The Meaning of the FDA Resignations
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | September 14, 2021
How significant is it that the two top FDA officials responsible for vaccine research resigned last week and this week signed a letter in The Lancet that strongly warns against vaccine boosters? This is a remarkable sign that the project of government-managed virus mitigation is in the final stages before falling apart.
The booster has already been promoted by top lockdown advocates Neil Ferguson of Imperial College and Anthony Fauci of NIH, even in the face of rising public incredulity toward their “expert” advice. For these two FDA officials to go on record with grave doubts – and their perspective is certainly backed by the unimpressive booster experience in Israel – introduces a major break in the narrative that the experts in charge deserve our trust and deference.
What’s at stake here? It’s about more than the boosters. It’s about the whole experience of taking away the control of health management from individuals and medical professionals and handing it over to modelers and government officials with coercive power.
From the first week of March 2020, the US embarked on a wild experiment in virus mitigation, deploying a series of measures with a sweep and scope that had never previously been attempted, not in modern times and not even in ancient times. The litany of controls and tactics is long. Many of these measures survive in most parts of the US. The retail landscape is still filled with plexiglass. We are still invited to sanitize ourselves when going indoors. People still mask up in proximity to others. The “Karens” of the world are still actively shaming and denouncing anyone suspected of non-compliance.
The vaccine push has been particularly divisive, with President Biden actively encouraging “anger” at those who don’t get the jab, even as he refuses to acknowledge the existence of infection-induced immunities. In several cities, people who refuse vaccines are being denied active participation in civic life, and a populist movement is rising up that scapegoats the refuseniks as the only reason that the virus continues to be a problem.
All these measures were deployed in waves of controls. It all began with event cancellations and school closures. It continued with travel bans, most of which are still in place. Sanitization and plexiglass were next. Masks were rolled out and then mandated. The principle of forced human separation governed social interactions. Capacity limits indoors were a common feature. The US example inspired many governments around the world to adopt these NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) and take away the liberties of the people.
At each stage of control, there were new claims that we’ve finally found the answer, the key technique that would finally slow and stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Nothing worked, as the virus seemed to follow its own course regardless of all these measures. Indeed there was no observable difference anywhere in the world based on whether and to what extent any of these measures were deployed.
Finally came the pharmaceutical interventions, voluntary at first but gradually mandatory, just as with each previous protocol began as a recommendation until it was mandated.
At no point in these 19 months have we seen a clear admission of failure on the part of government officials. Indeed, it’s mostly been the opposite, as the agencies double down, claiming effectiveness while citing no data or studies, while social media companies backed it all by taking down contrarian posts and brazenly deleting accounts of people who dare cite dissenting science.
The vaccine was the biggest gamble of all simply because the program was so expensive, so personal, and so wildly oversold. Even those of us who opposed every other mandate had hopes that the vaccines would finally end the public panic and provide governments a way to back out of all the other strategies that had failed.
That did not happen.
Most people believed that the vaccine would work like many others before them to block infection and spread. In this, people were merely believing what the head of the CDC said. “Our data from the C.D.C. today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick,” Rochelle Walinsky told Rachel Maddow. “And that it’s not just in the clinical trials, it’s also in real-world data.”
“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,”President Biden said, reflecting what was the common view in the summer of 2021.
That of course turned out not to be the case. The vaccines appear to have been helpful in mitigating against some severe outcomes but it did not achieve victory over the virus. Israel’s surge in infections in August was among the fully vaccinated. The same happened in the UK and Scotland, and that precise result began to hit the US in September. Indeed, we all have vaccinated friends who caught the virus and were sick for days. Meanwhile, team natural immunity has received a huge boost from a large study in Israel that demonstrated that recovered Covid cases gain far more protection than is conferred by the vaccine.
The fallback position then became the booster. Surely this is the answer! Israel was first to mandate them. Here again, the problems began to show, as yet another magic bullet of disease mitigation failed. Then the inevitable headline came: Israel preparing for possible fourth COVID vaccine dose. So think about this because there is a sense in which the vaccines rank among the biggest failures: in a matter of a few short months, we’ve gone from the claim that they fully protect to they are pretty okay provided you get regularly scheduled boosters forever.
Now to the striking resignation of two top officials at the FDA who were in charge of vaccine safety and administration. It was the Director and Deputy Director of the Office of Vaccines Research, Marion Gruber and Phillip Kause. They gave no reason for their departure, which is scheduled for October and November.
The case is fascinating because 1) people rarely resign cushy government jobs unless a higher-paying, higher-prestige job in the private sector awaits, or 2) they are being pushed out. It’s rare for anyone in a position like that to resign over a principled matter of science. When I first read that they were going, I figured something else was up.
These days, extremely weird things are going on within the Biden administration. Even though his approval ratings are sinking, the president has to pretend that he has all the answers, that the science behind his mandates and virus war is universally settled, that anyone who disagrees with him is really just a political enemy. He has gone so far as to denounce, demonize, and legally threaten red-state governors who disagree with him.
This is a deep problem for actual scientists working within the bureaucracy because they know for sure that all of this is a pretense and that the government cannot win this war on the virus. They simply cannot preside over more false promises, especially when the whole of their professional training is about assessing the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.
So what can they do? In this case, it appears they had to get away before they dropped a bombshell.
The bombshell is called “Considerations in boosting COVID-19 vaccine immune responses.” It appears in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet. The two top officials are among the authors. The article recommends against the Covid booster shot that the Biden administration, following Fauci’s advice, is suggesting as the key to making the vaccines work better and finally fulfill their promise.
Fauci and company are pushing boosters because they know what is coming. Essentially we are going the way of Israel: most everyone is vaccinated but the virus itself is not being controlled. More and more among those hospitalized and dying are vaccinated. This same trend is coming to the US. The boosters are a means by which government can save face, or so many believe.
The trouble now is that the top scientists at the FDA disagree. Further, they think that the push for boosters is courting problems. They think the current regime of one or two shots is working as well as one can expect. Nothing is gained on net from a booster, they say. There just isn’t enough evidence to take the risk of another booster, and another and another.
The authors knew this article was appearing. They knew that signing it under the FDA affiliation would lead to a push for their resignations. Life would get very difficult for both of them. They got ahead of the messaging and resigned before it came out. Very smart.
The signed article goes even further to warn of possible downsides. They point out that boosters might seem necessary because “variants expressing new antigens have evolved to the point at which immune responses to the original vaccine antigens no longer protect adequately against currently circulating viruses.” At the same time, there are possible side effects that could discredit all vaccines for a generation or more. “There could be risks,” they write, “if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects (such as myocarditis, which is more common after the second dose of some mRNA vaccines, or Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been associated with adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccines.”)
Bringing up such side effects is essentially a taboo topic. That this was written by two top FDA officials is nothing short of remarkable, especially because it comes at a time when the Biden administration is going all in on vaccine mandates. Meanwhile, studies are showing that for teenage boys, the vaccine poses a greater risk to them than Covid itself. “For boys 16-17 without medical comorbidities, the rate of CAE is currently 2.1 to 3.5 times higher than their 120-day COVID-19 hospitalization risk, and 1.5 to 2.5 times higher at times of high weekly COVID-19 hospitalization.”
From the beginning of these lockdowns – along with all the masks, restrictions, bogus health advice from plexiglass to sanitizer to universal vaccine mandates and so on – it was clear that there would someday be hell to pay. They wrecked rights and liberties, crashed economies, traumatized a whole generation of children and other students, ran roughshod over religious freedom, and for what? There is zero evidence that any of this has made any difference. We are surrounded by the carnage they created.
The appearance of The Lancet article by two top FDA vaccine scientists is truly devastating and revealing because it undermines the last plausible tool to save the whole machinery of government disease management that has been deployed at such enormous social, cultural, and economic cost for 19 months. Not in our lifetimes has a policy failed so badly. The intellectual and political implications here are monumental. It means that the real Covid crisis – the task of assigning responsibility for all the collateral damage – has just begun.
In 2006, during the early years of the birth of lockdown ideology, the great epidemiologist Donald Henderson warned that if any of these restrictive measures were deployed for a pandemic, the result would be a “loss of trust in government” and “a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.” Catastrophe is exactly what has happened. The current regime wants to point the finger toward the noncompliant. That is no longer believable. They cannot delay the inevitable for much longer: responsibility for this catastrophe belongs to those who embarked on this political experiment in the first place.
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.
35,000 Women Report Period Problems After Covid Jab
By Richie Allen | September 16, 2021
Around 35,000 women have come forward to report irregularities with their menstrual cycle, including abnormal period pain, after they received a covid jab.
Writing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Dr. Victoria Dale called for an investigation. She lectures on reproductive immunology at Imperial College London.
Incredibly, The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the UK’s drug watchdog, has refused to accept that there is a link between the jabs and menstrual cycle problems.
According to the MHRA:
“The rigorous evaluation completed to date does not support a link between changes to menstrual periods and related symptoms and Covid vaccines.”
According to The Mail Online this morning:
Data on the number of period problems following vaccination was collected from the MHRA’s Yellow Card Scheme, which keeps a record of every case of a potential side effect. But this data is reliant on women coming forward, meaning nearly 35,000 figure could be the tip of the iceberg.
So-called experts were rushed onto UK TV and radio shows this morning to assure the public that even if there is a link between the jabs and period problems, the jabs do not affect fertility.
They’re lying. I am not saying that I know the jabs affect fertility. I do not know that. But equally they cannot know that the jabs do not affect fertility in males or females.
That’s because they have no long-term data on how the jabs affect fertility or anything else for that matter. I really hope this information is getting through to people. The jabs are unnecessary, untried, unsafe and the manufacturers have been indemnified against legal action from anyone injured by their products.
The Media Is Lying About Greenland and Climate Change
By Vijay Jayaraj | Real Clear Energy | September 13, 2021
The mainstream media is hell-bent on instilling climate fear among the masses. This means that they can never get over their obsession with weather events in the Arctic, which is one of their favorite subjects for projecting a climate catastrophe.
The Greenland Ice Sheet has been of great interest to climate alarmists. Any small change in ice sheet mass is promoted in the media as a product of man-made climate change. Last week, media outlets across the globe claimed that there has been rain for the first time at the Greenland summit.
“Rain fell at the normally snowy summit of Greenland for the first time on record,” read CNN’s headlines. Others went a step further and declared it a sign of climate doomsday. “Rain On Greenland Ice Sheet, Possibly A First, Signals Climate Change Risk,” read another headline.
Unfortunately, for the mainstream media, climate history nearly always comes back to haunt their claims of unprecedented events. Records reveal that this is not the first rainfall in Greenland, and certainly not the first on the Greenland summit peak, which stands at around 10,000 feet.
Records Show Past Rain Events in Greenland
A 1975 report prepared for National Science Foundation (NSF) by Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army, at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory documented the summer climate at Greenland ice sheet. It showed at least two rainfall events have occurred, once in 1933 at 8,840 feet and again in 1950 at a much higher altitude. The 1950 rainfall event was above 9,500 feet and very close to the Greenland summit peak, thus contradicting mainstream media claims of unprecedented rainfall at the summit.
The NSF report states, “According to Hogue (1964) heavy rainfall seldom occurs above 6,000 ft on the Greenland ice sheet. However, at Watkins (75°N, 48°W, and elevation 8,840 ft) rain was reported to have occurred in July 1933. Hogue also notes that in the Centrale-Eismitte area, drizzle and rain were each reported once in a three-year period, on 20 and 21 June 1950, respectively.”
The site of the previous rainfall event, Centrale-Eismitte, is close to the 9,800-feet mark where the current rainfall event occurred. It would be a pure lie — or gross ignorance — to claim that rainfall at such an altitude has never occurred before at Greenland.
Headlines That Portray an Incomplete Reality
Besides misleading the public on the “first-time rain event,” these media outlets have also concealed the reality of the situation in Greenland, especially in 2021.
This year, Greenland’s surface mass balance (SMB) was higher than the 30-year average during many days of the year. SMB is the net balance between the accumulation and ablation on a glacier’s surface, typically denoted by mass gain and mass loss.
Data on Greenland’s SMB is available at Polar Portal, where Danish research institutions display the results of their monitoring of the Greenland Ice Sheet and the sea ice in the Arctic.
SMB data for 2021 show that there has been no significant melting and there was also a surprising gain in the SMB during the summer months, which is usually the melting season.
During July and August, the total accumulation of SMB (as measured in gigatons) was higher than the 30-year average (1981-2010). This can be attributed to the unexpected gain in SMB during the summer months.
So not only has the media lied to the public about the “never-before” rainfall event, it has also withheld the truth about the above-average SMB that was witnessed during the past 50 days.
This endless parade of lies about Greenland and the Arctic will likely continue. Even above-average snow accumulations will be kept out of the news and one-time warm weather events (especially during the melt season) will be used as “proof” for global warming.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Contributing Writer to the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Va., and holds a master of science degree in environmental science from the University of East Anglia, England. He resides in Bengaluru, India.
AMA issues mix of mindless propaganda & “Trust the SCIENCE” jargon to teach doctors to lie about Covid jabs
By Meryl Nass, MD | September 14, 2021
I am looking over the “AMA Covid -19 Guide. Winter 2021. It is not a guide. It only deals with Covid vaccines, not treatment. It’s raison d’etre is:
“To overcome vaccine hesitancy and ensure widespread vaccine acceptance among all demographic groups, physicians and the broader public health community must continue working to build trust in vaccine safety and efficacy, especially in marginalized and minoritized (this is not my misspelling–Nass) communities with historically well-founded mistrust in medical institutions. As COVID-19 vaccines become more widely available, it is critical that physicians continue to ensure they practice and encourage their patients to wear masks, physical distance and wash hands until a critical mass of the population is vaccinated.”
It is an extraordinary document. I wonder how much the AMA got paid to put their name on it. Probably a lot.
It is extraordinary because it would repel most doctors. It was obviously written by a non-doctor. I have an idea of one person who may have had a hand in creating it–John Grabenstein, a pharmacist and propagandist extraordinaire, who helped craft the fake science on the anthrax vaccine. He works for the Immunization Action Coalition now. He is a one man band who knows how to pull all the levers to push terrible vaccine policies.
It turns out that the current AMA President, Gerald Harmon, was instrumental in pushing the experimental and dangerous anthrax vaccine, and punishing refusers and truth tellers. This got him rapid promotions, and he retired as a Major General. No doubt he worked with Grabenstein back then, and probably now.
Whoever wrote the “Guide” did not know that whooping cough and pertussis were the same thing, or that the DTP vaccine includes tetanus. It is of interest that there is no name on it, no clue about how it came into existence.
All this business about “equity.” If the federal government cared about equity, why are they always bombing and droning people of color? What equity means to them is that a 25% acceptance of the Covid vaccine by Black people cannot be allowed to stand. And the refusal by blacks to participate in clinical trials is especially egregious.
The document is really kind of a hoot, it is so out of 1984. It shows you what the propagandists are really worried about, for example, the fact that too many people have learned the FDA “review” and the Pfizer preclinical tests were bogus:
On combating the spread of vaccine misinformation:
• With misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine development process circulating widely, new AMA policy seeks to educate physicians on speaking with their patients about the vaccine and provide culturally appropriate education materials for all patients.
On vaccine development:
• To help physicians promote vaccine confidence among patients and the general public, we must continue to instill confidence in the information, education, and transparency around the FDA’s process for authorization or licensure, as well as the standards by which FDA will review future vaccine candidates and the clinical endpoints the FDA hopes to achieve.
• Physicians must be continuously updated about the review process for future COVID-19 vaccines. Any available safety and efficacy data must be in place as soon as possible so that any questions or concerns about the vaccine candidates can be addressed.
• The AMA has been talking to FDA officials about the role the agency needs to continue to play in alleviating vaccine concerns by ensuring the process is transparent and based on science.
• The widespread availability and adoption of a safe and efficacious vaccine will play an essential role in slowing transmission of COVID-19 and allow us to move safely and confidently toward the full re-opening of our businesses and schools, helping ease Americans back toward pre-pandemic life.
• Research shows growing levels of confidence in the safety and effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines, but there continues to be vacancy hesitancy among some individuals and in some communities, which we are striving to overcome.
• What’s clear is that the benefits of getting the vaccine to protect you from COVID-19 exceed the risks, which is why medical experts strongly recommend getting the vaccine.
• To improve the dialogue and provide opportunities for physicians to learn more about vaccine development, approval, and ongoing distribution plans and challenges, AMA has initiated a series of “town hall” type webinars with physicians and career staff at both the FDA and CDC. All events are archived on AMA’s website.
• To develop the most effective COVID-19 vaccine, U.S. clinical trials must include representation of all Americans to ensure treatments are studied in every population that may use it.
The AMA is pleased that efforts have been made by institutions to acknowledge the exclusion of Black and Latinx people from clinical trials historically.
Now there are many efforts underway to ensure Black and Latinx people, who have been disproportionately affected by the virus, are prioritized in clinical trials.
This not only provides better safety and efficacy data but is a more equitable strategy that will hopefully contribute to trust in the vaccine once available.
Viral Reality Check – What’s going on, but with real logic and science
Ivor Cummins | September 13, 2021
Quick update on the evolving irrationality of our viral issue – couple of links below that were mentioned:
Revealing talk on one major reason WHY science died in early 2020: https://odysee.com/@IvorCummins:f/Ernst-Wolff—Uncovering-the-Corona-Narrative—Aug-2021:8
Also our Covid Chronicles movie latest update here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/capecrusaders/the-covid-chronicles/posts/3279184
NOTE: My extensive research and interviewing / video/sound editing and much more does require support – please consider helping if you can with monthly donation to support me directly, or one-off payment: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=69ZSTYXBMCN3W
Elizabeth Warren Demands Amazon Censor Best-Selling Books
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | September 14, 2021
Senator Elizabeth Warren is demanding Amazon censor best-selling books because they contain information that challenges the official narrative on coronavirus.
Warren wrote a letter asserting that Amazon was complicit in spreading “COVID-19 misinformation” because it allows people to buy books authored by people like Dr. Joseph Mercola, who has been targeted by the mainstream media as a purveyor of “dangerous” fake news about COVID and vaccines.
“During the week of August 22, 2021, my staff conducted sample searches on Amazon.com of pandemic-related terms such as ‘COVID-19,’ ‘COVID,’ ‘vaccine,’ ‘COVID 19 vaccine,’ and ‘pandemic,’” Sen. Warren wrote in a letter addressed to Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy. “The top results consistently included highly-ranked and favorably-tagged books based on falsehoods about COVID-19 vaccines and cures.”
Of course, the claim that these are “falsehoods” is a completely arbitrary assertion made by Warren and her staff, with no objective standard of proof required.
Mercola was again singled out for condemnation.
“[Dr. Mercola] has posted over 600 articles on Facebook casting doubt on COVID-19 vaccines and been subject to multiple federal investigations (with one false- advertising investigation leading to a $2.95 million consumer settlement). But Amazon’s algorithms promoted ‘The Truth About COVID-19’ as a best seller and top result in response to common pandemic-related search terms,” Warren wrote.
As Cindy Harper highlights, Warren’s efforts to have Amazon ban books follows a similar effort by Rep. Adam Schiff, who claimed that 10 per cent of Amazon search results related to vaccines returned “misinformation” (a description again solely determined by Schiff and his staff).
At what point did we enter an era where the very thing that drove scientific progress for hundreds of years – challenging the official orthodoxy – is now treated as heresy?
Putting people on lists with terrorists and sex traffickers before deplatforming them from social media sites is not enough.
Erasing information published by actual doctors and scientific experts that dares to question the ever-shifting goalposts of what “the science” says is also insufficient.
Now the digital book burnings must begin.
Cuba Says ‘Mysterious Syndrome’ is Not Scientifically Plausible
teleSUR | September 13, 2021
A technical report was released Monday by a multidisciplinary research team created by the Cuban Academy of Sciences (ACC) on the “unidentified health incidents” reported in Havana in which some U.S. employees complained of various symptoms when they were stationed in Havana. Similar symptoms apparently appeared in some Canadian citizens and, later, in U.S. employees in other countries.
The report debunks a narrative it calls “mystery syndrome,” which assumes that the cause of these incidents are attacks with some unidentified energy weapon. Its authors reveal that the narrative is based on the following – unverified – claims:
1) A novel syndrome with shared core symptoms and signs is present in the affected employees;
2) It is possible to detect in these employees brain damage originating during their stay in Havana;
3) A directed energy source exists that could affect people’s brains from great distances after crossing the physical barriers of homes or hotel rooms;
4) A weapon capable of generating such a physical agent is achievable and identified;
5) Evidence of an attack was discovered;
6): The available evidence rules out alternative medical explanations.
The report critically examines the plausibility of these claims and the evidence on which they are based, concluding that the “mystery syndrome” narrative is not scientifically acceptable in any of its components and has only survived because of a biased use of science.
Although the report lacks some information, it provides plausible interpretations that fit the available facts better than the “mystery syndrome” narrative, based on published reports in the United States and Canada and field studies in Havana.
The text details the arguments for these interpretations, which are that:
Possibly some U.S. employees while stationed in Havana felt ill due to a heterogeneous collection of medical conditions, some pre-existing before going to Cuba and others acquired due to simple or well-known causes.
Many diseases prevalent in the general population can explain most of the symptoms. Thus, there is no novel syndrome (something evident in the official U.S. reports). Only a minority of people have detectable brain dysfunction, most due to experiences prior to their stay in Havana and others due to well-known medical conditions.
No known form of energy can selectively cause brain damage (with spatial precision similar to a laser beam) under the conditions described for the alleged Havana incidents.
The laws of physics governing sound, ultrasound, infrasound or radio frequency waves (including microwaves) do not permit this. These forms of energy could not have damaged brains without being felt or heard by others, without disturbing electronic devices in the case of microwaves, or without producing other injuries (such as ruptured eardrums or skin burns).
The report assures that at no time was anything of the sort reported. Although there are weapons that use sound or microwaves they are large in size and there is no possibility that this type of weapon would not go unnoticed (or leave a trace) if it had been deployed in Havana. Neither the Cuban Police, nor the F.B.I., nor the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, have discovered evidence of “attacks” on diplomats in Havana despite intensive investigations.
Finally, psychogenic and toxic explanations for many symptoms in some cases were rejected by adequate research. Specifically, all the conditions for the psychogenic spread of distress were present in this episode, including probably an inadequate initial medical response, early official U.S. government endorsement of an “attack” theory, and sensationalist media coverage, among others.
The experts stand ready to revise its conclusions if new evidence emerges, inviting efforts to refute its interpretations in a climate of open scientific collaboration. However, it firmly rejects as “established truth” a narrative built on flimsy foundations and flawed scientific practice. An example is the idea that there was an “attack,” which is accepted as “established truth without critical thinking.”
Some scientific articles – and most of the news read – accept as an axiom that there were attacks in Havana, so they take it as an idea on which to build theories. However, after four years, no evidence of attacks has surfaced, making it time to rethink the narrative, the report’s authors hold.
Javid: “Healthcare Staff Facing Mandatory Covid & Flu Jabs”
By Richie Allen | September 14, 2021
Speaking in the House of Commons this morning, Health Secretary Sajid Javid said that a consultation has been launched over making Covid and flu vaccinations mandatory for front-line healthcare and social care workers in England.
Javid said that while he’s keeping an open mind until he sees the results of the consultation, he believes that:
“It is highly likely that front-line NHS staff and those working in wider social care settings will also have to be vaccinated to protect those around them and this will be an important step in protecting those at greatest risk”.
Tyranny just rolls off the tongues of these fascists doesn’t it? Nobody cares though. There wasn’t so much as a murmur from the Labour Party benches, the so-called party of the working man and woman.
The Health Secretary had just threatened hundreds of thousands of people who work in the nation’s hospitals and care homes, that if they don’t take his medicine, they’ll be out of a job. Not a peep from Labour.
Javid was laying out his plans for tackling covid and flu this Winter. On flu, he said that in the next few weeks we will see the launch of the largest flu vaccination campaign the country has ever seen.
He said that people will also be encouraged to meet outdoors where possible, and try to let in fresh air when meeting indoors.
He also said that people will be encouraged to wear face masks in crowded areas where they can come into contact with others they don’t normally meet. This was greeted by jeers from his Tory colleagues on the backbenches.
I never believed for a moment, that we would ever see the back of the arbitrary measures introduced to tackle covid. I said many times on The Richie Allen Show that we’d be living with these measures and more forever. I hate being right.
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Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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- Israel’s top Jewish religious body ‘refuses to condemn’ smashing of Jesus statue
- No Tricks Zone
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
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