Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla sees the dangers ahead, as his very carefully worded interview (worthy of close review) with CNBC yesterday shows.
Remember NINJA loans?
NINJA stood for “No income, no job/assets.” Back in the mid-aughts, when the banks and not the regulators were the ones going crazy and setting the financial system on fire with free money, they were all the rage.
I remember hearing ads for them in 2006 and 2007 and thinking, this has to be a bait and switch. You cannot walk into Your Friendly MegaBank and walk out with a few hundred grand for a house with no proof you even have a job! A job seems pretty basic.
But you could. And people did. Lots of people.
Underlying this madness was a model, naturally. American housing prices had never collapsed nationally and simultaneously since at least the Depression. Therefore the models that the banks and mortgage originators used said they never would.
Therefore on a national basis the collateral – the houses – underlying the mortgages would always be fine, even if the borrowers couldn’t repay them. The lenders just needed to be in different markets to be geographically protected. Besides, the bankers were all reselling the loans and offloading the risk. They got paid up front, whether the loans were paid back or not.
It was a very good business.
Until it went bad.
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
—
You remember 2008. You were there.
In a matter of months, the big banks became the most hated institutions in the United States. The desperation to blame them ran so deep that we all seemed to agree collectively that the borrowers were the victims. The people who had taken the money had no responsibility for signing those loans, much less repaying them.
Obviously, that formulation was simplistic. Many of the NINJA and similar borrowers no doubt understood the game they were playing. They were hoping to buy and flip houses they couldn’t afford.
No matter. They had lost. Anyway, we couldn’t make villains out of millions of ordinary people. So we understandably focused our anger on the Wall Street tycoons who had crashed our financial system and made hundreds of billions of dollars.
Fast-forward to 2022.
This time around the myth of the truly innocent victim is not a myth.
The hundreds of millions of people who have received shots of mRNA/LNP and DNA/AAV Covid vaccines had no real idea what they were taking.
They did so on the urging of the vaccine companies and health authorities, who told them that in doing so they would protect themselves and their families and end the Covid epidemic. The statements were public. Many are less than a year old. They cannot be suppressed or memory-holed, no matter how hard anyone wants to try.
Every single one of those statements has proven wrong – so wrong that the companies, which are at much greater legal risk than the public health authorities – no longer even try to defend them.
Here’s what Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chief executive officer, said on Monday in an interview on CNBC:
The hope is that we will achieve something that will have way, way better protection, particularly against infections because the protection against the hospitalizations and the severe disease, it is, it is reasonable right now, with the current vaccines as long as you are having let’s say the third dose.
Read those words very carefully.
Protection against “severe disease” is “reasonable right now” for people who have taken a “third dose” of Pfizer’s vaccine.
Put aside the fact that even those words are at best an optimistic interpretation of current data.
Put aside the fact that Pfizer has NEVER compared a three-dose vaccine regimen to a placebo in a clinical trial.
Put aside the fact that “reasonable right now” suggests that any effect of a third dose will not last.
What the chief executive of Pfizer is telling you is THAT IF YOU RECEIVED TWO DOSES OF HIS COMPANY’S VACCINE LAST YEAR, YOUR PROTECTION IS GONE.
Even against “the hospitalizations and the severe disease.”
You need to be “having let’s say the third dose” for protection against those.
I didn’t say it.
Pfizer’s CEO did. (And I can’t wait to see Twitter’s lawyers try to explain it when they defend my fifth strike. It goes WAY further than that tweet did.)
Ask yourself why Pfizer’s chief executive officer would be MORE negative about his company’s vaccine and future boosters than the public health authorities and the media bluechecks.
Here’s a hint: not because Pfizer has a history of honest and ethical behavior to uphold.
—
Most people don’t understand yet how badly they were conned.
But they will.
The raw numbers are stark – in Ontario, for example, 76 percent of hospitalized people and 56 percent of those in intensive care are now vaccinated. Both the raw numbers and the percentages have soared in the last two weeks.
The data out of Europe are similar. The only reason the American data look different is that we don’t get to see the raw numbers. Instead, health authorities provide meaningless adjusted rate ratios (adjusted for age of vaccinated people, but NOT for healthy vaccine user bias – the fact that frailest elderly people are often not vaccinated because they cannot be.) Further, American hospitals report people as unvaccinated when their vaccine status is “unknown,” further skewing the ratios.
But you can trust Albert Bourla: vaccine protection against severe outcomes drops over time – and drops much more quickly against the Omicron variant.
That’s one side of the coin.
The flip side is adverse events. We don’t know how bad those are after a third dose, much less a fourth or fifth or more. (How can we? Remember, the companies didn’t test three doses against placebo.)
But the third-shot myocarditis data looks bad. It suggests a dose-dependent response. And the rise in all-cause deaths across Europe in the last few months cannot be ignored, even if the health authorities are ignoring it.
I suspect the smartest people at the companies are increasingly aware of the potential crisis of repeated dosing. Which may be why Bourla also said in the CNBC interview, “I don’t know if there is a need for a fourth booster.”
What? In the same interview where Pfizer’s CEO warned people not to expect long-lasting protection from a third shot – “reasonable right now” – he also pivoted away from more boosters?
Instead Bourla talked up Paxlovid, his company’s new $530 per treatment antiviral. “This is where most of the effort of most of the governments is moving.”
Actually Paxlovid is basically unavailable right now; Pfizer has promised 120 million doses worldwide in 2022, but as of 10 days ago, only 180,000 were available.
So what’s Bourla’s game? Doesn’t he want to sell as many vaccines as he can?
Maybe not. Especially not with a drug that potentially can be huge ($530 x 120 million = $62 billion, give or take, and Pfizer won’t have to share it with BioNTech).
More important for Bourla, the real risk to Pfizer – and to him – comes from side effects. People will be angry when they figure out that they’ve been conned into taking vaccines that didn’t work. But most of them won’t be furious, especially since Omicron appears much milder than earlier variants. Zero efficacy probably won’t destroy Pfizer or get anyone indicted.
But side effects might. People will be FURIOUS if they think they have been conned into taking vaccines that didn’t work and potentially hurt them, or their parents, or their kids.
Right now the rate of reported serious vaccine injury is just low enough that the companies and vaccine fanatics can argue it’s not real, it’s a statistical artifact, the VAERS reports are fake (they’re not), etc. The third dose appears to be changing that equation somewhat.
Who knows what future doses will bring? Nobody, including Albert Bourla, though his scientists may have shot up enough mice and monkeys to give him a better idea than the rest of us.
Unlike BioNTech and Moderna, Pfizer isn’t stuck with mRNA. It is a $300 billion pharmaceutical company that is busily taking its vaccine loot to buy lots of research. Plus it now has Paxlovid.
(Big investors have figured all this out, by the way. The stocks of BioNTech and Moderna are down more than 50 percent since the peak of the vaccine frenzy in August, while Pfizer’s is up 20 percent and near an all-time high. Like Big Pharma, Wall Street is a lot of things, but it ain’t dumb.)
So the prudent move for Albert Bourla, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, PhD., is to begin to tamp expectations for vaccines, slow-walk more boosters, and hope that Omicron does his job for him. His biggest problem is probably that the public health authorities are a lot stupider than he is and continue to push boosters.
I’d love to know what Pfizer is telling them privately. I’m gonna guess it’s not in email, though.
January 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Paxlovid |
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The genome of Omicron has taken the community of public health scientists by surprise.
Not only are there a large number of mutations, but some of these mutations have not been observed in the many previous genome analyses, thousands of which are being conducted in labs around the world.
Among scientists, there are five competing explanations for this situation.
- Maybe the virus has been mutating toward Omicron for a long while, but it has happened “under the radar” in a region of the world where there are few scientific labs that might have reported its genome in intermediate states. In other words, it appeared someplace where genomic testing was unavailable and intermediate strains remained undetected.
- A single immune-compromised patient might have harbored the virus for an extended period of “long COVID,” during which the virus mutated while replicating within that individual.
- The virus might have jumped to a mouse host and spread from mouse to mouse, in an environment where different mutations would be favored. The heavily mutated virus must then have jumped back to humans.
- The virus leaked from, or was released from, a laboratory in Durban, South Africa, where experimenters were genetically manipulating the virus.
- Vaccinated populations have put intense selection pressure on the virus to evade the vaccine by mutating its spike protein, which is the only part of the virus to which vaccinated individuals have immunity.
As with everything COVID, we’ve seen significant censorship around the origins of Omicron, both in the mainstream press and the medical journals.
Three of the above theories were discussed out in the open. But No. 4 was relegated to the fringes because scientists are still gunshy about discussing engineered bioweapons, and No. 5 has similarly been sidelined because it is politically incorrect to say anything bad about vaccines.
The irony here is that evolution in vaccinated populations may have led to the emergence of a version of COVID that everyone can live with.
Let’s take a closer look at each theory.
Theory #1: Omicron was hiding out in darkest Africa
Christian Drosten, a virologist at Charité University Hospital in Berlin, proposed Omicron evolved its prodigious ability to spread rapidly while hiding out in regions of Botswana and Southwest Africa.
“I assume this evolved not in South Africa, where a lot of sequencing is going on, but somewhere else in southern Africa during the winter wave,” Drosten said.
This region of the world has few virology laboratories that would have reported intermediate versions of the virus.
In both Botswana and South Africa, just under half the population has been vaccinated, according to Reuters. This might explain the many mutations in the spike protein and Omicron’s ability to infect the vaccinated.
Theory #2: Omicron gestated in the slow cooker of a single patient with long COVID
According to a Dec. 1, 2021 article in Science, Omicron clearly did not develop out of one of the earlier variants of concern, such as Alpha or Delta.
Instead, it appears to have evolved “in parallel — and in the dark.”
Emma Hodcroft, a virologist at the University of Bern, told Science :
“Omicron is so different from the millions of SARS-CoV-2 genomes that have been shared publicly that pinpointing its closest relative is difficult. It likely diverged early from other strains. I would say it goes back to mid-2020.”
That raises the question of where Omicron’s predecessors lurked for more than a year.
Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh told Science he can’t see how the virus could have stayed hidden in a group of people for so long.
“I’m not sure there’s really anywhere in the world that is isolated enough for this sort of virus to transmit for that length of time without it emerging in various places,” Rambaut said.
Rambaut and others propose the virus most likely developed in a chronically infected COVID-19 patient, likely someone whose immune response was impaired by another illness or a drug.
According to Science, when Alpha was first discovered in late 2020, that variant also appeared to have acquired numerous mutations all at once, leading researchers to postulate a chronic infection.
That theory is bolstered by sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 samples from some chronically infected patients.
Theory #3: Omicron jumped to a mouse, then back to humans
This study from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, cites genetic evidence from the Omicron genome to support the thesis that the virus jumped to mice, then back to humans.
The frequency of different kinds of mutations (different amino acid substitutions) is different within the mouse physiology compared to the human physiology.
These authors determined the types of mutations found in Omicron are more characteristic of mouse than human physiology.
A creative idea! But perhaps that is its main weakness, because:
- There are a huge number of mutations of every kind when the virus replicates, either in a mouse or a human. The ones that stick are the ones that are adaptive, i.e., the ones that help the virus replicate or spread more effectively to another host. The Chinese study does not address this.
- A great many adaptations would be needed for a virus to effectively infect a mouse population. These would have to be established to accomplish the jump into the mouse population, then undone for the virus to jump back to humans. Still, there is some precedent in the known ability of SARS-CoV-2 to infect a herd of white-tailed deer.
- Both these objections could be obviated if the virus were deliberately passaged through humanized mice in a laboratory.
Theory #4: Omicron escaped from a gain-of-function laboratory
In April 2021, a laboratory in Durban, South Africa, published this paper, describing the genetic modification of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
In November 2021, the Omicron variant was first discovered in the area of Johannesburg / Pretoria, about 600 km away from Durban.
Were the two events related?
The 501Y mutation which is the subject of the Durban study is present in the Omicron variant, but many of the other mutations listed in the Durban manuscript are missing from the Omicron genome.
Many scientists are convinced, based on its genetic signature, that the original Alpha strain of COVID was engineered in a bioweapons laboratory.
Normally, the spike protein of a virus is just evolved to latch firmly onto a host cell. But in the case of the COVID virus, the spike protein does a lot of nasty things as well, including blood clots and damage to nerves and arteries.
The spike protein seems on its face to be designed for toxicity.
The early Nature Medicine article that tried to put the lab-origin theory to rest claimed only that the spike protein was not fully optimized to bind to human cells. That was the sole basis of the authors’ certainty that “SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
However, when Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails were FOIAed, we learned Fauci himself commissioned this article, whose authors included suspects for channeling bioweapons research to China through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of which Fauci is the director.
So now it appears the spike protein was designed as a compromise between optimal infectivity and optimal toxicity.
If Omicron was engineered for unsavory purposes, it seems to be serving more as an antidote rather than a weapon.
Omicron appears to spread so fast that it has rapidly displaced Delta in the population where it originated, yet it is causing remarkably mild illness and few if any deaths.
Theory #5: Omicron evolved to evade the vaccine
All four of the above theories have adherents and all four can be supported with logic. Any one of them may turn out to be correct.
But there is a simpler hypothesis, theory No. 5, which involves no extra assumptions, relying instead only on the principles of natural selection.
The main weakness of this hypothesis is that the number of mutations in Omicron, and the rate of evolution of those mutations, seem to be anomalously high — but perhaps that fact is being ignored because of publishing taboos.
Viruses eventually evolve toward higher transmission rates and lower fatality rates. The higher transmission rate is what allows the virus to out-compete other variants and spread through the population.
The lower fatality rate is less obvious — viruses can spread better if the host is feeling well and circulating in the population. If the host dies, the virus dies with it.
The Omicron variant seems to take an unusually large step in both directions. This is why most epidemiologists are looking for a specialized explanation for its origin.
A more mundane explanation points to the possibility that vaccinated populations put pressure on the virus to adapt. Communities with high vaccination rates have created an ideal environment for the coronavirus to mutate.
All parts of the virus are mutating all the time, but not all help the virus to be successful.
If the spike protein mutates, this can throw the vaccinated immune system off the scent because vaccination produces a highly focused immune response to the (Wuhan original) spike protein.
Dr. Geert vanden Bossche prominently predicted this would happen early in the distribution of the COVID vaccines.
The Omicron variant demonstrates that vanden Bossche got this exactly right. It includes 37 new mutations in the area of the spike protein, and Omicron has largely evaded the vaccines.
Vaccinated people are as likely or more likely to get Omicron compared to unvaccinated.
Vanden Bossche anticipated tragic consequences for all of humanity, but this does not seem to be what is happening. Rather, this cloud appears to have a silver lining.
As stated above, the spike protein is the toxic payload of the COVID virus, responsible for most of the damage the virus does to blood vessels and neurons. (It appears that the spike protein was engineered for this purpose in a gain-of-function experiment.)
As the spike protein has mutated, it has become less toxic. As a result, the Omicron variant is far milder than the original Wuhan COVID.
The Omicron mortality rate, according to UK figures, is only 1/10 as high as the Wuhan rate. (The UK has had 10,866 Omicron cases and 14 deaths for a mortality rate of 0.0013. For comparison, the two-year total of COVID deaths and cases in the UK was 148,000/11,800,000 = 0.013, almost exactly 10 times higher.)
Unknowns and what lies ahead?
We know historically that the natural immunity of a recovered patient provides the best immunity we know. People (mostly Chinese) who recovered from SARS 18 years ago seem to have full immunity to COVID, though the two viruses are substantially different.
This should mean that Omicron will sweep through the population, and many, many people will recover after a mild and abbreviated illness, with permanent immunity to all forms of COVID.
This would be the dawn of herd immunity and the end of COVID. The question is whether recovering from Omicron will provide full immunity to future variants.
We see that recovery from past variants does not provide sufficient immunity to protect against Omicron.
Is this because Omicron is an exception to the general rule about robust immunity in recovered patients?
Or is it an artifact of faulty testing, people who have been told they recovered from COVID when they really had the flu?
Or is it an artifact of vaccination after recovery, which seems to be counter-productive, narrowing some of nature’s robust, acquired immunity?
Meanwhile, press releases from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and mainstream reports are using Omicron as a booster for the fear-porn industry, citing exploding “case” statistics while ignoring the simultaneous drop in “death” statistics.
Pfizer is developing a new mRNA vaccine for Omicron, which it plans to release in March. Will the vaccine maker double down on its tragic mistake in basing the vaccine on the toxic spike protein?
Or will the new vaccine be derived from a less dangerous part of the virus?
We have reason to hope Omicron will spell the end of COVID, but only time will tell.
Josh Mitteldorf, Ph.D., has a background in theoretical physics. Since the 1990s, he is best known for his contributions to the biology of aging, including many articles and two books.
© 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.
BUY TODAY: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s New Book — ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’
January 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19 |
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THE headline, in lofty bold type across two full pages, screams: ‘6million follow anti-vaxxer lies’. The Mail on Sunday is firing a full salvo from the good ship Booster. On the same pages it ‘exposes’ some anti-vaxx military-style group ‘planning mayhem’ and hands the Health Secretary Sajid Javid a column to call out ‘dangerous nonsense’ from extreme anti-vaxxers.
It is a telling postscript to a week in which Boris Johnson seemed to have the needle stuck (no pun intended) on the word ‘booster’ and the newly-knighted Chris Whitty again over-stepped the mark from unelected adviser to public influencer.
The vaccine voices are getting louder and more strident: ‘misinformation’ has become ‘lies’ and persuasion is morphing dangerously close to intimidation. They’re turning up the heat on those who exercise their legal, moral and medical right not to be jabbed.
Why so vigorous an offensive? Could it be that the cracks are showing, that the queues for a third jab are dwindling, that millions are wondering why they are ill despite being vaccinated or that Covid numbers in intensive care are significantly lower than last year? Or is it that Omicron is turning out, for most people, to be not much worse than a cold, the virus behaving just as virologists said it would? Are we approaching the herd immunity Professor Whitty craved when Covid arrived, i.e. no more expensive jabs required?
In this same week GB News granted airtime to sceptical, knowledgeable experts who have been cancelled by Twitter and labelled ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘spreaders of false information’ on their Wikipedia pages, while an unvaccinated doctor challenged the science with Sajid Javid on Sky News. The consultant, Steve James, has of course been called ‘deluded’ in a Twitter barrage and put down by Javid in his Mail on Sunday column, but he’s a hero to the estimated 120,000 other NHS professionals who face dismissal for remaining vaccine-free.
And these anti-vaxx lies? It’s in desperation that such world-renowned scientists as Dr Robert Malone, the father of mRNA research; Dr Peter McCullough, a cardiologist who has 1,000 publications and 600 citations in the US National Library of Medicine, and Dr Mike Yeadon, a former top scientist at Pfizer, are smeared and cancelled. Whether they are right or wrong, such experience and expertise demands a hearing. These people – and many others like them – have serious misgivings based on their specific knowledge. And opinions don’t become lies just because they question the narrative. The Mail on Sunday’s quoted six million probably follow names such as these to get a balanced view because, in general, they are not getting it from mainstream media.
Which brings us to Sir Chris Whitty. Studious, strait-laced and straight-faced, he’s been the super-spreader of gloom with his charts and graphs. Now he’s adding judgment.
First came his December message, urging people to ‘prioritise social interactions that really matter to them’. Millions took his advice, devastating thousands of businesses and ruining many a family Christmas. And his words were counter to Boris Johnson’s, however they tried smoothing it over.
But if that was a toe in the political water, he dived right in at the latest Westminster briefing, pronouncing that ‘misinformation’ on the internet, ‘a lot of it deliberately placed’, about potential side-effects from jabs was fuelling fears about vaccine safety.
Fuelling fears? That’s rich, because that’s precisely what the Government has done from day one, with its behaviour specialists frightening and intimidating the population, ‘nudging’ us to comply over Covid, and the media acting as cheerleaders in spreading that fear. Messages have been ‘deliberately placed’ ad infinitum by the Government across TV, radio, newspapers and online, scaring us, cajoling us, appealing to community spirit and playing to guilt . . . ‘Don’t miss out’ or worse, ‘Don’t let your child miss out’. And all with taxpayers’ money.
It is astonishing that Professor Whitty, as a man of science, dismisses internet intelligence as ‘misinformation’. Does he include the aforementioned experts? How about the bona fide scientific investigations under way around the globe about Covid itself, the benefits or otherwise of restrictive measures including lockdowns and mask-wearing, the vaccine’s efficacy and, crucially, its side-effects (note: Pfizer’s clinical trials will not end until 2023, and for children 2025). Pfizer’s own early results are disturbing, as Professor Whitty and his Sage colleagues must know. Will all of this really be labelled misinformation?
Sorry, Professor, science is about questioning, reviewing, reworking, rethinking. It is not about silencing those who challenge, otherwise we would still believe the world is flat. We deserve to hear all sides of the story, particularly when our health and our children’s health is at stake. And particularly if there is even the tiniest shred of doubt about vaccine safety.
But then, maybe you have been ‘nudged’ yourself. It was disturbing to hear the Minister for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Nadine Dorries telling the Commons that the Government has a Disinformation and Misinformation Unit, working daily with online providers to remove ‘harmful’ misinformation, particularly on Covid. Very Orwellian.
The BBC and Sky News have similar units, but their output so far points to a supposed debunking of anything that challenges the official line.
Make no mistake, freedom of speech and open debate are under serious attack, a pincer movement with arbitrary censorship by Big Tech platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter on one flank and, I’m ashamed to say, most mainstream media outlets on the other.
We accept that in times of crisis government powers necessarily increase and frequently remain long after that crisis is over, but we are on a dangerous path of authoritarianism, of overt State intervention in too many aspects of everyday lives at a time when there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel. Is it any wonder that theories beyond public health are gaining ground?
If Britain was the cradle of democracy, we are now on the road to its grave. And headlines like the Mail on Sunday’s ‘lies’ are signposts along the way.
January 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, UK |
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This Banned.Video short with Harrison Smith of The American Journal playing a dual role points out the obvious about COVID tyranny and the absurd policies many governments around the world imposed after the virus’ emergence.
https://www.banned.video/watch?id=61d87b852158bd5f8de0b486
January 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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Sanatech’s CRISPR gene-edited tomato engineered to contain higher levels of a sedative substance, GABA, is being sold on the open market in Japan.
While GABA is reportedly viewed as a health-promoting substance in Japan, findings in studies are mixed and there are no studies at all showing that eating the gene-edited tomato has health benefits or is even safe.
In an article about the development, the journal Nature Biotechnology quotes Maarten Jongsma, a molecular cell biologist at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, who studies the effects of plant compounds on human nutrition, as saying “There’s no consensus” on the health benefits of consuming GABA.
Nor is there evidence that it can cross the blood-brain barrier and reach the central nervous system, adds Renger Witkamp, a nutrition scientist also at Wageningen.
Nature Biotechnology notes:
“Sanatech has been careful not to claim that its tomatoes therapeutically lower blood pressure and promote relaxation. Instead, the company implies it, by advertising that consuming GABA, generally, can achieve these effects and that its tomatoes contain high levels of GABA. This has raised some eyebrows in the research community, given the paucity of evidence supporting GABA as a health supplement.”
The article also reports on news regarding the purple tomato developed by Cathie Martin at the John Innes Centre in the UK using older-style transgenic GM (genetic modification).
Martin says she expects a regulatory decision from the U.S. Department of Agriculture by the end of February for her purple tomatoes. Martin’s targeting of the U.S. is no surprise, given the weak regulation of GM crops in that country.
Like Sanatech, Martin plans to initially market her GM tomatoes directly to the public. Nature Biotechnology reports that she has not conducted human intervention studies comparing the health effects of high-anthocyanin and conventional tomatoes and does not plan to make health benefit claims.
But this means little, as the John Innes Centre and the media have been hyping the supposedly cancer-fighting qualities of the tomatoes over several years, despite warnings from health organizations that these claims are not supported by evidence.
GMWatch notes that Martin’s tomatoes, like the high-GABA ones, have also not been safety tested in animals or humans.
January 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | GABA, GMOs, Japan, United States |
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Why are media dialling back on the Covid hysteria? Is it because the “pandemic” is really over? Or is it an important part of the gaslighting process?
The past few days, even weeks, have seen a definite alteration in the media’s attitude to the Covid “pandemic”.
There have been numerous examples of what, if the media were not so tightly controlled, might be referred to as “dissent”. But, since the media is tightly controlled, we must call it an apparent change in the message.
Famously, Dr Steve James, a consultant anaesthetist, confronted UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid over the weakness of the science supporting vaccine mandates. Note this was actually aired on Sky News.
A few days ago Dr Rochelle Walensky, the director of the CDC, went on Good Morning America to discuss the “Omicron” wave, and ended up pointing out that most “omicron deaths” have multiple co-morbidities.
In another interview, with Fox News, Dr Walenksy said the CDC was going to publish data on how many people had died of Covid, and how many died with it.
This begs a series of important questions.
- Why is the director of the CDC (seemingly) engaging with these Covid skeptic arguments after two years of pretending they don’t exist?
- Why would Sky News air, and then tweet out, the video clip of a doctor challenging the health secretary?
- Why is the Guardian running headlines like “End mass jabs and live with Covid, says ex-head of vaccine taskforce”and quoting medical personnel who say we need to “treat Covid like the flu”?
- Why are new studies being promoted that claim T cells from ordinary colds can “protect you from Covid”?
There’s no denying the messaging, the deceleration of the narrative. There’s a new thread being woven into the story: “living with Covid”.
For over a month that has been a popular buzz phrase all over the Western press.
On December 1st, Forbes headlined:
Why Endemic Covid-19 Will Be Cause For Celebration
An article which argued, among other things, that “Endemic Covid-19 will be no worse than seasonal flu”. This sentiment has been repeated ad nauseum across multiple outlets.
We already mentioned the Guardian article from January 8th, there’s also an earlier one from Dec 5th titled “From pandemic to endemic: this is how we might get back to normal”.
CNBC ran three almost identical stories on this topic in the space of two weeks:
On New Year’s Day, Vox had a piece titled:
Despite omicron, Covid-19 will become endemic. Here’s how.
Bloomberg is reporting that Omicron signals the end “of the acute phase of the pandemic”.
Just yesterday the New York Post headlined: “COVID will become endemic by later this year, ex-Biden task-force head predicts”, and USA Today asked “The pandemic is changing. Will omicron bring a ‘new normal’ for COVID-19?“
And earlier today Channel 4 opined that “Covid in 2022” means “learning to live with the virus”.
The messaging isn’t just media-based, either. Reports are coming out that “living with Covid” is going to be the UK government’s strategy moving into 2022, with an official publication on this topic expected “within weeks”.
So, “living with the virus” is going to be added to the Covid phrasebook alongside “flatten the curve” and “the new normal”. But what does it actually entail?
When they say “living with Covid”, what do they really mean?
Well, firstly, let’s not make the mistake of trusting any government, media, or “expert”, just because they start telling 20% of the truth.
They are liars, they have an agenda, this is always true, you should always be aware of it, even when – or especially when – they are suddenly telling you what you want to hear.
They have not seen the light, they are not correcting their mistakes, they not finally seeing sense, and they are not switching sides.
There have been no Damascene conversions. There is no wave of guilty consciences sweeping through the elite.
They have an agenda. They always have an agenda.
You should also dispel all notions of “getting back to normal” from your mind. That isn’t happening.
How do we know? Because they said so.
Half the articles talking about “living with Covid” go into detail about how things won’t really change. Take this one, from the Guardian yesterday:
‘Living with Covid’ does not have to mean ditching all protective measures
It outlines that Covid could become endemic soon, that the mass testing of asymptomatic people may be counter-productive and possibly should stop, but it doesn’t reverse course on masks or vaccines and leaves the door wide open for a new “variant” to jump-start more lockdowns in the future:
“Living with Covid” does not have to mean reversing every protective measure. If better ventilation and face masks reduce the impact of winter respiratory illnesses, that is a positive, even if the NHS is no longer under imminent threat of being overwhelmed. We will also need to remain vigilant about the threat from new variants, which could still cause big setbacks. There is no guarantee that another variant, more infectious and more virulent than Omicron, could emerge in the future. Scientists say that supporting global vaccination efforts will be crucial to securing the path to normality.
Masks, working from home, and social distancing in crowded settings could all be “sticking around”, according to one of the above CNBC articles. And “Covid Boosters could become like annual flu shots”.
Meanwhile, “experts” are warning that even once Covid is endemic we should prepare for “surges” every three or four months.
It seems “living with the virus” means maintaining the status quo, loosening a few restrictions, but leaving the path clear for new waves of fear porn should the need arise.
But why? Why are they doing this now?
It could be that there are splits and factions, fractures along the floors of the corridors of power. Perhaps some members of the great big club want to halt the Pandemic where it is, afraid that any more progress along the “Great Reset” path may imperil their own position or their own wealth.
Maybe.
What I see as more likely is that they sense they have over-extended themselves already, and that stretching further could break their entire story to pieces.
To use an apt metaphor, imagine the “Great Reset” agenda as an invading army, marching through town after town, winning battle after battle and burning as they go.
There comes a point where you have to stop. Your supply lines are pulled taut, your men are tired and numbers dwindling, and the occupied citizens are putting up more and more resistance. Push on now, and your entire campaign could crumble.
What you do in that situation is withdraw to a defensible position and fortify it. You don’t give back the land you’ve taken, or not much of it at least, but you stop pushing forward.
The people whose land you have invaded will be so glad the war is over, so tired of fighting, they’ll be so relieved by the respite before realising how much of their land you’ve taken away. They may even say “let them keep it, as long as they stop attacking us”.
That’s how conquest works, from the days of ancient Rome and beyond. A cycle of aggression followed by fortification.
When we switch from “pandemic” to “endemic”, we won’t be getting our rights back, the vaccine passes and surveillance and the culture of paranoia and fear will remain, but people will be so relieved at the pause in the campaign of fear and propaganda they will stop resisting.
They won’t push back, and the “New Normal” will literally become just that, normal.
Hell, they’ll probably greenlight funding for anything Bill Gates wants to do to make sure “Covid is the last pandemic”.
And then, one day when people are nice and docile again, a new variant will come back, or we’ll need a “climate lockdown”, and the push for control of every aspect of our lives will start up again in earnest.
The best thing we can do is not fall into the trap.
The press politicians and Big Pharma didn’t all just realise the truth, they’re just using some small parts of truth they’ve been ignoring for two years to fortify their position.
But that doesn’t make it a bad thing.
The very fact they feel the need to do so shows that the resistance is building, and that they’re are trying to lull us into relaxing.
Now would be the worst time to stop fighting.
January 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK, United States |
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A reader has shared with us the complaint he submitted yesterday to the BBC about the way in which Radio 4 presented the news that Britain’s Covid death toll has reached 150,000 – a figure which is also on the front of most of today’s papers:
The 1800 News on Radio 4, Saturday January 8th 2022 began with this headline:
“More than 150,000 people now have died of Covid in the UK since the start of the pandemic two years ago.”
This clearly stated that the deaths of 150,000 people had been as a result of contracting Covid. This is at best misleading, at worst a falsehood. The truth is stated on the BBC website, which said, correctly, “More than 150,000 people in the UK have now died within 28 days of a positive Covid test since the pandemic began.”
This isn’t a question of semantics. It’s a really important point and a crucial distinction between accurate news reporting and ‘number theatre’ (as Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter calls it). I can include two of my neighbours who died ‘with Covid’ and went down in the Covid total, even though one in fact died from the leukaemia that had kept him in hospital (where he caught Covid) for two years as he deteriorated, and another from liver cancer, also catching asymptomatic Covid in hospital.
On the 1800 News the Health Correspondent Katherine da Costa made no attempt to contextualise the figure of 150,000 in terms of annual normal deaths in the UK (this might in fact have strengthened her piece), interviewed a family member of a victim without clarifying the actual cause of death, and ignored the much larger number of people who have died of other causes.
Although Ms Da Costa did not repeat the inaccurate headline, she did not qualify her reference to the number of deaths by making it clear, as the news website did, that these were of people who had died within 28 days of testing positive. It was also quite evident that the interviewee had no framework of reference for the 150,000.
There is a stark contrast here with the coverage by Nick Triggle which always contextualises the figures and makes it clear what they actually are, without seeking to sensationalise as the inaccurate headline in the 1800 did.
January 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | BBC |
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COVID is a very treatable disease if it is treated early using an early treatment protocol. There are lots of such protocols that are highly successful. This new book documents one such protocol.
Since March of 2020, Brian Tyson and George Fareed, two physicians with impeccable credentials, have been treating COVID patients of all ages in Imperial Valley, CA using early treatment protocols.
Their track record is extraordinary. If you started treatment within 7 days of first symptoms, only 2 people were briefly hospitalized and there were no deaths. The earlier you start treatment, the better the results and the faster you recover.
Their book is now available at Amazon (if you buy it now on Kindle for $5.95, it will be delivered Jan 24). It is a #1 best seller as you can see below.

The entire pandemic response was unnecessary: COVID is very treatable if treated early
This book shows that we’ve known about effective treatments since March 2020.
Had the CDC publicized such treatments, it would have made the entire pandemic response completely unnecessary: lockdowns, vaccines, mandates, masking, business closures, etc. Everyone would have gotten natural immunity and the pandemic would have ended with virtually no deaths.
Tyson and Freed tried contacting the FDA, CDC, and NIH, but nobody would talk to them or return their calls. The same is true today. They are just “too busy” to talk to them. Keeping patients out of the hospital and morgue is not a priority for them.
The same is true of the mainstream media. The NY Times refused to run op-eds about early treatments and CNN said that they were too busy covering the vaccines and people dying from COVID that they didn’t have the resources to talk about early treatment protocols that would have prevented everything.
Instead of promoting early treatment using repurposed drugs, the CDC instructed people to just stay home and do nothing until they were so sick that they had to go to the hospital. Even after drugs in the Tyson/Fareed protocol like ivermectin and fluvoxamine have been proven time and time again to work in clinical trials and, in the case of ivermectin, published in systematic reviews and meta-analyses, the NIH still fails to acknowledge them rating them NEUTRAL. This means that most doctors will not use them.
On May 24, 2021, I offered $2M to anyone who could show that the NIH made the proper decision on these two drugs, but nobody came forward.
In short, nobody in the world thought they made the right decision (or at least could justify it). But they are the authorities and we cannot question their judgement, ever.
The CDC doesn’t want you to share this post with anyone
The CDC would like you to know the following:
- You need to follow our advice. Do not think. Do not ask questions. Just do as you’re told. We are the CDC and we always know best.
- Trust us: early treatments don’t work. Ignore all the data from these physicians. Even though we’ve never even talked to them or looked at their data, we know they are wrong. We don’t even have to look at their data to know that they are wrong. The data does not matter. It is our opinion that matters. Got it?
- Do not share this post with anyone, especially your doctor, anyone in mainstream media, or Congress. Do not to do anything to disrupt Big Pharma’s profits.
- Even if you did share it, nobody would believe you anyway; they will think you are crazy. We have totally brainwashed pretty much everyone except for a relatively small number of people.
- Don’t read the book. This book will destroy our credibility as well as that of the NIH and FDA. You may not be able to deal with the cognitive dissonance. Just do what we say. Don’t worry, be happy.
- If you feel you must read the book, ask your doctor to prescribe Versed and take it as directed before you read the book. That way, after you are done reading it, you won’t remember anything.
- If the public finds out about this book, a lot of people are going to be very upset about how they’ve been fooled. You wouldn’t want that to happen now, would you?
January 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, Covid-19, FDA, New York Times, NIH |
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It’s been clear that the Pfizer and Moderna covid vaccines cause myocarditis for some time. What hasn’t been clear, though, is whether the risk of myocarditis after vaccination is greater than it is after infection. If the risk after infection is even greater than it is after vaccination, then a pretty good case can be made for not worrying too much about vaccine induced myocarditis, under the assumption that almost everyone who doesn’t get vaccinated is sooner or later going to get covid, and thereby be exposed to the risk of post-infection myocarditis.
If, on the other hand, the risk is greater after vaccination, then a more careful weighing of risks needs to be done. For the large segments of the population that face infinitesimal personal risk from covid-19 (basically everyone under 40 years of age who is not overweight and who doesn’t have any underlying health issues), even a small risk of serious disease from the vaccines could be enough to tip the scales in favour of not vaccinating.
And myocarditis is a serious disease, make no mistake. Lately, I’ve been hearing this sentence alot: “but the myocarditis caused by the covid vaccines is mild!”. I’d never heard of “mild” myocarditis pre-covid. Pre-covid, myocarditis was always considered a serious disease. What the people saying this mean is that the patients admitted to hospital with myocarditis after vaccination are usually able to go home after a few days, and don’t generally end up in an ICU. Which is true.
But we don’t say that most heart attacks are “mild” just because they don’t result in a stay in an ICU, and just because the patient is usually able to leave the hospital within a week. A heart attack is a heart attack, and is by definition serious. The same goes for myocarditis. Our heart muscles are not very good at repairing themselves, and it is impossible to know today the extent to which an episode of vaccine induced myocarditis increases the person’s future risk of serious long-term complications, such as chronic heart failure or atrial fibrillation.
So, myocarditis is always serious, regardless of whether it puts you in an ICU or not, and we need to know whether the risk of myocarditis caused by the vaccines is greater than the risk caused by infection.
Thankfully, a study was recently published in Nature Medicine that helps us to answer that question. What the researchers did was to gather data from everyone in the UK over the age of 16 who was vaccinated against covid-19 between December 2020 and August 2021. This works out to about 40 million people (more than half the UK population). For this massive cohort, data was then gathered on myocarditis events and on positive covid tests. 8% of the 40 million people had a positive covid test during the study period. The objective of the study was to see what the risk of myocarditis was within 28 days of vaccination vs infection, and relate that to the background rate of myocarditis.
There is one big problem with taking the numbers in this study at face value, and that is that it used a positive covid test as the indicator for covid infection. But we know that up to half of all covid-infections are asymptomatic, and on top of that there is an unkown number of people who have symptoms but don’t take the test. So the true number of infections is likely to be at least twice as high as the test-confirmed infections. This creates an unfair comparison when comparing with the vaccines, because we know about everyone who gets the vaccine. There aren’t lots of people who have been secretly vaccinated, and aren’t included in the statistics. So whatever risk rate we get for myocarditis after infection should probably be halved, to more accurately reflect reality.
Anyway, let’s get to the results.
The first thing that is important to note is that the relative risk of myocarditis after vaccination vs infection appears to vary massively depending on how old you are. Among people over the age of 40, there was no sign that the vaccines increased risk of myocarditis at all. A positive covid-19 test, on the other hand, increased the risk 12-fold in this group. So for people over the age of 40, the risk of myocarditis after infection was much higher than the risk after vaccination.
Among people between 16 and 40 years of age, however, the situation was very different. In this group, the 28 day risk of getting myocarditis after a positive covid-test was “only” increased four-fold. The risk after the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine was increased two-fold, while the risk after the first dose of the Moderna vaccine increased four-fold.
Let’s remember that the the covid test is probably only catching half, at best, of all infections, so the real risk increase after infection is more like two-fold, not four-fold. In other words, in people under 40, the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine causes roughly the same number of cases of myocarditis as an actual covid infection, while the first dose of the Moderna vaccine causes roughly twice as many cases of myocarditis.
Ok, so let’s get to the second dose. The second dose of the Pfizer vaccine increased the risk of myocarditis three-fold, while the risk after the second dose of the Moderna vaccine was increased 21-fold!
It’s safe to conclude here that the decision, a few months back, by authorities in many European countries to put a hold on giving the Moderna vaccine to anyone under the age of 30 was wise. One thing that is clear is that the second dose, of both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine, increases risk substantially when compared with the risk seen after the first dose. Which really begs the question how smart it is to recommend a third dose to people under the age of 40. It’s reasonable to think that the third dose might increase the risk of myocarditis even further.
One thing that is clear from the data in this study is that there is a strong age gradient, with risk of myocarditis after vaccination increasing massively with decreasing age. In fact, for the youngest group (16-29 years), the risk of myocarditis after getting the second dose of the Moderna vaccine was increased 74-fold!
Considering that decreasing age also means decreasing risk of a bad outcome from covid (including decreasing risk of myocarditis after covid), it is reasonable to think that there is an inflection point at which the harms of vaccination outweigh the benefits. On top of that, there is evidence that increasing the number of doses increases the risk of myocarditis. With those two factors in mind, it’s my measured opinion that giving boosters to healthy young people, and especially to children, is nuts. On top of that, many, if not most, young adults and children have already had covid, and therefore have as good immunity as it’s possible to get, so boosting literally exposes them to risk of harm without any possibility of benefit. When the benefits of vaccination are zero, any non-zero risk is unacceptable.
January 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Myocarditis |
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Public Health Officer Matt Willis and Deputy Public Health Officer Dr. Lisa Santora speak out on requirements to get boosted. The evidence doesn’t matter and no questions will be tolerated.
Here is synopsis of Marin [county in California] Health meeting from 2 nights ago (from a parent).
Basically, the public health officers do whatever the hell they want, they refuse to answer questions from the audience, and none of this is based on solid science, and nobody can stop them. Welcome to 2022. Coming to your town soon (if not already).
Matt Willis presented charts and graphs. One was very interesting but I couldn’t take a picture in time. The majority infected are vaccinated. I believe the number 504. I believe a thousand in attendance from a source who tried to get in.
Lots of us put in questions but he answered none of them.
After that one chart showing the vaccinated getting infected more the next charts showed how Omicron has gone up and that kind of stuff.
Then Lisa Santora came on and gave the real bad news regarding the quarantine of unvaccinated students and staff and the modified quarantine of vaccinated and boosted. So per Willis you have to be boosted to be considered able to be on modified quarantine and parents have to be boosted to see their kids do sports or perform indoors. And a lot of infected have been boosted too but the efficacy of the vaccine was never called into question.
Our questions were how do you justify continuing quarantine and support for boosting if it doesn’t prevent transmission. If vaccinated and boosted spread the virus equally why are we quarantining unvaccinated or vaccinated without a booster? They never answered our questions.
Lisa Santora was super creepy and said “we expect that all students and staff are vaccinated and get their boosters”
So they prepared us for more variants with possibilities of more boosters. This pandemic keeps them relevant and in power and torturing the rest of us. Vaxxing testing masking again and again. Those are my words.
Willis said the vaccines will be mandatory in July 2022. My understanding is this will be mandated at the school year after the FDA approves the vaccines for kids so how can they even know??
When a kindergartner recently was registering the parent was told vaccines will be mandatory in July 2022. And the trials have not even been done.
CDC and FDA are being sued to release their safety data which they wanted to release in 75 years!! [ Editor’s Note: The FDA was recently ordered to speed up the timetable by 100X at 55,000 pages per month instead of 500 pages per month. ]
January 8, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Human rights, United States |
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Masking is not normal and should not be normalised

In the week when the requirement (or is it only a ‘recommendation’?) to mask children in the classroom was reinstated, it is worthwhile to consider the likely reasons underpinning the decision to return to a restriction that is both ineffective and harmful. Undoubtedly, there has again been pressure from the education unions for pupils to cover their faces, motivated either by a baseless belief that such a measure will reduce the risk of teachers contracting the virus, or perhaps a desire to further damage Government credibility by causing more disruption in our schools. Whatever their reason, at this juncture it is timely to revisit the range of circumstantial evidence that supports what HART believes to be the most plausible reason for compelling the healthy to wear face coverings: to increase compliance with future COVID-19 restrictions and the vaccination rollout.
Prior to June 2020, public health experts did not endorse masking healthy people in the community as a means of reducing viral transmission. In March 2020, Dr Jenny Harris (England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer) was unequivocal when she stated, ‘For the average member of the public, masks are really not a good idea’ and that ‘People can put themselves at more risk than less’. North of the border, Professor Jason Leitch (Scotland’s Clinical Director) was equally emphatic when – in April 2020 – he said, ‘The global evidence is masks in the general population don’t work’. Strikingly, in December 2020 – several months after mask mandates had been imposed in the UK – the World Health Organisation (WHO) published a document titled, Mask use in the context of COVID-19 that formed the conclusion that, ‘There is only limited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking healthy people in the community’. Many contemporary public figures spread a similar message.
So what changed in 2020 that flipped the public health experts into a pro-mask narrative?
One thing is clear: it was not in response to the advent of robust scientific evidence showing that face coverings significantly reduce viral transmission. On the contrary, a review of 14 controlled studies, published in May 2020, concluded that masks did not significantly lessen the spread of influenza in the community, protecting neither the wearer nor others. Although it is not possible to draw an unequivocal conclusion about the reason for the volte-face, several factors are consistent with masks being deployed primarily to enhance compliance with the Government’s COVID-19 interventions.
Deborah Cohen, a medically-qualified correspondent working for the BBC Newsnight programme, stated (in July 2020) that various sources had informed her that the WHO had recommended masks in response to political lobbying, and when she put this possibility directly to the WHO they did not deny it. Also, in her book, A State of Fear, Laura Dodsworth interviewed Gavin Morgan – an educational psychologist and member of the SPI-B (the behavioural science subgroup of SAGE) – who told her that his antipathy to masks had been nullified by some colleagues in the group who believed they were useful in promoting a sense of ‘solidarity’, strengthening people’s feelings of cohesion in the collective fight against the virus.
Further support for the compliance explanation derives from an examination of the activities of the Government’s behavioural scientists who, throughout the pandemic, have recommended the use of covert psychological ‘nudges’ as a means of promoting people’s acceptance of COVID-19 restrictions and the subsequent vaccine rollout. Masking healthy people (adults and children) significantly enhances two fundamental ‘nudges’ used within this campaign. First, the exploitation of fear to promote compliance with Government diktats has been well documented. Masking people in community settings, as well as being one of the restrictions fuelled by fear, is also a powerful way of perpetuating fear. Acting as a crude reminder that danger is – purportedly – all around, face coverings will also prevent disconfirmation of anxious beliefs, preventing the wearer from concluding that our communities are now safe enough to re-engage with in a normal way. A self-reinforcing restriction; something that would strongly appeal to our ethically-compromised behavioural scientists.
Second, the awareness of ‘norms’ – the prevalent views and behaviour of our fellow citizens – can exert pressure on us all to conform, and this widely-deployed ‘nudge’ is also greatly strengthened by mask wearing. Normative pressure (otherwise known as peer pressure or scapegoating) is less effective in changing the behaviour of the deviant minority if there is no visible indicator of pro-social compliance rooted in communities. A face covering, or lack of one, enables instant recognition of the rule followers and rule breakers, thereby escalating the pressure to comply.
These observations as a whole are consistent with the premise that masking healthy people is primarily a compliance device. Clearly, widespread wearing of face coverings in community settings is an effective way of keeping the British public on board with any future restrictions the state decides to impose in pursuit of its agenda. Would the Government have so easily capitulated to union pressure to re-mask children in the classroom if this was not so?
January 8, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, Human rights, UK |
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“Where’s the vaccine mandate they promised us?” whines Daniel Brössler, reporter for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, disappointed because yesterday’s Corona summit of German minister presidents returned nothing but some adjustments to quarantine and sharpened testing rules. The double vaccinated will now have to submit negative tests if they want to eat at restaurants. Markus Söder, lockdown- and vaccine mandate-loving minister president of Bavaria, criticised even these milquetoast restrictions, with some bluster about how he’d already taken a hard line against bars and discos. This is after leading German Corona astrologer, Christian Drosten, used his state media podcast to suggest that Germany should start tolerating some of degree of SARS-2 transmission, and that breakthrough infections among the vaccinated should be considered normal. Such statements, which almost surely reflect sentiments within the coalition government, destroy most of the rationale for ongoing restrictions and vaccine mandates.
Meanwhile, in Austria, the thrice-vaccinated chancellor Karl Nehammer has tested positive for Corona. The news comes as Austria announces they will delay implementing their vaccine mandate by two months. It will now take effect in April, if at all. Gerald Gartlehner, an epidemiologist and sometime governmental adviser, suggested that mandates (or at least their enforcement) might have to be re-evaluated in light of Omicron and the widespread immunity the new variant will elicit across the Austrian population. There is every reason to think that Austria will be past the peak of the Omicron wave in April, and that a majority of Austrians will have SARS-2 antibodies by then.
In the United States, former Biden advisers have published a series of editorials in the Journal of the American Medical Association, arguing that it is time to normalise containment and begin managing SARS-2 as one of various seasonal respiratory infections.
It is obvious that we are at a turning point, even if everyone has yet to realise it – even if France is sharpening vaccine requirements, even if Italy has imposed vaccine mandates for everyone over 50, and even if Canada is for the moment determined to remain a prison state. This is the first time since the Floyd riots in America, that major political leaders and public health authorities have said that preventing Corona can no longer be the highest goal of western society.
It is a commonplace observation, but a true one: Since the vaccines began to fail in August, the vaccinators have been progressing through the proverbial five stages of grief. They spent a lot of time in denial, before becoming very angry and punitive. Then they began bargaining, hoping that SARS-2 would go away after four doses, or after five, with just the right dosing intervals, with a return to double masking, with child vaccinations. Now they appear to be drifting finally into depression and acceptance. They have realised, not a second too soon, that there is nothing to be done [outside of improving personal health and early treatment protocols].
Omicron is a highly contagious variant with immune escape features. The vaccinators can vaccinate all they want, but their vaccines will not stop the waves of infection to come. A lot of the hyperbolic rhetoric about Corona was put about in the hopes that most everyone wouldn’t be infected. They thought they could terrify people for a few years, vaccinate them, and harvest their gratitude for saving them from the worst respiratory virus since SARS. Now, though, it’s clear that everyone will have personal experience with Corona infection, whether or not they are vaccinated. This will destroy popular faith measures, it will erode their confidence in the vaccines, and it will do away with their fear of the virus. Maybe a few people somewhere will still support containment, after two years of heavy restrictions, mandated vaccinations, and infection, but I doubt there will be very many of them. It’s the beginning of the end.
January 8, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Austria, Canada, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, France, Germany, Human rights, Italy, United States |
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