FOR several years the public have been bombarded with threats of extreme weather to brainwash them about the dangers of climate change. Every bit of bad weather is relayed by the 24/7 media, which naturally has the effect of making the public believe ‘things are getting worse’. This is then backed up by repeated claims that global warming is to blame, making such events more frequent and more severe.
As part of this propaganda onslaught, the BBC has been broadcasting a monthly Climate Check video for the last couple of years, usually presented by weatherman Ben Rich, who they hope will give a flavour of authenticity. Last month’s edition was a summary of 2021. According to the introduction: ‘Fires, floods, heatwaves and drought – 2021 has been another year of remarkable extremes around the world.’
The video then goes on to cover a heatwave in Canada, floods in Canada, Germany, China, India and Australia, Hurricane Ida, wildfires in Greece and a drought in East Africa. None of these were unprecedented, yet there was the usual sloppy assertion that global warming is making all these types of events worse. No evidence or data is given to back up these absurd claims, which are purely derived from computer models sexed up by alarmist scientists.
Is our weather really any worse than in the past? Recently I looked back at the world’s weather 50 years ago, in 1971. The weather that year was every bit as bad as anything seen either this year or in the recent past.
Was 1971 exceptional? Let’s go back to 1961 for another viewpoint.
It’s ironic that Ben Rich began last month’s report by saying ‘If anywhere in the world sums up a year of extreme weather, it’s Canada’, because he could have said exactly the same if he had been doing his Climate Check 60 years ago.
The drought that summer on the Canadian prairies was reckoned at the time to be even worse than the dustbowl years of the 1930s. Many places had received no proper rainfall for a year and a half, and harvests were devastated, as this CBC video describes.
Wildfires burned millions of acres across much of Canada in what was called at the time ‘The Angriest Summer’.
To cap it off, flash floods killed a family of five in Timmins, Ontario in August, following six inches of rain in 12 hours.
Catastrophic floods hit many other parts of the world that year. New South Wales suffered some of the worst floods in its history in November 1961, probably only surpassed by the ones in 1900. The Nepean Times reported: ‘During a week of rain in which 474mm of rain were recorded at the post office, Penrith received half its annual rainfall on two days.’
In the very same week, the BBC was reporting on flood-stricken Somalia: ‘Unconfirmed reports put the number of homeless at 300,000 . . . The Prime Minister said nearly all Somalia’s food crops have been destroyed, and said food will have to be found for about 600,000 people for eight months, until the next harvest.’
The USA was also badly affected by flooding in 1961. ‘Widespread, prolonged and disastrous’ floods hit Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama in February and March, followed by the Midwest in May, and Idaho in June. The most tragic flood of the year was in July in Charleston, West Virginia when a small area cloudburst flood caused 22 deaths. Severe flooding also occurred in December in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama.
The worst floods that year in the USA were brought by Hurricane Carla in September, a Cat 4 storm with winds of 170mph, which left a trail of devastation from Texas to Illinois, including 34 dead, 1,900 homes destroyed and a record number of tornadoes.
The Atlantic hurricane season in 1961 saw two in the most powerful Category 5, Esther and Hattie, making it one of only seven Atlantic hurricane seasons to feature multiple Category 5 hurricanes in one season. Hattie devastated Belize City, damaging 70 per cent of the buildings. The damage was so severe that the government relocated inland to a new city, Belmopan.
1961 was certainly not an exceptional year and history is littered with weather disasters like these. The idea that today’s weather is any more ‘remarkable’ or ‘extreme’ is not only ridiculous, it has no basis in fact. But Ben Rich has no intention of presenting an objective account of the weather last year. His final statement gives the game away: ‘2021 has brought into sharp focus the impact that severe weather is having on peoples around the world. Limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C was at the top of the agenda at COP26 in Glasgow, with scientists urging world leaders to commit to cutting greenhouse gases to stave off a climate catastrophe.’
There is just one purpose in all of this: to brainwash the public into accepting the UN’s climate agenda.
Making it up as you go along
You might have thought that when the head of the Environment Agency was giving a speech on climate change to the Royal Society he would check his facts first. Not Sir James Bevan.
The agency’s chief executive recently stood up to give a talk ludicrously titled ‘Drought risk in the Anthropocene: from the Jaws of Death to the Waters of Life’. In an attempt to show that climate change was making floods worse, he made the claim that ‘in England, three of the five wettest winters on record have happened in the last eight years’. However according to the Met Office only one of the five has occurred in that period, in 2013/14. The other four were 1876/77, 1914/15, 1989/90 and 1994/95.
Bevan also claimed that winters are wetter than in the past on average, but they were just as wet in the early 1900s.
UK Met Office
He went on to warn that climate change was making our summers drier, increasing the risk of drought. As you have probably guessed by now, summers in England are not becoming drier, or for that matter wetter. They are no different from summers in the past!
UK Met Office
Bevan worked as a diplomat all his career prior to joining the Environment Agency in 2015. His ignorant speech makes his lack of qualifications for his job glaringly obvious.
Landscapes will be altered for ever, warns National Trust!
Not to be outdone by the Environment Agency, the National Trust has just published its annual Weather and Wildlife Review. As you would expect from an organisation taken over by the far Left years ago, it carries apocalyptic warnings about the so-called climate crisis.
The report begins: ‘The climate crisis presented serious challenges for nature across the UK this year. A warm winter, low levels of rain and gale-force winds all contributed to various natural disasters, causing devastation across precious landscapes and affecting the wildlife they support.’
As usual they confuse ‘weather’ with ‘climate’.
According to the BBC, the report warns that some of the landscapes under the Trust’s control are being altered for ever as climate change makes some forms of extreme weather the new normal.
Yes, the same landscapes which have remained largely unaltered for thousands of years, other than by mankind: through the warmth of the Middle Ages and the cold of the Little Ice Age, and many other previous climate cycles, and through the huge differences which we see from year to year. Do the National Trust think we are all a bunch of idiots?
And their evidence for this absurd claim?
1) Moorland fires, due to dry springs caused by climate change.
Only one slight problem though. Our springs are not getting drier, or for that matter wetter:
2) Ash dieback – caused by ‘warmer/wetter winters’
Climate has nothing whatsoever to do with dieback, a disease caused by fungal infestation. It has been spreading rapidly across Europe since its introduction about 30 years ago from eastern Asia. It thrives in all climates – warm, cold, wet and dry.
3) Stormy weather
Storms have blown down trees since time immemorial. But just because the Met Office now give them silly names, the National Trust think they must be getting worse. In fact, the opposite is true, as Met Office data clearly proves:
Incredibly their report ends:
Isn’t it time they concentrated on their real job instead?
In an internal memo sent by El Camino Hospital CMO Mark Adams to hospital staff, he disclosed three things that nobody is supposed to know and that the mainstream press is just never going to cover.
But hey, I’m not in the mainstream press, so I will cover it.
Here are the three key admissions:
“Currently, 57% of our hospitalized COVID patients are fully vaccinated.” In other words, a clear majority, almost 2/3 of the COVID patients in the hospital, are fully vaccinated. This suggests that the vaccines hardly work at all since this is slightly less than the vaccination rate in the area.
“Only one patient is on a ventilator which is consistent with the evidence that the Omicron variant is more contagious but less virulent.” This suggests that all the panic and lockdowns to prepare for Omicron are insane.
“SCC public health has issued a new order that potentially might cripple our ability to provide patient care. This is the only county in CA that is mandating that no health care worker (HCW) that is not boosted or has an approved exemption from vaccination can continue to work after January 24.”In short, in my opinion, Dr. Adams has correctly determined that Santa Clara County Health Officer Dr. Sara Cody is a complete bozo and is deliberately compromising patient safety because she can’t interpret the science correctly. He’s just making this accusation a lot more tactfully and diplomatically than I ever would. This just shows you how out of control our public health officials are. There is effectively no oversight for the reckless decisions of these people.
Kudos to Dr. Adams for telling the truth.
Here’s the memo:
MEMO
To: El Camino Health Medical Staff
From: Mark Adams CMO
Subject: COVID-19 Update
Date: January 6, 2022
Colleagues:
We are now in the midst of a COVID-19 surge driven by the Omicron variant.
…
Currently, 57% of our hospitalized COVID patients are fully vaccinated. Most have underlying medical conditions such as immunocompromised. Only one patient is on a ventilator which is consistent with the evidence that the Omicron variant is more contagious but less virulent. Unlike during previous surges, our biggest challenge this time is not the patients but staffing. We are seeing many community acquired infections in our employees making it difficult to fully staff the hospitals. To help maintain adequate staffing and still maintain a safe environment for patients we have modified our isolation and quarantine policies to reflect the differences in the behavior of the Omicron variant. Anyone who is exposed but asymptomatic can continue to work unless symptoms develop without the need for testing. Anyone who becomes symptomatic and tests positive must isolate for 5 days then if asymptomatic for 24 hours may return to work without testing. For physicians who are symptomatic but need to work, we continue to offer special testing. The physician can contact the house supervisor (AHM) who will bring a test kit to the car in the parking lot, the physician swabs themselves, the AHM then delivers the test to the lab and provides the rapid test result to the waiting physician. This is only for symptomatic must work situations. (Asymptomatic testing is now in short supply so cannot always be readily available.)
SCC public health has issued a new order that potentially might cripple our ability to provide patient care. This is the only county in CA that is mandating that no health care worker (HCW) that is not boosted or has an approved exemption from vaccination can continue to work after January 24. We believe this is an overreach and is not consistent with the evolution of the effects of the Omicron variant. Hopefully, this will be reconsidered.
Because of the potential for a continued increase in hospitalized COVID-19 patients and further staffing shortages we may need to reduce/restrict elective procedures at our facilities. We are monitoring this on a day to day basis but please be prepared that this could be necessary in the near short term. We will keep you updated on that possibility.
We do have a limited supply of sotrovimab for IV infusion for high risk patients that test positive to prevent worsening symptoms. This is administered in the ED. Paxlovid distribution will be controlled by the state and has not yet been released.
The bottom line is that the “pandemic” is changing to “endemic” so will most likely be with us for an extended period of time. This means that while it is no longer an emergency or crisis it is something that we must adapt to and accept as a regular part of our health care business.
Mark Adams, MD, FACS
Chief Medical Officer, Administration Department
2500 Grant Rd, Mountain View, CA 94040
Pandemic of the unvaccinated?
Just one more thing…
Didn’t the CDC say earlier this year that this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”?
For example, this article from US News and World Report (July 16, 2021) says:
The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday warned that COVID-19 is becoming a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said that cases, hospitalizations and deaths from the coronavirus are increasing nationwide, adding that over 97% of new hospitalizations are in patients who are unvaccinated.
“There is a clear message that is coming through,” Walensky said at a press briefing. “This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated. We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage because unvaccinated people are at risk, and communities that are fully vaccinated are generally faring well.”
Someone is lying to you. Hint: It isn’t Mark Adams.
Of course it is certainly possible that El Camino Hospital is a statistical outlier. But that’s a huge difference from what is claimed, so is statistically unlikely.
And for those accusing me (without any evidence) of cherry picking from confidential internal memos meant for hospital staff only, let me clarify that this is the only such memo of this type I’ve ever received. So you can’t use the cherry picking argument.
Maybe it is time for our CDC Director to start telling the American people the truth?
I know the liberal judges still seem to have no idea that the vaccines don’t end infection or transmission, but they aren’t the majority.
Here’s the current lead of the New York Times article about today’s Supreme Court hearings on the mandates. It shows the conservative justices – importantly, including Chief Justice John Roberts – have serious questions about the most important mandate, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule that covers workers at big companies:
The OSHA mandate is clearly at the greatest risk, as it is the biggest reach both legally and medically. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services mandate on health-care workers at least fits with what CMS does, and trying to protect patients from communicable disease is a worthy goal. (Too bad the Covid vaccines don’t stop infection or transmission.)
I suspect the OSHA mandate goes. What happens to health-care workers may depend on whether Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh know the science well enough to understand how useless the vaccines have become. If not, they might just decide to split the difference and allow the CMS mandate to move forward. That would be a (seemingly) reasonable decision, and Roberts likes to seem reasonable…
On behalf of a client, my firm requested that the FDA produce all the data submitted by Pfizer to license its Covid-19 vaccine. The FDA asked the Court for permission to only be required to produce at a rate of 500 pages per month, which would have taken over 75 years to produce all the documents.
I am pleased to report that a federal judge soundly rejected the FDA’s request and ordered the FDA to produce all the data at a clip of 55,000 pages per month!
This is a great win for transparency and removes one of the strangleholds federal “health” authorities have had on the data needed for independent scientists to offer solutions and address serious issues with the current vaccine program – issues which include waningimmunity, variants evading vaccine immunity, and, as the CDC has confirmed, that the vaccines do not prevent transmission.
No person should ever be coerced to engage in an unwanted medical procedure. And while it is bad enough the government violated this basic liberty right by mandating the Covid-19 vaccine, the government also wanted to hide the data by waiting to fully produce what it relied upon to license this product until almost every American alive today is dead. That form of governance is destructive to liberty and antithetical to the openness required in a democratic society.
In ordering the release of the documents in a timely manner, the Judge recognized that the release of this data is of paramount public importance and should be one of the FDA’s highest priorities. He then aptly quoted James Madison as saying a “popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy” and John F. Kennedy as explaining that a “nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
The following is the full text of the Judge’s order, a copy of which is also available here.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
PHMPT, Plaintiff v. FDA, Defendant, No. 4:21-cv-1058-P
ORDER
This case involves the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”). Specifically, at issue is Plaintiff’s FOIA request seeking “[a]ll data and information for the Pfizer Vaccine enumerated in 21 C.F.R. § 601.51(e) with the exception of publicly available reports on the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System” from the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”). See ECF No. 1. As has become standard, the Parties failed to agree to a mutually acceptable production schedule; instead, they submitted dueling production schedules for this Court’s consideration. Accordingly, the Court held a conference with the Parties to determine an appropriate production schedule.[1] See ECF Nos. 21, 34.
“Open government is fundamentally an American issue” – it is neither a Republican nor a Democrat issue.[2] As James Madison wrote, “[a] popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”[3] John F. Kennedy likewise recognized that “a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”[4] And, particularly appropriate in this case, John McCain (correctly) noted that “[e]xcessive administrative secrecy . . . feeds conspiracy theories and reduces the public’s confidence in the government.”[5]
Echoing these sentiments, “[t]he basic purpose of FOIA is to ensure an informed citizenry, [which is] vital to the functioning of a democratic society.” NLRB v. Robbins Tire & Rubber Co., 437 U.S. 214, 242 (1977). “FOIA was [therefore] enacted to ‘pierce the veil of administrative secrecy and to open agency action to the light of public scrutiny.’” Batton v. Evers, 598 F.3d 169, 175 (5th Cir. 2010) (quoting Dep’t of the Air Force v. Rose, 425 U.S. 352, 361 (1976)). And “Congress has long recognized that ‘information is often useful only if it is timely’ and that, therefore ‘excessive delay by the agency in its response is often tantamount to denial.’” Open Soc’y Just. Initiative v. CIA, 399 F. Supp. 3d 161, 165 (S.D.N.Y. 2019) (quoting H.R. REP. NO. 93-876, at 6271 (1974)). When needed, a court “may use its equitable powers to require an agency to process documents according to a court-imposed timeline.” Clemente v. FBI, 71 F. Supp. 3d 262, 269 (D.D.C. 2014).
Here, the Court recognizes the “unduly burdensome” challenges that this FOIA request may present to the FDA. See generally ECF Nos. 23, 30, 34. But, as expressed at the scheduling conference, there may not be a “more important issue at the Food and Drug Administration . . . than the pandemic, the Pfizer vaccine, getting every American vaccinated, [and] making sure that the American public is assured that this was not [] rush[ed] on behalf of the United States . . . .” ECF No. 34 at 46. Accordingly, the Court concludes that this FOIA request is of paramount public importance.
“[S]tale information is of little value.” Payne Enters., Inc. v. United States, 837 F.2d 486, 494 (D.C. Cir. 1988). The Court, agreeing with this truism, therefore concludes that the expeditious completion of Plaintiff’s request is not only practicable, but necessary. See Bloomberg, L.P. v. FDA, 500 F. Supp. 2d 371, 378 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 15, 2007) (“[I]t is the compelling need for such public understanding that drives the urgency of the request.”). To that end, the Court further concludes that the production rate, as detailed below, appropriately balances the need for unprecedented urgency in processing this request with the FDA’s concerns regarding the burdens of production. See Halpern v. FBI, 181 F.3d 279, 284–85 (2nd Cir. 1991) (“[FOIA] emphasizes a preference for the fullest possible agency disclosure of such information consistent with a responsible balancing of competing concerns . . . .”).
Accordingly, having considered the Parties’ arguments, filings in support, and the applicable law, the Court ORDERS that:
1. The FDA shall produce the “more than 12,000 pages” articulated in its own proposal, see ECF No. 29 at 24, on or before January 31, 2022.
2. The FDA shall produce the remaining documents at a rate of 55,000 pages every 30 days, with the first production being due on or before March 1, 2022, until production is complete.
3. To the extent the FDA asserts any privilege, exemption, or exclusion as to any responsive record or portion thereof, FDA shall, concurrent with each production required by this Order, produce a redacted version of the record, redacting only those portions as to which privilege, exemption, or exclusion is asserted.
4. The Parties shall submit a Joint Status Report detailing the progress of the rolling production by April 1, 2022, and every 90 days thereafter.[6]
SO ORDERED on this 6th day of January, 2022.
[1] Surprisingly, the FDA did not send an agency representative to the scheduling conference.
[2] 151 CONG. REC. S1521 (daily ed. Feb. 16, 2005) (statement of Sen. John Cornyn).
[3] Letter from James Madison to W.T. Barry (August 4, 1822), in 9 WRITINGS OF JAMES MADISON 103 (S. Hunt ed., 1910).
[4] John F. Kennedy, Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the Voice of America (Feb. 26, 1962).
[5] America After 9/11: Freedom Preserved or Freedom Lost?: Hearing Before the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 108th Cong. 302 (2003).
[6] Although the Court does not decide whether the FDA correctly denied Plaintiff’s request for expedited processing, the issue is not moot. Should the Parties seek to file motions for summary judgment, the Court will take up the issue then.
“Early indications from South Africa and the United Kingdom signal that the fast-spreading Omicron variant of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is less dangerous than its predecessor Delta. Now, a series of laboratory studies offers a tantalizing explanation for the difference: Omicron does not infect cells deep in the lung as readily as it does those in the upper airways.”
Importance: I discussed this back on December 15th in my Substack article:
“Has Omicron shifted receptor binding specificity away from deep lung tissue? Could this be why it appears that Omicron is less severe than other variants?”
Now this has been confirmed in an animal model.
The importance of this research is also that it answers the question of whether those who have neither been infected or vaccinated will have a less severe course of disease. That answer is good news. Omicron is milder for everyone, significantly milder.
“… Here, we present a comprehensive quantitative analysis of Omicron’s infectivity, vaccine breakthrough, and antibody resistance. An artificial intelligence (AI) model, which has been trained with tens of thousands of experimental data and extensively validated by experimental results on SARS-CoV-2, reveals that Omicron may be over 10 times more contagious than the original virus or about 2.8 times as infectious as the Delta variant. On the basis of 185 three-dimensional (3D) structures of antibody-RBD complexes, we unveil that Omicron may have an 88% likelihood to escape current vaccines.
… However, its impacts on GlaxoSmithKline’s sotrovimab appear to be mild.”
Importance:
Based on modeling, the Omicron may have an 88% likelihood to escape current vaccines.
Do I need to write more?
Older individuals are at higher risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and severe outcome but the underlying mechanisms are incompletely understood. In addition, how age modulates SARS-CoV-2 re-infection and vaccine breakthrough infections remains largely unexplored. Here, we investigated age-associated SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis, immune responses, and the occurrence of re-infection and vaccine breakthrough infection utilizing a wild type C57BL/6N mouse model.
The study demonstrates that interferon and adaptive antibody response upon SARS-CoV-2 challenge are significantly impaired in aged mice in comparison to young mice, which results in more effective virus replication and severe disease manifestations in the respiratory tract.
Aged mice also showed increased susceptibility to re-infection due to insufficient immune protection acquired during primary infection.
Importance:
“In mice, a two-dose COVID-19 mRNA vaccination conferred limited adaptive immune response among the aged mice which rendered them susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection.”
The significant adverse event profile of the genetic vaccines, combined with the more mild disease profile of Omicron has to raise the possibility that the boosters may not be good “medicine,” even for the elderly.
We will have more variants- natural immunity is robust and more broadly protective. Omicron is going to rip through the US population.
Maybe it is time to entirely re-evaluate our entire SARS-CoV-2 vaccination program?
Before the COVID vaccines, cardiac arrest = very rare
Before the COVID vaccines, it was very rare for a healthy 13-old-year to die from a heart attack.
After the COVID vaccines, cardiac arrest = not so rare
Now, with the rollout of the COVID vaccines, it is becoming commonplace.
Remember Jacob Clynick, the 13-year old from Minnesota who died of cardiac arrest on June 20, 2021, just 3 days after his second Pfizer shot?
Here’s his VAERS record memorializing his death. Here’s the Defender story that appeared shortly after his death.
Fast forward 6 months later, there is still no investigation into his death! See this story which appeared in the Defender yesterday. It references emails which indicate that the autopsy had been completed prior to June 28, 2021. Silence from the CDC regarding the cause of death. Seriously?!?!? Jacob dies just 3 days after the jab due to cardiac arrest and six months later, despite the myocarditis link that they admit, they cannot figure this one out? WTF? Where is the accountability?
Ernest Ramirez’s son died of cardiac arrest as well, but he was 16. Dr. Peter McCullough looked at the death records and determined the death was caused by the vaccine. No acknowledgement from the CDC. Again, where is the accountability? Does the CDC have a better qualified expert than Peter McCullough? Did McCullough goof? Well, we don’t know because nobody is talking.
Another 13-year-old bites the dust from cardiac arrest after vaccination
For the record, here’s the latest healthy 13-year-old to die from a heart attack.
Although this happened 6 months after his second shot, as we learned from the Bhakdi study, death from the vaccine can still happen 6 months after the shot. And we learned from that study that unless you know what to look for, the medical examiner is almost sure to miss the cause of death.
How many kids have to die before they acknowledge that the vaccines are killing kids?
I just wanted to memorialize Jack’s death so that it is not forgotten.
I hope that someday, someone will connect the dots and at least acknowledge that these kids were killed by the vaccine. Is that too much to ask?
This is going to keep happening until they halt the vaccines.
I’m forwarding my article to all of the CDC people involved in investigating Jacob’s death. I doubt I’ll hear anything back. But I wanted to make sure they are aware of all this. For the record.
Apparently, appalled by robust sales of my bestseller, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper — in lieu of critically reviewing the work — used his Twitter feed to unleash a barrage of ad hominem insults against me.
Breaking with the traditional restraints of journalistic neutrality, professional propriety and intellectual rigor, he branded me “dangerous,” a “menace,” a “liar,” a “grifter,” a fraud, “unhinged” and more.
But Tapper’s defamations hang in the atmosphere without substantiation or citation. If I’m a liar, then what was my lie? If I’m a grifter, then what is my personal profit or advantage? If I am a fraud, then where is my inaccurate statement?
I concede that I’m a dangerous menace, but only to the pharmaceutical industry, its captive technocrats and its media toadies.
When I responded to his slander with a respectful tweet inviting him to debate me, Tapper declined, explaining he would not debate a “conspiracy theorist.” Characteristically, he neglected to cite any conspiracy theory he believes I promoted.
I’ve won hundreds of successful lawsuits, including milestone victories against Monsanto, DuPont, Exxon, Smithfield Foods and leading polluters from the chemical, carbon, pharmaceutical and agricultural industries. (Many of these also initially dismissed me as a “conspiracy theorist.”)
My current book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” may be the most heavily footnoted volume to ever sit atop global best-seller lists for six consecutive weeks. With 500,000 copies sold, it has attracted a whopping 5,500+ five-star reviews (92%).
Despite extreme hostility toward this volume from mainstream media and the medical cartel, no one has yet identified a factual inaccuracy in its 250,000 words.
If my book is baseless conspiracy theories, then shouldn’t Mr. Tapper welcome an opportunity to correct me with facts or arguments that go beyond name-calling?
Allow me, then, to offer my own theory for Mr. Tapper’s apoplexy.
Many people make Faustian bargains during their lives, trading personal integrity for material advantage. Oftentimes the metamorphosis occurs as a gradual erosion of moral fiber. Occasionally it happens in an instant; a man stands at a moral crossroads and chooses the dark side.
I happened to have a front-row seat when Jake Tapper had his moment of moral crisis. I’m guessing his fierce vitriol toward me is a reaction to his embarrassment that I was witness to the instant when Mr. Tapper chose career over character.
In July 2005, Jake Tapper was ABC’s senior producer when the network ordered him to pull a lengthy exposé on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) secret 2000 Simpsonwood conference.
Here is the background:
In 1999, in response to exploding epidemics of autism and other neurological disorders, CDC decided to study its vast Vaccine Safety Datalink — the medical and vaccination record of millions of Americans, archived by the top HMOs — to learn whether the dramatic escalation of the vaccine schedule, beginning in 1989, was a culprit. CDC’s in-house epidemiologist, Thomas Verstraeten, led the effort.
Verstraeten’s findings propelled CDC into DEFCON 1. The agency’s top vaccine officials summoned 52 pharmaceutical industry leaders, the foremost vaccinologists from academia and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and public health regulators from the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), CDC, World Health Organization (WHO) and European Medicines Agency to a secret two-day meeting at the remote Simpsonwood retreat center in Norcross, Georgia, to strategize about how to hide these awful revelations from the public.
In 2005, I obtained the explosive transcripts of this meeting and was about to publish excerpts in Rolling Stone (Deadly Immunity, July 18, 2005). Those recordings, ironically, portrayed these leading kingpins of the vaccine cartel poised at their own moral brink, and chronicled their collapse into corruption over two sickening days of debate.
Most of these individuals were physicians and regulatory officials who had committed their lives to public health out of idealism and deep concern for children. Verstraeten’s data confronted them with the fact that the cumulative mercury levels in all those new vaccines they had recommended had overdosed a generation of American children with mercury concentrations over a hundred times the exposures the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considered safe.
In recommending a vast battery of new vaccines for children, public health regulators had somehow neglected to calculate the cumulative mercury and aluminum loads in all the new jabs.
Dr. Peter Patriarca, the then-director of the FDA Office on Vaccine Research and Review, expressed the general feeling of horror when he asked why no one had calculated the cumulative mercury exposure to children as policymakers added this cascade of new vaccines to the childhood schedule: “Conversion of the percentage thimerosal to actual micrograms of mercury involves ninth-grade algebra. What took the FDA so long to do the calculations?”
In the tense days leading up to the Simpsonwood conclave, children’s health champion Dr. Ruth Etzel of the EPA pleaded with her fellow public health leaders to publicly admit they made a terrible mistake by inadvertently poisoning American children, and to repair the damage.
Dr. Etzel urged AAP and the government regulators to handle the crisis with the same honesty and public remorse that Johnson & Johnson had demonstrated on discovering toxic chemicals in its Tylenol formulations:
“We must follow three basic rules: (1) act quickly to inform pediatricians that the products have more mercury than we realized; (2) be open with consumers about why we didn’t catch this earlier; (3) show contrition. If the public loses faith in the Public Health Services recommendations, then the immunization battle will falter. To keep faith, we must be open and honest and move forward quickly to replace these products.”
Confronted with scientific proof of their role in the chronic disease calamity, the cabal did exactly the opposite. The shocking Simpsonwood transcripts show Dr. Patriarca and the other public health panjandrums warning each other of their reputational liabilities, their vulnerability to litigation by plaintiffs’ lawyers and potential damage to the vaccine program.
Dr. Patriarca cautioned that public disclosure of CDC’s explosive findings would make Americans feel that the FDA, CDC and vaccine policymakers had been “asleep at the switch” for decades in allowing Thimerosal to remain in childhood vaccines.
Over two days of intense discussion, these Big Pharma operatives and government technocrats persuaded each other to transform their disastrous error into villainy — by doubling down and hiding their mistake from the public.
Tapper saw an early draft of my Rolling Stone story and proposed that, in exchange for exclusivity, he would do a companion piece for ABC timed to air on the magazine’s publication day.
Tapper spent several weeks working on the story with me and a team of enthusiastic ABC reporters and technicians. During his frequent conversations with me over that period, he was on fire with indignation over the Simpsonwood revelations. He acted like a journalist hoping to win an Emmy.
The day before the piece was to air, an exasperated Tapper called me to say that ABC’s corporate officials ordered him to pull the story. The network’s pharmaceutical advertisers were threatening to cancel their advertising.
“Corporate told us to shut it down,” Tapper fumed. Tapper told me that it was the first time in his career that ABC officials had ordered him to kill a story.
ABC had advertised the Simpsonwood exposé, and its sudden cancellation disappointed an army of vaccine safety advocates and parents of injured children who deluged the network with a maelstrom of angry emails.
In response, ABC changed tack and publicly promised to air the piece. Instead, following a one-week delay, the network duplicitously aired a hastily assembled puff piece promoting vaccines and assuring listeners that mercury-laden vaccines were safe.
The new “bait and switch” segment precisely followed Pharma’s talking points. “I’m putting my faith in the Institute of Medicine,” ABC’s obsequious medical editor, Dr. Tim Johnson, declared in closing. Two pharmaceutical advertisements bracketed the story.
After that piece aired, I called Jake to complain. He neither answered nor returned my calls.
During the 16 intervening years, Pharma has returned Mr. Tapper’s favor by aggressively promoting his career. Pfizer shamelessly sponsors Tapper’s CNN news show, announcing its ownership of the space — and Mr. Tapper’s indentured servitude — before each episode with the loaded phrase: “Brought to you by Pfizer.”
Under the apparent terms of that sponsorship, CNN and Tapper provide Pfizer a platform to market its products and allow the drug company — a serial felon — to dictate content on CNN.
This arrangement has transformed CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper into a propaganda vehicle for Pharma and effectively reduced Mr. Tapper to the role of a drug rep — shamelessly promoting fear porn, confusion, and germophobia, and ushering his audience toward high-yield patent pharmaceuticals.
Tapper’s main thrust during the pandemic has been to promote levels of public terror sufficient to indemnify all the official lies against critical thinking.
All that Pharma money naturally requires that Mr. Tapper kowtow to Dr. Fauci, and the CNN host’s slavishness has helped make Tapper’s show the go-to pulpit for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director.
It’s a safe place for Dr. Fauci to hit all Jake’s reliable softballs out of the park.
“The bootlicking competition at CNN is pretty nauseating,” observed investigative journalist Celia Farber who has chronicled Dr. Fauci’s mismanagement at NIAID for more than 25 years. “It’s ruinous for both democracy and for public health.”
Another journalist has compared Tapper’s mortifying on-air servility toward Dr. Fauci to the adulation of a loyal and obedient canine. “It’s like a dog watching a chess match,” says former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson. “So much intensity and so little understanding.”
Tapper has gone two years without asking Dr. Fauci a single tough question. He has covered up Fauci’s involvement with Wuhan, suppressed news of vaccine injuries, gaslighted the injured, and defended every official orthodoxy on masks, lockdowns, social distancing, vaccines, remdesivir, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
He has never asked about the public health, mental health, and economic costs of lockdown, about the disproportionate burdens of Dr. Fauci’s policies on minorities, the working class and the global poor.
He has never asked Dr. Fauci to explain why countries and states that refused Dr. Fauci’s prescription have consistently experienced dramatically better health outcomes. For example, why are U.S. death rates 1,000x the death rates of African countries like Nigeria and Indian states that widely use hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin? Mr. Tapper simply never allows contrary views on his show.
He continues to extol COVID vaccines as a miracle technology that individuals can take four times and still both get and spread the illness.
“He never calls Dr. Fauci on his vacillating science-free pronouncements,” said Farber. “Dr. Fauci seems to be able to paralyze the curiosity features of Tapper’s brain.”
Tapper has to ask Dr. Fauci why, under his direction, America suffered the world’s highest body count. With 4.2% of the global population, our nation suffered 15% of COVID deaths.
Instead, he functions as high priest of every official orthodoxy, working to deify Dr. Fauci and anoint all his absurd, vacillating and contradictory pronouncements with papal infallibility. The sure way to earn Tapper’s indignation is to criticize Dr. Fauci.
Here are just a few examples of Mr. Tapper’s brazen deceptions:
On Feb. 2, 2021, Tapper “debunked” claims that baseball great Hank Aaron may have died from a COVID shot. The home run king submitted to a CDC-staged press conference 17 days earlier. Tapper assured his audience that the Fulton County coroner had determined Aaron to have died from “natural causes.”
When the Fulton County coroner subsequently denied ever having seen Aaron’s body, much less performed an autopsy, Tapper refused to correct his story.
In August 2021, Tapper gave Dr. Fauci a platform to spread the rumor that deluded Americans were poisoning themselves with a “horse medicine” called ivermectin.
In an Aug. 29, 2021 interview, Dr. Fauci told Tapper, “There’s no evidence whatsoever that that works, and it could potentially have toxicity… with people who have gone to poison control centers because they’ve taken the drug at a ridiculous dose and wind up getting sick. There’s no clinical evidence that indicates that this works.”
Tapper never corrected Dr. Fauci. He never pointed out that there were by then 70 peer-reviewed studies demonstrating ivermectin’s miraculous efficacy against COVID.
He didn’t dispute Dr. Fauci’s characterization of ivermectin as a horse medicine by noting that the drug had won both a Nobel Prize and WHO’s listing as an “essential medicine” for its miraculous efficacy against human illnesses, and that people have consumed billions of doses with no significant safety signals.
Mr. Tapper never thought to ask Dr. Fauci if he was trying to discourage use of a cheap, effective drug that might compete with his experimental vaccines.
Instead, Tapper abjectly parroted Dr. Fauci’s talking points: “Poison control centers are reporting that their calls are spiking in places like Mississippi and Oklahoma, because some Americans are trying to use an anti-parasite horse drug called ivermectin to treat coronavirus, to prevent contracting coronavirus.”
It mattered not to Tapper that both Mississippi and Oklahoma officials quickly denied that anyone in their state had been hospitalized for ivermectin poisoning. Tapper never corrected his false story.
On Sept. 14, 2021, Tapper obligingly gave Dr. Fauci a platform to dispute rapper Nicki Minaj’s worry that COVID vaccines may affect fertility. Dr. Fauci simply declared, “The answer to that, Jake, is a resounding no.”
As usual, Tapper did not ask Dr. Fauci to cite a study to support this assertion. He never pointed out to Dr. Fauci that all of the COVID vaccine manufacturers acknowledge that their products are not tested for effects on fertility, or that recent data has shown dramatic upticks in miscarriages and pre-eclampsia in vaccinated women.
Nevertheless, based upon Dr. Fauci’s word alone, CNN rushed on to defame and discredit the rapper and to assure the public that Minaj was wrong. Dr. Fauci, after all, had spoken!
It’s easy to see how two years of such obsequious deference emboldened Dr. Fauci in November 2021 to declare that “I represent science.”
There are too many other examples of Tapper’s uncritical promotion of government and pharma falsehoods to even summarize. These are not harmless lies. Each of them has potentially disastrous consequences for public health.
The term “psychological projection” describes the uncanny precision with which a certain sort of person applies the very pejoratives to others that most accurately depict their own shortcomings.
When Mr. Tapper calls me “unhinged,” a “menace to public health,” a “fraud,” a “liar,” is he falling victim to projection?
The critical functions of journalism in a democracy are to speak truth to power, relentlessly expose official corruption, and to forever maintain a posture of skepticism toward government and corporate power centers.
What Jake Tapper does is the opposite of journalism. Tapper, instead, aligns himself with power, and makes himself a propagandist for official narratives and a servile publicist for powerful elites and government technocrats.
No wonder his fury at those who challenge their narratives.
A LOT has been said about the psychological effects of Covid on the public. Worryingly, the management of an unpredictably mutating virus which is always one step ahead is fraying the composure of our leaders too.
In the last couple of weeks, Presidents Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron have lashed out at fellow citizens who defy government orders to be vaccinated because they doubt ‘the science’ is truly settled in favour of a jab which has not been subjected to the full range of tests for side-effects later in life.
Exasperated by resistance to their Covid dictates, the American and French leaders appear to be losing their minds and their manners in the battle between the risks of vaccination and the risk of becoming serious ill with the virus.
Biden, alarmed by the refusal of one third of Americans to be vaccinated while Omicron is on the loose – though it causes mainly flu-like symptoms – warned them at Christmas that they faced a ‘winter of death’. Not one person in the US is yet known to have died from the latest Covid variant.
‘We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated, for themselves and their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm,’ quoth the ancient prophet of doom at a White House briefing whose message was that the unjabbed are not just selfish, they endanger the lives of everyone else.
Biden fingered them officially as ‘bad persons’, an unwelcome term in America where being a good person is vital to many. Not unnaturally, his presentation was badly received, reinforcing as it did the political polarisation between Democrats and Republicans, whom the former accuse of being the main vaccination hold-outs.
People, including essential workers, are being fired across America for defying Biden’s vaccination mandates.
Macron went further this week in a newspaper interview, threatening to ‘emmerder les non-vaccinés jusqu’au bout’. A polite translation of this is that he intends to go after them hard until they give in.
Emmerder – literally, to smear with sh*t – is a commonly used expression and is offensive or not according to context. Macron deliberately used it at its rudest and got the reaction he hoped for.
A session of parliament to discuss the government’s introduction of an updated vaccination passport restricting the freedom of movement of the unvaccinated was suspended in uproar when members heard the explosion of Macron’s little bomb.
He changed the focus of the argument from the virus to his brutal language. It’s likely to be a talking point for his opponents during his campaign for re-election this spring.
The fashion for politicians insulting the people they rely on to elect them was set by President Obama referring to ‘bitter clingers’ and Hillary Clinton describing some Midwestern voters as ‘deplorables’. (Those bad persons again.)
Biden and Macron forgot that these remarks were never forgiven by their targets and in Clinton’s case helped her to lose the race for the presidency.
Boris Johnson has at least grasped that, after two years of unprecedented exposure to the arbitrary powers of government, it is politically counter-productive to strain people’s patience with constant loosening and re-tightening of a Covid regime unknown in free countries outside wartime.
What is shocking about Biden, Macron, Obama and Clinton is the openness of their contempt for the people they govern as if being in public office conferred on them a wisdom that separated them from the common voters rather than the duty to lead with their consent.
There is nothing in our democratic system, adversarial as it is, that entitles politicians to treat us angrily. How many people, hearing the Biden and Macron anathemas, rushed out with arms bared to the needle?
I was vaccinated promptly myself because the odds pushed me that way. But I understand the motives of those who see obligatory vaccination – along with a sustained media campaign to vilify them – as a step too far by an overbearing state.
The certitudes of government’s own scientific advisers are offset by the determination of so many health professionals – including my own GP – to refuse the vaccines. What right do political leaders, themselves scientifically uneducated, have to threaten doctors and nurses who have daily experience of how medical treatments work and which can be trusted?
‘My body my choice’, the battle cry that worked so well for supporters of abortion, is suddenly off the table when the principle doesn’t suit politicians.
Biden and Macron weren’t showing leadership. What they expressed was frustration that, with all their power, they cannot force obedience on free-thinking citizens and anger that they will be blamed for the consequences. Macron especially forgot that the way we speak to each other in public matters. If you abuse people, they remember.
The European (EEA and non-EEA countries) database of suspected drug reaction reports is EudraVigilance, verified by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), and they are now reporting 36,257 fatalities, and 3,244,052 injuries following injections of four experimental COVID-19 shots:
From the total of injuries recorded, almost half of them (1,540,852) are serious injuries.
“Seriousness provides information on the suspected undesirable effect; it can be classified as ‘serious’ if it corresponds to a medical occurrence that results in death, is life-threatening, requires inpatient hospitalisation, results in another medically important condition, or prolongation of existing hospitalisation, results in persistent or significant disability or incapacity, or is a congenital anomaly/birth defect.”
A Health Impact News subscriber in Europe ran the reports for each of the four COVID-19 shots we are including here. It is a lot of work to tabulate each reaction with injuries and fatalities, since there is no place on the EudraVigilance system we have found that tabulates all the results.
Since we have started publishing this, others from Europe have also calculated the numbers and confirmed the totals.*
Here is the summary data through January 1, 2022.
Total reactions for the mRNA vaccine Tozinameran (code BNT162b2, Comirnaty) from BioNTech/ Pfizer: 16,471 deaths and 1,546,829 injuries to 01/01/2022
42,225 Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 230 deaths
50,455 Cardiac disorders incl. 2,379 deaths
467 Congenital, familial and genetic disorders incl. 45 deaths
20,812 Ear and labyrinth disorders incl. 11 deaths
293,748 General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 1,740 deaths
1,004 Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 66 deaths
5,228 Immune system disorders incl. 35 deaths
36,265 Infections and infestations incl. 564 deaths
13,023 Injury poisoning and procedural complications incl. 188 deaths
24,589 Investigations incl. 191 deaths
12,747 Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 113 deaths
164,732 Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 144 deaths
704 Neoplasms benign malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 34 deaths
228,601 Nervous system disorders incl. 1,095 deaths
586 Pregnancy puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 19 deaths
194 Product issues incl. 1 death
20,622 Psychiatric disorders incl. 65 deaths
4,226 Renal and urinary disorders incl. 71 deaths
16,282 Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 3 deaths
40,154 Respiratory thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 963 deaths
50,986 Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 59 deaths
1,581 Social circumstances incl. 6 deaths
1,686 Surgical and medical procedures incl. 28 deaths
28,023 Vascular disorders incl. 497 deaths
Total reactions for the COVID-19 vaccine JANSSEN (AD26.COV2.S) from Johnson & Johnson: 2,245 deaths and 114,229 injuries to 01/01/2022
1,113 Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 46 deaths
2,196 Cardiac disorders incl. 186 deaths
40 Congenital, familial and genetic disorders incl. 1 death
1,227 Ear and labyrinth disorders incl. 3 deaths
93 Endocrine disorders incl. 1 death
1,548 Eye disorders incl. 9 deaths
9,141 Gastrointestinal disorders incl. 87 deaths
30,336 General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 623 deaths
143 Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 13 deaths
509 Immune system disorders incl. 10 deaths
5,832 Infections and infestations incl. 187 deaths
1,060 Injury, poisoning and procedural complications incl. 23 deaths
5,197 Investigations incl. 126 deaths
709 Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 55 deaths
16,069 Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 50 deaths
80 Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 8 deaths
21,863 Nervous system disorders incl. 234 deaths
52 Pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 1 death
29 Product issues
1,627 Psychiatric disorders incl. 21 deaths
485 Renal and urinary disorders incl. 29 deaths
2,625 Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 6 deaths
4,115 Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 283 deaths
3,506 Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 10 deaths
372 Social circumstances incl. 4 deaths
785 Surgical and medical procedures incl. 69 deaths
3,477 Vascular disorders incl. 160 deaths
*These totals are estimates based on reports submitted to EudraVigilance. Totals may be much higher based on percentage of adverse reactions that are reported. Some of these reports may also be reported to the individual country’s adverse reaction databases, such as the U.S. VAERS database and the UK Yellow Card system. The fatalities are grouped by symptoms, and some fatalities may have resulted from multiple symptoms.
The Government on Wednesday published the evidence informing its recent controversial decision to recommend all secondary school pupils wear face masks in classrooms.
The new document from the Department for Education (DfE) explains that the decision “has been taken on the recommendation of UKHSA and is based on a range of evidence”. It says the Government has “balanced education and public health considerations, including the benefits in managing infection and transmission, against any educational and wider health and wellbeing impacts from the recommended use of face coverings”.
While conceding that the “direct COVID-19 health risks to children and young people are very low” – and rejecting SAGE’s advice to recommend masks in primary school classrooms (yes, really) – it claims that “the balance of risks for secondary classrooms has changed at this point in time, in accordance with the evolving evidence and the phase of the pandemic”.
The document summarises its evidence as follows:
Face coverings can be effective in contributing to reducing transmission of COVID-19 in public and community settings. This is informed by a range of research, including randomised control trials, contact tracing studies, and observational studies – assessed most recently by UKHSA, described in a review conducted in November 2021. The review’s conclusions were broadly in line with those of a previous Public Health England review; however, the addition of randomised control trials and substantially more individual-level observational studies increases the strength of the conclusions and strengthens the evidence for the effectiveness of face coverings in reducing the spread of COVID-19 in the community, through source control, wearer protection, and universal masking.
In fact, though, the UKHSA review from November 2021 found no high quality studies (except, it claims, the ONS study, which really isn’t high quality). Of the two randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that have been done and which were cited by the UKHSA, the one from Denmark found no statistically significant reduction in COVID-19 incidence from surgical masks (the study didn’t look at cloth masks) while the Bangladesh mask study found no benefit from cloth masks and the reported benefit from surgical masks was just 11%, with a 95% confidence interval that included zero. The UKHSA review also considered 23 observational studies, which it said had “mixed” results and many of which were of low quality and small.
This does not seem a strong basis to claim a large effect for mask wearing. A recent more comprehensive review (which included earlier evidence for other flu-like viruses) by Ian Liu, Vinay Prasad and Jonathan Darrow for the Cato Institute, entitled “Evidence for Community Cloth Face Masking to Limit the Spread of SARS‐CoV‑2: A Critical Review“, concluded that: “More than a century after the 1918 influenza pandemic, examination of the efficacy of masks has produced a large volume of mostly low- to moderate-quality evidence that has largely failed to demonstrate their value in most settings.”
That is a better summary of the evidence than the DfE managed.
Needless to say, the DfE gives the propaganda value of masking a nod: “It can be a visible outward signal of safety behaviour and a reminder of COVID-19 risks.”
Notably, there is no mention in this document of the potential harms of wearing a mask for an extended period, such as the impact on breathing, the heart, or the skin. Contamination gets a brief mention, though it’s quickly dismissed:
Face masks and coverings will become highly contaminated with upper respiratory tract and skin micro-organisms. Disposal of single-use face coverings could theoretically pose a risk of transmission for inappropriately discarded face coverings, but it is very likely that the reduction in transmission risk due to reduced droplet and aerosol emissions from wearing a face covering significantly outweighs any potential for enhanced risk of transmission through inadvertent contact with a contaminated face covering. This is likely to hold regardless of duration that the face covering is used.
The reference provided for these claims is a SAGE document from September 2020, “Duration of Wearing of Face Coverings.” This is an interesting document, but it can scarcely be said to support the claims the DfE is making. On harms from masks, for example, it says:
Neither surgical masks nor face coverings are designed for use for extended periods. Wearing a face covering for an extended period can maintain a higher moisture level around the face which can be uncomfortable for some people and may increase the likelihood of skin complaints. Masks will become highly contaminated with upper respiratory tract and skin micro-organisms. A review of the downsides of face masks and face coverings (by Bakhit et al) found 20 studies reporting irritation and discomfort from using masks. Participants in studies with surgical or cloth masks reported difficulty breathing (12%-34%), facial irritation and discomfort (11-35%). More serious symptoms of headache, acne, rashes were associated with use of N95 and goggles. A study among healthcare workers (by Han et al) associates acne with extended duration of wearing. …
In a clinical study of extended wearing (by Chughtai et al), 124/148 participants reported at least one problem associated with mask use including pressure on face, breathing difficulty, discomfort, trouble communicating with the patient and headache. …
Measurements of heart rate during activity (by Li et al) showed significantly lower rates with a surgical mask compared to N95. In a study (by Fikenzer et al) of healthy young male volunteers surgical masks and FFP2/N95 respirators, both had a significantly marked negative impact on pulmonary capacity (FEV, PEV and PEF) while wearing the mask (with a spirometry mask) during exercise.
The DfE document omits to mention any of these issues. It does, however, include some recognition of the negative impact on education. It mentions a survey conducted by the Department in March 2021 that found “80% of pupils reported that wearing a face covering made it difficult to communicate, and more than half felt wearing one made learning more difficult (55%)”. It also mentions a DfE survey from April 2021 that found “almost all secondary leaders and teachers (94%) thought that wearing face coverings has made communication between teachers and students more difficult, with 59% saying it has made it a lot more difficult”. It adds:
Research into the effect of mask wearing on communication has found that concealing a speaker’s lips led to lower performance, lower confidence scores, and increased perceived effort on the part of the listener. Moreover, meta-cognitive monitoring was worse when listening in these conditions compared with listening to an unmasked talker. A survey of impacts on communication with mask wearing in adults reported that face coverings negatively impact hearing, understanding, engagement, and feelings of connection with the speaker. People with hearing loss were impacted more than those without hearing loss. The inability to see facial expressions and to read lips have a major impact on speech understanding for those with hearing impairments. The worse the hearing, the greater the impact of the mask.
What about the evidence for the claims the document does make – that it is “very likely” that the transmission reduction from wearing a mask “significantly outweighs any potential for enhanced risk of transmission through inadvertent contact with a contaminated face covering” and that “this is likely to hold regardless of duration that the face covering is used”. This is what the cited SAGE document says:
There is a lack of good evidence relating to the wearing of face coverings, with very little data relating to duration of wearing. In particular we suggest that the following aspects would benefit from further research:
• Effectiveness of face coverings as a source control after longer duration wearing, including analysis of the influence of moisture on the performance of different types of face coverings.
• Analysis of the potential risk of transmission due to contaminated face coverings (during and after removal).
• Assessment of the prevalence of skin complaints associated with face coverings, including an understanding of the factors that contribute and potential mitigation.
• Analysis of user acceptability of face coverings for long duration use in different settings.
In other words, there was no good evidence on the things the DfE is claiming are “likely” or “very likely”, or on much else really.
The DfE also carried out its own analysis of the impact of masks in schools.
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not. The preliminary findings demonstrate a potential positive effect in reducing pupil absence due to COVID-19.
What did it find? It found that COVID-19 absences fell by 0.6% more (absolute reduction) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2-3-week period, which amounts to an 11% relative reduction.
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on October 1st 2021 to 3.6% in the third week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on October 1st 2021 to 3.0% in the third week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2-3-week period.
However, the study had numerous limitations, which made the finding a “non-statistical and unknown clinical significant” reduction, i.e., it may just be chance.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
Therefore, further work should be done to extend the analysis in terms of scope: for example, looking at different statistical methodologies, capturing different and longer treatment time periods and controlling for a wider number of school and local area variables to ensure this is a consistent finding.
The statistical uncertainty around the result was such that the 95% confidence interval for the effect size included zero (note in the below the upper CI is positive).
What’s more, the control group of 1,192 schools that didn’t use masks were very different to the 123 treatment schools which did, so that the above findings only emerged after significant weighting was added to the control group schools using a process the document calls “entropy balancing”.
Exploration of the data showed that the control and treatment group had differing characteristics, so weights for the control group schools were calculated using entropy balancing.
Prior to this weighting, the non-mask schools actually had lower average absence rates throughout the study period – though the treatment schools reduced more from their higher starting point.
Prior to weighting, the mean absence rate of the control group increases across the treatment period, whereas the mean absence rate of the treatment group decreases. However, the absence rates in the control group remain lower overall than those in the treatment group.
All-in-all, not exactly robust, compelling evidence of the benefits of masking, particularly given all the well-documented harms, which the document itself either sets out or cites other documents which do.
The document at one point hints at what I suspect is the real reason masks were brought back into classrooms: “In a Unison survey of support staff, 71% said face coverings in secondary school classrooms are an important safety measure.” Conservative MP Jonathan Gullis wrote in the Times this week that: “Face masks have been a central demand of teaching unions.” Sounds vey much like politics rather than science to me. (See this recent Daily Sceptic article by Ben Irvine on the role the teaching unions played in forcing the Government to lockdown in March 2020.)
When are we going to stop harming our young people with pointless interventions to deal with a virus that poses no threat to them and let them live normal lives again?
Stop Press: Oxford Professor of Evidence Based Medicine Carl Heneghan tells Julia Hartley-Brewer he is unimpressed by the Government’s “evidence” for masking in classrooms.
Education secretary Nadhim Zahawi has published the "evidence" for pupils wearing face masks in schools.
Professor of Evidence Based Medicine Carl Heneghan says the study is "not fit for purpose" and actually shows evidence for NOT wearing masks.@JuliaHB1 | @carlheneghanpic.twitter.com/OhqK0a9nUJ
The pro-drug industry mainstream media are insanely positive over the newly FDA approved Pfizer antiviral COVID treatment pills.
The drug, Paxlovid, received an emergency use authorization by FDA for use in patients 12 years old and up who have tested positive for COVID-19 and are at high risk.
Now is the time to speak calmly and accurately about Paxlovid. First, everyone should appreciate that there was very little testing of the short- and long-term safety of this product, exactly what happened with COVID vaccines.
Really good testing of a new drug should take many months or even years.
All you get is positive news for this new drug – actually a combination of drugs.
Here are brief summary statements about this new product:
It was approved by the FDA without any external meetings, serious reviews of test data or opportunity for public input. Pretty much all the regulatory work was done behind closed doors.
Terrific for Pfizer. Bad for the public.
Of importance, note that in the trials only 21 percent of people had a comorbidity, while in reality 94 percent of COVID deaths have at least one comorbidity, and the average number of underlying medical conditions is four.
As to antiviral science, protease enzymes must be present for the virus to successfully infect by completing the cycle before taking the cell over. Paxlovid or any drug classified as a ‘Protease Inhibitor’ will inhibit or decrease the protease enzyme interfering with the virus.
Paxlovid blocks the 3CLPro protease from chopping up the long protein into pieces. The virus can’t separate out which pieces to cut out and assemble. It can’t make copies of itself. The covid infection quickly stops.
Contrary to what the government says, Ivermectin is the most successful and proven protease inhibitor in use worldwide. Just as with Paxlovid, ivermectin decreases the protease enzyme but… there are benefits of ivermectin in covid treatment that are not present in Paxlovid.
Additional actions of ivermectin include anti-coagulant action and anti-inflammatory actions, both observed in covid infections. And IVM has been safely used for decades and there have been many medical studies as well as clinical results showing its antiviral and anti-inflammatory effectiveness.
Paxlovid requires combination with an HIV/AIDS drug, Ritonavir, preventing the breakdown of the Paxlovid so it may inhibit or decrease the enzyme interrupting the viral life cycle. Ritonavir acts as a booster for Paxlovid, keeping it active inside a person’s body. Ritonavir also has its own black box warning and side effects include life-threatening liver, pancreas and heart issues.
Does the public really want to take an HIV/AIDS drug?
A course of the treatment is 20 Paxlovid pills and 10 ritonavir pills taken over five days. Taking 6 pills daily can pose challenges for many elderly people in particular.
According to Pfizer’s press release, for people with proven COVID infection, Paxlovid reduces hospitalization/death by 89 percent when taken within three days of symptom onset. So in the treatment group there were 5 of 697 hospitalized with no deaths compared to 44/682 hospitalized with 9 subsequent deaths.
Think about that statement of taking this drug combo within three days of symptom onset. Here are critical problems facing ordinary people:
How can you accurately identify COVID symptoms from similar symptoms from the flu or a bad cold;
How can you get a fast test; how can you get in touch with your doctor within just a day or two and decide whether you really have COVID (don’t have drug interactions) and if so get a prescription; how can you get the prescription filled quickly?
None of these are easy to address and overcome. All this makes this new combo medicine unrealistic and impractical for nearly everyone.
Also reported was an approximate 10-fold decrease in viral load at day 5, relative to placebo, indicating robust activity against SARS-CoV-2 and representing (supposedly) the strongest viral load reduction reported to date for a COVID-19 oral antiviral agent.
How interesting it would have been to test the Pfizer drug against an ivermectin protocol.
For example, how does the Pfizer drug compare with the Dr. George Fareed and Dr. Brian Tyson protocol? Well, Fareed and Tyson had many more patients (about 7,000) taking the drug combo and yet they had fewer hospitalizations (4) and the same number of deaths (0).
So, you’re way better off with the Fareed and Tyson protocol. And the safety protocol of IVM after billions of uses globally is far better proven than for the Pfizer product.
For a good discussion on how IVM compares to Paxlovid see this article. Especially on scientific evidence of ivermectin’s ability to block 3CL protease.
In terms of safety, the most common side effects reported during treatment and up to 34 days after the last dose of Paxlovid were dysgeusia (taste disturbance), diarrhea and vomiting. But what more serious side effects may turn up months or years later?
Paxlovid must not be used with certain other medicines, either because due to its action it may lead to harmful increases in their blood levels, or because conversely some medicines may reduce the activity of Paxlovid itself. The list of medicines that must not be used with Paxlovid is included in the proposed conditions for use.
That list includes a very large number of drugs and supplements used by many millions of people, including, for example, Lipitor and St. John’s Wort. Paxlovid must also not be used in patients with severely reduced kidney or liver function.
Paxlovid is not recommended during pregnancy and in people who can become pregnant and who are not using contraception. Breastfeeding should be interrupted during treatment. These recommendations are because laboratory studies in animals suggest that high doses of Paxlovid may impact the growth of the fetus.
As to availability, Pfizer CEO Bourla recently said the company can manufacture 80 million courses in 2022, with 30 million available in the first half of the year. That is not enough to serve many millions of Americans coming down with symptoms and a positive test result.
This too was said, tens of thousands of the pills will ship in the US before the end of 2021 and hundreds of thousands more are expected at the beginning of 2022, a Pfizer spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal. The US government is paying Pfizer $5.3 billion for 10 million treatment courses that will be delivered by the end of next year, according to the paper. Will medical insurance cover $530 per course?
Always follow the money. A month ago, SVB Leerink analyst Geoffrey Porges projected the drug will generate $24.2 billion in 2022 sales. Together with the company’s megablockbuster COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer could be looking at $50 billion in peak pandemic vaccine and drug sales, Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Louise Chen wrote earlier this month.
No surprise that some top Pfizer executives have become billionaires.
Do you want to do what is right for you, or terrific for Pfizer?
If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
If you scoff at the notion that the US, a republic founded on principles of freedom and democracy, has morphed into a world empire, perpetrating assassinations, coups d’état, acts of terror and illegal warfare . . .
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USA: The Ruthless Empire, by Swiss historian and peace researcher Daniele Ganser, is the newly published English language translation of his book Imperium USA, originally written in German and published in 2020. Here is a summary of key points — including some lesser-known ones — along with remedies for a more peaceful future, that are covered in the book. … continue
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