You are not alone! As of 28 July 2021, 29% of Canadians have not received a COVID-19 vaccine, and an additional 14% have received one shot. In the US and in the European Union, less than half the population is fully vaccinated, and even in Israel, the “world’s lab” according to Pfizer, one third of people remain completely unvaccinated. Politicians and the media have taken a uniform view, scapegoating the unvaccinated for the troubles that have ensued after eighteen months of fearmongering and lockdowns. It’s time to set the record straight.
It is entirely reasonable and legitimate to say ‘no’ to insufficiently tested vaccines for which there is no reliable science. You have a right to assert guardianship of your body and to refuse medical treatments if you see fit. You are right to say ‘no’ to a violation of your dignity, your integrity and your bodily autonomy. It is your body, and you have the right to choose. You are right to fight for your children against their mass vaccination in school.
You are right to question whether free and informed consent is at all possible under present circumstances. Long-term effects are unknown. Transgenerational effects are unknown. Vaccine-induced deregulation of natural immunity is unknown. Potential harm is unknown as the adverse event reporting is delayed, incomplete and inconsistent between jurisdictions.
You are being targeted by mainstream media, government social engineering campaigns, unjust rules and policies, collaborating employers, and the social-media mob. You are being told that you are now the problem and that the world cannot get back to normal unless you get vaccinated. You are being viciously scapegoated by propaganda and pressured by others around you. Remember; there is nothing wrong with you.
You are inaccurately accused of being a factory for new SARS-CoV-2 variants, when in fact, according to leading scientists, your natural immune system generates immunity to multiple components of the virus. This will promote your protection against a vast range of viral variants and abrogates further spread to anyone else.
You are justified in demanding independent peer-reviewed studies, not funded by multinational pharmaceutical companies. All the peer-reviewed studies of short-term safety and short-term efficacy have been funded, organized, coordinated, and supported by these for-profit corporations; and none of the study data have been made public or available to researchers who don’t work for these companies.
You are right to question the preliminary vaccine trial results. The claimed high values of relative efficacy rely on small numbers of tenuously determined “infections.” The studies were also not blind, where people giving the injections admittedly knew or could deduce whether they were injecting the experimental vaccine or the placebo. This is not acceptable scientific methodology for vaccine trials.
You are correct in your calls for a diversity of scientific opinions. Like in nature, we need a polyculture of information and its interpretations. And we don’t have that right now. Choosing not to take the vaccine is holding space for reason, transparency and accountability to emerge. You are right to ask, ‘What comes next when we give away authority over our own bodies?’
Do not be intimidated. You are showing resilience, integrity and grit. You are coming together in your communities, making plans to help one another and standing for scientific accountability and free speech, which are required for society to thrive. We are among many who stand with you.
Angela Durante, PhD
Denis Rancourt, PhD
Claus Rinner, PhD
Laurent Leduc, PhD
Donald Welsh, PhD
John Zwaagstra, PhD
Jan Vrbik, PhD
Valentina Capurri, PhD
This is not just scientific madness, it appears to be very intentional and purposeful.
The Moderna and Pfizer vaccine tests were conducted, as customary, with a control group; a group within the trial who were given a placebo and not the test vaccine. However, during the trial -and after the untested vaccines were given emergency use authorization – the vaccine companies conducting the trial decided to break protocol and notify the control group they were not vaccinated. Almost all the control group were then given the vaccine.
Purposefully dissolving the placebo group violates the scientific purpose to test whether the vaccine has any efficacy; any actual benefit and/or safety issues. Without a control group there is nothing to compare the vaccinated group against. According to NPR, the doctors lost the control group in the Johnson County Clinicial Trial (Lexena, Kansas) on purpose:
(Via NPR) […] “Dr. Carlos Fierro, who runs the study there, says every participant was called back after the Food and Drug Administration authorized the vaccine.
“During that visit we discussed the options, which included staying in the study without the vaccine,” he says, “and amazingly there were people — a couple of people — who chose that.”
He suspects those individuals got spooked by rumors about the vaccine. But everybody else who had the placebo shot went ahead and got the actual vaccine. So now Fierro has essentially no comparison group left for the ongoing study. “It’s a loss from a scientific standpoint, but given the circumstances I think it’s the right thing to do,” he says.
People signing up for these studies were not promised special treatment, but once the FDA authorized the vaccines, their developers decided to offer the shots. (read more)
Just so we are clear, the final FDA authorization and approval for the vaccines are based on the outcome of these trials. As noted in the example above, the control group was intentionally lost under the auspices of “the right thing to do”, so there is no way for the efficacy, effectiveness or safety of the vaccine itself to be measured.
There’s no one left within the control group, of a statistically valid value, to give an adequate comparison of outcomes for vaxxed -vs- non-vaxxed.
Whiskey – Tango – Foxtrot !!! This is nuts.
That NPR article is one to bookmark when people start claiming the vaccination is effective.
How can the vaccine not be considered effective when there is no group of non-vaccinated people to compare the results to?
Good grief, the entire healthcare system is operating on a massive hive mindset where science, and the scientific method, is thrown out the window in favor of ideological outcomes and self-fulfilling prophecies. The fact that the researchers and doctors, apparently under the payroll of the pharmaceutical companies that have a vested financial interest in the vaccine outcome, lost the control group on purpose is alarming.
Of course, Big Pharma will promote the vaccine as beneficial, and the controlled media will promote that message with a complete disconnect from the clinical trial details, and the FDA will grant approval on results that were intentionally constructed to produce only one outcome.
WE HAVE a limited time to act. The essence of the situation now is clear: what is still perceived by many as a medical emergency is in reality a highly organised global corporate and political agenda. This agenda is directed towards imposing unimaginable control over the global human population though mandatory vaccination, connected to a digital passport, which will be linked to digital currency and a social credit score.
These technologies enable power to be centralised to a level of intensity never seen before in history.
At the controls of the machine will be the network which has orchestrated everything that has unfolded over the past eighteen months.
Here is what has happened in Great Britain since March last year. The Ministry of Health under the direction of Matt Hancock has presided over the deaths of tens of thousands of the elderly in care homes. These deaths were not caused by deciding to lock down too slowly, but were the outcome of a series of political decisions.
At this time the government also reduced hospital capacity, emptied untested and sick patients into care homes, suppressed the early treatment use of safe generic drugs and initiated a behavioural control campaign directed towards increasing fear.
If there had been a premeditated plan to maximise deaths while retaining plausible deniability that this plan existed, how would it have unfolded differently?
The government has now converted hotels into prisons and incarcerates everyone who enters Britain from an arbitrary list of countries, drawn up without clear logic, and subject to sudden rapid changes. Leaving and returning to the country now involves submission to a regimen of humiliating, pointless and expensive testing based on Drosten’s defective PCR tests and a disinformation myth of asymptomatic spread.
Why are they doing this? To confuse and to humiliate, to deter travel, and to desensitise the population to a new normality of arbitrary imprisonment without trial.
Now the government has mandated the compulsory vaccination of care home workers even as evidence accumulates that the global universal vaccination programme, an unprecedented policy in the history of public health, following the unprecedented global lockdown, is a medical catastrophe with numbers of major side effects including death reported in the aftermath of vaccination climbing into tens of thousands, and still not ending the pandemic.
Mandating any medical treatment as a condition of employment writes medical apartheid into law; the fact that this treatment might be useless (since the ‘vaccines’ do not prevent contracting, transmitting or even dying from the virus) as well as dangerous indicates a darker logic.
The extension of the vaccine programme to children, who are at less risk from the virus than they are from vaccines, suggests the vaccines have a function independent of their role in serving as a vaccine passport Trojan horse. Children will be harmed and die due to this policy, having already been tortured for a year with pointless mandatory testing and propaganda baselessly accusing them of potentially becoming accidental murderers if they did not comply with government decrees. Meanwhile Carrie Antoinette Ceaușescu is pregnant once again, with Johnson having done to her what he has been doing to the country.
For the vaccines to receive regulatory approval (if not for further reasons) effective, safe and cheap treatments have been ruthlessly suppressed. In March 2020 the Lancet, once the most reputable medical journal in the world, now a propaganda organ for the global network, published a fake paper claiming hydroxychloroquine had a negative effect; the paper was eventually retracted. One of the largest hydroxychloroquine factories in the world burned down after an explosion. The highly effective drug ivermectin remains suppressed in the UK and criminalised in other countries. If these drugs had been made available tens of thousands of people would be still alive today. Instead official policy has increased the death toll on the road to mandating vaccines.
Global government intends to make recurring vaccinations mandatory, indefinitely, to access social life. For this purpose they have stockpiled 450million doses of vaccines, enough to vaccinate each member of the British population seven times; other countries have similar figures. They will later order more. What is being implemented is compulsory repeated vaccination for perpetuity.
Towards this goal the facts about the danger of the virus and now the dangers of the vaccines have been ruthlessly suppressed, and bogus information, lies, neurolinguistic programming, and pseudo-scientific models promoted in their place.
A long and growing list of authoritative and conscientious scientists and doctors (including John Ioannidis, Mike Yeadon, Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, Didier Raoult, Scott Atlas, Peter McCullough, Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, Sucharit Bhakdi, Robert Malone) have been censored and defamed. In their place we’ve been presented with charlatans, propaganda actors and fanatics.
Sweden, Florida and Texas, which have all defied the global line on lockdowns, are no longer mentioned, while Haiti’s Moise, Burundi’s Nkurunziza, and Tanzania’s John Magufuli are all dead, in Magufuli’s case weeks after theGuardian published a Gates Foundation-sponsored article demanding action.
This is a shameful period in human history and with every day that passes the shame of what we have already allowed to happen deepens. We have failed to stop a systematic policy which has killed millions around the world and will kill millions more. We have failed to stop the imposition of policy of child abuse on a national scale. We have failed to stop the imposition of lockdown policy which has achieved nothing but the immiseration of hard-working men and women. We are facing government by mercenaries, tyrants, propagandists and fanatics.
Men and women who have already shown courage must continue to do so, and others must now find their courage.
Doctors who have sacrificed their ethics to collaborate in this grotesque charade must redress the balance and remember their duty is to patients, not the government, and not to science.
Apathetic journalists who for eighteen months have functioned as the mindless relays of a criminal regime must recognise their duty is to truth and to the people.
The judiciary, who for eighteen months have deferred to rule by diktat and extended their goodwill to tyranny must recognise, like some of their colleagues in Spain, Alberta, Lisbon, Weimar and elsewhere, that their duty is to justice and human rights, and that these cannot be suspended under any circumstances whatsoever without being destroyed completely.
The vaccination programme must be stopped, or it will never end. Instead, it will become the basis of a new post-social contract modelled on the periodically updated terms of social media in which shared political and corporate interests will make humanity a resource to be farmed.
The Government, who answer to these interests, will seek to reimpose a lockdown with additional restrictions in the autumn. They must be stopped by every moral means.
Extract presentation from America’s Front Line Doctors ‘White Coat Summit’ San Antonio TX July 28, 2021
Dr. Ryan Cole is the CEO and Medical Director of Cole Diagnostics, one of the largest independent labs in the State of Idaho. Dr. Cole is a Mayo Clinic trained Board Certified Pathologist.
He is Board Certified in anatomic and clinical pathology. He has expertise in immunology and virology and also has subspecialty expertise in skin pathology.
Back in early July I noted that data from the ZOE Covid Symptom Study was showing that new infections in the unvaccinated were peaking and falling while those in the vaccinated were still surging.
This was not a phenomenon noted elsewhere and prompted questions about whether it showed that the vaccines were delaying infection, or whether it was primarily an age-based phenomenon. Unfortunately, before anyone was able to investigate further, within a couple of weeks ZOE had ‘updated‘ their methodology and in their new data the phenomenon had oddly disappeared.
This left questions as to whether it had been entirely an artefact of problems with their previous methodology or whether it had been a real phenomenon.
PHE data from the three most recent technical briefings (18, 19 and 20) allow us now to answer this question. Above (top of page) are the Delta case counts for the period July 6th to July 19th and then July 20th to August 2nd, broken down by vaccination status and age. (Actually, it’s not clear whether the initial date is July 6th or another date around then as briefing 18 appears to have a typo and says its data runs up to June 21st, even though briefing 17 also had data up to June 21st and the figures in briefing 18 are higher. However, for the purpose of this analysis it’s not important exactly what the start date is, and I have used July 6th as that is what it would be assuming briefing 18 has the equivalent date to the other briefings.)
The key lines to look at in the chart are the grey and yellow lines. They show that in the under-50s, Delta cases in the unvaccinated dramatically declined between early July and late July whereas those in the vaccinated (at least 21 days after the first dose) were stable. In the second half of the month there were actually more infections in the vaccinated of all ages than in the unvaccinated (the blue and orange lines).
This was the period when new infections nationwide peaked (on July 17th, by report date) and dropped quickly. This new analysis allows us to see that this fast drop was entirely in the unvaccinated under-50s (presumably the result of reaching herd immunity for the Delta variant). Infections in the vaccinated of all ages (and the unvaccinated over-50s) did not fall at the same time but remained stable. This helps explain why the drop ended around July 28th (by report date) and new infections have currently plateaued. What we are experiencing now is the ‘wave’ of infections in the vaccinated (along with the unvaccinated over 50s).
We can’t be sure that the explanation of the phenomenon is that the vaccines delayed infection. Another possibility is that the early surge was in the younger, less vaccinated portion of the under 50s (i.e., people under 30). What we really need is a finer breakdown by age. Unfortunately, despite all the data published during this crisis, very little of it is properly broken down by both vaccination status and age to allow us to do this kind of analysis.
Nonetheless, this confirms that ‘old ZOE’ was right to show infections in the unvaccinated falling during July while those in the vaccinated did not. The fact that ‘new ZOE’ no longer shows this phenomenon once again leads to questions about what changes were made and why, and whether the new methodology is really more reliable, or just more politically acceptable.
All doctors (and probably most non-doctors) have heard of Burkitt’s lymphoma, a type of cancer found primarily in children living in malaria-endemic areas in Africa. Denis Burkitt was the first person to describe the disease, and also the first person to propose that there was an environmental cause (now known to be simultaneous infection by both malaria and Epstein-Barr virus).
Most doctors probably don’t know that Denis Burkitt is also almost single-handedly responsible for the now widespread belief that dietary fibre is an important part of a healthy diet. Interestingly, Burkitt developed his ideas about dietary fibre after corresponding with a less well known doctor called Thomas Cleave (who hasn’t been allowed to give his name to any diseases).
Cleave was interested in the connection between diet and disease, and had noticed how the transition from a traditional diet to a modern diet, rich in refined carbohydrates, was associated with a massive increase in a large number of diseases, including cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. He even wrote a book on the subject. Burkitt was introduced to Cleave in the late 1960’s by epidemiologist Richard Doll (himself famous for discovering that smoking causes lung cancer).
Burkitt was deeply affected by Cleave’s ideas, and in particular his conception that all the “diseases of civilization” had a single underlying cause, but he took the data and went off in a different direction with it. While Cleave believed that it was the refined carbohydrates in the modern diet that were causing harm, Burkitt came to believe instead that it was the absence of dietary fibre that was responsible. Since refined carbohydrates are by definition low in dietary fibre, the two things track together perfectly, and it becomes almost impossible to say from observational data which is the causative factor and which is the confounder.
There was a big fly in the ointment of Burkitt’s hypothesis from the start, however, and that was the fact that the Maasai tribespeople in Kenya and Tanzania, who lived on a diet consisting almost entirely of meat, milk, and blood, showed none of the diseases of modern civilization, even though they had virtually no fibre in their diet. Burkitt, who spent much of his career in Africa, was well aware of this fact, but seemingly chose to ignore it because it didn’t fit his hypothesis.
The world of nutrition was at this time (the late 1970’s) focusing increasingly on dietary fat as the cause of modern diseases (based on atrociously low quality evidence and forceful lobbying by diet-heart hypothesis originator Ancel Keys), and Cleave’s hypothesis was inconvenient, because telling people to cut down on both fats and carbohydrates wouldn’t work – people had to eat something. Burkitt’s fibre hypothesis could however be made to fit together with the diet-heart hypothesis without too much trouble. The two were thus wedded and came to dominate dietary advice for the next couple of decades.
That is how breakfast cereals came to be considered a health food, and why we’ve all been told to increase our intake of dietary fibre. Anyway, it’s now a couple of decades later. One would think that by now there would be plenty of data from actual randomized trials to tell us whether we should be eating more dietary fibre or not. Unfortunately we’re still to a large extent stuck with crappy and confounder-riddled observational studies that cannot separate the presence of refined carbohydrates from the absence of dietary fibre, and that therefore cannot actually say anything about what causes what.
The Cochrane Collaboration tried to do a systematic review and meta-analysis in 2016 to look at the state of the evidence when it comes to the ability of dietary fibre to prevent cardiovascular disease. They found 23 randomized controlled trials with a total of only 1,513 participants. Most of the studies ran for only 12 weeks (the minimum length of time the reviewers had set for inclusion in the review, since short term effects are meaningless from a public health standpoint), and the longest ran for only six months. That’s why I say they tried – there simply isn’t enough data to draw any firm conclusions about what effect dietary fibre has on cardiovascular disease risk. 1,513 people followed for a few months provides far too little data to be able to say anything certain.
With that being the case, the reviewers decided to look at surrogate markers for cardiovascular risk instead of looking at hard outcomes like heart attacks and deaths. In other words, they looked at blood lipids and blood pressure. They included trials of both dietary interventions (i.e. that had people eat more food rich in dietary fibre) and trials of fibre containing supplements. I prefer the fibre supplement trials, since the dietary intervention trials have the same confounding issue that the observational studies have – i.e. that an increase in intake of foods rich in dietary fibre virtually always also means a decrease in intake of foods rich in refined carbohydrates. The supplement trials are also at lower risk of bias, since they can be placebo-controlled and thereby blinded. But I’ll report what the diet modification studies showed too, for the sake of completeness. In total, there were fifteen fibre supplement trials and eight diet modification trials.
Let’s get to the results. The fibre supplements were associated with a marginal 0.04 mmol/L reduction in LDL (“bad cholesterol” – yes I know that description is dumb and technically incorrect) that was just about statistically significant. The effect was similar (0.03 mmol/L) in the diet modification trials. For an average person with an LDL of 4 mmol/L this would represent a reduction of just 1%, in other words nowhere near enough to be expected to have any noticeable impact on cardiovascular disease risk.
And LDL is anyway a poor predictor of risk of cardiovascular disease. A much better predictor is triglycerides. The fibre supplements were associated with a 0,03 mmol/L reduction in triglycerides (not statistically significant), while diet modification was associated with a 0,02 mmol/L increase in triglycerides (also not statistically significant). Considering that the average person has a triglyceride level of around 2 mmol/L, this amounts to no noticeable effect on triglycerides whatsoever (and when the supplement and diet modification trials were meta-analyzed together, the difference between high-fibre and low-fibre was exactly zero mmol/L).
When analyzing blood lipids, the final piece of the puzzle is HDL (“good cholesterol”). While you want LDL and triglycerides to be low, you want HDL to be high. Unfortunately, fibre was associated with a reduction in HDL – 0,04 mmol/L in the supplement trials and 0,03 mmol/L in the diet modification trials. Fortunately, that difference was again so small as to be utterly inconsequential.
Ok, so the overall picture is that fibre doesn’t meaningfully impact blood lipids one way or the other. What about blood pressure?
Both the supplement studies and the diet modification studies reported a 2 mmHg reduction in systolic blod pressure and a 2 mmHg reduction in diastolic blood pressure. Considering that the average person has a systolic blood pressure of around 130 and a diastolic blood pressure of 80, this again amounts to such a marginal difference that it’s not going to have any noticeable impact whatsoever on an individual’s risk of cardiovascular disease (in other words, the story when it comes to fibre is the same as the story when it comes to salt – the impact of diet change is far too small to have any noticeable impact on an individual’s heart disease risk).
So the evidence to support the notion that fibre is “heart healthy” is weak. Kellogg’s should definitely stop marketing bran flakes as a “heart healthy” food.
Fifty years ago, when Denis Burkitt started researching fibre and it’s possible health benefits, the first thing he focused on was it’s potential to prevent colon cancer. The notion that fibre might have a role in preventing colon cancer makes a lot more intuitive sense than the notion that it might prevent heart disease, for the simple reason that fibre doesn’t move from the intestine into the body proper (technically the contents of the intestine are considered to be outside the body), but fibre does have various effects on the intestine, not least of which is the fact that it interacts with the bacteria that reside in the colon.
Colon cancer is thus a good test case for the many claims made about dietary fibre’s health benefits. The Cochrane Collaboration carried out a systematic review in 2017 that looked at the ability of dietary fibre to prevent colon cancer. The review included randomized trials of people who had had polyps removed and that then followed them over time to see if they developed new polyps and/or colon cancer.
Colon cancer usually progresses in an orderly fashion, beginning as a polyp that over time (if you’re unlucky) progresses to full blown cancer, so studies that want to determine risk of colon cancer progression can usually get away with looking at whether new polyps develop rather than having to wait and see whether the participants develop cancer (which saves time and allows for shorter, smaller studies).
Five trials were identified, with a total of 4,798 participants. The average age of the participants was around 60 years at the start of the studies, and they were followed for two to four years. As with the heart disease studies, there was quite a bit of variation in terms of the intervention used, with four trials providing dietary supplements while one attempted diet modification. The trials were for the most part able to at least double people’s fibre intake.
Ok, let’s take a look at the results.
Over the course of follow-up, participants in the high fibre group were 4% more likely to develop at least one new polyp in their colon than participants in the control group, although the difference wasn’t statistically significant. Hmm. Odd. We’d have expected at least some signal of benefit. The trend definitely shouldn’t be towards harm.
But polyps are really just a surrogate marker, like blood pressure is when it comes to heart disease. What we really want to know is whether the high fibre diet protects against colon cancer. Two of the studies were big enough to provide data on this more meaningful outcome.
In these two studies, participants in the high fibre group were 170% more likely to develop colon cancer than participants in the control group. Yes, more. Not less. That difference was statistically significant. So… that’s strange. Admittedly, this result is based on a few thousand participants followed for a few years. It could be wrong. But what it means is that the highest quality evidence currently available suggests that a high fibre diet might actually increase your risk of colon cancer, not decrease it.
How do we square this finding with the observational data that shows a decrease in colon cancer risk with a high fibre diet? As mentioned, the observational data is heavily affected by confounding variables, not least of which is the fact that a high fibre diet usually means a diet low in refined carbohydrates. These results support the notion that Burkitt was wrong and Cleave was right – that the harms associated with a diet rich in refined carbohydrates are due to the presence of refined carbohydrates, not due to the absence of fibre.
So, what can we conclude from all this? Does fibre prevent the so-called “diseases of civilization”?
Well, maybe. That is certainly the impression you would get if you look at the observational data, which find a correlation between a low fibre diet and pretty much any chronic disease you care to look at. The randomized trials that have been done have however for the most part failed to show evidence of a benefit of increasing intake of dietary fibre.
Yesterday I wrote about the new data from Public Health England that allows us to make a (rough) calculation of vaccine efficacy during the Delta surge. Using data from technical briefings17 and 20 I calculated that vaccine efficacy against infection with the Delta variant in the over-50s was a disappointing 17%. Vaccine efficacy against mortality was a better (if lower than expected) 77%.
The Daily Expose also published a piece looking at the new PHE data and argued that it showed vaccination was actually increasing the risk of hospitalisation and death. Their analysis did not break the results down by age, however, and so did not take into account that most of the infections are in the young, who are less vaccinated, and most of the deaths are in the old, who are much more vaccinated. That’s why my analysis focused on the over-50s, and when you do that you find the vaccines reduced mortality during the Delta surge in that age group by around 77%.
The Daily Expose article helpfully drew attention to the fact that in a recently published document, the Government advisers on SAGE themselves appear to admit that the vaccines do not prevent infection and transmission. In paragraph eight, they write:
While we feel that current vaccines are excellent for reducing the risk of hospital admission and disease, we propose that research be focused on vaccines that also induce high and durable levels of mucosal immunity in order to reduce infection of and transmission from vaccinated individuals. This could also reduce the possibility of variant selection in vaccinated individuals.
This being the case, why is SAGE not advising the Government to cease all aspects of the vaccination programme based on the idea of reducing transmission and protecting others (vaccine passports, the coercion of young people, vaccination of children and so on) as its members clearly don’t believe that these things are backed up by sound scientific evidence?
The Daily Expose article also highlights that there is another way of using the data in the PHE report to calculate the vaccine effectiveness against death. This is by calculating the case fatality rates (CFRs) in the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups respectively and taking the ratio.
Doing this for the over-50s, between June 22nd and August 2nd there were 339 deaths from 17,926 cases in the double vaccinated, giving a CFR of 1.9%, and 167 deaths from 2,464 cases in the unvaccinated, giving a CFR of 6.8%. One minus the ratio of these gives a vaccine effectiveness against death of 72% (1-(1.9%/6.8%)). Unlike the figure I calculated yesterday using population vaccination coverage, this is the vaccine effectiveness against death once infected, so doesn’t include any protection the vaccines provide against infection in the first place, meaning it is not surprising that it is lower. That it is not much lower is a further indication that the vaccines do little to prevent infection.
Because with this method we don’t need to worry about vaccination coverage in the population, we don’t need to restrict ourselves to the period June 22nd to August 2nd, which I selected because it was when the vaccination programme in the over-50s was basically complete. This means we can use all the Delta cases up to August 2nd as found in technical briefing 20. Again, for the over-50s, up to August 2nd there were 389 deaths from 21,472 cases in the double vaccinated, giving a CFR of 1.8%, and 205 deaths from 3,440 cases, giving a CFR of 6%. One minus the ratio of these gives a vaccine effectiveness against death (once infected) of 70%. So vaccine effectiveness against death in the over-50s rose slightly during the recent surge.
We can also use this method for the under-50s. Up to August 2nd there were 13 deaths from 25,536 cases in the double vaccinated, giving a CFR of 0.05%, and 48 deaths from 147,612 cases in the unvaccinated, giving a CFR of 0.03%. Strikingly, the CFR in the vaccinated here is higher than in the unvaccinated. In fact, it is 57% higher, meaning the vaccine effectiveness is negative 57%, i.e., in the under-50s the vaccine increases the risk of death once infected by 57%. This is in line with the Daily Expose‘s report, albeit the effect is found only in the younger population.
One caveat is that this doesn’t allow for any protection the vaccine might offer against infection, which may be higher in the under-50s (I haven’t attempted to calculate this as the vaccine coverage in that age group is constantly rising meaning I can’t pin down a figure). But even so, the fact that the case fatality rate among the vaccinated under-50s is 57% higher than among the unvaccinated under-50s is not just disappointing, it is alarming.
It’s worth bearing in mind that we are dealing with very small numbers here. There were only 61 deaths in these two groups (double vaccinated and unvaccinated under-50s) and only 13 of them were in the double vaccinated. One possible explanation is that these 13 deaths are highly vulnerable people who were vaccinated to try to protect them, while the CFR in the unvaccinated was driven down by the high infection rate among socially active young people. A more reassuring statistic, using data from the same report, is that the vaccine effectiveness against A&E attendance (once infected) among under-50s is 35%, and against an overnight hospital stay is 43%. These are not exactly stunning results, but do at least indicate a positive effect. Interestingly, the same statistics for the over-50s are a vaccine effectiveness against A&E attendance once infected of 71% and against an overnight hospital stay of 73%, indicating again an unexpectedly higher efficacy in the older population. Is this an artefact of higher risk younger people being vaccinated first?
Since, then, the disturbing statistic arises from just 13 deaths, perhaps the most sensible course of action would be for PHE to investigate these 13 deaths and publish a report assessing what role if any the vaccine may have played in them. More generally, given that the number of Covid deaths in vaccinated under-50s is small, a report filling out details on each would be illuminating. It would help to address what is otherwise a worrying sign that the vaccines may be counterproductive for younger people.
Now that we’re more than a year into the pandemic, it’s crystal clear that the panic that ensued was unnecessary and the draconian measures put into place for public health were unwarranted and harmful.
John Tierney, a former reporter for The New York Times, looked back over the pandemic, providing a timeline of the media-induced viral panic that led to censorship and suppression of scientific research on an unprecedented scale.
In his article for City Journal, where he is a contributing editor, he explained that the “moral panic that swept the nation’s guiding institutions” during the pandemic was far more catastrophic than the viral pandemic itself.
Media-induced panic set off in March 2020
The panic was started by journalists beginning in March 2020, when the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team released “Report 9” on the impact of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPSs) to reduce deaths and health care demand from COVID-19.
The report’s computer model projected that intensive care units in the U.S. would be overrun, with 30 COVID-19 patients for every available bed, and 2.2 million dead by summer. They concluded that “epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time,” which led to lockdowns, business and school closures and population-wide social distancing. But as Tierney noted:
“What had originally been a limited lockdown — ‘15 days to slow the spread’ — became long-term policy across much of the United States and the world.
“A few scientists and public-health experts objected, noting that an extended lockdown was a novel strategy of unknown effectiveness that had been rejected in previous plans for a pandemic. It was a dangerous experiment being conducted without knowing the answer to the most basic question: Just how lethal is this virus?”
John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford, was an early critic of the response, who argued that long-term lockdowns could cause more harm than good. Ioannidis came under intense fire after he and colleagues revealed that the COVID-19 fatality rate for those under the age of 45 is “almost zero,” and between the ages of 45 and 70, it’s somewhere between 0.05% and 0.3%.
In Santa Clara County, in particular, he and colleagues estimated that in late March 2020, the local COVID infection fatality rate was just 0.17%. “But merely by reporting data that didn’t fit the official panic narrative, they became targets,” Tierney explained. “… Mainstream journalists piled on with hit pieces quoting critics and accusing the researchers of endangering lives by questioning lockdowns.”
Journals refused to publish solid, anti-narrative research
The discrediting and censorship of researchers who spoke out against the official narrative — even if they included supportive data — became a common and alarming theme over the last year, one that extended to virtually every aspect of pandemic-related policy, including masks.
The “Danmask-19 Trial,” published Nov. 18, 2020, in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that among mask wearers 1.8% (42 participants) ended up testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, compared to 2.1% (53) among controls. When they removed the people who reported not adhering to the recommendations for use, the results remained the same — 1.8% (40 people), which suggests adherence makes no significant difference.
Initially, numerous research journals refused to publish the results, which called widespread mask mandates into question. Tierney said:
“When Thomas Benfield, one of the researchers in Denmark conducting the first large randomized controlled trial of mask efficacy against COVID, was asked why they were taking so long to publish the much-anticipated findings, he promised them as ‘as soon as a journal is brave enough to accept the paper.’
“After being rejected by The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA, the study finally appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the reason for the editors’ reluctance became clear: the study showed that a mask did not protect the wearer, which contradicted claims by the Centers for Disease Control and other health authorities.”
A similar experience was had by Dr. Stefan Baral, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist with 350 publications, who wanted to publish a critique of lockdowns. It became the “first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere,” he told Tierney.
Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff also wrote a paper against lockdowns and couldn’t get it published, noting that most other scientists he spoke to were also against them but were afraid to speak up.
Kulldorff and colleagues soon banded together to write the Great Barrington Declaration, which calls for “focused protection” of the elderly and those in nursing homes and hospitals, while allowing businesses and schools to remain open. Soon after, they too were attacked:
“They managed to attract attention but not the kind they hoped for. Though tens of thousands of other scientists and doctors went on to sign the declaration, the press caricatured it as a deadly ‘let it rip’ strategy and an ‘ethical nightmare’ from ‘COVID deniers’ and ‘agents of misinformation.’”
Physicians targeted, labeled heretics
Dr. Scott Atlas of Stanford’s Hoover Institution was another common target, as he also suggested that protections should be focused on nursing homes and lockdowns would take more lives than COVID-19. According to Tierney:
“When he joined the White House coronavirus task force, Bill Gates derided him as ‘this Stanford guy with no background’ promoting ‘crackpot theories.’ Nearly 100 members of Stanford’s faculty signed a letter denouncing his ‘falsehoods and misrepresentations of science,’ and an editorial in the Stanford Daily urged the university to sever its ties to Hoover.
“The Stanford faculty senate overwhelmingly voted to condemn Atlas’s actions as ‘anathema to our community, our values and our belief that we should use knowledge for good.’”
Similarly, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, which regulates the practice of medicine in Ontario, issued a statement in May prohibiting physicians from making comments or providing advice that goes against the official narrative.
Actor Clifton Duncan shared the Orwellian message on Twitter, urging his followers to “Read this. Now. And then share it as much as you can.”
Because, equally as disturbing as the notion of publicly dictating to physicians what they’re allowed to say, is the fact that, as Duncan said, the statement has a glaring omission, “The health and well-being of the patient.”
Florida’s mortality rate from COVID lower than average
Certain states have stood out for their refusal to buy into the draconian public health measures that were adopted throughout much of the U.S. Florida is chief among them. After a spring 2020 lockdown, Florida business, schools and restaurants reopened, while mask mandates were rejected.
“If Florida had simply done no worse than the rest of the country during the pandemic, that would have been enough to discredit the lockdown strategy,” Tierney said, noting that the state acted as the control group in a natural experiment. The results speak for themselves:
“Florida’s mortality rate from COVID is lower than the national average among those over 65 and also among younger people, so that the state’s age-adjusted COVID mortality rate is lower than that of all but ten other states. And by the most important measure, the overall rate of ‘excess mortality’ (the number of deaths above normal), Florida has also done better than the national average.
“Its rate of excess mortality is significantly lower than that of the most restrictive state, California, particularly among younger adults, many of whom died not from COVID but from causes related to the lockdowns: cancer screenings and treatments were delayed, and there were sharp increases in deaths from drug overdoses and from heart attacks not treated promptly.”
The crisis crisis
It defies reason how so many government, academic and policy leaders could support rampant censorship and suppress scientific debate for so long, all while propagating panic. One of Tierney’s explanations is what he calls “the crisis crisis,” or the “incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians”:
“It’s a longstanding problem — humanity was supposedly doomed in the last century by the ‘population crisis’ and the ‘energy crisis’ — that has dramatically worsened with the cable and digital competition for ratings, clicks and retweets.
“To keep audiences frightened around the clock, journalists seek out Cassandras with their own incentives for fearmongering: politicians, bureaucrats, activists, academics and assorted experts who gain publicity, prestige, funding and power during a crisis.
“Unlike many proclaimed crises, an epidemic is a genuine threat, but the crisis industry can’t resist exaggerating the danger, and doomsaying is rarely penalized. Journalists kept highlighting the most alarming warnings, presented without context. They needed to keep their audience scared, and they succeeded.”
The politicization of research is another major issue that contributes to groupthink and the suppression of scientific debate in order to support one agenda. Meanwhile, while the media advertised that we’re all in this pandemic together, some were clearly more affected than others — namely the poor and less educated, who lost jobs while professionals were mostly able to keep working from the “safety” of their homes.
Children from disadvantaged families also suffered the most from year-long school closures. “The brunt was borne by the most vulnerable in America and the poorest countries of the world,” Tierney wrote, while many of the elitegot richer. The reality is, lockdowns have caused a great deal of harm, from delays in medical treatment and disrupted education to joblessness and drug overdoses, and for little, if any, benefit.
Data compiled by Pandemics ~ Data & Analytics (PANDA) also found no relationship between lockdowns and COVID-19 deaths per million people. The disease followed a trajectory of linear decline regardless of whether or not lockdowns were imposed. Yet, this is the type of information that has been censored from the beginning. As Tierney put it:
“This experience should be a lesson in what not to do, and whom not to trust. Do not assume that the media’s version of a crisis resembles reality. Do not count on mainstream journalists and their favorite doomsayers to put risks in perspective. Do not expect those who follow ‘the science’ to know what they’re talking about.”
She lies in the same sentence, claiming the vaccines still work “exceptionally well.”
If they don’t prevent transmission, you CANNOT USE PUBLIC HEALTH AND HERD IMMUNITY AS THE JUSTIFICATION FOR A MANDATE. At best, the vaccines might provide the recipient with some protection for a few months. But the downside is they might increase susceptibility or severity of disease later.
And when you add on the known and unknown short and long-term side effects, vaccination with an experimental product that went through minimal testing and poorly designed clinical trials just doesn’t make sense.
All the bluster about mandates was designed to trick the public into getting vaccinated before the truth came out. Now it’s out. Help your friends and family avoid these shots.
Remember: Your vaccine does NOT protect me, and it might not protect you either. Not for long. Then it might make things worse for you.
Fauci is asked about his ideal drug for Covid. And he lists these characteristics as his “Optimal Profile:”
a pill that blocks a viral function
oral, not injected
minimal drug-drug interactions
use for 7–10 days
low toxicity
He points out you should:
“take it early in the disease” and
“if you can keep that virus from going down into the lungs and to other organ systems, you can change that disease to a common cold type approach. We only need to knock out that virus for 7-10 days.”
Folks, the ship is turning. Sad to say, too many died waiting. And Fauci the money man is not going to shill for a drug his agency can’t patent. He’ll instead extract more taxpayer money in a vain attempt to find this perfect drug–which a pharmacist just refused to dispense to a patient of mine, no doubt in part due to Fauci’s criminal machinations.
But what will happen is that the concept of early treatment–not waiting it out–will enter the public consciousness. And some people will realize there is already a drug out there that can be used early.
While now Israel is saying 85-90% of those hospitalized with Covid (in a huge wave) were vaccinated. And 95% of those with severe disease are vaccinated. Israeli TV yesterday:
Downing Street will enlist TikTok stars to push teens to get vaccinated, even as critics note that the committee behind the decision to expand the inoculation drive has admitted it had sparse evidence for doing so.
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) announced on Thursday that the first dose of the Pfizer Covid vaccine will be offered to all 16- and 17-year-olds without needing the consent of their parents, reversing its own recommendation from just two weeks ago.
The independent panel of experts, which advises the UK government on immunisation, had earlier said that the jab should not be given to minors unless they were over 12 and suffered from medical conditions that would make them vulnerable to Covid-19, or lived with someone deemed high-risk. JCVI said it will issue a recommendation about when the second dose should be administered at a later date.
The NHS is now gearing up to give the shot to about 1.4 million children. To help with the effort, the government plans to assemble an army of Instagram and TikTok stars, as well as a fleet of ‘vaccine buses’ to drum up enthusiasm for the jab and make it easy for teens to get, iNews reported.
The kid-friendly approach to promoting the Pfizer jab comes after social media observers highlighted the fact that JCVI chair Wei Shen Lim sent mixed signals about how the decision to offer the jab to teens was made.
During a press briefing on Thursday announcing the policy, Lim said his committee decided to reverse its recommendation after “carefully considering the latest data.”
But he appeared to back-pedal after a journalist asked if the committee would be publishing “the evidence” used in making its decision to allow 16- and 17-year olds to get the shot, in order to help reassure parents. Lim responded by stating that there was currently no evidence available to share with the public.
The intention is for all the evidence to be published. The evidence isn’t necessarily in the hands of JCVI. We have spoken to academic partners and to other people in other countries as well. So wherever possible we encourage that the evidence is published, but the timing is not in our hands.
The committee’s attempt to explain its decision led to head-scratching from the media. Sarah Knapton, the Science Editor at The Daily Telegraph, said that after sitting through two press briefings, “I’m none the wiser about why JCVI has changed their advice. Not convinced they know either.”
Others pointed to what appears to be a rather straightforward conflict of interest. While the JCVI claims to be an independent body, Professor Wei Shen Lim is part of a department at the British Thoracic Society that received more than £25,000 ($34,760) in funding from Pfizer. Lim declared the “departmental interests” in a 2021 audit, which stated that he had “direct responsibility” over the Pfizer-gifted funds. The British Thoracic Society is a charity that aims to improve treatments for respiratory and associated disorders.
Governments around the world have urged people of all ages to get vaccinated, claiming that the more transmissible Delta variant may pose a greater risk. However, the disease has had a negligible effect on mortality among children. In the first 12 months of the pandemic, NHS data shows only 25 under-18s died from the illness.
Should we trust people who claim to be speaking in the name of science?
Someone on Twitter just posted this, thinking himself profound:
“If you think you don’t trust scientists, you’re mistaken. You trust scientists in a million different ways every time you step on a plane, or for that matter turn on your tap or open a can of beans. The fact that you’re unaware of this doesn’t mean it’s not so.”
Saifedean Ammous, a great friend of the Tom Woods Show, wasn’t about to let this stand.
Before going any further, let me add this: after the past 18 months, I think the dangers and absurdities of scientism have become clear enough.
“Science” does not and is not intended to have the answers to all questions. It does not and cannot tell us what we should value, what our priorities should be, whether certain behaviors are morally acceptable or indeed required, etc.
Staring longingly at men in white coats, seeking the meaning of life, is superstition of the worst kind.
Not to mention: the standard story of how science progresses is completely wrong. We do not move forward because government-subsidized men in lab coats play around in laboratories doing “basic science” untainted by mundane concerns.
It is generally men of action who actually do the work.
Now for Saifedean:
The Wright brothers and a century of airplane builders were engineers. Scientists first dismissed flight as impossible even after it happened, then made up a bunch of irrelevant equations to pretend to explain how it happened.
Everything that matters to our modern life was built by engineers and workers who got their hands dirty. Scientists sat in cushy universities writing textbooks after the fact indoctrinating generations to think it was their post-hoc explanations that built things.
Lord Kelvin was one of the world’s most important scientists when airplanes were invented. This is what he thought:
“I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning, or of the expectation of good results from any of the trials we heard of.”
Astronomer and polymath Simon Newcomb in 1903:
“Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which man will never be able to cope.”
This was the same year in which the Wright Brothers, two bicycle shop owner high school dropouts, built the first working airplane.
Three years after the Wright Brothers flew, The London Times dismissed their claims of flight as fake, and was instead writing:
“All attempts at artificial aviation are not only dangerous to human life, but foredoomed to failure from the engineering standpoint.”
The first commercial steam engine was invented by Simon Newcomen, a barely literate ironmonger who had never come in contact with a scientist. James Watt was a technician, not a scientist, and explicitly denied that any scientific theories influenced his invention.
The scientific method is practiced by engineers building things, experimenting to see what works. Professional science consists mostly of nerds quibbling over each other’s irrelevant papers and agreeing they all need more funding.
Nothing in science needs trust. I don’t trust anyone to get in an airplane. I look at the track record of airplanes and decide the risks are acceptable given the benefits. “Trust science” is how you end up with billions of lives destroyed over virus hysteria.
I love Saifedean.
The real story of science, again, is something like the opposite of what we’ve been told. Not to mention: countries that heavily subsidized science in the nineteenth century lagged behind the UK, which spent no government money.
I tell the story in my 2011 book Rollback, but the classic treatment is Terence Kealey, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research.
At Liberty Classroom, my dashboard university, we don’t go in for cutesy myths about how the world works. We tell the un-p.c. truth, every time.
… 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
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.