even though these products appear to have an outsized impact). Parents groups have made up for the cowardice of mainstream toxicology by funding their own research.

We have fairly good data that five classes of toxicants increase autism risk:

  1. Mercury from coal fired power plants and diesel trucks;
  2. Plastics;
  3. Pesticides & herbicides;
  4. EMF/RFR; and
  5. Pharmaceuticals (Tylenol, SSRIs, & vaccines).

Taking each toxicant in turn…

For every 1,000 pounds of environmentally released mercury, there was a 61% increase in the rate of autism (Palmer, 2006). For every 10 miles closer a family lives to a coal fired power plant the autism risk increases by 1.4% (Palmer, 2009).

Plastics: Children with autism had significantly increased levels of 3 endocrine disruptors (two phthalates — MEHP & DEHP, & BPA) in blood samples as compared with healthy controls (Kardas, 2016).

Pesticides & herbicides: Increased use of RoundUp is strongly correlated (r = 0.989) with the rising prevalence of autism (Swanson, 2014). Organophosphates increase autism risk 60 – 100%; chlorpyrifos increase risk 78% – 163%; pyrethroids increase risk 78% (Shelton et al., 2014).

9 studies show an association between acetaminophen (Tylenol) use & adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes (Bauer et al., 2018). Avella-Garcia (2016) & Liew et al. (2016) found that males exposed to Tylenol in utero have significantly elevated risk of autism.

8 studies show a statistically significant association between selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) use in pregnant women and subsequent autism in their children (see meta-analysis in Kaplan et al., 2016). Doctors who prescribe SSRIs to pregnant women are committing malpractice.

Unfortunately, in the debate over toxicants that increase autism risk, all roads lead back to vaccines. At least 5 studies show a statistically significant association between vaccines & autism (Gallagher & Goodman, 2008 & 2010; Thomas & Margulis, 2016; Mawson et al., 2017a & 2017b).

Dr. Paul Thomas is the most successful doctor in the world at preventing autism. Data from his practice show:

If zero vaccines, autism rate = 1 in 715;

If alternative vaccine schedule, autism rate = 1 in 440;

If CDC vaccine schedule, autism rate = 1 in 36.

That study had large sample size (3,344 children), access to medical files, and good researchers working on it. But look closely. His alternative vaccine schedule reduces autism risk by more than 1200%. However even an alternative vaccine schedule increases autism risk by 160% versus no vaccines at all.

And all of those other toxicants that I described above that have been shown to increase autism risk? Those are the 1 in the 715 cases when the parent does not vaccinate at all. Autism appears mostly be a story of iatrogenic injury from vaccines.

This is not a surprise. Thousands of parents have been telling us for years that their children regressed into autism following vaccinations. Ethylmercury is a known neurotoxin and is still in 7 different vaccines (Thomas & Margulis, 2016, p. 14).

Aluminum is a known neurotoxin (Grandjean & Landrigan, 2014) and is used in a majority of vaccines. “The dose makes the poison” paradigm has collapsed in recent years and now we know that many toxicants have no safe dose.

In a sane world, all of this would be seen as good news. In a sane world the CDC, EPA, NIH and every major newspaper would rush out to Portland, Oregon to examine whether the data from Dr. Paul’s practice (and other studies) are correct. But we live in an insane world…

To date, the CDC, EPA, NIH, the federal government, and all state governments have ignored Dr. Paul’s work. None of the top 10 major newspapers in the U.S. have reviewed his book, The Vaccine Friendly, plan even though it is a bestseller on Amazon. In fact the Oregon Medical Board was so incensed by Dr. Paul’s success in preventing autism that they pulled his medical license briefly in 2021 (he has since been reinstated).

All of this information is public and available to anyone with an internet connection and a library card. By 1999 it was clear that vaccines that contained mercury were a problem (see Kirby, 2005). By the early 2000s it was clear that the problems with vaccines went well beyond mercury. Government had a choice to make: come clean or double down. And starting with senior scientist Thomas Verstraeten and then William Thompson the CDC decided to just flat out lie, manipulate findings, and destroy data.

The pharmaceutical industry also had a choice to make: improve their products or utilize their extensive capture of media and government to protect their existing toxic products. As everyone now knows, they chose to protect their existing toxic products. But the pharmaceutical industry has an enormous problem on their hands. We know some vaccines (hepatitis B, HPV, flu, DTaP…) cause catastrophic harms. And pockets of unvaccinated people across the country — who are healthier than vaccinated children — are the control group that provides evidence of Pharma’s crimes.

So starting in 2015, with the introduction of SB277 in California, the pharmaceutical industry began a systematic effort to eliminate the unvaccinated control group in all 50 states. They start by removing religious or personal belief exemptions to vaccination. In subsequent years they introduce bills to eliminate all medical exemptions to vaccination (SB 277 in CA in 2019) to get to 100% vaccination rates (even though all scientists will tell you that there are some children who should not be vaccinated because of underlying health conditions). In the Pharma legislative blitzkrieg no one is spared so that there will be no evidence left of the harms from these products. If 100% of children are treated, then there is no background rate of illness and all vaccine injuries just appear “normal”.

These mandatory vaccine bills are racketeering and crimes against humanity. With the introduction of coronavirus vaccines in late 2020, the situation has gotten much worse. Pharma now aims to vaccinate 100% of adults as well as 100% of kids and the results thus far have been catastrophic.

So here’s where things stand. The vaccine paradigm has collapsed (and no, mRNA, DNA, and adenovirus vector vaccines are not going to save it). Pharma has piles of cash and extensive capture of the media, academia, and government. So they have the ability to do just about whatever they want. Fearing prosecution and seeking immense profits, Pharma has abandoned any pretense of science, consent, or health and pushed all in to set up a totalitarian state that will serve their interests.

But Pharma has harmed so many people — first with the childhood schedule and now with coronavirus vaccines — that there are now millions of people who have seen vaccine injury first-hand and are now fighting back with everything they’ve got. Variously referred to as the medical freedom movement, the health choice movement, and/or the personal sovereignty movement, these brave citizens are taking on the most powerful industry in the world and fighting to save our country from Pharma fascism. The fighting is so fierce because the stakes are enormous. We are fighting to preserve human life as we know it from the most predatory and corrupt industry in the world.

To learn more about the toxicants associated with autism, read The Political Economy of Autism. To learn more about the battle to save our country and the world from Pharma totalitarianism, please subscribe to my Substack.

January 24, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Guardian: ANTI-VAXXERS ARE JOINING RACIST MILITIAS

OffGuardian | January 23, 2022

This Week in the New Normal is our weekly chart of the progress of autocracy, authoritarianism and economic restructuring around the world.

1. “ANTI-VAXXERS ARE JOINING RACIST MILITIAS”

We’ve covered the increasing demonisation of the “anti-vaxxers” regularly for over a year now. Ever since Joe Biden announced his new “domestic terrorism bill”, it was obvious that “Anti-vaxxers” were going to be re-branded as some kind of violent threat to democracy (and they were).

Now it’s happening in the UK too, with a story being published warning that “anti-vaxxers” are becoming more militant and there are fears they will “evolve towards US-style militias”, according to the Guardian.

The article references nameless “counter terrorism” officials and anonymous “Whitehall sources”, who warn that…

Latest intelligence assessments describe the anti-vaxxer movement as ostensibly a conveyor belt, delivering fresh recruits to extremist groups, including racially and ethnically motivated violent extremist organisations.

So there you have it, being anti-Covid “vaccines” is a gateway protest. Before you know it you’ll be shaving your head and sieg hieling all over the place.

Absolutely pathetic propaganda, and hopefully not an early warning sign of legislation to come.

2. “WHAT IF DEMOCRACY AND CLIMATE MITIGATION ARE INCOMPATIBLE?”

OK, this is from two weeks ago, but it’s too important to skip. The title says it all, Foreign Policy is genuinely wondering if climate change is too much of a threat to let democracy stand in the way of fighting it.

It’s a long read, soaked to the bone in double-talk and built on some very shaky assumptions, but there’s some good material on there…

Democracy works by compromise, but climate change is precisely the type of problem that seems not to allow for it. As the clock on those climate timelines continues to tick, this structural mismatch is becoming increasingly exposed. And as a result, those concerned by climate change—some already with political power, others grasping for it—are now searching for, and finding, new ways of closing the gap between politics and science, by any means necessary.

It warns in the opening section, before concluding…

… democracy, in its current form, is not necessarily the path to a solution. It might, instead, be part of the problem.

It’s not hard to see where this is going. We warned, several times, that we would be moving on from Covid to climate, and that “climate lockdowns” were a very real possibility. This kind of talk is setting the groundwork for that movement.

3. ‘MORE PEOPLE IS THE LAST THING THIS PLANET NEEDS’

Another from the Guardian, this time interviewing all the hip and happening young men who are “getting vasectomies to save the world”

It’s about the climate. Again.

Apparently, there are already too many people (that’s not true, but whatever), and so young men are getting the snip. Bravely preventing placing the burden of climate catastrophe onto the next generation… by making sure there isn’t one.

One of the (anonymous, and therefore potentially made-up) interviewees went right out cut his balls off the week Donald Trump was elected. That’ll show ’em.

But wait… It’s not just about climate, it’s also about feminism.

Specifically, it’s about correcting the “gender imbalance” traditionally associated with birth control:

Vasectomies address the gender imbalance that still accompanies the choice and practice of birth control. They come with less risk than more invasive and less reliable methods of female contraception, including sterilisation and the coil.

They are genuinely arguing that making yourself sterile forever is less risky and less invasive than having a completely 100% reversible IUD inserted.

Then they start bemoaning that vasectomies can be “hard to come by, especially for younger, childless men“. NHS GPs are apparently reticent to simply sterilise perfectly healthy young men for no good reason:

While there are no laws on the age at which men in the UK can get a vasectomy, the NHS advises that they may be more likely to be accepted if they are older than 30 and have children. “Your GP can refuse to carry out the procedure … if they don’t believe it’s in your best interests,”

Not only that, but the NHS has cut funding to for vasectomies, and perhaps as a result of this, vasectomy numbers are down nationwide. The Guardian want us to think this is a bad thing, but considering the UK’s birth rate has been falling for decades, it might not be.

Nevertheless, there is hope that “world vasectomy day”, and its links to the fight against climate change, will help “burnish” the vasectomy’s progressive image.

The story ends with inspiring words from one of the voluntarily snipped…

“A lot of people are happy to point and say: ‘That’s wrong,’ or film it on their phone… I look at the world and say: ‘That’s not right; I’m going to try to do something about it.’”

A wonderful attitude. I hope he can pass that wisdom on to his children and his children’s children.

… oh, wait.

BONUS: (NEW) HELLHOLE OF THE WEEK

Not Australia this time, well done guys.

This time it’s New Zealand, where Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has just put in place strict new rules to “combat” the spread of Omicron.

Starting today, the whole of the country will move into the red on New Zealand’s “traffic light” system, meaning mandatory masks, lockdowns for the unvaccinated and an increased self-isolation period of 24 days.

How many cases prompted this decision? Nine.

Nine Covid cases in Motueka are confirmed to have the Omicron variant, prompting the decision, Ardern said.

Australia has been pretty aggressive in the game of “anything you can do, I can do worse” they have going with both New Zealand and Canada, so expect a move from them sometime this week.

IT’S NOT ALL BAD…

Yesterday marked 2022’s first “Worldwide Freedom Rally”, with marches taking place all over the world, from London to Bern, to Vancouver to Warsaw to Liverpool to Genoa.

Bilbao, Graz, Brisbane. The list goes on and on and on.

Huge crowds turned out in Toronto… Stockholm… and Sydney.

In London NHS staff threw down their uniforms in front of Downing Street.

These are the people who they want to classify as domestic terrorists and militias.

Also, someone also sent us this sign, which is our new favourite:

All told a pretty hectic week for the new normal crowd, and we didn’t even mention that the world’s ten richest men have doubled their fortunes during the pandemic or the Fed’s report on a digital dollar.

January 23, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Environmentalism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

News the BBC couldn’t ignore as top doctors demand jab mandates are ditched

By Will Jones | TCW Defending Freedom | January 23, 2022

THE NHS vaccine mandate should be cancelled to prevent staff shortages, the Royal College of GPs has said, as thousands took to the streets across England to protest against the policy. The BBC reported:

‘NHS workers who oppose the Government’s mandatory vaccination policy have staged a protest in central London.

‘Demonstrations were also held in other cities across England including Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds.

‘Martin Marshall, Chairman of the Royal College of GPs, said compulsory vaccination for health professionals in England was “not the right way forward”.

He said the vast majority of staff were vaccinated but some 70,000 to 80,000 were not and they accounted for 10 per cent of staff at some hospital or GP surgeries.

If unvaccinated staff were taken out of frontline roles by April 1st there would be “massive consequences” for the NHS, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

‘He said a delay would allow time for booster jabs and a “sensible conversation” about whether vaccines should be mandatory at all.

‘Danny Mortimer, deputy chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said some frontline staff would have to leave their roles if they choose not to be vaccinated.

‘He said: “This will reduce frontline NHS staff numbers even further and lead to more gaps in capacity at a time of intense pressure and patient demand.”

‘In London, demonstrators marched from Regents Park to the BBC headquarters in Portland Place in a peaceful protest against mandating vaccines for health workers.’

Update:

The Telegraph and Daily Mail report that mandatory vaccines for NHS staff could now be pushed back by six months, following these nationwide protests over the requirement and amid demands by Tory backbenchers to drop the rule entirely.

January 23, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Solidarity and Activism | , | Leave a comment

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