Arctic River Discharge Growing
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | November 30, 2021
AMHERST, Mass. — A civil and environmental engineering researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has, for the first time, assimilated satellite information into on-site river measurements and hydrologic models to calculate the past 35 years of river discharge in the entire pan-Arctic region. The research reveals, with unprecedented accuracy, that the acceleration of water pouring into the Arctic Ocean could be three times higher than previously thought.
The publicly available study, published recently in Nature Communications, is the result of three years of intensive work by research assistant professor Dongmei Feng, the first and corresponding author on the paper. The unprecedented research assimilates 9.18 million river discharge estimates made from 155,710 orbital satellite images into hydrologic model simulations of 486,493 Arctic river reaches from 1984-2018. The project and the paper are called RADR (Remotely-sensed Arctic Discharge Reanalysis) and was funded by NASA and National Science Foundation programs for early career researchers.
https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/809497
The key thing about this study is not that river flows are greater than previously estimated, but that they have increased over the period of the study, 1984-2018:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27228-1
This is significant because it means the Arctic Ocean is gradually becoming fresher. Exactly the same phenomenon occurred during what was called The Great Salinity Anomaly, GSA, which began in the 1960s. As Dickson & Osterhus described in their study, One Hundred Years in the Norwegian Sea in 2007:

Though other factors were involved in the freshening of the Arctic Ocean, such as the NAO, the GSA marked a dramatic shift in the Arctic climate, putting an end to what is known as the Warming of the North between 1920 and 1960 and bringing a much colder era.
Part of the reason for this is the fact that freshwater freezes at higher temperatures than salty water, leading to an increase in sea ice. The GSA is also known to have slowed down the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC).
HH Lamb also wrote about it, particularly how the GSA was triggered by greater run off from rivers in Canada flowing into the Arctic:

HH Lamb: Climate, History & The Modern World
And a Russian study by Viktor Kuzin shows that 11% of the world’s river water flows into the Arctic, a considerable amount.


Source
A milder Arctic tends to be a wetter one, but a wetter climate leads to freshening of the ocean and a return to colder conditions. In other words, it is cyclical.
All of this reinforces the likelihood that the Arctic will become much colder, with sea ice expanding again in the not too distant future.
November 30, 2021 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Canada, Russia, United States | Leave a comment
Global Sea Ice Area
By Zoe Phin | November 28, 2021
According to many sources (including National Snow and Ice Data Center), global sea ice has been drastically decreasing for a long time. Today I will show you a very legitimate source that will have you question this fact. The data comes from NASA, specifically here, or here. The relevant data variable is called FRSEAICE.
I analyzed monthly data over exactly 40 years, from 1982/10 to 2021/09. Here is my result:

Linear Regression Trend: From 0.03625 To 0.03631 is +0.171%
The “Sea Ice Area Fraction” is a proportion of the entire Earth’s surface that is ice over water. As you can see, about 3.6% (on average) of our planet’s area is covered in ice over water. In the last 40 years, ice over water has INCREASED, and not decreased, as popularly claimed.
The observed increase of 0.00006 is equivalent to ~30,600 km², roughly the size of Belgium.
Now let’s break it down by hemisphere:

Northern Hemisphere
Linear Regression Trend: From 0.04039 To 0.03405 is -15.707%

Southern Hemisphere
Linear Regression Trend: From 0.03214 To 0.03855 is +19.947%
The large loss in sea ice in the northern hemisphere is more than made up for in a larger gain in sea ice in the southern hemisphere.
November 30, 2021 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment
Coral and the Great Global Warming Lie
By Luke Perry • The Daily Sceptic • November 30, 2021
Corals occupy an exalted place in the climate tablets of doom. These photogenic little critters find themselves on the science obit pages on an almost daily basis. In fact, their demise has been grossly exaggerated for political purposes. There may not be too much certitude in climate projections, but at least we can hang our hat on one scientific prediction – the little fellows will be around for another 500 million years.
Their demise of course is projected from the bleaching that occurs when they expel symbiotic algae in reaction to sudden changes in water temperature. The changes occur due to natural weather oscillations, often around the El Nino event. These occur on a regular basis and once localised conditions have been stabilised, the coral usually recovers. Tropical coral grows in temperatures between 24C and 32C and sometimes grows quicker in warmer waters. Cold water coral is also abundant and grows in latitudes up to 65 degrees above and below the equator, often in deep water and at temperatures as low as 4C. The one event all this coral is unlikely to be affected by is climate warming, or cooling, which occurs over a much longer period.
The mythology around Corals represent one of the more obvious misinterpretations of data that seek to suggest local and temporary weather-related events are connected to long term changes in the climate. Needless to say, there is not a scintilla of scientific proof to make the connection in the case of coral. Professor Peter Ridd, an authority on the Great Barrier Reef who has spent 40 years observing it, noted recently that the reef was in “robust health”. Coral growth rates have, if anything, “increased over the last 100 years”. Fired from his post in 2018 at James Cook University in Queensland for “uncollegial” activities, i.e., questioning global warming dogma, Professor Ridd went on to note that “somehow, our science organisations have convinced the world that the reef is on its last leg”. The BBC rarely needs much convincing of coral catastrophe: “Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has lost more than half of its corals since 1995 due to warmer seas driven by climate change”, it reported in October 2020.
Of course, corals need environmental protection. It is not a good idea to drench them in untreated sewage, smash up their habitat with reckless fishing, dump litter on them or douse them with toxic chemicals. But these are mundane planet-keeping measures, nothing like as exciting as ‘save the world’ political posturing in aid of the net zero project.
Corals are the second most successful animal on the planet after their close cnidarian cousin the jellyfish. They have been around for 500 million years (reef building ones for 400 million) having survived five major extinction events including the Permian-Triassic Event, which wiped out 96% of marine life. They have survived C02 levels as high as 2,240 parts per million (ppm) in the Ordovician period, to the more modest 400 ppm we know today. During their time on Earth they have survived massive temperature changes such as the Permian period when global temperatures rose by around 10C and the Ordovician period when they dropped by 8C. And of course they are happy to live almost anywhere. Even in Scotland, where the Darwin Mound remained untouched by the recent massive expulsion of greenhouse gases by the COP26 private jets.
Corals, like polar bears (numbers rising nicely), are just too valuable a propaganda tool for the climate change and net zero green zealots to relinquish. Too pretty. It was surely not a coincidence that in the run up to COP26, one of Prince William’s £1 million Earthshot gifts was handed out to a small Bahamian company called Coral Vita that says it grows coral to replant in the ocean. How did coral survive so long just left to its own evolutionary devises? But thanks to this company’s good offices, you can now “sponsor” or “gift” a coral, gaining “discount codes for our Coral Vita shop”.
The second danger to corals, it is suggested, is posed by higher levels of CO2 dissolved in the ocean. This is often said to make the ocean more acidic, although the correct scientific term is less alkaline. The ‘acid’ will then attack the calcium carbonate skeletons of the corals, it is said.
It is possible to plot average temperatures and atmospheric levels of CO2 over the last 600 million years since complex life began to evolve. Temperatures vary greatly, as do CO2 levels, although the latter have trended downwards to our current low point. It would take a much larger brain than your correspondent possesses to make any connection between the two, although it may not be beyond the ability of a number of self-identifying IPCC scientists. Compared to the geological record, current CO2 levels are very low – some scientists even suggest dangerously low – and temperatures could do with being a little warmer. Corals, as has been observed, have put up with huge variations in temperatures and CO2 levels in the past.
In 2015 the noted physicists Dr. Roger Cohen and Professor William Happer of Princeton wrote a short note looking at ocean ph. They found that doubling atmospheric CO2 from 400 to 800 ppm only decreases the ph of ocean water from about 8.2 to 7.9. They went on to note: “This is well within the day-night fluctuations that already occur because of photosynthesis by plankton and less than the ph decreases with depth that occur because of the biological pump and the dissolution of carbonate precipitates below the lysocline.”
The scientists noted that “scare stories about dissolving carbonate shells are nonsense”. Regarding their own paper, the authors concluded: “This minimalist discussion already shows how hard it is to scare informed people with ocean acidification, but, alas, many people are not informed.”
November 30, 2021 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment
Northern New England Defies Brandon
el gato malo – bad cattitude – november 30, 2021
the essence of science and scientific credibility is generating a hypothesis, making forward predictions about outcomes, and then testing them to see if you got it right.
it’s really little more than that, but it’s also certainly nothing less.
so let’s take a look at this set of hypotheses and predictions made by the president on august 3rd 2021.

attribution was crystal clear.

so, let’s see how he did on this claim:

maine is 90% 12 and up vaxxed and more than 99% of the over 65’s . yet it has seen has seen record cases, record hospitalizations and near record deaths despite being nowhere near wheat is usually peak season. that won’t be for 4-6 weeks.
compared to this date last year, hospitalizations are 85% higher.
the lion’s share of hospitalizations are in 70+ with many of the rest in 60-69. this is a 99%+ vaccinated demographic.

this is NOT a pandemic of the unvaxxed. 70+ already set new highs at 99% vaxxed vs last year’s peak when 0% were DESPITE more natural immunity as well.
new hampshire looks the same. and it’s similarly 4-6 weeks from peak season. 98% of 12 and over vaxxed. 99%+ of over 65’s.

compared to this date last year, hospitalizations are 133% higher.

maybe vermont is better? nope. 94% of over 12’s vaxxed, 99%+ of over 65’s.

compared to this date last year, hospitalizations are 214% higher.

they have all exploded since biden’s claims (made right at about seasonal nadir) and all have vastly exceeded last year at this time. on cases and hospitalization, all have already exceeded last year’s PEAKS (though cases may be affected by testing rates and i have not run the math).
all are 4-6 weeks from what is usually the seasonal peak and just coming into what was the steep ramp last year.
clearly, brandon was trying to pass off seasonality as vaccine efficacy.
this prediction of a “clear link” between vaccines and lower rates and lower severity looks to have failed utterly.
there is simply no other way to put it.
it was just a cross correlation of vaccine rates and latitude.
seasons shifted, and so did covid expression. and vaccines seem to have done little or nothing to stop it.
just like certain internet felines hypothesized.
bad cattitudewinter is coming, and the vaccine narrative is about to shiftcovid is a highly seasonal disease and that seasonality varies by region. this has been obvious for over a year and i and many others have laid out graph upon graph proving it. that’s what makes claims like this so wonderfully disingenuous: she’s just mistaking seasonality for vaccine efficacy…2 months ago · 195 likes · 171 comments · el gato malo
meanwhile, covid has dropped to the lowest rates since data collection began in the southern states biden and others were so anxious to pillory.

this has been an utter shambles of misinformation and misleading claims coming from DC. the fact that the white house is still getting this astonishingly wrong when the data is so clear that even internet DOGS much less cats are nailing it is inexcusable.
this is either such rank incompetence or such towering mendacity as to disqualify those promulgating it from any future epidemiological utterances, much less determinations on what constitutes disinformation.
November 30, 2021 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, Joe Biden, United States | Leave a comment
Free homeschool guide to Arctic sea ice ecology
By Susan Crockford | Polar Bear Science | November 28, 2021
I have put together a Arctic Sea Ice Ecosystem Teaching Guide for homeschooling Arctic sea ice ecology at the middle school level (grade 5-8; ages 10-13) meant to complement my two books, Polar Bear Facts & Myths and Walrus Facts & Myths and supplement your local school board curriculum.
You’ll find critical facts about the amazing creatures that inhabit the Arctic sea ice, links to trust-worthy online sites with additional information, suggested exercises, and links to fascinating videos like this one that aren’t filled with doom-mongering about the future.
The printable pdf booklet is free to download here. However, if you find it useful and can afford to do so, please consider a small donation (I suggest $6.00) at the ‘donate’ button).
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November 30, 2021 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | Leave a comment
Sinister seizing of the unjabbed Aborigines
By Paul Collits | TCW Defending Freedom | November 29, 2021
THE Northern Territory of Australia often produces a vague sense of unease due to its climate, desert landscape, remoteness and isolation. You wouldn’t venture far off the main highways. The Territory is also a focal point for the culture wars in view of its large indigenous population, who generally live in remote communities in often abhorrent circumstances. Despite two centuries of policy failure there has been little evidence of new thinking in the centres of power. And, given the poor health generally– putting it very mildly – of the resident Aborigines, and their seeming caution in taking the Covid jab, it is a powder keg.
Now a story has emerged that links the two issues of Aboriginal affairs and Covid elimination. It is not pretty, and it comes while Europe is awash with Covid developments that are, not to put too fine a point on it, redolent of the Third Reich. Jonathan Sumption has touched on these ‘dangerous precedents’ as the ‘first symptom of totalitarianism’:
‘Across Europe, basic norms of civilised society are giving way to panic. The unvaccinated are being excluded from an ever-wider range of basic rights. Austria has criminalised them. Italy has stopped them doing their jobs. The Dutch police have fired on anti-lockdown demonstrators, seriously injuring some of them. We are witnessing the ultimate folly of frightened politicians who cannot accept that they are impotent in the face of some natural phenomena.
‘If lockdowns, forced closures of businesses and other brutal countermeasures work, then why are these countries on their fifth wave of the pandemic and their third or fourth lockdown? How long must this go on before we recognise that these measures simply push infections into the period after they are lifted?’
There is a broad sense that something is about to give. So, not a good week to be caught shipping the unvaccinated off to a Covid camp down under.
This is a story delivered not just by the fringe media but by the Territory’s Chief Minister, Michael Gunner.
After nine new Covid-19 cases were identified in the community of Binjari, it was reported that the Australian army forcibly removed 38 residents said to be ‘close contacts’ to the Howard Springs quarantine camp in Darwin, which I wrote about in TCW Defending Freedom in September (Australia’s Covid concentration camps). Gunner said: ‘Residents of Binjari and [the nearby community of] Rockhole no longer have the five reasons to leave their homes,’ referring to Australia’s five allowable excuses to avoid lockdown (buying food and supplies, exercising for up to two hours, care or caregiving, work or education if it can’t be done from home, and to get vaccinated). He said it was ‘highly likely’ that more residents would be transferred to Howard Springs.
This is a truly astonishing development, even by bizarre Covid policy standards. Very few cases have occurred on Gunner’s patch since March 2020 and the latest piece of policy overreach is in response merely to ‘close contacts’. We do not yet know whether any of those removed are even sick.
Gunner’s now infamous rant against the anti-vaxxers is world class among elected politicians. His enforced removal of the unvaccinated to a holding camp is a global first, as far as I am aware. Australia continues to break new ground.
As a Labor man, Gunner is a partisan brother of the Premiers of Queensland, Western Australia and of Victoria. Daniel Andrews of Victoria needs little introduction. Not a lot more can be said of the Victorian Covid regime, it would seem, that hasn’t already been said and that could possibly add to the public’s understanding of the raving lunatic down south. Western Australia decided long ago in effect to secede and to impose border closures and lockdowns on less than a whim.
Of Queensland, it has recently been observed that there is no Covid crisis yet there are bizarre plans for imminent vaccine passports to be introduced in high summer (December 17, to be precise), following on from months of inexplicable, hard border closures.
Then there is the recent and chilling development of a contract being awarded to build Queensland’s second dedicated Covid quarantine camp next door to Brisbane Airport. One observer has wondered why this ‘facility’ would require double electric fencing, and whether its purposes might one day include accommodation for the removed-and-unvaccinated as well as for incoming travellers slated for more routine and short-term stays.
Also in the recent news is the descent upon the far north outback Queensland town of Charter Towers by the military police, who are now apparently stopping travellers and locals and demanding their papers.
The alt-news reports that the Australian Army, with no published explanation, is booking out hotel chains for the summer on the Gold Coast. (This story has no independent corroboration to date.)
It was then of little surprise that the head of the Australian Medical Association in Queensland had this to say: ‘Life will be miserable without being vaccinated. You won’t be able to hide. There will be no employment. We will be tracking you. You won’t be able to go anywhere.’
Can anyone see a pattern emerging here?
But back to the Northern Territory and its current travails. Just like the unvaccinated Queenslanders, the First Australians in the Territory have no place to hide, however remote they might be.
There is no confirmation yet of whether any force accompanied the removal of unvaccinated First Australians from the two communities, but a Darwin Aboriginal elder has shared her distress. Judy Mills said on a video that Northern Territory Aborigines are being dragged out of their communities by the army and police, taken to health centres and forcibly inoculated.
She called Michael Gunner a ‘coward who is deceiving and killing our people’ and accused the administration of a genocide of ‘blackfellas’.
In another video posted on social media, a community member said there were reports of police rounding people up, taking them to a clinic and forcibly vaccinating them; food supplies were being withheld from families and Territory child welfare services were ‘waiting like vultures’ to grab children. She said the government had taken control of communications from these remote communities and it was difficult to confirm information. ‘There’s a state of emergency here. I’m putting out a cry for help to the world,’ she said.
These are incendiary claims. To call this a brazen move by the Northern Territory Government would be to understate considerably the utter gall of the latest push. Messing with Territory Aborigines is normally a no-go area, with every move on the part of politicians needing to be backed by visible community buy-in, painstakingly sought and obtained. That this can be done – with, apparently, not only the knowledge of our perpetually slithering Prime Minister but also with his blessing and, indeed, his resources – is a measure of how far we in Australia have travelled down the road towards totalitarian control.
And totalitarian control that has, by and large, received a pass from the citizenry. There is, now, precious little second-guessing of the political class and its more rampant actions in relation to the virus by that middle go-along-to-get-along group that sits between the rabid Covid class and we-the-non-conforming Covid dissidents and outcasts. This is the group, probably quite substantial, that was unkindly but not inaccurately described by a retired Federal Court Judge as being satisfied so long as they have ‘Netflix, a full belly and a warm place to defecate’. Concern for the rights of fellow Australians, now including indigenous fellow Australians, is not likely to be a priority.
It would be interesting to see the reactions of white Australians, especially those on the Left who are forever championing the interest of remote communities. I say ‘would’ as I am yet to find this story even mentioned in the Australian mainstream media.
Given that indigenous affairs are a core issue in the culture wars and an obsession in the Left-of-centre media, the absence of comment to date is both noteworthy and odd. I am guessing they just don’t know what to think or to say about this. Many, no doubt, would be (quietly) cheering if the Caucasian unvaccinated were marched off for re-education and solitude, a ‘safe’ distance from the vaccinated. No one has quite said it in public, yet.
One might even term this awful affair the Covid Stolen Generation, a term that will have deep resonance for those with an interest in the recent history of the indigenous people of Australia. It all takes us right back to Central Europe and the Auschwitz meme. Lord Sumption is correct. These are, indeed, highly dangerous times.
The writer is in Australia
November 29, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Australia, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights | Leave a comment
The English data on vaccines and mortality, revisited
By Alex Berenson | November 28, 2021
Last Saturday morning I posted a short post with a very simple chart – two lines in all.
One line tracked the number of weekly deaths per 100,000 vaccinated people aged 10-59 in England. The other tracked the number of deaths per 100,000 unvaccinated people in England. The chart showed that vaccinated people in this age group were dying overall at a higher rate than unvaccinated people.
I’m never exactly sure which posts will “land” – gain traction and go viral. This chart landed. Hard. Someone wrote me that it broke the Internet. It didn’t break the Internet, only Kim Kardashian’s ass can break the Internet, but it has rocketed around ever since. It has been seen over 800,000 times on this page alone and many millions more in screenshots and Twitter posts elsewhere.
Clearly, the reason the chart has gained so much attention is that it quickly and simply provides a way for people who are concerned about the vaccines to provide apparent visual proof that they are increasing all-cause mortality – overall death rates.
The chart has also engendered a fierce backlash from the usual fact-checkers and vaccine fanatics who say it is – wait for it – “misinformation.” (To be clear, I didn’t actually create the chart, but I checked the underlying British government report to make sure it accurately represents the report’s figures. It does, as everyone agrees.)
The “fact-checkers” have two primary complaints about the chart.
The first is that the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups are not exactly the same. A smaller percentage of teenagers than fifty-somethings are vaccinated, so the unvaccinated group overall skews somewhat younger than the older group. Since death rates rise with age, that difference may be enough to explain the gap between the two groups.
The second is that overall death rates in people over 60 (who are not covered in the chart) are much higher than those in the 10-59 range and appear to be lower in the vaccinated over the unvaccinated.
Another way to look at the objections: the first is that the chart doesn’t say what it seems to say, because of a hidden flaw in the data. The second is that it would be basically meaningless even if it did, because other more robust datasets contradict it.
—
Part of being on Team Reality is acknowledging reality, and acknowledging when your critics have a factually correct objection. So I want to acknowledge that, like the chart itself, these objections BOTH are valid and factually accurate, viewed individually.
What the fact-checkers and vaccine fanatics appear incapable of understanding is that the two objections effectively cancel each other out – and do nothing to address concerns over the long-term failure of Covid vaccines or their impact on all-cause mortality.
These folks think they are sophisticated thinkers who have blown up apparent evidence that the vaccines are dangerous. In fact, just as they have for the last several months, they are telling themselves what they want to hear instead of listening to what the data are saying – and, increasingly, shouting.
—
They have identified and latched on to ONE complication of using population-level data to judge vaccine effectiveness – the fact that differing rates of uptake by age may make the Covid vaccines seem less effective than they are.
But they – deliberately or out of ignorance – are ignoring another one, one that makes the vaccines seem MORE effective than they are.
The second problem is not a secret to epidemiologists.
It has been quietly discussed for flu vaccines for more than a decade, and I have written about it repeatedly in the last year. The problem is this: the popular belief that sick people are more likely to be vaccinated than healthy people is entirely wrong.
People who receive vaccines are healthier overall than those who do not. They care more about avoiding sickness, and they have the time and energy and money to find their way to a vaccination site. They are not healthier because they get vaccines; they get vaccines because they are healthier.
Older people who receive flu vaccines die – of both the flu and all causes – at much lower rates than unvaccinated people after they receive flu shots. But they also die at much lower rates BEFORE they receive the vaccines. The seminal study demonstrating this relationship is now more than 15 years old; it was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology in April 2006.
“The reductions in risk before influenza season indicate preferential receipt of vaccine by relatively healthy seniors,” the authors wrote.
This paradox helps explain why a huge study of flu vaccines in the United Kingdom showed that increasing vaccination levels in older people did not reduce the number of hospitalizations or deaths from the flu.
The researchers took advantage of the fact that Britain prioritizes people 65 and older for vaccinations and that people are much more likely to get a shot when they are 65 or 66 than 64 or 63. Vaccination levels rose sharply as people turned 65, but the health of the people who received the shots did not improve.

(SOURCE: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M19-3075?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%20%200pubmed)
The same pattern is visible in the United States, where a massive increase in the number of flu vaccines in the last generation has made no apparent difference in the number of flu deaths. In fact, in 2005, researchers noted that although vaccinations had risen from 20 percent of elderly people in 1980 to 65 percent in 2001, “unexpectedly, estimates of influenza-related mortality in this age group also increased [emphasis added] during this period.”
In other words, influenza vaccines only seem to work. Any observational estimate that compares death rates in people who have gotten shots to those who have not will be inherently untrustworthy, no matter how hard researchers try to correct for the healthy recipient bias.
—
What is true for flu vaccines appears to be even more true for Covid vaccines.
The relentless vaccination push means that in many countries, more than 90 percent of elderly people are vaccinated. The split is even more stark in countries like England, where 2.44 million people 80 and over have been fully vaccinated, compared to 69,000 who are unvaccinated (and 24,000 who have received the first dose but not the second).
Look at those numbers again.
2,440,000 people in England 80 and over vaccinated. Almost 97 percent of the total number of elderly people.
69,000 80 and over unvaccinated. Less than 3 percent.
These two groups cannot remotely be compared.
How do they differ? I can’t find any hard data, but we know that at least a fraction of the elderly unvaccinated are too ill to be vaccinated. Some are in hospice care. Norway recommended against giving people in hospice the Covid vaccine in January following deaths in terminally ill patients.

A paper published online in March in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management noted that “communication from hospice organizations has primarily emphasized the vaccination of hospice staff without the same priority mention for patients” and called for hospices to do more to offer vaccines to patients.
The paper’s title was even starker:
A Shot at Inclusion: Reconsidering Categorical Exclusion of Hospice Patients from COVID Vaccine Allocation.
How many Covid deaths in unvaccinated elderly people are actually “with Covid” deaths in people dying in hospice? Again, we don’t know. But what we know is that even a small number of those deaths will hopelessly bias the relative risk ratio for unvaccinated to vaccinated Covid deaths, because the overall number of unvaccinated people is so small.
As of September, about 30 to 35 unvaccinated English people 80 and over died of or with Covid each week, compared to about 250 fully vaccinated people a week.
So trying to measure vaccine effectiveness by looking at the relative risks of the vaccinated and unvaccinated elderly is impossible. But that is exactly what the health authorities and their servants in the media do when they put out figures that seem to show the risk of death from Covid is much lower in elderly people who have been vaccinated.
They are lying with truthful data, and they (some of them, anyway, though probably not the reporters who are writing the stories) are smart enough to know exactly what they’re doing.
—
Meanwhile, they are ignoring a much more important indicator – trends in both Covid and all-cause mortality are very much going the wrong way in the vaccinated elderly population.
In the last four weeks for which British data are available, roughly coinciding with September, about 1,000 vaccinated English people 80 and over died from Covid and 16,000 from all causes.
Compare those numbers to four weeks in May, when fewer than 70 vaccinated English people 80 and over died from Covid and 13,000 from all causes.
Put another way, overall deaths rose more than 20 percent in the vaccinated elderly from May to September, and Covid deaths 15-fold. And this was not because many more people were vaccinated. The number of vaccinated elderly people rose only about 4 percent from May to September.
Compare that to the mortality trends in unvaccinated English people 80 and over.
About 800 died of all causes in four weeks in May (at the time, there were about 77,000 unvaccinated elderly people, compared to 69,000 in September). Fewer than 20 of those died of Covid.
In September, about 140 unvaccinated elderly people died of Covid – a eight-fold increase compared to the 15-fold increase in the vaccinated.
(All data from the British government:
See tables 3 and 4 in downloaded file.)
But that difference isn’t the striking part.
The striking part is that only 700 unvaccinated elderly English people died OF ALL CAUSES in those four weeks in September – FEWER than back in May. (The trend roughly tracked the overall drop in the elderly unvaccinated population. It appears that about 1 percent of those folks die a month, at least in warmer months.)
This trend is stunning for two reasons.
First, the fact that 100 more unvaccinated elderly people (supposedly) died of Covid in September yet 100 fewer of them died overall strongly suggests that many of those reported deaths are actually with and not from Covid.
Second, per capita all-cause mortality – not just Covid mortality, all-cause mortality – rose close to 20 percent in the very large group of the vaccinated elderly. Some of those extra deaths came from Covid. But most did not.
And though death rates are still somewhat higher in the unvaccinated – as they should be, given the fact that vaccine recipients are healthier – but that fact is far less relevant than the notable rise in the vaccinated.
What’s behind the rise in those deaths in the vaccinated elderly? We don’t know. But we’d better find out. Especially since we are now stuffing boosters into their arms.
—
All of this is somewhat complicated, I’ll admit. The data has lots of confounders and continues to evolve. And trying to explain relative changes in all-cause mortality in the context of healthy vaccine recipient bias using papers about flu vaccine – well, it’s not a soundbite.
Which comes back to the chart from last week.
The chart IS a soundbite.
It is a simple and factually accurate way to say:
Something is wrong. The promises that the health authorities have made over the last 12 months about the vaccines are not coming true. Despite near-complete levels of adult vaccination in Europe, many countries are seeing skyrocketing Covid cases and deaths. And worst of all, all-cause non-Covid mortality is running well above normal in country after country.
Not everyone is going to wade through this article. But everyone can read that chart from last week. It’s not perfect, but it uses real data to raise a crucial issue.
That’s why it landed. And that’s why the vaccine fanatics hate it so much.
November 29, 2021 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, UK | Leave a comment
Whatever You Do, Don’t Think of the Children

By Toby Young • The Daily Sceptic • November 29, 2021
Like most parents across the land, I received a letter from the local council’s Director of Public Health this morning (forwarded by the school in an email) explaining that they have “advised [sic] schools that parents/carers/other visitors are not invited” to nativity plays this year. Not the end of the world in the grand scheme of things, of course – just another depressing example in the long litany of examples of children’s priorities being cast under a bus due to adult panic during the course of this pandemic.
Much more concerning, because of what it said about the mindset of the Director of Public Health in question, was this alarmingly blithe justification for continued restrictions in schools, buried in the body of the letter:
Much as we would all like it to be, the pandemic is not over. Whilst it is clear that the vaccination programme is effective in preventing serious disease and deaths, the vaccine is never going to stop all transmission, and resultant harm, on its own. [Emphasis added]
You couldn’t get a starker admission than this that we long ago moved beyond “flattening the curve” or staving off a dire public health emergency in a once-in-a-lifetime, never-to- be-repeated year. No: we are now in a different place altogether – one in which we must stop transmission “and resultant harm” for its own sake, forever. For how else are we supposed to interpret this statement? On what grounds will parents ever be allowed back into schools to watch nativity plays (or even properly meet their children’s teachers), if the requirement is for “all transmission and resultant harm” to end? We will never be in that position. So in what circumstance does the Director of Public Health envisage there ever will be a return to normal schooling? Ought this not to be made clear to local parents?
More broadly, this incident raises the question of how it is that something so fundamental – children’s schooling – has ended up beholden to the whim of unelected, largely unaccountable, public officials such as this. The local Director of Public Health in any given local authority cannot be voted out. They are not challenged by probing interviews in prominent media outlets. The means by which they are appointed is entirely opaque. And their policy positions, political backgrounds, and motivations are subject to essentially no public scrutiny. Yet they possess the power, at the sweep of a pen, to disrupt the lives of literally tens of thousands of people within their bailiwicks, with the only possible avenue of challenge being a prohibitively expensive and time-consuming claim for judicial review. This ought to be intolerable in a free society. Yet it is the position in which we find ourselves.
Once again, the Covid pandemic and its response have shone a harsh light on British democracy, and revealed it to be in a dilapidated state indeed.
November 29, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, Human rights, UK | Leave a comment
Fauci and the Great AIDS Swindle
A Partial Review of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., THE REAL ANTHONY FAUCI
BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT • UNZ REVIEW • NOVEMBER 27, 2021
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s new book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health is not the book of a politician seeking attention. It is the book of a man determined to stake his own life in the resistance against the unfolding bio-terrorist assault on humankind by governments captive of the pharmaceutical industry. He is calling for mass insurrection, and his last word is: “I’ll see you on the barricades.” The book begins like this:
I wrote this book to help Americans—and citizens across the globe—understand the historical underpinnings of the bewildering cataclysm that began in 2020. In that single annus horribilis, liberal democracy effectively collapsed worldwide. The very governmental health regulators, social media eminences, and media companies that idealistic populations relied upon as champions of freedom, health, democracy, civil rights, and evidence-based public policy seemed to collectively pivot in a lockstep assault against free speech and personal freedoms. Suddenly, those trusted institutions seemed to be acting in concert to generate fear, promote obedience, discourage critical thinking, and herd seven billion people to march to a single tune, culminating in mass public health experiments with a novel, shoddily tested and improperly licensed technology so risky that manufacturers refused to produce it unless every government on Earth shielded them from liability. … Conscientious objectors who resisted these unwanted, experimental, zero-liability medical interventions faced orchestrated gaslighting, marginalization, and scapegoating. American lives and livelihoods were shattered by a bewildering array of draconian diktats imposed without legislative approval or judicial review, risk assessment, or scientific citation. So-called Emergency Orders closed our businesses, schools and churches, made unprecedented intrusions into privacy, and disrupted our most treasured social and family relationships.
Kennedy is not a newcomer to this frightening dystopia. “My 40-year career as an environmental and public health advocate,” he writes, “gave me a unique understanding of the corrupting mechanisms of ‘regulatory capture,’ the process by which the regulator becomes beholden to the industry it’s meant to regulate.” From the time he entered the vaccine debate in 2005, he realized that “the pervasive web of deep financial entanglements between Pharma and the government health agencies had put regulatory capture on steroids.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for example, owns 57 vaccine patents and spent $4.9 billion in 2019 buying and distributing vaccines. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) receives 45 percent of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), with its $42 billion budget, owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates. High-level officials receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help develop and then usher through the approval process.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, “America’s reigning health commissar,” stands at the summit of that Leviathan. From 1968, he occupied various posts at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a sub-agency of NIH, of which he became director in 1984. With a $417,608 annual salary, he is the highest paid of all federal employees, including the President. “His experiences surviving 50 years as the panjandrum of a key federal bureaucracy, having advised six Presidents, the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, foreign governments, and the WHO, seasoned him exquisitely for a crisis that would allow him to wield power enjoyed by few rulers and no doctor in history.” He has nurtured a complex web of financial entanglements that has transformed the NIH into a subsidiary of Big Pharma. Reaching into the deep pockets of the Clinton and Gates Foundations, he has used his $6 billion annual budget to achieve dominance and control over many agencies, including the World Health Organization (WHO). He can make and break careers, enrich or punish university research centers, and dictate the outcome of scientific research across the globe, consistently prioritizing pharmaceutical industry profits over public health.
Kennedy’s book documents Fauci’s “two-decade strategy of promoting false pandemics as a scheme for promoting novel vaccines,” as well as “his actions to conceal widespread contamination in blood and vaccines, his destructive vendettas against scientists who challenge the Pharma paradigm, [and] his deliberate sabotaging of patent-expired remedies against infectious diseases.”
But of course, Kennedy’s book is not about a man: it is about an irremediably corrupt and predatory system created in the U.S. and exported worldwide. Ultimately, however, the system is built and run by humans, and focusing on its most emblematic representative shows its very soul.
Kennedy’s book puts the current crisis in historical perspective. But it doesn’t tell the story chronologically. It starts with a very long first chapter on the current Covid crisis—a book by itself—, then goes back, from chapter 3, to the 1980s and the search for the AIDS vaccine, the template for today’s pharmaceutical coup. In this review, I will focus on the AIDS episode, because it is the least familiar part of a history covering fifty years, and it helps make sense of what is happening today. It is an incredible story, that I would have had difficulty believing just three years ago, but that our current enslavement now makes utterly credible.
The thirty-year decampment of journalistic scrutiny means that there is still no coherent public narrative chronicling Dr. Fauci’s futile quest for his “inevitable” AIDS vaccine, much less accountability. Industry and government scientists have instead shrouded the scandalous saga in secrecy, subterfuge, and prevarication, obscuring a thousand calamities and a sea of tears deserving its own book. Every meager effort to research the debacle—on Google, PubMed, news sites, and published clinical trial data—yields only shocking new atrocities—a grim, repetitive parade of horribles: heartbreaking tragedies, entrenched institutional arrogance and racism, broken promises, vast expenditures of squandered treasure, and the recurring chicanery of Anthony Fauci, Bob Gallo, and Bill Gates.
Kennedy deserves praise and gratitude for his courage to bring this controversy out into the open, in a clear and well-documented exposé. His book is destined to become a landmark in the struggle for Life and Truth—and in the Kennedy heroic saga. This article reflects only a fraction of what can be learned from its 480 pages packed with data and references. Since page numbers in the kindle edition (recommended for its thousand hyperlinks) differ from those in the printing book, I have dispensed with them.
In the Beginning
In the first lines of his 2014 book Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak (documenting an astonishing 1,135 percent higher rate of autism among children who took hepatitis B vaccines), Kennedy prudently claimed to be “pro-vaccine” and to “believe that vaccines have saves the lives of hundreds of millions of humans over the past century.” Kennedy makes no such disclaimer in his new book. Rather, he sides with the critics of the popular dogma that vaccines played the key role in abolishing mortal contagious illnesses in North America and Europe, citing a 2000 study by CDC and Johns Hopkins scientists that concluded: “nearly 90 percent of the decline in infectious disease mortality among US children occurred before 1940, when few antibiotics or vaccines were available.” The main causes of the dramatic 74 percent decline in infectious disease mortality in the first half of the twentieth century were improved nutrition and sanitation.

From Kennedy, The Real Anthony Fauci, 2021
This revisionist but objective perspective explains why Fauci and Gates’s obsession with vaccine-preventable diseases has caused negative overall impacts on public health in Africa and Asia, by proportionally reducing assistance streams for nutrition, clean water, transportation, hygiene, and economic development. Gates and Fauci have actually hijacked WHO’s public health agenda away from the projects that are proven to curb infectious diseases, and diverted international aid to wedge open emerging markets for their multinational partners.
To understand their craze for vaccines, Kennedy reminds us of the pioneering influence of the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1911, after the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil constituted an “unreasonable monopoly” and splintered it into thirty-four companies, John D. Rockefeller inaugurated what Bill Gates would later call “philanthrocapitalism.” He provided large grants to scientists for synthesizing and patenting chemical versions of the molecules identified in traditional medicine. The Foundation provided almost half of the initial budget for the League of Nations’ Health Organization (LNHO) in 1922, and populated its ranks with its veterans and favorites. It imbued the League with its technocratic philosophy of health, inherited by its successor body, the WHO, in 1948.
The Rockefeller Foundation launched a “public-private partnership” with pharmaceutical companies called the International Health Commission, which first set about inoculating the hapless populations of the colonized tropics with a yellow fever jab. By the time John D. Rockefeller, Jr. disbanded it in 1951, the International Health Commission had spent billions of dollars on tropical disease campaigns in almost 100 countries and colonies. These projects had a hidden agenda, according to a 2017 report, U.S. Philanthrocapitalism and the Global Health Agenda: they allowed the Rockefeller family to open developing world markets for oil, mining, banking and other profitable trades, including pharmaceutical profits that grew tremendously when, in the 1970s:
a wave of new technologies, including PCR and super powerful electron microscopes, had opened windows on teeming new worlds containing millions of species of previously unknown viruses to scientists. … The lure of fame and fortune ignited a chaotic revolution in virology as ambitious young PhDs scrambled to inculpate newly discovered microbes as the cause of old malignancies. … Under this new rubric, every theoretical breakthrough, every find, became potentially the basis for a new generation of drugs.
By the mid-1970s, the CDC was seeking to justify its existence by tracking small outbreaks of rabies. “Drumming up public fear of periodic pandemics was a natural way for NIAID and CDC bureaucrats to keep their agencies relevant. Dr. Fauci’s immediate boss and predecessor as NIAID Director, Richard M. Krause, helped pioneer this new strategy in 1976.” That year the fake swine flu epidemic was concocted. The experimental vaccine was so fraught with problems that the Health and Human Services (HHS) discontinued the jab after vaccinating 49 million Americans. According to news accounts, the incidence of flu was seven times greater among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. Furthermore, the vaccine caused some 500 cases of the degenerative nerve disease Guillain-Barré Syndrome, 32 deaths, more than 400 paralyzations, and as many as 4,000 other injuries. Injured plaintiffs filed 1,604 lawsuits. By April 1985, the government had paid out $83,233,714 and spent tens of millions of dollars adjudicating and processing those claims.
Another scandal broke in 1983, when a NIH-funded UCLA study found that the DTP vaccine developed by Wyeth—now Pfizer—was killing or causing severe brain injury, including seizures and death, in one in every 300 vaccinated children. While protecting children against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, the DTP vaccine had ruined their immune systems, making them vulnerable to a wide range of other deadly infections.
The resultant lawsuits caused the collapse of insurance markets for vaccines and threatened to bankrupt the industry. Wyeth claimed to be losing $20 in downstream liability for every dollar it earned on vaccine sales, and induced Congress to pass in 1986 the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which shielded vaccine makers from liability. (This incentive for unrestricted greed was strengthened in 2005 when George W. Bush signed into law the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act).
AIDS and AZT
In 1984, when Fauci became director of NIAID, the AIDS crisis was spiraling out of control. That proved “a redemptive juncture for NIAID and the launch pad for Dr. Fauci’s stellar rise.” In an April 1984 press conference, NIH scientist Robert Gallo linked AIDS to the virus that was soon to be named HIV. Dr. Fauci then moved aggressively to claim jurisdiction for his agency over the National Cancer Institute (NCI), another sub-agency of NIH. “As the nation’s newly appointed AIDS czar, Dr. Fauci was now a gatekeeper for almost all AIDS research … parroting NCI’s vows to cure cancer, Dr. Fauci promised Congress that he would quickly produce drugs and vaccines to banish AIDS.”
At the same time, he was deliberately spreading contagion terror, warning in a 1983 fear-mongering article that “the scope of the syndrome may be enormous”, since “routine close contact, as within a family household, can spread the disease”—despite the fact that AIDS was almost exclusive to intravenous drug users and male homosexuals. A year later, Fauci was forced to concede that health officials had never detected a case of the disease spread through “casual contact.” Nevertheless, Dr. Fauci’s systematic response was “to amplify the widespread panic of dreaded pestilence that would naturally magnify his power, elevate his profile, and expand his influence. Amplifying terror of infectious disease was already an ingrained knee-jerk institutional response at NIAID.”
Having seized control over AIDS research, Fauci captured the new flood of congressional AIDS appropriations flowing to NIH through the lobbying of a newly organized gay community. By 1990, NIAID’s annual AIDS budget reached $3 billion. In the ensuing decades, the federal government spent over half a trillion dollars in the quest for an elusive vaccine that never materialized. Dr. Fauci pumped up taxpayers’ money into nearly 100 vaccine candidates, with no other result than “massive transfers of public lucre to Dr. Fauci’s Pharma partners,” and a sea of tears for millions of unfortunate human guinea pigs.
NIAID’s lack of in-house drug development capacity meant that Fauci had to farm out drug research to a network of so-called “principal investigators” (PIs), academic physicians and researchers controlled by pharmaceutical companies and acting as liaisons, recruiters and spokespersons.
PIs are pharmaceutical industry surrogates who play key roles promoting the pharmaceutical paradigm and functioning as high priests of all its orthodoxies, which they proselytize with missionary zeal. They use their seats on medical boards and chairmanships of university departments to propagate dogma and root out heresy. … They are the credentialed and trusted medical experts who prognosticate on television networks—now helplessly reliant on pharmaceutical ad revenue—to push out Pharma content.
Dr. Fauci’s choice to transfer virtually all of NIAID’s budget to pharmaceutical PIs for drug development was an abdication of the agency’s duty to find the source and eliminate the explosive epidemics of allergic and autoimmune disease that began under his watch around 1989. … NIAID money effectively became a giant subsidy to the blossoming pharmaceutical industry to incubate a pipeline of profitable new drugs targeted to treat the symptoms of those very diseases.
In the late 80s and early 90s, PIs received every year between 4 and 5 billions of dollars from NIH’s budget. But “legalized bribes” from drug companies and royalty payments from drug products often dwarfed their government funding. Celia Farber’s 2006 Harper’s article, “Out of Control: AIDS and the Destruction of Medical Science,” laid bare the culture of squalor, corruption, and vendetta at Fauci’s AIDS Branch, the Division of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (DAIDS).
Despite his miserable track record at reducing illness over the previous decade, Fauci persuaded President Bill Clinton, in May 1997, to set a new national goal for science. In a speech delivered at Morgan State University, Clinton—perhaps not without cryptic irony— imitated Kennedy’s May 25, 1961 moonshot promise, saying, “Today let us commit ourselves to developing an AIDS vaccine within the next decade.”
A year later, Bill Gates, who had just founded his International Aids Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), sealed a deal with Fauci. “Over the next two decades, that partnership would metastasize to include pharmaceutical companies, military and intelligence planners, and international health agencies all collaborating to promote weaponized pandemics and vaccines and a new brand of corporate imperialism rooted in the ideology of biosecurity.” The story of Gates’ involvement in the vaccine business, of his murderous experiments in Africa and India, and of his rise as the unofficial top sponsor of the WHO (ordering in 2011: “All 193 member states, you must make vaccines a central focus of your health systems”), is told in chapters 9 and 10 of Kennedy’s book.
When Dr. Fauci became head of NIAID, azidothymidine, known as AZT, was the only candidate as an AIDS remedy. AZT is a “DNA chain terminator,” randomly destroying DNA synthesis in reproducing cells. It had been developed in 1964 for cancer, but abandoned as too toxic even for short-term therapy. It was deemed so worthless that it was not even patented. In 1985, Samuel Broder, head of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), claimed having found that AZT killed HIV in test tubes. The British company Burroughs Wellcome then patented it as an AIDS remedy. “Recognizing financial opportunity in the desperate terror of young AIDS patients facing certain death, the drug company set the price at up to $10,000/year per patient—making AZT one of the most expensive drugs in pharmaceutical history. Since Burroughs Wellcome could manufacture AZT for pennies per dose, the company anticipated a bonanza.”
Fauci gave Burroughs Wellcome a monopoly control over the government’s HIV response. But all did not go smoothly. “AZT’s horrendous toxicity hobbled researchers struggling to design study protocols that would make it appear either safe or effective.” Another problem is that community-based doctors were achieving promising results with cheap, off-label therapeutic drugs. Dr. Fauci refused to test any of those repurposed drugs that had no Pharma patrons. When he did put on trial AL721, an antiviral that was far less toxic than AZT, he rigged the studies to fail, and abruptly cancelled Phase 2.
Meanwhile, he accelerated testing of AZT, skipping animal testing and allowing Burroughs Wellcome to proceed directly to human trials. In March 1987, Fauci’s team declared the human trials a success after only four months, and Fauci congratulated himself in front of the press. However, when in July 1987, the official report of Burroughs Wellcome’s Phase 2 trial was published, European scientists complained that raw data showed no benefit in reducing symptoms. FDA conducted its own investigation eighteen months later, but kept its results secret, until investigative journalist John Lauritsen obtained some of them by using the Freedom of Information Act; the documents showed that the Fauci/Burroughs Wellcome research teams had engaged in widespread data tampering. More than half of the AZT patients suffered adverse reactions so deadly that they needed multiple blood transfusions just to keep them alive. Nevertheless, Fauci kept on lying himself to the top of the world, with little scrutiny from mainstream media.
A key and enduring legacy of the AZT battle was Dr. Fauci’s emergence as the alpha wolf of HHS [Health and Human Services]. His enormous budget, and multiplying contacts on Capitol Hill, the White House, and the medical industry, thereafter allowed him to influence or ignore a succession of politically appointed HHS directors and to bully, manipulate, and dominate HHS’s other sister agencies, most notably FDA.
AZT was not the only subject of interest to Fauci. By June 2003, NIH was running 10,906 clinical trials on new antiviral concoctions in some four hundred clinical trials in ninety countries. Some of those trials seemed pulled out of Dickens’ worst nightmares. The Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), a medical industry watchdog organization, has documented that between 1985 and 2005, NIAID conscripted at least 532 infants and children from foster care in New York City as subjects of clinical trials testing experimental AIDS drugs and vaccines. AHRP’s investigation revealed that many of those children were perfectly healthy and may not even have been HIV-infected. Yet 80 of them died. In 2004, journalist Liam Scheff chronicled Dr. Fauci’s secretive experiments on foster children at Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC) in New York City and numerous sister facilities between 1988 and 2002. These disclosures, comments Kennedy, beg many questions:
From what moral wilderness did the monsters who devised and condoned these experiments descend upon our idealistic country? How have they lately come to exercise such tyrannical power over our citizens? What sort of nation are we if we allow them to continue? Most trenchantly, does it not make sense that the malevolent minds, the elastic ethics, the appalling judgment, the arrogance, and savagery that sanctioned the barbaric brutalization of children at the Incarceration Convent House, and the torture of animals for industry profit, could also concoct a moral justification for suppressing lifesaving remedies and prolonging a deadly epidemic? Could these same dark alchemists justify a strategy of prioritizing their $48 billion vaccine project ahead of public health and human life? Did similar hubris—that deadly human impulse to play God—pave the lethal path to Wuhan and fuel the reckless decision to hack the codes of Creation and fabricate diabolical new forms of life—pandemic superbugs—in a ramshackle laboratory with scientists linked to the Chinese military?
Indeed, Kennedy shows in his final chapter, “Germ Games,” that Fauci’s investments in so-called “gain of function” experiments to engineer pandemic superbugs raise “the ironic possibility that Dr. Fauci may have played a role in triggering the global contagion that two US presidents entrusted him to manage.”
Africa is “the venue of choice for companies seeking cooperative government officials, compliant populations, the lowest per-patient enrollment costs, and lax oversight by media and regulatory officials.” In the early 1990s, African dictators rolled out the red carpet for Pharma, cashing in on the lucrative business of farming out their citizens for the booming clinical trial business. And on January 29, 2003, President George W. Bush announced at his State of the Union speech his Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), Fauci’s new swindle:
On the continent of Africa, nearly 30 million people have the AIDS virus. … Yet across that continent, only 50,000 AIDS victims—only 50,000—are receiving the medicine they need. … I ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean.
Does HIV Cause AIDS?
Kennedy’s chapter 5, “The HIV Heresies,” opens up with the following note:
I hesitated to include this chapter because any questioning of the orthodoxy that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS remains an unforgivable—even dangerous—heresy among our reigning medical cartel and its media allies. But one cannot write a complete book about Tony Fauci without touching on the abiding—and fascinating—scientific controversy over what he characterizes as his “greatest accomplishment” and his “life’s work.”
The controversy illustrates how pharmaceutical industries and health agencies, acting in concert, engineer consensus on incomplete or fraudulent theories, and ruthlessly suppress dissent from even the most gifted recognized scientists. “From the outset,” Kennedy insists, “I want to make clear that I take no position on the relationship between HIV and AIDS.” However, there seems little doubt that his basic point is correct:
During the thirty-six years since Dr. Fauci and his colleague, Dr. Robert Gallo, first claimed that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, no one has been able to point to a study that demonstrates their hypothesis using accepted scientific proofs. … Even today, incoherence, knowledge gaps, contradictions, and inconsistencies continue to bedevil the official dogma.
The success story of the HIV-AIDS dogma shows “many of the tactics Dr. Fauci has pioneered to dodge debate—bedazzling and bamboozling the press into ignoring legitimate inquiry of the credo, and undermining, gaslighting, punishing, bullying, intimidating, marginalizing, vilifying, and muzzling critics.” One of Fauci’s victims was Dr. Peter Duesberg, who in 1987 was still recognized as the world’s most accomplished retrovirologist. Duesberg argues that HIV does not cause AIDS but is essentially a “free rider” common to high-risk populations who suffer immune suppression due to environmental exposures. HIV, he says, is a harmless passenger virus that has almost certainly coexisted in humans for thousands of generations without causing diseases. While HIV may be sexually transmittable, Duesberg claims, AIDS is not.
Duesberg published his views in a groundbreaking 1987 article, then in a 724-page book, Inventing the AIDS Virus. Kennedy finds that “Duesberg’s rationales appear so clean, so elegantly crafted, and so compelling that, in reading them, it seems impossible that the entire [orthodox] hypothesis did not instantly collapse under the smothering weight of relentless logic.” But Fauci and Gallo never attempted to reply to Duesberg. Blaming AIDS on a virus was the gambit that had allowed NIAID to claim the jurisdiction—and cash flow—away from NCI, and Duesberg was severely punished for endangering this.
Dr. Fauci summoned the entire upper clergy of his HIV orthodoxy—and all of its lower acolytes and altar boys—to unleash a storm of fierce retribution on the Berkeley virologist and his followers. … the AIDS establishment, down to its lowliest doctor, publicly reviled Duesberg, NIH defunded him, and academia ostracized and exiled the brilliant Berkeley professor. The scientific press all but banished him. He became radioactive.
Surprisingly, however, Dr. Luc Montagnier, whose discovery of HIV Gallo had in fact stolen—as he admitted in 1991 after years of litigation—, became Duesberg’s most embarrassing convert, declaring at the San Francisco International AIDS Conference in June 1990, that “the HIV virus is harmless and passive, a benign virus.” He added that, according to his findings, HIV becomes dangerous only in the presence of a second organism, a bacteria-like bug called a mycoplasma. Montagnier, in fact, had never claimed that HIV was the only factor in AIDS, and grew increasingly skeptical of that theory. His repeated questioning of the establishment paradigm signaled the beginning of his vilification, for which his Nobel Prize hardly protected him.
Gallo’s “proof” that the cause of AIDS was a virus—as opposed to toxic exposures— provided the critical foundation stone of Dr. Fauci’s career. It allowed Fauci to capture the AIDS program and launch NIAID as the leading federal partner of the drug-production industry. This explains why Fauci never funded any study to explore whether HIV actually caused AIDS, and took vigorous preemptive action against any such study.
Kennedy cites other dissenting voices on AIDS epidemiology. Dr. Shyh-Ching Lo, the Chief Researcher in charge of AIDS programs for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, was shocked by Anthony Fauci’s unconventional claim that antibodies, normally the sign of a robust immune response, should, with HIV, be the signal for impending death. Since “HIV tests” do not in reality detect the elusive virus but only antibodies, there seems to be an Orwellian inversion at work. Kennedy also quotes Dr. David Rasnick, a PhD biochemist who has worked for thirty years in the pharmaceutical biotech field:
Fauci’s fundamental conundrum is that he has told everybody to diagnose AIDS based on the presence of HIV antibodies. With every other disease, the presence of antibodies is the signal that the patient has vanquished the disease. With AIDS, Fauci and Gallo, and now Gates, claim it’s a sign you’re about to die. Think about it; if the objective of an AIDS vaccine is to stimulate antibody production, then success would mean that every vaccinated person would also have an AIDS diagnosis. I mean, this is fodder for a comedy bit. It’s like someone gave the Three Stooges an annual billion-dollar budget!
The nature of AIDS—a syndrome, not a disease—is itself subject to questions, since it was made to encompass a galaxy of some thirty separate well-known diseases, all of which occur in individuals who have no HIV infection. “In the hands of Dr. Fauci’s opportunistic PIs, AIDS became an amorphous malady subject to ever-changing definitions, encompassing a multitude of old diseases in hosts who test positive for HIV.” Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR tests, pointed out that the PCR was capable of finding HIV signals in large segments of the population who suffered no AIDS symptoms. On the other hand, AIDS commonly occurs in people who test HIV negative, as Geoffrey Cowley documented in a 1992 Newsweek article, followed by Steve Heimoff in the Los Angeles Times.
These very inconsistencies were not a problem for Fauci and his standing army of pharmaceutical mercenaries. Quite the opposite: they opened up Africa’s AIDS bonanza. Researchers funded by Fauci, using PCR tests and murky statistical models, declared that up to 30 million Africans were suffering from AIDS, nearly half the adult population in some nations. While in Western nations, AIDS continued to be a disease of drug addicts and homosexual “poppers” (consumers of the amyl nitrite vasodilator providing relaxation of the anal musculature, packaged into the “popper” container patented by Burroughs Wellcome and advertised in the gay press throughout the AIDS epidemic), mysteriously, in Africa, 59 percent of AIDS cases were women, and 85 percent were heterosexuals.
But in the early 1990s, the character of AIDS changed dramatically with the proliferation of AZT. As they started to give AZT to people who were in fact not even sick but simply positive on the HIV test, AIDS started to look increasingly like AZT poisoning. And the death rate climbed precipitously. According to the Duesbergians, the vast majority of “AIDS deaths” after 1987 were actually caused by AZT. The medication that Dr. Fauci was prescribing to treat AIDS patients actually did what the virus could not: it caused AIDS itself. In 1988, the average survival time for patients taking AZT was four months. In 1997, recognizing the lethal effect of AZT, health officials lowered the dose; the average lifespan of AZT patients then rose to twenty-four months. According to Dr. Claus Köhnlein, a German oncologist, “We virtually killed a whole generation of AIDS patients without even noticing it because the symptoms of the AZT intoxication were almost indistinguishable from AIDS.”
Conclusion
In July 2019, Dr. Fauci made a surprise announcement: he finally had a working HIV vaccine, the potential “nail in the coffin” for the epidemic. He conceded that his new vaccine didn’t prevent transmission of AIDS, but predicted that those who took the jab would find that when they did get AIDS, the symptoms would be much reduced. Kennedy comments:
So confident was Dr. Fauci of the media’s slavish credulity that he assumed, correctly, that he’d never need to answer the many questions raised by this feverish gibberish. That entire odd proposition received zero critical press commentary. His success at slapping lipstick on this donkey and selling it to the world as a Thoroughbred may have emboldened his ruse—a year later—of placing similar cosmetics on the COVID vaccines that, likewise, neither prevent disease nor preclude transmission.
By 2019, the AIDS rope started to wear out. Who still cared about AIDS anyway? The “Covid-19 Pandemic” came as the perfect opportunity for a reset and an update in the pharmaceutical racket. As Winston Churchill reportedly said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. With complicit corporate media blacking out the scandalous track record of his white-coat mafia, Fauci emerged, again, as the good doctor, the savior.
“Is it fair to blame Dr. Fauci for a crisis that, of course, has many authors?” asks Kennedy. To some extent, it is.
Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the allergic, autoimmune, and chronic illnesses which Congress specifically charged NIAID to investigate and prevent, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children, up from 12.8 percent when he took over NIAID in 1984. Dr. Fauci has offered no explanation as to why allergic diseases like asthma, eczema, food allergies, allergic rhinitis, and anaphylaxis suddenly exploded beginning in 1989, five years after he came to power. On its website, NIAID boasts that autoimmune disease is one of the agency’s top priorities. Some 80 autoimmune diseases, including juvenile diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, Graves’ disease, and Crohn’s disease, which were practically unknown prior to 1984, suddenly became epidemic under his watch. Autism, which many scientists now consider an autoimmune disease, exploded from between 2/10,000 and 4/10,000 Americans when Tony Fauci joined NIAID, to one in thirty-four today. Neurological diseases like ADD/ADHD, speech and sleep disorders, narcolepsy, facial tics, and Tourette’s syndrome have become commonplace in American children. The human, health, and economic costs of chronic disease dwarf the costs of all infectious diseases in the United States. By this decade’s end, obesity, diabetes, and pre-diabetes are on track to debilitate 85 percent of America’s citizens. America is among the ten most over-weight countries on Earth. The health impacts of these epidemics—which fall mainly on the young—eclipse even the most exaggerated health impacts of COVID-19.
Dr. Fauci has done nothing to advance NIAID’s core obligation of researching the causes of chronic allergic and autoimmune diseases that have mushroomed under his tenure. Instead, Fauci has “reshaped NIAID into the leading incubator for new pharmaceutical products, many of which, ironically, profit from the cascading chronic disease pandemic.” Instead of researching the causes of Americans’ failing health, Dr. Fauci funnels the bulk of his $6 billion budget to the research and development of new drugs and vaccines that are largely responsible for weakening our natural immunity. “Of late, he has played a central role in undermining public health and subverting democracy and constitutional governance around the globe and in transitioning our civil governance toward medical totalitarianism.”
I was reminded of Dr. Knock, the central character of Jules Romains’s famous novel Knock or the Triumph of Medicine, written in 1923. Dr. Knock is a shady medical doctor of dubious competence who professes that “health” is an obsolete and unscientific concept, and that all men are sick and need to be informed about it by their doctor. To advance his plan of converting a whole town into permanent patients, he enlists the help of the school teacher and of the pharmacist, who suddenly sees his clientele booming (watch unforgettable moments of Guy Lefranc’s 1951 film adaptation with Louis Jouvet here and here).

Louis Jouvet as Dr. Knock in 1951
To some extent, however, Fauci is himself the product of a civilizational orientation that could only, in the long run, lead to the tyrannical medical technocracy that is now trying to enslave us. Rather than a new Dr. Frankenstein, Fauci is our own monster coming back after us. Kennedy hints at this vast aspect of the question, pointing to the need for deep questioning. The way Americans and Westerners in general have come to view health care has been shaped by the philosophy of the Rockefeller Foundation: “a pill for an ill.” In the debate between the “miasma theory”—that emphasizes preventing disease by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and by reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses—versus the “germ theory”—which blames disease on microscopic pathogens—we have unambiguously opted for the latter. We have signed up for an approach to disease that requires to identify the culpable germ and tailor a poison to kill it. The choice was not forced upon us. We have surrendered responsibility for our health to medical experts and insurance brokers.
As Dr. Claus Köhnlein and Torsten Engelbrecht observe in their book Virus Mania (2007) quoted by Kennedy: “The idea that certain microbes—above all fungi, bacteria, and viruses—are our great opponents in battle, causing certain diseases that must be fought with special chemical bombs, has buried itself deep into the collective conscience.” It is a warlike paradigm, perfectly suited for manufacturing consent on the way to dictatorship. As Kennedy wrote in his preface to Dr. Joseph Mercola and Ronni Cummins, The Truth About Covid-19 (2021), “demagogues must weaponize fear to justify their demands for blind obedience.”
Government technocrats, billionaire oligarchs, Big Pharma, Big Data, Big Media, the high-finance robber barons, and the military industrial intelligence apparatus love pandemics for the same reasons they love wars and terrorist attacks. Catastrophic crises create opportunities of convenience to increase both power and wealth.
Laurent Guyénot, PhD, is the author of The Unspoken Kennedy Truth and of a film on the same subject.
November 29, 2021 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | AIDS, AZT, FDA, NIAID, NIH, Rockefeller Foundation, United States | Leave a comment
The Moral Panic Over Absinthe Lasted 100 Years
BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER | THE BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | NOVEMBER 28, 2021
Last week, I showed up to a nice party with a bottle of Absinthe. I like the stuff but I was also performing an experiment. How long before someone at the party asks if Absinthe causes hallucinations and was thereby banned? It didn’t take long. The question came up repeatedly. What is the ingredient in this that is highly suspect? Oh yes, it’s wormwood. What is wormwood anyway? Is it like heroin?
So it went. And so it has been for the better part of one-hundred years. There is absolutely no medical basis for this at all. Wormwood has been used as a medicinal herb since the ancient world, and there is a great deal of legend surrounding it, but there is zero evidence that it has any hallucinogenic properties at all.
Incredibly, some research suggests that wormwood is possibly an early treatment for Covid that inhibits the reproduction of SARS-CoV-2!
What about the belief that it was banned? It was indeed banned, over most of the Western world since the late 19th century. It was only relegalized for import into the United States in 2007. Now there are micro-distilleries all over the country that make the real thing, the exact drink about which Oscar Wilde wrote:
After the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish they were. After the second you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world. I mean disassociated. Take a top hat. You think you see it as it really is. But you don’t because you associate it with other things and ideas. If you had never heard of one before, and suddenly saw it alone, you’d be frightened, or you’d laugh. That is the effect absinthe has, and that is why it drives men mad. Three nights I sat up all night drinking absinthe, and thinking that I was singularly clear-headed and sane. The waiter came in and began watering the sawdust.The most wonderful flowers, tulips, lilies and roses, sprang up, and made a garden in the cafe. “Don’t you see them?” I said to him. “Mais non, monsieur, il n’y a rien.”
Kind of makes you want to go out and buy a bottle right now. Fortunately you can, because your right to drink it has been restored. The century-old moral panic is over. However, with that change, some of the cachet has been drained away from this yummy drink, which, as it turns out, is just a drink like any other: if you drink too much, you get drunk. Nothing special here.
The irony of the history here is that it was precisely the dire warnings, first issued in French medical journals in the mid 19th century, that created the vast demand for absinthe all over Europe and America. Dangerous drink? Bring it on. The British medical journals seemed to agree that absinthe was highly dangerous, citing this strange experiment from 1869:
The question whether absinthe exerts any special action other than that of alcohol in general, has been revived by some experiments by MM. Magnan and Bouchereau in France. These gentlemen placed a guinea-pig under a glass case with a saucer full of essence of wormwood (which is one of the flavouring matters of absinthe) by his side. Another guinea-pig was similarly shut up with a saucer full of pure alcohol. A cat and a rabbit were respectively enclosed along with a saucer each full of wormwood. The three animals which inhaled the vapours of wormwood experienced, first, excitement, and then epileptiform convulsions. The guinea-pig which merely breathed the fumes of alcohol, first became lively, then simply drunk. Upon these facts it is sought to establish the conclusion that the effects of excessive absinthe drinking are seriously different from those of ordinary alcoholic intemperance.
You can imagine, then, why that generation of artists, poets, playwrights, and literary gadabouts immediately seized on this drink and caused it to be the most fashionable in the land, spreading the plague of absinthism far and wide. Paintings, poetry, music were written in homage to the great muse of the green fairy. No doubt that people believed it, just as Dumbo thought it was the feather that made him fly.
At the height of the absinthe mania in France, 5:00pm became known as “the green hour.” The French were drinking 5 times as much absinthe as wine. The French producers were shipping all over the world. It became the world’s most notorious drink.
Here we have a classic case: science speaks of danger, daring people jump on the trend, moralists get outraged, government acts. That is precisely the situation that lasted for 100 years until it became rather obvious that absinthe is just a normal liquor.
The reason it gained the reputation for making people insane – Vincent Van Gogh, for example – is that highly fashionable people were drinking far too much. It was a classic fallacy: post hoc ergo propter hoc. A confusion of cause and effect. That was enough to effect a century of prohibition.
Here is another article from The Lancet in 1873 about the vast multitudes of “victims of absinthe.”
Originally the only important ingredient in its composition, besides alcohol, was the essential oil of absinthium, or wormwood; and though, doubtless, this added something to the mischievous effects of the liquor, it would be impossible to trace to it, or to the other comparatively trivial ingredients, the more serious of the special results which are now observed to occur in the victims of absinthe. An analysis recently made at the Conservatoire des Arts shows that the absinthe now contains a large proportion of antimony, a poison which cannot fail to add largely to the irritant effects necessarily produced on the alimentary canal and the liver by constant doses of a concentrated alcoholic liquid. As at present constituted, therefore, and especially when drunk in the disastrous excess now common in Paris, and taken frequently upon an empty stomach, absinthe forms a chronic poison of almost unequalled virulence, both as an irritant to the stomach and bowels, and also as a destroyer of the nervous system.
Science has spoken. What can you do but ban it? That didn’t happen until 1915 (the same few years in which every terrible trend in politics happened, from income taxation to central banking).
By then, the drink became associated with elaborate rituals that survive to this day, such as the slow-drip fountain that pours over a special steel spoon that holds a sugar cube. So far as I can tell, the ritual is entirely for show (if you want a bit of sweet in your drink, just add simple syrup) but it’s also enormously fun to reenact the faux-decadence of the absinthe generation. Even now, Amazon offers many absinthe fountains, most in the Victorian style of course.
The war on absinthe – this won’t surprise you – created the opposite of its intended effect. It raised the status of the drink and created a completely unwarranted hysteria in both directions: overconsumption followed by bans followed by speakeasy indulgence. Can you think of anything else, perhaps, that has fit that general model? Marijuana perhaps? Liquor in general? Tobacco? Politically incorrect speech?
Bans stemming from moral panics never seem to end, and people never seem to learn from this classic example. But in this case, the bans gradually came to an end. We’ve lived a full fifteen years of Absinthe freedom. And sure enough, with that freedom has come a bit of blase attitude toward it. Now it sits on the shelf in the liquor store as just another cocktail mixture, alongside the elderflower liqueurs and peach schnapps. It is said to be favored by people on the Keto diet because of its low-carb, low-sugar content.
And yet, to this day, you will still find people who drink it only with great apprehension and with some anticipation that they will soon not be themselves once it is tasted. Drink enough of it, and it will become true. The same is the case with gin, tequila, and rum.
There is surely another lesson here. Science has long served to back public panic, and that panic usually involves some fear of physical and moral corruption. We saw it with Absinthe, and then alcohol Prohibition. We saw it with AIDS. And we’ve lived through it with Covid and all the variants (Omicron!), as a naive public held closely to the words of Anthony Fauci, as the nation’s poet-prophet of a respiratory virus held court for two years, with changing instructions and never-ending insight about the need for all of us to upend our lives to control the invisible enemy.
It’s my habit, and maybe it should be yours, to celebrate every bit of freedom we gain back from the armies of authoritarians who wield the power of the state to improve our health and our lives. It took one hundred years, but they finally got their mitts off this one market. The research suggesting wormwood as a Covid treatment merits a visit from the green fairy as soon as possible.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
November 28, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment
Is saturated fat unhealthy?
By Sebastian Rushworth, M.D. | November 27, 2021
In a sense, I can’t believe I’m writing this article. From a scientific perspective, this issue has been firmly settled. The answer is very clearly “NO!”. And yet, if I google “is saturated fat unhealthy?”, then seven of the top nine results proclaim with great certainty that “yes, it is”.
Here’s what the NHS says to people living in the UK: “Too much saturated fat can increase the amount of cholesterol in the blood, which increases your risk of developing heart disease.”
And here’s what the US government tells its citizens: “Eating too many foods high in saturated fats can be bad for your health. By replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats, you may lower your risk of getting heart disease.”
To be fair, the US government doesn’t sound quite as confident as the UK health authorities. There’s a lot of “can” and “may” in that sentence. Which is actually a bit funny, when you consider that it was the US government that got the whole world to cut down on saturated fats in the first place.
Interestingly, none of the self-appointed fact checking organizations that have sprung up in recent years has yet tried to pull the NHS or the US government off the internet for spreading misinformation.
The claim that saturated fat is unhealthy originated with physiologist Ancel Keys in the mid-part of the twentieth century. He initially believed that cholesterol in the diet was what caused heart disease. Unfortunately, he soon noticed that feeding people cholesterol had no effect whatsoever on the cholesterol levels in their blood streams. So he was forced to abandon that line of thinking. On doing some further research, he noticed that increasing the proportion of saturated fat in the diet did however appear to increase cholesterol somewhat.
This led him to develop the diet-heart hypothesis, which basically says the following: Saturated fat in the diet leads to increased cholesterol levels in the blood stream, which causes heart disease. So it’s a two part hypothesis. As I’ve already discussed before on this blog, the second part of the hypothesis has been disproven – cholesterol in the blood stream does not cause heart disease.
But what about the first part? Even if not through the intermediate action on cholesterol, saturated fat might still somehow be unhealthy. Ancel Keys claimed to have evidence that high levels of saturated fat in the diet correlates with heart disease. This evidence came from a very shaky observational data set called the “Seven Countries Study”, in which Keys presented results from relatively small, hand-picked cohorts in seven countries, which appeared to show a correlation between saturated fat intake and heart disease (and ignored data from a bunch of other countries where no such correlation could be seen).
But it’s now more than forty years after the Seven Countries Study was published, and there is thus no reason to rely any longer on what Ancel Keys claimed to have found. We can instead look at the wealth of data that’s been produced since then.
Let’s start with what the observational data show. A meta-analysis was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2010 that sought to find if the prospective cohort studies that had been carried out up to that point supported the notion that saturated fat causes heart disease.
A meta-analysis is a pooled analysis, where you take a bunch of studies and add their results together, to get a higher degree of statistical accuracy. A prospective cohort study is a study where you find two groups of people that vary in some significant respect, for example in terms of how much saturated fat they eat, and then follow them over time to see what happens – it’s generally considered to be the highest quality type of observational study, although it doesn’t reach the level of quality of a randomized controlled trial, because it isn’t able to get rid of confounding effects to the level that a randomized trial can (if you need to brush up on scientific method in the health sciences, read this).
Why are we even bothering to look at observational studies at all then, instead of just jumping straight to randomized trials? Because observational studies are easier to do, so there are more of them, and they can gather a lot more data. While a randomized trial with a few thousand people is huge, an observational study with a few thousand people is tiny. Additionally, as mentioned, the initial recommendation to eat less saturated fat was based on a single observational study, and quite a small one at that (the Seven Countries Study included less than 13,000 people – “Seven Countries” makes it sound much bigger than it was). So it’s interesting to see if the vast mass of observational data that we have today bears out the initial findings of the Seven Countries Study.
The authors of the meta-analysis identified 21 prospective cohort studies, with a total of almost 400,000 participants. That’s a big data set. The studies followed participants for between five and 23 years.
So, what did they find?
The difference in risk of cardiovascular disease between the groups with a high intake of saturated fat and those with a low intake of saturated fat was exactly zero. There was no difference at all. If you look more closely at the different kinds of cardiovascular disease, then you see a slightly increased risk of coronary heart disease in the saturated fat group (7% increased relative risk), but a slightly decreased risk of stroke (21% decreased relative risk). Neither of those differences were statistically significant, however. And in observational data sets, with all the risks of confounding they face, anything less than a halving or doubling of risk should be ignored, since small differences between groups are almost certainly caused by confounding factors.
Let’s move on and look at what the randomized controlled trials show. A Cochrane review was published in 2020 that looked at the ability of a diet low in saturated fat to prevent heart disease and death. 15 trials were identified, with a total of roughly 55,000 participants, and included in Cochrane’s meta-analysis. In most of the trials, the intervention consisted of dietary advice, although a few also provided polyunsaturated fats (so-called “healthy oils”), and told people to replace their lard and butter with them, and one provided participants with complete meal replacements. The trials lasted from two to eight years, with an average duration of five years.
Eleven of the 15 trials measured intake of saturated fats at multiple time points, and could thus confirm that intake of saturated fats decreased in the intervention group as compared with the control group. This is good to know, since if that wasn’t the case then a lack of benefit in terms of heart disease risk could simply be due to not managing to get people to change their diets sufficiently. So we know for certain that saturated fat intake decreased in at least eleven of the fifteen trials. Did this have any meaningful impact on people’s risk of having a heart attack or dying?
No, is the short answer. In the low saturated fat group, 6.4% of participants died, while in the high saturated fat group, 6.2% of participants died. So 0.2% more people died in the low saturated fat group than in the high saturated fat group. As you would expect for such a small difference, it isn’t statistically significant.
After the dark magic known as Mantel-Haenszel weighting (a statistical technique used in meta-analysis in which studies with more precise results are given greater weight), the authors reach the conclusion that it’s actually the other way around, that marginally less people should have died in the low saturated fat group, but the difference still isn’t statistically significant.
So it’s not possible to conclude that a diet high in saturated fat increases overall mortality. What about if we look specifically at heart attacks?
Most heart attacks are not fatal, so it’s possible that an intervention could lower heart attacks without meaningfully impacting overall risk of death. In the low saturated fat group, 3.3% of participants had a heart attack. In the high saturated fat group, 3.1% of participants had a heart attack. So the people in the high saturated fat group actually experienced fewer heart attacks than the people in the low saturated fat group.
Again, after statistical weighting, it appears that there should have been slightly fewer heart attacks in the group with the low saturated fat diet (rougly 0.3% less). Just as before, however, the difference isn’t statistically significant. What that means is that the small difference that was found is within the margin of error.
To conclude, the sum of all the observational and randomized trial evidence now available to us does not allow us to conclude that there is any increased risk of cardiovascular disease or death with increased intake of saturated fat. Considering that the data sets that these conclusions are based on are massive, we can be certain that even if there were a benefit, it would be so tiny as to not be worth bothering with. It is therefore shocking that public health agencies still tell their populations to cut down on saturated fats, instead of focusing on the things that have actually been shown to make a difference.
November 28, 2021 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment
Higher Infection Rates in Vaccinated Not an Artefact of Wrong Population Data, New Analysis Shows

By Will Jones • The Daily Sceptic • November 26, 2021
Back in October, when the critics rounded on the UKHSA for publishing vaccine data that didn’t fit the narrative, front and centre of their complaints was the claim that they were using poor estimates of the size of the unvaccinated population, and thus underestimating the infection rate in the unvaccinated. Cambridge’s Professor David Speigelhalter didn’t hold back, writing on Twitter that it was “completely unacceptable” for the agency to “put out absurd statistics showing case-rates higher in vaxxed than non-vaxxed” when it is “just an artefact of using hopelessly biased NIMS population estimates”.
To the UKHSA’s credit, while it conceded other points, it never gave in on this one, sticking to its view that the National Immunisation Management System (NIMS) was the “gold standard” for these estimates. It pointed out that ONS population estimates have problems of their own, not least that for some age groups the ONS supposes there to be fewer people in the population than the Government counts as being vaccinated.
How can we know which estimates are more accurate? A group of experts has applied analytical techniques in order to estimate the size of the unvaccinated population independently of ONS and NIMS figures. Using three different methods, experts from HART found that estimates from all three methods were in broad agreement with the NIMS estimates, whereas the ONS estimate was a much lower outlier.
The first method involves recognising that people not within the NHS database system still catch Covid and still get tested. Assuming these people have the same infection rates per 100,000 people as the unvaccinated, you can calculate how many people there are outside of the database system and add these to the NIMS totals.
The second method involves looking at the rate of growth of people with an NHS number, which has been remarkably steady at around 2.9% per year. If you assume that people who are not yet registered in the NHS will sometimes become sick enough to seek healthcare, and thus a record will be created for them, applying this growth rate to the 2011 ONS population estimates give another figure for the total population.
The third method involves assuming that, in low-Covid weeks, deaths within an age bracket should occur at a similar rate in vaccinated and unvaccinated, allowing the size of the total population to be inferred from the percentage of deaths in the unvaccinated.
The results in terms of reported infection rates according to the five different estimates are depicted in the chart above. They show that the ONS is a clear outlier, its estimates sitting far too low, and NIMS is likely to be much more accurate. The ONS puts the unvaccinated population at around 4.59 million whereas NIMS puts it at 9.92 million, a difference of 5.33 million. That’s a lot of people not to be included in estimates, and suggests, among other things, that the ONS has not adequately estimated the magnitude of illegal immigration into the country.
As well as vindicating the UKHSA in its decision to stick with NIMS over ONS, HART’s analysis also indicates that, contrary to the assertions of Prof Spiegelhalter, the UKHSA data showing infection rates higher in the vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated is not a mere artefact of using the wrong population estimates. There may be other biases in it, but this is not one of them.
Here is the weekly update on unadjusted vaccine effectiveness based on the raw data in the UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance report. The unadjusted vaccine effectiveness estimates against infection have remained low in all adult age brackets this week, particularly in those aged 40-70, though there is little sign of further decline; in the older age groups (over 40), the recent vaccine effectiveness revival continues, possibly as a result of the third doses. There is also a sign of a rise in vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation in the over-70s.




November 28, 2021 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, UK | Leave a comment
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Mutually Assured Delusion (MAD)
By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | November 5, 2013
Groupthink: A pattern of thought charaterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.
Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets, by Roland Benabou, published in the Review of Economic Studies. Benabou also has a talk (ppt slides) on this subject.
First, a definition of groupthink (from the ppt slides):
Janis (1972)’s eight symptoms [of groupthink]:
- illusion of invulnerability
- collective rationalization
- belief in inherent morality
- stereotyped views of out-groups
- direct pressure on dissenters
- self-censorship
- illusion of unanimity
- self-appointed mind guards
Sound like any groups that we know? … continue
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