The World Economic Forum, an international group that works to “shape global, regional and industry agendas,” has formed a new “Global Coalition for Digital Safety” that’s made up of Big Tech executives and government officials and intends to come up with new “innovations” to police “harmful content and conduct online.”
The scope of so-called “harmful” content that will be targeted by this Global Coalition for Digital Safety is far-reaching and encompasses both legal content (such as “health misinformation” and “anti-vaccine content”) and illegal content (such as child exploitation and abuse and violent extremism).
Big Tech companies already censor millions of posts under their far-reaching rules that prohibit harmful content and misinformation. They also publish detailed quarterly reports about this censorship.
But according to the World Economic Forum, Big Tech’s current metrics, recommendation systems, and complaints systems are “deficient” which is why “more deliberate coordination between the public and private sector is needed.”
The World Economic Forum intends to deliver this “more deliberate coordination” through its Global Coalition for Digital Safety which will work to tackle what it deems to be harmful content through a series of measures.
These measures include exchanging “best practices for new online safety regulations,” taking “coordinated action to reduce the risk of online harm,” and creating global definitions of harmful content “to enable standardized enforcement, reporting, and measurement across regions.”
The members of this Global Coalition for Digital Safety include officials from the governments or government regulators in Australia, the UK, Indonesia, Ukraine, Bangladesh, and Singapore, an executive from the tech giant Microsoft, and the founder of the artificial intelligence (AI) powered content moderation and profanity filter platform Two Hat Security.
“Global online safety is a collective goal that must be addressed by working across borders as well as by individual nations,” Ofcom Chief Executive Dame Melanie Daws said. “We look forward to collaborating with international Coalition members to reduce the risk of online harms and build a safer life online for everyone.”
Microsoft’s Chief Digital Safety Officer, Courtney Gregoire, added: “The World Economic Forum is uniquely positioned to accelerate the public-private collaboration needed to advance digital safety globally, Microsoft is eager to participate and help build whole-of-society solutions to this whole-of-society problem.”
The formation of this global coalition is reflective of tech companies’ increased willingness to collaborate with global governments to censor legal content that they deem to be harmful and to push these governments to introduce more expansive speech regulations.
Just a few months before this coalition was announced, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki called for global coalitions to address content that’s “legal but could be harmful” at the World Economic Forum Global Technology Governance Summit 2021.
Similar global coalitions that have attempted to create global censorship standards, such as the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), have resulted in the automated censorship of satire, media reports, and other types of legal content.
“The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” Edward Grey
Several years ago, I wrote a book called Doctoring Data. It was my attempt to help people navigate their way through medical headlines and medical data.
One of the main reasons I was stimulated to write it, is because I had become deeply concerned that science, especially medical science, had been almost fully taken over by commercial interests. With the end result that much of the data we were getting bombarded with was enormously biased, and thus corrupted. I wanted to show how some of this bias gets built in.
I was not alone in my concerns. As far back as 2005, John Ioannidis wrote the very highly cited paper ‘Why most Published Research Findings are False’. It has been downloaded and read by many, many, thousands of researchers over the years, so they can’t say they don’t know:
‘Moreover for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.’1
Marcia Angell, who edited the New England Journal of Medicine for twenty years, wrote the following. It is a quote I have used many times, in many different talks:
‘It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.’
Peter Gotzsche, who set up the Nordic Cochrane Collaboration, and who was booted out of said Cochrane collaboration for questioning the HPV vaccine (used to prevent cervical cancer) wrote the book. ‘Deadly Medicine and Organised Crime. [How big pharma has corrupted healthcare]’.
The book cover states… ‘The main reason we take so many drugs is that drug companies don’t sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs… virtually everything we know about drugs is what the companies have chosen to tell us and our doctors… if you don’t believe the system is out of control, please e-mail me and explain why drugs are the third leading cause of death.’
Richard Smith edited the British Medical Journal (BMJ) for many years. He now writes a blog, amongst other things. A few years ago, he commented:
‘Twenty years ago this week, the statistician Doug Altman published an editorial in the BMJ arguing that much medical research was of poor quality and misleading. In his editorial entitled ‘The scandal of Poor Medical Research.’ Altman wrote that much research was seriously flawed through the use of inappropriate designs, unrepresentative sample, small sample, incorrect methods of analysis and faulty interpretation… Twenty years later, I feel that things are not better, but worse…
In 2002 I spent eight marvellous weeks in a 15th palazzo in Venice writing a book on medical journals, the major outlets for medical research, and the dismal conclusion that things were badly wrong with journals and the research they published. My confidence that ‘things can only get better’ has largely drained away.’
Essentially, medical research has inexorably turned into an industry. A very lucrative industry. Many medical journals now charge authors thousands of dollars to publish their research. This ensures that it is very difficult for any researcher, not supported by a university, or a pharmaceutical company, to afford to publish anything, unless they are independently wealthy.
The journals then have the cheek to claim copyright, and charge money to anyone who actually wants to read, or download the full paper. Fifty dollars for a few on-line pages! They then bill for reprints, they charge for advertising. Those who had the temerity to write the article get nothing – and nor do the peer reviewers.
It is all very profitable. Last time I looked the Return on Investment (profit) was thirty-five per-cent for the big publishing houses. It was Robert Maxwell who first saw this opportunity for money making.
Driven by financial imperative, the research itself has also, inevitably, become biased. He who pays the paper calls the tune. Pharmaceutical companies, food manufacturers and suchlike. They can certainly afford the publication fees.
In addition to all the financial and peer-review pressure, if you dare swim against the approved mainstream views you will, very often, be ruthlessly attacked. As many people know, I am a critic of the cholesterol hypothesis, along with my band of brothers… we few, we happy few. In the 1970s, Kilmer McCully, who plays double bass in our band, was looking into a cause of cardiovascular disease that went against the mainstream view. This is what happened to him:
‘Thomas N. James, a cardiologist and president of the University of Texas Medical Branch who was also the president of the American Heart Association in 1979 and ’80, is even harsher [regarding the treatment of McCully]. ”It was worse than that – you couldn’t get ideas funded that went in other directions than cholesterol,” he says. ”You were intentionally discouraged from pursuing alternative questions. I’ve never dealt with a subject in my life that elicited such an immediate hostile response.”
It took two years for McCully to find a new research job. His children were reaching college age; he and his wife refinanced their house and borrowed from her parents. McCully says that his job search developed a pattern: he would hear of an opening, go for interviews and then the process would grind to a stop. Finally, he heard rumors of what he calls ”poison phone calls” from Harvard. ”It smelled to high heaven,” he says.’
McCully says that when he was interviewed on Canadian television after he left Harvard, he received a call from the public-affairs director of Mass. General. ”He told me to shut up,” McCully recalls. ”He said he didn’t want the names of Harvard and Mass. General associated with my theories.’ 2
More recently, I was sent a link to an article outlining the attacks made on another researcher who published a paper which found that being overweight meant having a (slightly) lower risk of death than being of ‘normal weight. This, would never do:
‘A naïve researcher published a scientific article in a respectable journal. She thought her article was straightforward and defensible. It used only publicly available data, and her findings were consistent with much of the literature on the topic. Her coauthors included two distinguished statisticians.
To her surprise her publication was met with unusual attacks from some unexpected sources within the research community. These attacks were by and large not pursued through normal channels of scientific discussion. Her research became the target of an aggressive campaign that included insults, errors, misinformation, social media posts, behind-the-scenes gossip and maneuvers, and complaints to her employer.
The goal appeared to be to undermine and discredit her work. The controversy was something deliberately manufactured, and the attacks primarily consisted of repeated assertions of preconceived opinions. She learned first-hand the antagonism that could be provoked by inconvenient scientific findings. Guidelines and recommendations should be based on objective and unbiased data. Development of public health policy and clinical recommendations is complex and needs to be evidence-based rather than belief-based. This can be challenging when a hot-button topic is involved.’ 3
Those who lead the attacks on her were my very favourite researchers, Walter Willet and Frank Hu. Two eminent researchers from Harvard who I nickname Tweedledum and Tweedledummer. Harvard itself has become an institution, which, along with Oxford University, comes up a lot in tales of bullying and intimidation. Willet and Hu are internationally known for promoting vegetarian and vegan diets. Willet is a key figure in the EAT-Lancet initiative.
Where is science in all this? I feel the need to state, at this point, that I don’t mind attacks on ideas. I like robust debate. Science can only progress through a process of new hypotheses being proposed, being attacked, being refined and strengthened – or obliterated. But what we see now is not science. It is the obliteration of science itself:
‘Anyone who has been a scientist for more than 20 years will realize that there has been a progressive decline in the honesty of communications between scientists, between scientists and their institutions and the outside world.
Yet, real science must be an area where truth is the rule; or else the activity simply stops being scient and becomes something else: Zombie science. Zombie science is a science that is dead, but is artificially keep moving by a continual infusion of funding. From a distance Zombie science looks like the real thing, the surface features of a science are in place – white coats, laboratories, computer programming, PhDs, papers, conferences, prizes etc. But the Zombie is not interested in the pursuit of truth – its citations are externally-controlled and directed at non-scientific goals, and inside the Zombie everything is rotten…
Scientists are usually too careful and clever to risk telling outright lies, but instead they push the envelope of exaggeration, selectivity and distortion as far as possible. And tolerance for this kind of untruthfulness has greatly increased over recent years. So, it is now routine for scientists deliberately to ‘hype’ the significance of their status and performance and ‘spin’ the importance of their research.’ Bruce Charlton: Professor of Theoretical Medicine.
I was already pretty depressed with the direction that medical science was taking. Then COVID19 came along, the distortion and hype became so outrageous that I almost gave up trying to establish what was true, and was just made up nonsense.
For example, I stated, right at the start of the COVID19 pandemic, that vitamin D could be important in protecting against the virus. For having the audacity to say this, I was attacked by the fact checkers. Indeed, anyone promoting vitamin D to reduce the risk of COVID19 infection, was ruthlessly hounded.
Guess what. Here from 17th June:
‘Hospitalized COVID-19 patients are far more likely to die or to end up in severe or critical condition if they are vitamin D-deficient, Israeli researchers have found.
In a study conducted in a Galilee hospital, 26 percent of vitamin D-deficient coronavirus patients died, while among other patients the figure was at 3%.
“This is a very, very significant discrepancy, which represents a big clue that starting the disease with very low vitamin D leads to increased mortality and more severity,” Dr. Amir Bashkin, endocrinologist and part of the research team, told The Times of Israel.’ 4
I also recommended vitamin C for those already in hospital. Again, I was attacked, as has everyone who has dared to mention COVID19 and vitamin C in the same sentence. Yet, we know that vitamin C is essential for the health and wellbeing of blood vessels, and the endothelial cells that line them. In severe infection the body burns through vitamin C, and people can become ‘scrobutic’ (the name given to severe lack of vitamin C).
Vitamin C is also known to have powerful anti-viral activity. It has been known for years. Here, from an article in 1996:
‘Over the years, it has become well recognized that ascorbate can bolster the natural defense mechanisms of the host and provide protection not only against infectious disease, but also against cancer and other chronic degenerative diseases. The functions involved in ascorbate’s enhancement of host resistance to disease include its biosynthetic (hy-droxylating), antioxidant, and immunostimulatory activities. In addition, ascorbate exerts a direct antiviral action that may confer specific protection against viral disease. The vitamin has been found to inactivate a wide spectrum of viruses as well as suppress viral replication abd expression in infected cell.’ 5
I like quoting research on vitamins from way before COVID19 appeared, where people were simply looking at Vitamin C without the entire medico-industrial complex looking over their shoulder, ready to stamp out anything they don’t like. Despite a mass of evidence that Vitamin C has benefits against viral infection, it is a complete no-go area and no-one even dares to research it now. Facebook removes any content relating to Vitamin C and COVID19.
As of today, any criticism of the mainstream narrative is simply being removed. Those who dare to raise their heads above the parapet, have them chopped off:
‘Dr Francis Christian, practising surgeon and clinical professor of general surgery at the University of Saskatchewan, has been immediately suspended from all teaching and will be permanently removed from his role as of September.
Dr Christian has been a surgeon for more than 20 years and began working in Saskatoon in 2007. He was appointed Director of the Surgical Humanities Program and Director of Quality and Patient Safety in 2018 and co-founded the Surgical Humanities Program. Dr. Christian is also the Editor of the Journal of The Surgical Humanities.
On June 17th Dr Christian released a statement to over 200 of his colleagues, expressing concern over the lack of informed consent involved in Canada’s “Covid19 vaccination” program, especially regarding children.
To be clear, Dr Christian’s position is hardly an extreme one.
He believes the virus is real, he believes in vaccination as a general principle, he believes the elderly and vulnerable may benefit from the Covid “vaccine”… he simply doesn’t agree it should be used on children, and feels parents are not being given enough information for properly informed consent.’ 6
When I wrote Doctoring Data, a few years ago, I included the following thoughts about the increasing censorship and punishment that was already very clearly out in the open:
… where does it end? Well, we know where it ends.
First, they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist
Then they came for the socialists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist
Then they came from the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist
Then they came for me, and there was no-one left to speak for me
Do you think this is a massive over-reaction? Do I really believe that we are heading for some form of totalitarian stated, where dissent against the medical ‘experts’ will be punishable by imprisonment? Well, yes, I do. We are already in a situation where doctors who fail to follow the dreaded ‘guidelines’ can be sued, or dragged in front the General Medical Council, and struck of. Thus losing their job and income…
Where next?
The lamps are not just going out all over Europe. They are going out, all over the world.
Covid 19 was and is a pseudopandemic. It was the gross exaggeration of the threat posed by a low mortality respiratory illness, comparable to influenza.
The pseudopandemic was a psychological operation (psy-op) designed to terrorise the public. The objective was to accustom the people to draconian system of government oppression by familiarising them with the mechanisms of a biosecurity state.
The pseudopandemic was based upon an influenza like illness which, regardless of its origin, was not and is not a disease which can legitimately be considered the cause of a “pandemic.” The only way it could ever be described as such was by the removal of any reference to mortality from the World Health Organisation’s definition.
COVID 19 is a disease which has a mortality age distribution profile indistinguishable from standard mortality. Unlike influenza, which disproportionately impacts the young, in terms of threat to life, COVID 19 was and is a wholly unremarkable illness.
Were it not for political theatrics and mainstream media propaganda, which began in China, no one, outside of the medical profession and COVID 19 sufferers, would have remarked on this disease.
The illusion of overwhelmed health services was created by massively reducing their capacity and staffing levels while simultaneously reorienting healthcare to treat everyone who presented with a respiratory illness as viral plague carriers.
In reality the pseudopandemic saw unusually low levels of hospital bed occupancy. However, due to the additional policies and procedures heaped upon them, healthcare services were thrown into into disarray.
This was combined with the use of tests, incapable of diagnosing anything, as proof of a COVID 19 “case.” This enabled governments around the world to make absurd claims about the threat level. They relied upon fake science and junk data throughout. As symptomatic illness and resultant disease mortality was relatively low, they asserted that people without any signs of illness (the asymptomatic) were spreading the contagion.
This was abject nonsense. There was no evidence that the asymptomatic infected anyone. Those at risk of severe illness were the small minority of people who already had serious comorbidities, often due to their age.
The mass house arrests (lockdowns) and other measures, such as wearing face masks, were then used to increase the infection risk, to reduce broad levels of population immunity and give the false impression of an extraordinary public health threat. The removal of health care for every other disease, including cancer and ischaemic heart disease, coupled with the health costs of increasing deprivation and immunosuppressant policies, were then exploited to bolster the illusion of a pandemic.
This does not mean that COVID 19 didn’t kill people but those who died of the disease were a small percentage of the total numbers claimed. COVID 19 had no discernible impact upon all-cause mortality. The increase above one of the lowest ever 5 year mortality averages was mainly caused by the withdrawal of health services, as increasing numbers of people died in their own homes or in overburdened care settings, without receiving normal medical attention.
Despite these efforts, mortality in 2020 was still only the 9th highest in the first two decades of the 21st century and one of the lowest age-standardised mortality rates in the last 50 years.
COVID 19 presented virtually no risk to those of working age an none at all to the young. There was no evidence that children were either at or presented any risk. The school closures were part of the pseudopandemic psy-op. They gave the misleading impression of an emergency and provided fraudulent justification for vaccinating children.
The pseudopandemic was planned to lead to the complete transformation of our culture and society. It has irrevocably changed our relationship with governments, has caused catastrophic economic disruption, shutdown global trade and saw millions become reliant on government subsidies. The pseudopandemic was the opening salvo in a global coup d’état.
The new pseudopandemic biosecurity apparatus is designed to control our behaviour as we are forced through a global transformation. Those behind the pseudopandemic intend to change the International Monetary and Financial System (IMFS) and establish global governance in the shape of technocracy. Technocracy is a neofeudal, totalitarian system based upon communitarian principles.
We will be offered the illusion of participatory democracy through our required participation and belief in “civil society.” Civil society will be a “stakeholder” in the Technocracy. However, civil society will only be allowed to pursue polices set at the global level.
Applied psychology was used throughout the pseudopandemic to fix our “choice environment.” We were conditioned to believe that following the rules was the responsible and moral choice. In reality our behaviour was being deliberately altered to ensure our compliance with the diktats of the biosecurity state, preparing society for the transition to technocracy.
The new global IMFS is built upon carbon trading and a $120 trillion carbon bond market is currently under construction. Assets are being defined in terms of their Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics which rate investments depending upon their environmental, social and governance (ESG) score.
These metrics have been established by the World Economic Forum working in partnership with the central banks, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and other stakeholder capitalists, such as the investment firm BlackRock.
The global system of central banks, headed by the BIS, are “going direct” by directly funding government policy. They have linked monetary policy to fiscal policy which means ultimate control of all government spending by the BIS. The Financial Services Board of the BIS regulates ESG’s and determines the value of sustainable financial assets.
In this way, the global technocracy will facilitate the continuation of crony capitalism, as only the right stakeholders will receive the approved ESG rating. Those who don’t will not be able to raise the investment capital they need and will be forced out of business.
“Going direct” began before the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a global pandemic. All of the economic and financial responses to the pseudopandemic, such as furlough and business support packages, were agreed as part of the “going direct” plan in August 2019.
The so called economic stimulus of Quantitative Easing (QE) is a fraud. It is based upon the unbridled monetisation of debt on an unprecedented scale. Going direct means that the toxic junk assets of the financial institutions have been taken on to the balance sheets of the central banks. Thus creating unimaginable levels of public debt that can never, and will never, be repaid.
The QE money, created out of absolutely nothing, has been pumped into the financial markets for the continued enrichment of the right stakeholders. The vast expansion of the money supply will shortly lead to hyperinflation. The mass unemployment that will occur as a result of the austerity, caused both by the staggering levels of debt and our transition to a new IMFS, will create stagflation.
The new net zero carbon economy will mean permanent austerity for the majority. The Technate will provide a universal basic income (UBI), or some variation of the concept, to be paid in Central Bank Digital Currency (CDBC). This will mean that no one will have their own money, other than the chosen stakeholders, as all transactions will be monitored and controlled by the central banks.
Those who oppose the neofeudal authority of the corporate, stakeholder Technate and refuse to comply with the imposition of biosecurity obligations will have their CBDC restricted or switched off. The pseudopandemic has established the framework of the biosecurity state that will control all our lives. The vaccine passports are the gateway to full biometric identity for every citizen in the new normal Technate.
We will be required to show our biometric ID on demand. Access to goods and services will be monitored and restricted as desired by the Technate. UBI and CBDC combined with biometric ID will ensure our compliance. The central planners of the Technate will oversee the AI controlled system which will automatically limit the freedoms of those who defy the rules decreed by the stakeholder capitalists.
Money, as we currently understand it, is no longer required by those behind the pseudopandemic. The net zero carbon economy enables them to seize control of the “global commons.” This means that they will have dominion over all of the Earth’s natural resources. All land, the oceans, the atmosphere and even space is being converted into assets via Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics.
Not only will we have no money of our own, we will be unable to access the resources we need to survive without permission from the Technate. While this system of technocracy has been planned for more than a century, it was the financial collapse in 2008 that led the pseudopandemic planners to increase the pace of transformation. The monetisation of debt had long been the source of their authority but this IMFS was unsustainable. As all money was debt, its eventual collapse was inevitable. It passed the point of no return in 2008.
With their going direct plan in place, the stage was set for the pseudopandemic. SARS-CoV-2 provided the perfect opportunity and the core conspirators behind the pseudopandemic had trained extensively in readiness for the operation. We were then barraged by a mainstream media propaganda campaign and military’s information warfare units were deployed to control our “choice environment.”
Scientific and medical doubts were censored as the suspension of normal democratic processes was exploited to introduce the biosecurity state. Laws were passed to allow government to commit any crime it wished in pursuit of stakeholder capitalist sustainable development goals. Laws to end the right of protest and censor free speech are moving unopposed through the legislature as national governments, who are no more than stakeholder partners within the new normal technocracy, prepare us for the coming Technate.
For the core conspirators of the pseudopandemic this is the realisation of their long held dream of global governance. They are steeped in the mythology of eugenics and population control. Once they have total control of the global commons they will no longer need us as consumers and are intent upon significant population reduction.
As insane as this all sounds the evidence, explored in pseudopandemic, is overwhelming. We are facing global neofeudalism unless we act now. Herein lies our hope.
The core conspirators have no real power. It is an illusion that they are desperate to maintain. They invest billions in propaganda, hybrid warfare and security systems because they are terrified that we will realise what they are doing.
Their plan can only succeed if we believe their lies and comply with their orders. If we don’t there is nothing they can do about it.
We can reset the world.
Pseudopandemic, by Iain Davis, is available both in kindle and paperback, from Amazon and other sellers. Or you can subscribe to In This Together for a free copy.
Civil liberties could be crushed by the private sector as US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has revealed that the Biden administration is openly nudging private companies towards introducing so-called Covid passports for their employees – seemingly as the closest thing, policy-wise, to having to outright mandate them.
Judging by Buttigieg’s department’s statement for Fox News, the administration would also like to keep itself outside of a move as controversial as making vaccination passports compulsory and government-mandated.
But when he spoke for FOX 4 on Monday, Buttigieg was clear: the federal level position is to “do everything” to encourage privately-owned businesses to enforce Covid passports among their workers.
This is consistent with Buttigieg’s statements earlier in the year, when he spoke along the same lines. At the same time, the federal government would not (likely to avoid getting itself directly mired in a world of political, legal, and constitutional trouble) mandate this kind of verification, that proves people have received the Covid jab. Instead, the policy is clearly that of encouraging and relying on the private sector to do “the dirt work.”
In April, Buttigieg said it was “not the role of the government” to make and impose that decision – but also noted that the tech to do that was “there.” And if the private sector developing it needed any kind of advice or support, the Biden administration was there for them, he said at the time.
This applies not only to employees but also to private companies’ customers – like airline passengers. According to Buttigieg’s statements, the federal government would allow these firms to do whatever they saw fit to “protect passengers and workers” – but also clearly to prop up industries that have suffered greatly from over a year and a half of the (mis)handling of the Covid pandemic.
Also in April, Dr. Anthony Fauci spoke for Politico to say he thought it unlikely that the vaccine passports would be mandated by the government, but at the same time revealed how the mechanisms of enforcing the scheme might eventually achieve much the same result.
“I’m not saying that they should or that they would, but I’m saying you could foresee how an independent entity might say, ‘Well, we can’t be dealing with you unless we know you’re vaccinated,’ but it’s not going to be mandated from the federal government,” Fauci told Politico at the time.
A recent search of Google News for the term ‘climate change’ turns up a number of stories in the mainstream media promoting the United Nations (UN) World Food Programme saying climate change is causing a drought in Madagascar that threatens more than one million people with starvation.
Linking climate change to a temporary weather event, which this drought is, equates to a false comparison.
Also, the U.N.’s own data show Madagascar has been setting records in recent decades for crop production, so any food supply shortages are due to political or economic factors not declining crop production.
“Climate change is the driving force of a developing food crisis in southern Madagascar, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) has warned,” writes CNN.
“The African island has been plagued with back-to-back droughts — its worst in four decades — which have pushed 1.14 million people ‘right to the very edge of starvation,’ said WFP executive director David Beasley in a news release Wednesday.”
The UN and CNN should check their premises and data. History shows back to back droughts are not unprecedented in Madagascar’s history.
Indeed, CNN’s own coverage notes the current drought is the worst in forty years. Forty years ago, during Madagascar’s last major drought, scientists were warning of a coming ice age, not global warming.
Peer-reviewed research shows Madagascar’s large megafauna declined sharply, with many species going extinct during previously extended droughts.
Research indicates Madagascar suffered extended droughts nearly 6,000 and again nearly 1,000 years ago.
A drought, approximately 950 years before the present, triggered a large transformation in vegetation, an increase in wildfires, and a sharp decline in the island’s megafauna.
It may be true that some people in Madagascar face potential starvation, but contrary to UN Food Programme’s claims it can’t be due to more than a very recent decline in food supplies, because data from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization show Madagascar’s food production has set repeated records since 1980, as seen in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1. Primary crops in Madagascar, all available years. Graph created from the FAO Website. Source
Rice, cassava, and sweet potatoes are three of Madagascar’s staple crops. Each has set multiple records for production over the past few decades. Between 1980 and 2019, the last year for which the FAO has records for Madagascar:
Rice production increased by approximately 101 percent.
Cassava production grew by slightly more than 73 percent.
Sweet potato production increased by more than 198 percent.
The FAO reports Madagascar also saw its fresh vegetable production grow 63 percent between 1980 and 2019.
Madagascar’s current drought is hardly unique and as dire as the present food shortage its people face may be, there is no evidence supposed human-caused climate change is to blame.
Indeed, during the era of global warming, Madagascar’s food production, like food production for the world as a whole, has increased significantly.
Research shows at least part of the recent increase in food production is due to the fertilization effect from increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human fossil fuel use.
In a fervor to link the current drought and associated food shortages to climate change, the UN and CNN forgot a basic fact, weather is not climate and temporary weather conditions, such as back-to-back drought years, don’t necessarily reflect a changing climate.
The UN Food Programme should check its own data before it promotes climate alarm to the media.
Also, media outlets, like CNN, should be more skeptical of alarming climate change-related claims about drought and food production, which readily available data refute.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is managing editor of Environment & Climate News and a research fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute.
An issue that is rarely discussed or given serious attention is the over-specialization in healthcare. Modern medicine’s approach to identify and treat illnesses and tackle the reduction of infections has in many instances ceased to be multidisciplinary. Medicine has also become increasingly compartmentalized and confined to a rigid materialistic belief system that has now established its own set of standards, criteria and values that are often contrary to gold-standard scientific protocols. The consequence is that its narrow single-mindedness has insulated modern medicine from objective criticism and preserved its internal flaws, errors and fabrications, which have contributed to the unnecessary injury and death of countless patients.
US healthcare spending reached $3.8 trillion in 2019. Due to the Covid pandemic, expenditures for 2020 will be astronomically higher. One might expect that with the world’s most expensive healthcare system, the US would equally have the best evidence-based practices to keep its citizens healthy. By now we should be proficiently expert at preventing and reversing disease, while making minimal errors resulting in injury or death. However, the exact opposite is the case. Instead of minimizing disease-causing factors, American medicine causes more illness through misguided diagnostic testing, overuse of medical and surgical procedures, and over prescribing pharmaceutical drugs. The fundamental reason for this catastrophe is that today’s healthcare establishment, and corporate science in general, over relies on profit-generating motives.
Dr. Peter Gotzsche is arguably recognized as one of the world’s foremost experts in evaluating evidence-based medicine (EBM). As the co-founder of EBM’s preeminent flagship organization – the Cochrane Collaboration — to review and analyze peer-reviewed clinical research, he is intimately knowledgeable about the widespread corruption permeating the pharmaceutical industry and medical journals. In his book Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime, he writes,
“The reason why we take so many drugs is that drug companies do not sell drugs. They sell lies about drugs… The patients do not realize that although their doctors know a lot about diseases, human physiology and psychology, they know very little about the drugs that have been concocted and dressed up by the drug industry.”
After we take a fair and objective look at American medicine during the past five decades, especially at the statistics of iatrogenic fatalities, or deaths caused by prescribed medications and medical error, our healthcare establishment is found to be anything but benign. Despite its many noteworthy discoveries and merits, a substantial amount of recommended medical practice has failed patients. “If the medical system were a bank,” writes Dr. Stephen Persell at Northwestern University’s School of Medicine, “you wouldn’t deposit your money here, because there would be an error every one-in-two to one-in-three times you made a transaction.” Dr. Persell is referring to the rates of preventable medical errors causing patients serious injury and now the third leading cause of death.
There is excellent evidence to support the argument that iatrogenic deaths have passed cancer fatalities and are now challenging heart disease for the number one spot. A 2008 study found as many as half of adverse events reported by patients were not recorded in their hospital charts. As of 2017, investigations continue to find that less than 10% of medical errors are reported. Reported adverse effects vary depending on the specialty and frequently go unnoticed or are improperly evaluated. An additional study found that almost two thirds of cardiologists had refused to report a serious error they had direct personal knowledge of to an authority.
As one example, heart disease is America’s leading cause of fatality, accounting for 665,000 deaths annually. The CDC, which consistently undermines health threats if it means positioning itself in opposition to private commercial interests, estimates that 34 percent of cardiovascular fatalities are premature and preventable. In contrast, the American Heart Association claims 80 percent are preventable. What are the heads of our federal health agencies doing to advocate on the side of prevention? Little to nothing.
There is no realistic and science-based national policy in place to lessen cardiovascular, cancer and diabetic death rates. Since the most viable and effective means to prevent these diseases are natural and within every person’s means, it is not financially lucrative to divert federal funding away from pharmaceutical treatments and surgical procedures. The CDC and FDA are largely dependent upon monetary income received from the drug and medical device industries.
Earlier we reported about the systemic corruption and fraud that has plagued the CDC and FDA for decades. It would be far cheaper to completely empty, dismantle, fumigate and rebuild the agencies anew rather than continue exerting pressure for reforms, which have only perpetuated a killing spree by protecting life-threatening drugs, vaccines and unnecessary medical procedures. Dr. Gotzsche notes, the same is true for private drug companies. Despite the numerous lawsuits drug companies have lost in federal courts, nothing has fundamentally changed in order to deter them from illegal activities to increase profits. In fact, the cost of paying out settlements and settling lawsuits is factored into the expense of doing business.
A decade ago, we teamed up with three board-certified physicians to undertake the task to review the peer-reviewed literature in order to recalculate the statistics from many branches of medicine in order to arrive at a more realistic casualty rate due to medical error. We began with a basic question. Do the current standards of American medical practice and its supporting science prove that the recommended therapies and healthcare protocols – whether drugs, surgery, diagnostic methods, medical devices, etc – are actually effective? And if so, at what cost to the patients’ health and well-being?
Our results and final conclusions were startling and culminated in the release of a widely read and referenced book, Death by Medicine. We made every effort to avoid editorial commentary to our findings. We decided to only report the statistics and facts with our calculations. The fact that our data placed iatrogenic error as the number one cause of death in America was alone sufficient. What was novel in our analysis was that we included preventable deaths, such as certain infections and severe nutrient deficiency, which could have been easily corrected by clinicians and medical personnel if viable prevention programs had been part of our healthcare system. After publication the book was sent to hundreds of journalists, federal officials and non-profit medical organizations. It was completely ignored by the orthodoxy; however, it became increasingly popular among alternative and complementary medical physicians who were already fully aware of the structural dangers to public health within conventional medical care.
Revisiting American medicine’s legacy of iatrogenic deaths is now more crucial than ever because the same behaviors that have contributed to the nation’s leading cause of death are being repeated during the Covid-19 pandemic. The government and federal health officials are in reprehensible denial of inexpensive and highly effective drugs, such as Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, to treat early and middle stage SARS-2 infections. Cases of Covid infections and deaths have been grossly exaggerated. And now we are realizing that the efficacy and safety profiles of the vaccines are orchestrated scams. As a result, the entire institutional edifice to vaccinate the global population is destined to become the greatest scandal of the 21st century.
Unfortunately, nobody can acquire accurate statistics for Covid-19 vaccine associated injuries and deaths from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). Careful weekly monitoring of VAERS’ adverse event updates convince us that the entire system is criminally rigged. CDC officials overseeing the database are undoubtedly fudging numbers after ratio of adverse events, including deaths, per number of doses administered are compared to the more robust and accurate EudraVigilance database in the European Union and the less reliable Yellow Card System in the UK.
As of June 17, VAERS was reporting 329,021 injuries and 5,888 deaths due to the Covid vaccines. The database’s most recent update is reporting an additional 26,541 injuries but 1,972 less deaths. How can this sudden disappearance of almost 2,000 deaths be accounted for? The mysterious loss of fatality entries occurred during the same week as a CDC working group of outside medical professionals was reviewing an association between the mRNA vaccines and the rising number of reported cases of cardiac inflammation or myocarditis. The group concluded that there is indeed “a likely association.” The occasion of deleted deaths in VAERS is also on the heels of the Israeli Shamir Medical Center report that Pfizer’s vaccine is linked with occurrences of thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, an autoimmune disorder associated with a rare form of blood clotting. However, despite weekly local news stories around the nation about youth as young as 19 years of age dying of vaccine complications shortly after receipt of an mRNA vaccine, the CDC is claiming that all 1,200 persons, between 16-24 years of age, recovered and no deaths were reported. Does this account for the likely scrubbing of entries in VAERS?
But it is much worse. We only need to look at the European Union’s statistics for adverse Covid-19 vaccine events and compare that with VAERS and the CDC’s recent conclusion to realize there is a massive cover-up in our government’s efforts to sanitize the safety record of Covid vaccines. As of this week the EudraVigilance system is reporting over 1.5 million injuries and 15,472 deaths. Within those figures, 28,583 injuries and 1,862 deaths are from cardiac complications such as myocarditis.
Second, the EU and US have administered approximately the same number of Covid vaccine doses, roughly 409 million and 379 million respectively. Therefore we should expect to find a similar dose-to-injury ratio. Again we discover the CDC gaming the nation’s reporting system to lessen the perception of lethal risks. Based upon the EU ratio we can conservatively estimate that a minimum of 14,300 Americans have been killed by the vaccines so far. If we go back a week before the CDC scrubbed entries in VAERS, it would be over 17,000 Covid vaccine deaths. The actual number of Americans suffering adverse reactions would be 1.4 million.
In other words the EU is reporting 4 times more vaccine injuries and deaths than American health officials. In both the US and EU, Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine accounts for the majority of these casualties. Unless the Covid-19 vaccines engineer a personal vendetta against people holding EU passports, these numbers don’t add up.
Before the arrival of the Covid vaccines, Merck’s anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx was widely regarded as the single largest pharmaceutical catastrophe in American medical history. The drug should never have been approved and licensed in the first place; and, Merck knew beforehand that the drug would be lethal and concealed that documentation from FDA regulators. Vioxx was on the market for five years before being withdrawn. At the time of the federal class action lawsuit against Merck, FDA epidemiologist Dr. David Graham estimated the drug had killed 60,000 patients due to heart attacks and strokes. Since the majority of deaths were among elderly patients, a later report by the American Conservative predicted that upwards to half a million patients may have died from the drug over the course of a longer period. Yet during those years Merck was cashing in $2 billion annually from Vioxx sales, earning over double its eventual $4.8 billion fine after being found guilty.
To put this into a broader perspective, the Covid vaccines have only been distributed for six months and have now contributed to a realistic 17,000 deaths or upwards towards 30,000 this year alone. Since the vaccines’ immunity quickly wanes and it seems certain they provide little protection against new SARS-2 strains, health officials are already recommending regular booster shots. Similar to a prescription medication, those who buy into the vaccine propaganda hype are in principle relying upon these vaccines for life or until such time the virus resides into just a seasonal nuisance. Consequently iatrogenic vaccine injuries and deaths may likely continue at current rates during forthcoming years. The Covid-19 vaccines are on track to outpace the conservative number of Vioxx deaths over three-fold and even modern medicine’s most deadly drugCerivastatin, manufactured by Bayer in the late 1990s and responsible for over 100,000 deaths during the four-year period it was on the market. In short time, Covid vaccines will be the deadliest drug to have emerged from Big Pharma.
A study published in the Journal of Patient Safety estimated that 400,000 unnecessary and preventable deaths occur annually in American hospitals alone. At that rate, it is not surprising that the large majority of deaths ruled as SARS-2 infections happened in hospitals. If our federal health officials had been competent, and less compromised by the demands and influence of drug makers, most of these fatalities likely would never have occurred.
It has been estimated that US taxpayers have paid out $39 billion for Covid-19 vaccine development, funding and towards nationalized response measures. Most of this has been horribly wasted after we consider other options on hand to curb the pandemic but were categorically ignored. “In the case of vaccines in general,” the journal Health Affairsobserved,
“the government often plays an outsized role, but in the era of Covid-19 the government’s role was even more central than usual. The government essentially removed the bulk of traditional industry risks related to vaccine development: a) scientific failures, b) failures to demonstrate safety and efficacy, c) manufacturing risks, and d) market risks related to low demand.”
While this may shock and disturb a rational person, Health Affairs – a thoroughly orthodox medical publication – applauds the government’s negligent measures as “money well spent.”
For this reason it is crucial to understand the terrible decisions made during the Covid pandemic in the context of modern medicine’s past crimes and preventable failures. In the coming months Anthony Fauci’s reputation will become further tainted. We might predict he will resign as more evidence of incompetence emerges, and, in our opinion, perhaps criminal negligence in his handling of the pandemic and efforts to whitewash the US’s role in supporting gain of function research leading to the genetic engineering of the SARS-2 virus. Fortunately, unlike past scandals when misguided medical decisions were responsible for thousands of unnecessary disabilities and deaths, numerous doctors and scientists worldwide are raising their voices to condemn the lethal policies of the CDC, NIAID, British Health Ministry and the World Health Organization.
So what can we reasonably surmise at this point? At one time most Americans trusted science, medicine and our healthcare system without question or criticism. However, today we observe systemic corruption and gross conflicts of interest across the same federal health agencies that have also contributed to untold medical errors and deaths prior to SARS-2 arrival. They have weaponized pharmaceutical science and a supplicant braying media supports this perversion of medical facts. Now the drug-happy media is attacking the truth-tellers, the physicians, professors and accomplished journalists who are risking their careers and reputations to bring forth the fallacies in the pandemic narrative. This is one battle that the silent majority can find its voice and courage to step forth and support.
Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD direct Progressive Radio Network.
THE recent spectacle of the G7 leaders in Cornwall posing for photos in masks and then ripping them off to party down with no social distancing is only the latest and most blatant example of double standards from the Covidians. For anyone paying attention, they have been giving us a daily masterclass in advanced hypocrisy.
The Covidian faith is strongest among Left-leaning elite managerial types. Safetyism is a huge part of their religion. These are people who slather sunblock on their kids before they step out the door and monitor them with tracking apps on their phones. And then they allow their kids to be shot up with an experimental ‘vaccine’ (gene therapy) that was tested on only 1,131 children who were followed up for less than six months.
The Covidians tremble in their homes like gutless cowards because of a disease that has an average survival rate of at 99.8 per cent for the general population and nearly 100 per cent for the healthy population. And then they allow themselves to be injected with an experimental gene therapy with less than a year of safety data, authorised by regulatory agencies fully corrupted by Big Pharma money. So much for ‘stay safe’!
Covidianism is a branch of wokism. The woke take every opportunity to manufacture status by loudly proclaiming their concern for ‘social justice’. They seized on the pandemic as a chance to flaunt their shining virtue to the world by hanging out of windows and lustily banging pots and clapping. They conveniently ignored the fact that the lockdown policies they so eagerly supported crushed the working class. They considered it completely natural that a class of workers should have to deliver their food, work in the grocery stores, take their garbage and clean their streets, while they hid behind their computer screens and called for ever harsher lockdowns. Their idea of social justice consists of forcing others to face the risks of Covid while they attend Zoom meetings in their sweatpants.
As card-carrying members of the woke, the Covidians surely spent the last four or five years eagerly mouthing the central tenet of the faith: that the ‘patriarchy’ is the root of all evil; that a gang of Western white men has spent the last few centuries brutally oppressing everyone else in the world. And then, without any irony, they slavishly follow every command of Western white men such as Boris Johnson, Chris Whitty, Matt Hancock, Anthony Fauci and Joe Biden.
Likewise, as good wokesters, they no doubt eagerly signed up to the campaign to ‘defund STEM’ (because science itself is a tool of the dreaded patriarchy). Now, without the slightest tinge of shame, they angrily insist that we must ‘follow The Science.’ Of course, what they mean by ‘The Science’ is the institutional narrative favourable to Big Pharma.
The Covidians profess tremendous faith in the vaccine. Yet they find it almost impossible to let go of their precious masks, their flag of tribal identity. Likewise, despite their faith in the vaccine, the Covidian faithful insist that everyone else on earth be forced to take the vaccine (though presumably, if the vaccine works, they are protected so it doesn’t matter whether others take it).
As members of the elite managerial class, they obsess about the quality of their food, scrutinising food labels to be sure that anything they put into their bodies is organic, artisanal and free from chemicals. And then they queue to have a syringe full of unknown, barely tested, industrial genetic products shot directly into their bloodstream.
No doubt most Covidian women are strident feminists who mouth the slogan ‘my body, my choice’. Yet they eagerly support a national campaign of coerced ‘consent’ wherein the state forces the people to accept injection of unknown and potentially dangerous genetic material into their bodies. They are supporting the penetration of the state into their physical beings – mechanical rape on an industrial scale.
Likewise, these feminists have no doubt spent the last few decades working their way into every boardroom, professorship and political office. Now they vocally support being locked in their homes by the state. They gladly accept limits on their freedom that would make Saudi Arabian women look like liberated hippie chicks.
The Covidians claim that black lives matter, and yet they support policies that damage the working class, in which people of colour are disproportionately represented. Likewise, they support the regime that actively suppresses knowledge and use of ivermectin, a drug that would eliminate Covid. Thus they perpetuate a pandemic that disproportionately affects people of colour.
If you look closely at the words and actions of the Covidians, you will see nothing but contradiction and hypocrisy. This indicates an appalling lack of principles, because principles would demand some consistency across words and actions. Rather, for the Covidians, it’s all about obedience to the diktats of the mainstream media and government agencies. These people are reeds bending in the wind, incapable of thinking for themselves and only concerned with appearing virtuous. They have stood for nothing and fallen for everything.
These are just a few examples: please add more in the comments section. We have a duty to history to document the full depths of the mind-boggling hypocrisy of the Covidians.
This two-part review is not meant to cast doubt on the seriousness of the SARS-CoV-2 infection, but to hold up to scientific and logical scrutiny the dominant narrative that has frantically promoted mandatory face coverings for the general public as an effective means of protection against the viral spread. Open-minded inquiry quickly uncovered evidence that this narrative is not only skewed, but unscientific, as we will see in even greater clarity. One of its noticeable features has been to denounce anyone who questions the dominant view as ignorant, deluded, a conspiracy theorist or a deliberate purveyor of misinformation. This is deeply disturbing in a free and democratic society. It also raises the question, if the pro-mask forces are unwilling to debate the issue on substance, just how strong their case really is. If they are truly “following the science,” why won’t they discuss the issue on exactly those terms?
In Part I, Science Gives Way to the Talisman, we noted the previous longstanding scientific and public health consensus against ubiquitous masking as an infection-control method, a view that was initially maintained by public health leaders when Covid-19 hit – but then abandoned. Following this came a blizzard of several hundred studies that appeared to prove the efficacy and benefits of wearing masks in reducing viral transmission (but with no mention of any potential harms). These studies seemed to “seal the deal” regarding masking, ending any need for further discussion.
Strangely, however, none of these studies were randomized controlled trials (RCT), the gold-standard of reliability in scientific testing and the only research method that can establish causal relationships between a selected behaviour or intervention and an outcome. The pro-mask studies were of an observational type and could demonstrate at best only a temporal association (i.e., correlation) between mask-wearing and infection rates – but were nonetheless hailed as definitive. Yet there was still room for doubt, because large-scale RCTs had been performed examining mask-wearing in relation to influenza viruses. And the bulk of these high-quality studies in the pre-Covid era failed to support the efficacy of mask-wearing to stop the spread of viral infection.
Why does this matter today? Because even as countries around the world reopen, the conflict over mask-wearing appears fated to continue. Even though mask mandates are being discarded or even outlawed in many U.S. states, and are soon to be dropped in Alberta, there is widespread resistance to allowing people once again to show their faces wherever they go and whatever they do.
Other Canadian provinces, left-leaning big-city mayors and various groups of medical experts are all demanding that mask mandates remain in place until some utopian goal is reached – such as zero recorded Covid-19 cases (as unrealistic an idea as, say, fully eradicating influenza). If we are to be subjected to prolonged political conflict over mask-wearing – and if many of us continue to feel a lingering urge to mask up just in case – then surely it is worth understanding whether masks even work, or whether wearing them might present health risks of their own, unrelated to Covid-19.
Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) of Masking During Covid-19
A search by C2C Journal of the scientific literature since early 2020 has found two RCTs specific to mask wearing during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The first was a large Danish study, approved by an ethics committee and published in March 2021 in Annals of Internal Medicine. It tracked over 6,000 participants across the country, divided roughly equally between people who wore surgical masks and those who did not, from April to June 2020. Universal mask wearing was not yet recommended by the Danish authorities and mask use remained generally uncommon, thereby avoiding ethical concerns that otherwise might have been raised by the need to persuade a control group not to wear masks, and freeing the study results from the impact of governmental regulation.
Another strength is that this study used not only the results of the common PCR test as its primary outcome to measure infection results, but also the participant’s antibody count, an arguably more reliable measure than nasal swab sampling. Importantly, all participants spent at least three hours per day outside their homes, i.e., were not isolated from social interaction with potentially infected individuals.
As with previous RCTs testing the efficacy of facemasks against influenza virus (discussed in Part I), the Danish scientific team found no statistically significant difference in the spread of SARS-CoV-2 between the experimental and control groups. Specifically, the researchers reported: “SARS-CoV-2 infection occurred in 40 participants (1.8%) in the mask group and 53 (2.1%) in the control group.” These results, it stated, were “compatible with a possible 46% reduction to 23% increase in infection among mask wearers,” which, as the researchers concluded, makes their findings practically inconclusive. Such low precision of the detected impact of mask wearing, varying from being beneficial against the infection to making it worse, impedes drawing a more definite conclusion. Among the study’s limitations was the reliance on self-reported data, but that seems inevitable in population-based studies.
The other RCT is a micro study performed in a laboratory setting. It used four participants whose saliva, captured on a petri dish, was analyzed following exposure to the virus. It found no difference in the median viral emission between the mask-free individuals and the mask wearers. That study, however, was ultimately retracted after the researchers admitted they had misinterpreted part of their findings but were, rather strangely, denied the customary opportunity to correct and update their paper.
Clearly then, despite claims that RCTs are inappropriate for studying mask effectiveness against Covid-19, it is both possible and would be of incalculable benefit to the public and policy-makers to perform just such studies – as was done with influenza. And the fact that the two conducted RCTs, one in a community setting and the other in a laboratory setting, were found inconclusive should only elevate the urgency of running additional and even better RCTs. Instead, and very strangely again, RCTs seem to be under a general halt in the scientific community.
The final point on the epidemiological evidence is the odd juxtaposition between the fact that most RCTs do not find facemasks to be beneficial against other respiratory illnesses while nearly all observational studies concerning Covid-19 do. That is why in reviews such as this, where accumulative data from both RCTs and observational studies are analyzed, the evidence for mask effectiveness is generally said to be “inconclusive.”
Despite claims that randomized controlled trials are inappropriate for studying mask effectiveness against Covid-19, such studies have been done with influenza.
To rationalize this observation, some have suggested that experimental epidemiological studies might underestimate the benefits of mask-wearing whereas observational studies overestimate them. If that is the case, then because the pre-Covid-19-era RCTs have been roundly ignored and virtually no Covid-era RCTs were conducted at all, the world has been subjected to a seriously skewed view of what masks can accomplish against this viral pandemic.
Looking broadly, the Covid-19 crisis has generated literally tens of thousands of scientific papers on nearly all aspects of the disease in question. This should certainly appear to justify more than two RCTs evaluating the efficacy of one of the most heavily relied-upon, onerous and contentious public health measures. The fact that this has not been done is a matter of considerable curiosity, to say the least.
The Microscopic Mechanics of Masks
There is, further, a common pro-mask argument based on “mechanistic” evidence of masks’ protective properties (see again this review). Covid-19 is said to propagate both through small respiratory aerosols, with a diameter of less than 5 micrometers (μm, one-millionth of a metre) and larger droplets, 5-10 μm in size. Technically, any kind of mask can impede the spread of aerosols and droplets, with various masks providing different degrees of protection. Although leakage is possible due to poor fit of certain mask types (reducing protective capacity by up to 30 percent), it is generally established that masks provide a physical barrier against splashes and sprays of fluids.
Masks do not, however, function as a “strainer” but rather as a filter, meaning there is far more to a mask than its pore size. Various mask fibres perform different types of filtration (such as gravitational sedimentation, inertial impaction or interception) and these processes play a role in catching airborne particles. The review cited above notes that N95 masks have the best so-called particle filtration efficiency, with surgical masks having a lower degree of such efficiency. Cloth facemasks, which are not regulated, are “expected” to be even less efficient. That was why the CDC recommended using masks with two or more layers to limit the spread of Covid-19.
This, too, seems like strong, if not decisive, evidence in favour of facemasks. And yet the conclusions provided by mechanical studies have not been supported by RCTs. On the contrary, several RCTs have shown no advantage of wearing N95 versus surgical masks in protecting individuals against clinical respiratory illness, including coronaviruses (see this systematic review of RCTs). This seemingly makes no sense given the assertions of the N95 type’s filtration advantage over surgical masks – unless of course the mechanistic studies were focused on the wrong variable, i.e., filtration efficiency is not determinative, or masks in general are not especially useful.
Moreover, recall that the studies discussed above merely state that cloth masks are “expected” to have less particle filtration efficiency. But just how much less is unknown, because to date there has been no known scientific study describing and evaluating the mechanical properties and effectiveness of cloth masks or facial coverings in reducing the transmission of droplets and aerosols containing Covid-19.
This in itself is remarkable if not shocking, since hundreds of millions of people worldwide – possibly billions – habitually wear those cloth coverings and expect them to be life-protecting. So it is fair to say that the body of mechanics-focused research that is meant to provide further evidence in favour of masking does little but cast even greater doubt on the rationale for universal public masking.
The Serious Adverse Effects of Mask Wearing
Public health decisions are not intended to be based solely on scientific evidence. Science aims to observe, explain and predict as many natural phenomena as possible, yet it is not absolute and its models frequently fail to be verified. Hence, in the realm of policy making, especially regarding public health-related issues, it is commonly understood that any proposed medical intervention should undergo thorough cost-benefit analysis prior to implementation.
Enforcement of masks on the general public should not have been an exception. Yet – again astoundingly – no known cost-benefit analysis has ever been done on the issue anywhere worldwide. Nor, until two months ago, was a comprehensive investigation conducted to evaluate the adverse effects of mask wearing in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. This should be considered a stunning omission since, in the pre-Covid-19 era, convincing evidence had been accumulated that the wearing of masks carries risks and can be harmful (see, for example, this and this study). And recall the WHO’s earlier warning about self-contamination (discussed in Part I).
The new literature review of April 2021 is devastating to the common view of masking as all-benefit, no-risk. Prepared by eight German scientists, it includes 31 RCTs and 13 observational studies, was published by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health and is entitled Is a Mask That Covers the Mouth and Nose Free from Undesirable Side Effects in Everyday Use and Free of Potential Hazards? Notably, the review provided quantitative evaluation of all types of masks including unregulated cloth masks. It reports undesired side effects across no fewer than 14 medical disciplines, including neurology, psychology, sports medicine, pediatrics and microbiology.
The review leaves very little room for doubt that prolonged mask wearing by the general public can be unsafe. In fact, it is claimed to lead to “psychological and physical deterioration” with a “negative effect on the basis of all aerobic life, external and internal respiration, with an influence on a wide variety of organ systems and metabolic processes with physical, psychological and social consequences for the individual human being.”
The overarching negative consequences of mask wearing include an increase in dead space volume (by 80 percent in one study), a reduction in the user’s blood oxygen levels, a 30-fold increase in carbon dioxide retention and greater average breathing resistance (by 128 percent) due to excessive moisturization of masks.
In essence, wearing a mask induces changes in the person’s physiology of breathing – one of the most basic and critical biological functions. In particular, it leads to expansion of dead space volume, which is the amount of the inhaled air that does not participate in gas exchange. It’s normal to have some 150 millilitres of dead space per inhalation (out of 500 ml that is typically inhaled and exhaled in each respiratory cycle), but an increase of 80 percent greatly diminishes the effectiveness of gas exchange in lungs.
Such breathing-related changes, in turn, lead to a host of other negative medical effects: increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure and irritation of the respiratory tract which could lead to asthmatic reactions. While these may strike many people as minor irritants to be endured during a pandemic, they are medically serious. In the long run, the effects are expected to be illness-provoking and include vascular damage, coronary heart disease (metabolic syndrome) and neurological diseases such as epileptic seizures. The review states: “Even slightly but persistently increased heart rates encourage oxidative stress with endothelial dysfunction, via increased inflammatory messengers, and finally, the stimulation of arteriosclerosis of the blood vessels has been proven.”
This summary of the previous findings is distressing enough, yet is not exhaustive. The initial physiological effects of mask wearing are also recognized to lead to non-physical consequences, including the impairment of the wearer’s brain function. The view that wearing a mask, especially for a long period of time, quite simply compromises one’s ability to think is among the review’s most firmly stated conclusions and is worth quoting at length:
“Confusion, disorientation and even drowsiness… and reduced motoric abilities… with reduced reactivity and overall impaired performance… as a result of mask use have also been documented…
The scientists explain these neurological impairments with a mask-induced latent drop in blood gas oxygen levels O2 (towards hypoxia) or a latent increase in blood gas carbon dioxide levels CO2 (towards hypercapnia). In view of the scientific data, this connection also appears to be indisputable.
In a mask experiment from 2020, significant impaired thinking (p < 0.03) and impaired concentration (p < 0.02) were found for all mask types used (fabric, surgical and N95 masks) after only 100 min of wearing the mask. The thought disorders correlated significantly with a drop in oxygen saturation (p < 0.001) during mask use.” (Emphasis added.)
In addition to covering these grave cognitive harms, the German review also discusses the psychological dimension, finding that habitual mask wearing can cause a combination of exhaustion, discomfort, anxiety, panic, anger, distraction and a feeling of imprisonment.
The idea that experiencing difficulty breathing and a needlessly elevated heart rate while inhaling one’s own C02 for hours or days on end is bad for one’s health and wellbeing seems like unassailable logic and sheer common sense. Yet it was ignored, if not actively suppressed, by the political class, public health officials, widely quoted medical professionals and the news and social media in the frenzied campaign to impose and then sustain public mask mandates. And some scientists in joining this moralistic crusade cast aside their professional impartiality, even-handedness and intellectual curiosity.
Dissenting scientific voices were silenced and even cancelled by their peers. Among those are Denis Rancourt, a former tenured Full Professor of Physics at the University of Ottawa. The prolific researcher had amassed a publication record of over 100 papers in leading peer-reviewed journals in physics, chemistry, geology, materials science, soil science and environmental science. Rancourt’s scientific “h-index” of 39 placed him just one point short of the international rating for “outstanding scientist” in the Nobel Prize category. But all of that would count for nothing once Rancourt concluded that the orthodoxy on masking was wrong.
For speaking up against the imposed pro-mask narrative, former tenured University of Ottawa Full Professor of Physics Denis Rancourt was silenced and cancelled – not by government, but by his peers.
In April 2020, Rancourt wrote Masks Don’t Work: A Review of Science Relevant to Covid-19 Social Policy. The article was published by ResearchGate, a popular networking site for academics, gathering an unprecedented 400,000 reads – but was later taken down. Since then Rancourt has written another dozen articles opposing the general narrative around the Covid-19 virus and pandemic while ResearchGate has all-but erased his existence, leaving only the remnants of his publicly presented lab on its website and moving his original profile into “archives.”
On his personal blog, Rancourt explained the censorship he suffered. The note he received from ResearchGate’s two managing directors stated that he was de-platformed because his widely read paper “goes against the public health advice and/or requirements of credible agencies and governments” which they “thought… had the potential to cause harm.” In other words, instead of free-wheeling scientific inquiry like Rancourt’s stimulating broader debate, aimed at informing and strengthening public policy, the people in charge of a major scientific website appear to believe that it is current public policy orthodoxy which must dictate the bounds of science itself. And that a nebulous and entirely unsupported (i.e., unscientific) worry about the “potential” for harm must outweigh and shut down the search for truth.
On balance, it is Rancourt who evidently has truth on his side for, as we have seen, the risks of mask-wearing are extensively documented. These harmful effects are particularly evident – bluntly starring into people’s faces – in sports. There have been several vivid recent accounts of young athletes forced to wear masks during competitions falling into distress, events that were captured on video and covered by local TV stations.
Earlier this spring, for example, a young cross-country runner collapsed at a New Mexico state championship. The teenager, who had never suffered a collapse in his five-year running experience, was taken to hospital and was reported to have excessive C02 in his lungs, a lack of oxygen, elevated liver enzymes and high red blood count. Recalling the last minute of the race, the runner said, “I realized I’m going to fall, I got super dizzy, I was losing my balance and I could feel my legs almost giving out from under me every step,” and then, “I don’t feel like I’m getting enough air under the mask.” This was not the only time when masked school-age athletes needed emergency care.
Indeed, the German review makes it very clear that mask wearing has long been recognized as a destructive practise for athletes – and as much or more so for children. Respiratory problems are especially severe in children due to the high oxygen demand associated with their early developmental stages. In one of the studies cited by the German team, masks in children were shown to trigger headaches in 50 percent of cases, difficulty concentrating in 50 percent, joylessness in 49 percent, learning difficulties in 38 percent, fatigue in 37 percent, anxiety in 25 percent and even nightmares in 25 percent.
That masks and athletics are a toxic combination was considered incontrovertible until Covid-19 came along. It has required masked athletes falling into medical distress during competitions to rediscover this obvious truth.
Finally, wearing masks may actually increase the risk of catching other diseases. The surfaces and interior fibres of warm and humid masks provide an ideal environment for the accumulation of germs. As was shown in the reviewed experimental studies, after only two hours of wearing masks the pathogen density can increase ten-fold and after six hours the following viruses can be detected: adenovirus, bocavirus, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza viruses. And these are consequences observed in medical personnel who are conscious of avoiding self-contamination. While the WHO is by now likely to be discredited in the eyes of many people, its original caution about masks is evidently well-founded.
After its exhaustive scientific enterprise, the German review team arrived, in effect, back at the beginning: reiterating the longstanding skepticism towards mass-masking that prevailed until March 2020. Opening with a pointed reminder of the World Medical Association’s 1948 Geneva Declaration (revised in 2006), the German team’s conclusion can only be read as a full-throated denunciation of the mask frenzy of the past 15 months:
“… Every doctor vows to put the health and dignity of his patient first and, even under threat, not to use his medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties. Within the framework of these findings, we, therefore, propagate an explicitly medically judicious, legally compliant action in consideration of scientific factual reality against a predominantly assumption-led claim to a general effectiveness of masks, always taking into account possible unwanted individual effects for the patient and mask wearer concerned, entirely in accordance with the principles of evidence-based medicine and the ethical guidelines of a physician.” (Emphasis added.)
It is worth repeating three devastating words from the German review: “assumption-led claim.” In the researchers’ considered opinion, that is the crux of the entire campaign to subject billions of people to the burdens and harms of habitual mask-wearing.
It Is Time to Unmask
Perhaps upon finishing this read there will still be some facemask proponents who maintain that mask wearing is warranted because, even if they are not as effective as first hoped, they might still do some good – perhaps saving even one life. They can point out that in a public health crisis, with thousands dying and hundreds of thousands infected, anything even marginally beneficial, especially something inexpensive and simple to use by anyone, is surely worth doing. Objections based on human rights, freedom and individual responsibility, as often argued, can be dismissed as frivolous or irrelevant, or set aside until normality returns.
Nonetheless, as we have seen, the risks of this practice on a broad population scale are substantially greater and more palpable than their benefits, which turn out to be largely assumed and remain unsupported by gold-standard scientific evidence. And these risks are not merely transient but of potentially life-shortening or life-threatening consequence.
If the benefits themselves are exaggerated or even chimerical – if masks are more like a “talisman” (in the words of a prominent WHO physician quoted in Part I) than a plausible means to control the spread of infection – then the case for masking weakens further. Once it is clearly seen that masks are harmful – and not just in one or two ways, but in a dozen or more – then the “where’s the harm” and “even one life” arguments collapse and the failure to clearly establish the net benefits of masking becomes unconscionable. If masks are bad for you and don’t even protect you, they shouldn’t be worn. At that point, the message becomes clear: it is time to unmask.
It is time to unmask because the facemask mandate for the general public – which was always an egregious assault on civil liberties – is unsupported by either the highest-quality science or a rational evaluation of the relevant risks (not only the risk of transmitting Covid-19). It is time to unmask because masks have not been shown to be effective at preventing people from catching Covid-19. It is time to unmask because the negative health consequences of wearing masks are so detrimental that continuing to wear them (especially at a time when the risks of Covid-19 have been driven down to immaterial) is not merely irrational but borders on self-destruction.
For children in particular, mask wearing is nothing less than a grave health hazard – a conclusion that also “follows the science”. Yet the dominance of the “narrative” during Covid-19 has highlighted the vulnerability of the scientific community to concurrent political ideology and the propensity towards false prediction.
As for the scientific community’s role, the public and policy-makers should insist on having more Covid-19-related experimental studies – prominently to include RCTs – and cost-benefit analyses around the imposed public health measures. The public deserves to know in tangible terms the price attached to employing either approach. This reflects the basis of any decision-making, at both personal and societal levels.
It is obvious that scientists are faced with some serious challenges with regard to this pandemic; there’s no doubt that the infamous and ever-growing cancel culture has penetrated their métier and is actively carrying out its destructive work. Arguably science has always been vulnerable to political influence, or even manipulation by the ruling class, yet the pandemic crisis has either greatly exacerbated this trend or illuminated it more starkly – perhaps both.
Had scientists remained professionally impartial, while the political and public health establishment were actually true to their unapologetic motto to “just follow science,” it is likely that we would not have seen ubiquitous mask mandates. Or, if we had, that they would have been discarded in the face of countervailing evidence – like the studies and reviews cited above.
The failure of science and government regulators to develop any kind of standard for an effective, practical and low-cost mask type to be universally used during this pandemic further undermines the integrity of the imposed mask rules. The notion that Covid-19 transmission can be halted by – to take just one of many real-world examples – pulling a mucous-laden bandana over one’s face while standing in a ski area lift lineup seems ludicrous. Yet that practice last winter satisfied government and corporate rules in B.C., Alberta and much of the U.S.
Canada is not the only country that remains largely oblivious to the truth about masks; governments around the world are maintaining the same shroud of ignorance. Yet some countries have proved more willing than others to unmask and return to normal. The United States is the most prominent example. And while the increasing vaccination rates are frequently regarded as the main or even sole ground for relaxing or discarding mask wearing, it should not be so. Because, at bottom, masks just do not work.
Maria (Masha) V. Krylova is a Social Psychologist and writer based in Calgary, Alberta who has a particular interest in the role of psychological factors affecting the socio-political climate in Russia and Western countries.
A GP who resigned his ‘job for life’ as a partner with a Hampshire practice because of his doubts about Covid-19 vaccines has been suspended by NHS England for questioning coronavirus protocol.
Dr Sam White received a letter on Friday informing him that he was suspended with immediate effect, which stops him practising as a doctor within the NHS. On Saturday he was telephoned by a senior clinical adviser to NHS England, who condescendingly called him ‘poppet’.
In a soothing manner, she told him she was concerned for his welfare. ‘I’m worried about whether you’re well,’ she said, the undercurrent of the conversation being the suggestion that Dr White is suffering mental health issues.
In fact, Dr White has never felt saner even though he has pressed the nuclear button on his professional life. The two main reasons for detonation involved the Covid-19 vaccine roll out, an initiative that he fundamentally disagrees with because vaccines are not needed if there’s an effective treatment; and the mandatory wearing of masks, a theme introduced by psychologists not scientists, which Stanford University research shows is nothing more than theatre.
He said: ‘It’s hard to go against the grain like this, but when I found out they were going to start testing the vaccine on children, I couldn’t sleep. I knew it didn’t matter what the results of the trials were, negative or positive, they would begin injecting children regardless. A healthy child is more likely to be struck by lightning than die of Covid. They don’t need an experimental vaccine that has no proven benefit.
‘The risks from the vaccine are completely unknown because it’s barely been tested. But reactions are beginning to come to light. Adolescent boys seem to be developing myocarditis – heart inflammation – which can permanently damage the heart. The risks could be potentially devastating compared with them contracting Covid and surviving it.
‘I began waking up in a cold sweat. I was so anxious that I ended up calling in sick. That was back in March, and I never went back.’ He now fears this anxiety will be used to question his mental health.
The second dig in his ribs came when someone in the Twitter community posted in the wake of apocalyptic stories about the vaccine-injured: ‘What are all the doctors doing about this crime against humanity?’ It struck a chord, and it was then he knew he had to reveal how he’d taken a stand.
Dr White explained in a heartfelt resignation video that went viral after he posted it to Twitter on Friday June 4. ‘I had to go because of all the lies. They’re so vast it’s been impossible to stomach.
‘I became a doctor because I wanted to help people and make a difference.
‘Since the pandemic was announced, I’ve had my hands tied behind my back. There are safe treatments that I have researched and there is good science behind them, proven treatments, but we’re not allowed to use them.’
During our interview, Dr White explained that the ‘vaccine cure’ was worse than the ‘disease’. He said: ‘After the vaccine programme began, I started to see more people with vaccine damage than with Covid.
‘I effectively left my practice three months after the rollout but before I left, I saw eight vaccine injured patients, they felt feverish and short of breath post-vaccination, and one was hospitalised in his 50s. He’d had Covid-19 so he didn’t need the vaccine, but no one had checked his medical notes. When I got his discharge letter back from A&E, it just said Covid-19, not that he’d had a reaction to the injection.’
The lack of information available about the vaccine worried him, as did his contract to be complicit in potentially causing harm. He said: ‘A lot of doctors don’t know that this is not a vaccine, but genetic manipulation.
‘When you sign up to become a GP you sign a contract with the NHS who tell you what to do. Essentially you can’t refuse to do what you’re told. I was hoping in December that the General Practitioners’ Committee (GPC), our governing body, would say, “Hang on, we haven’t got enough data here, we need to hold off doing this”, but that didn’t happen.’
Now, he wonders how many of his elderly Covid patients would not have died if he’d been allowed to prescribe ivermectin, the medication recommended by Dr Tess Lawrie from British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD), a group of health researchers who say research shows it can cure and prevent Covid.
On Wednesday afternoon last week, Dr White had a call from a woman claiming to be a doctor from NHS England who expressed concerns that he’d discussed drugs such as the malaria prevention medicine hydroxychloroquine which research says could increase Covid survival rates by 200 per cent. She also did not want him to mention the steroid inhaler budesonide, talked about by a doctor in the US.
A clean getaway was too much to hope for, especially as he’d made his feelings known so publicly. Since that video flew around the world it’s had close to a million views, and Dr White has paid dearly for his outspoken departure. His bank account has been hacked and a five-figure sum removed. He has no idea if it’s connected but according to the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) it’s a ‘thing’: thieving people’s identities and stealing their money is a tactic used to intimidate the outspoken.
It has affected his personal relationships and is a divisive subject within his family, who all have their roots in healthcare.
As painful as the response from his family has been, the outpouring of support from strangers on social media has been phenomenal. He said: ‘Before I posted the video, I had 100 followers on Instagram which increased to 37.5k after my video. I had 11 followers on Twitter and now I have over 8k, but Instagram are taking down my posts. I put up a list of vitamins I take for boosting immunity. I didn’t even mention Covid, and they labelled it: “Covid-19 misinformation. False treatments. WARNING”.’
Dr White, 41, is not a naïve rookie. He qualified in 2004, worked as a GP for 11 years and was invited to become a partner in the Hampshire practice where he’d worked as a popular locum in February 2020. He’s worked in A&E, and he helped to run a palliative care unit for a while.
Initially, he turned down their offer of a partnership because he said: ‘Being a GP is a mill, you’re seeing 40 patients a day, a third of your day is spent doing paperwork, a lot of it is meaningless. It’s what we call tick-box medicine. What I felt was that I was, if I can be frank with you, a bitch for Big Pharma.
‘If you take someone coming in with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes, the agenda is to get them on a drug for the diabetes, get them on a different drug for their blood pressure, it’s not about reversing type 2 diabetes which you can do by changing their diet.’
Since he walked away from general practice, he feels lighter and is excited for the future. Dr White is now focusing on functional medicine, from which he is not suspended – a biology-based approach to healthcare that identifies and addresses the root cause of disease, for example poor diet and lifestyle.
He wants to cure people, not just control their symptoms with drugs with side effects that can potentially harm.
The vaccines, and the Armageddon he, and many other doctors and scientists, fear they could cause, are never far from his thoughts though. He has this advice for people undecided about whether to have a Covid vaccination or not: ‘Please don’t have this because you think they will let you go on holiday. Your ability to travel should not be impeded for a virus with a survival rate of 99.7 per cent. It makes no sense.’
All dangerous diseases are best treated early. A major failure of the global COVID-19 strategy has been to wait a week for the disease to become dangerous, when breathing becomes a problem. Early treatment of COVID, even for those with mild symptoms, prevents later hospitalization. There are several early treatment drugs showing promise but ivermectin leads the pack regarding safety, effectiveness and price. Unfortunately, the biggest players in Western mainstream media are members of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI). The TNI is a story for another day but it’s remarkable that big media companies barely report that they have agreed to promote global vaccination and to make sure any “disinformation myths are stopped in their tracks”[i]. Unfortunately, as a result early treatment seems to be seen as a disinformation myth and is not mentioned. Early treatment is vital in treating serious diseases and COVID-19 is no exception.
Considering the human and economic cost, the avoidance of early treatment with a very safe, effective and off-patent drug is a criminal tragedy of immense proportions and a winning lottery ticket for some pharmaceutical companies that are designing and selling novel patented drugs that could not compete with ivermectin in a free market. Mercks’ molnupiravir, for instance, is seeking an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the FDA and “Merck will receive approximately $1.2 billion to supply approximately 1.7 million courses of molnupiravir to the United States government.”[ii]
Ivermectin doesn’t need an EUA because it passed trials in 1986. It just needs to be recommended to treat COVID-19. However, if ivermectin was officially recognized as an effective treatment, it would legally prevent molnupiravir’s EUA until it passes trials and thus delay or endanger the $1.2 billion deal. An aggravating factor is the fact that molnupiravir (EIDD-2801) could cause harmful genetic mutations. [iii]
In the face of a public health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, government authorities and international organizations have traditionally looked to the World Health Organization (WHO) for guidance – trusting that the WHO is free of commercial interests. Originally funded entirely by member states, the organization now receives less than 20% of its budget from these states and the rest from donors[iv] with their own financial and strategic agendas. Margret Chan, the previous Director General of the WHO, said in 2015: “I have to take my hat and go around the world to beg for money and when they give us the money [it is] highly linked to their preferences, what they like. It may not be the priority of the WHO, so if we do not solve this, we are not going to be as great as we were”. [v]
Veteran journalist Robert Parsons explains that “the Smallpox eradication program was funded entirely by donors. That may have led to the problem that for special projects it [the WHO] has to raise the funding. But the private sector is unlikely to get involved unless it shows profit … Consequently, there is little independent public health research”.[vi] Since then, the undue financial influence of private stakeholders has further grown at the WHO. Donations come with caveats so that the organization is compromised on a number of issues that involve the interests of its donors.
In 2010, for instance, after the H1N1 flu pandemic, an investigative inquiry by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that “key scientists advising the World Health Organization on planning for an influenza pandemic had done paid work for pharmaceutical firms that stood to gain from the guidance they were preparing. These conflicts of interest have never been publicly disclosed by WHO, and WHO has dismissed inquiries into its handling of the A/H1N1 pandemic as ‘conspiracy theories’.” [vii] These advisors managed to convince the UK government to spend more than $7 billion on a vaccine that was never needed.[viii]
As of 2021, conflicts of interest such as these continue to be a problem – the undue influence of private stakeholders being a prime example. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is the second largest funder of the WHO after the USA. Gates, however, also founded and funds The Vaccine Alliance (GAVI). In the period 2018–19, their combined voluntary contribution to the WHO was 27%[ix] greater than the US voluntary contribution, making Gates’ influence pervasive. As funds by the Gates conglomerate are earmarked for specific projects, the WHO doesn’t decide how the respective money is spent, Gates does.
In addition to the undue financial influence exerted by the BMGF, there is also an overlap of personnel between the WHO and Gates’ endeavors. Tedros Adhanom, the current WHO Director General, has previously served on the board of GAVI and as the chair of the Gates funded Global Fund.[x] Arguably, he is still influenced by his previous employer’s ideology and financial power.
Gates’ priorities have become the WHO’s. The main priority of Gates is global COVID-19 vaccination, not public health systems providing early treatment. He has been pushing vaccination onto the global agenda since 2012. The power of Gates Foundation funding has dictated a drive towards vaccinations and away from other essential public health measures, a move which has been criticized for years by international NGOs involved in the health and development field.
Generally, Gates also believes that capitalism is more efficient than public health agencies when it comes to reaching his goals in the area of global health.[xi] Capitalism is usually more efficient than government but it values profits above people. Accordingly, Gates as well as the pharmaceutical companies his foundation is invested in and whose products he is pushing globally are making billions from their endeavors. Morgan Stanley believes that Pfizer, for example, could earn $100 billion from vaccines developed with public tax money from the US, Germany and other places in the next five years.[xii] Pfizer is partnered with BioNTech. The Gates Foundation has investments in both companies, putting $55 million into BioNTech alone in September 2019. The Gates Foundation also owns shares in Merck which is positioning the drug molnupiravir on the market hoping to make billions from it.
When it comes to ivermectin – in its off-patent form, Gates is funding work on a patentable, injectable form.[xiii] Organizations tied to Gates have taken an antagonistic stance thus far. Notably, GAVI has been going all out by running paid google ads against the use of ivermectin in COVID-19.[xiv]
Given the significant financial and ideological conflict of interest of its main donor, the WHO recommendation on early treatment with an off-patent, highly efficient, safe and cheap drug such as ivermectin needs to be critically examined. In the WHO ivermectin guideline, despite showing a reduction of deaths by 80%,[xv] the organization puzzlingly recommends against ivermectin’s use.
The WHO’s guideline document is “based on a living systematic review and network meta-analysis from investigators at McMaster University”.[xvi] McMaster University (including any of its direct affiliates) should have excused itself from conducting the guideline, given it has several objective conflicts of interest when it comes to ivermectin. For one, McMaster itself is designing and producing second generation COVID-19 vaccines.[xvii] It intends to produce hundreds of thousands of doses. It is likely that these experimental products would receive greater scrutiny if there is a viable safe prophylactic and treatment option for COVID-19. Secondly, McMaster University, like the WHO itself, receives millions in funding from the Gates Foundation. Additionally, McMaster, again like the WHO, shares personnel with the Gates Foundation.
Edward Mills, for example, is both a McMaster associate professor and the clinical trial advisor for the Gates Foundation. In addition he has recently been appointed as the principal investigator of the Gates-funded Together Trial that is currently evaluating repurposed drugs such as ivermectin for their use in COVID-19[xviii]. Asked for comment, Mills denied that the Gates Foundation was having any “say on the conduct of the trial” even though he himself is it’s principal investigator and employed by the Gates Foundation. As past experiences show, no product should ever be tested in a trial funded by those gaining or losing financially or ideologically from it. Thus, ivermectin trials are best not done by anyone with a financial and ideological investment in competing drugs and vaccines. No reputable organization or government agency should be basing their opinion of ivermectin on trials conducted by the Gates Foundation or any other party with a conflict of interest.
The recently announced Oxford University trial of Ivermectin shares a similar conflict as Oxford is profiting from the sales of the AstraZeneca vaccine and questions have been raised about the proposed trial possibly sabotaging the result by admitting elderly people already sick for 14 days but limiting the Ivermectin dose to three treatments.
Unsurprisingly, in a recent interview, Edward Mills seemed to be downplaying the effect of ivermectin. “The evidence on prophylaxis use of ivermectin is not very convincing”, Mills doubts, even though ivermectin is not being evaluated as a prophylactic in his own trial. Data from different clinical trials clearly shows that ivermectin is exceptionally effective, specifically as a prophylactic. Bryant et al. (2021) who analyzed the existing data from clinical trials according to conservative Cochrane meta-analysis standards – a gold-standard in science – found that “ivermectin prophylaxis reduced covid-19 infection by an average 86%” with the best-dosed study reaching an effectiveness of 91%.[xviv] There have been several studies that show that the regularity of the prophylactic dose is important with a weekly dose being more effective than bimonthly. Edward Mills curiously doesn’t find the prophylactic data interesting. The big money is not in running generic repurposed drug trials but in pharmaceutical company trials fighting for market share.
Mills also suggests ivermectin might be efficient as a treatment but emphasizes the need for other drug interventions. “I am very optimistic that it will – it will just be one component of the interventions that we need.“[xix] While other components can be useful additions, downplaying the effect of ivermectin is not warranted. An expert meta-analysis by Karale et al. (2021) including researchers from the renowned Mayo Clinic comes to the conclusion that when given early in mild or moderate COVID-19, ivermectin reduces mortality by 90%.[xx] The findings further corroborate the results of the scientific review conducted by Kory et al. (2021) that has been published in the American Journal of Therapeutics and shows ivermectin to be significantly effective in the treatment of COVID-19.[xxi]
Given the conflicts of interest of McMaster University as well as the dubious interrelations between McMaster personnel and private stakeholders such as the Gates Foundation and other industry-related companies, the WHO should not have accepted McMaster’s involvement in the guidelines on ivermectin. Further, the WHO should ensure that no undue influence is exerted by its own donors – a task it has not yet been able to achieve.
Questions sent to the WHO Ethics Office, asking for clarity about its recommendation against the use of ivermectin, were answered. However the organization refused to supply minutes of the meeting on ivermectin. It further declares that no interview will be granted. It does “not consider an assessment of ivermectin for prophylactic use in COVID-19 to be warranted”. It also does not consider trials by drug companies to be “biased per se” even though major pharmaceutical corporations have been repeatedly convicted of substantial fraud, manipulation and concealment of evidence and paying billions of dollars in fines. There was also an intimidatory confidentially clause in the WHO correspondence despite the author stating that they are writing about ivermectin.
The WHO needs to prove that it followed a scientific and ethical process in its recommendation against the use of ivermectin. Public trust is crucial to beat the pandemic. We cannot continue to have the Gates foundation determining the WHO decisions on Ivermectin given the large conflict of interest. The minutes of the meeting in which the recommendation against ivermectin was taken need to be made public. The public needs to be told and shown invoices with regards to who paid for the steps that informed the WHO ivermectin guideline. The conflicts of interest of major WHO donors and the employer (McMaster University) of the scientists that are responsible for the guideline need to be made transparent. Without this, the recommendation against the use of ivermectin, remains mired in suspicion of corporate overreach.
Few incidences make the general problem more apparent than the following: The WHO’s Chief Scientist, Soumya Swaminathan, was on Twitter recently warning Indian nationals in the midst of a deadly COVID-19 wave not to take ivermectin citing Merck marketing material.[xxii] As a reminder, the pharmaceutical giant Merck is hoping to make billions with its potentially mutagenic molnupiravir which won’t happen if off-patent ivermectin is a standard of care. Swaminathan’s statement went against the official Indian recommendation in favor of ivermectin issued by the most highly regarded health association in India after the country had been confronted with a new COVID-19 variant and regions were seeing improvement with early Ivermectin treatment. In the aftermath, the Indian Bar Association served Swaminathan a legal notice for spreading dangerous disinformation and causing a significant number of deaths by discouraging the use of a life-saving drug.[xxiii] Swaminathan’s tweet has since been deleted. The legal notice for aggravated offences against humanity concerning ivermectin has by now been extended to the WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom.[xxiv]
The once noble idea of a global public health system working for mankind’s best interests has been replaced by an organization largely driven by the financial and ideological interests of private stakeholders. This is not a new phenomenon. International groups have long called for a reform of the WHO. In a global pandemic, the disastrous consequences of these pervasive organizational issues become even more apparent.
Distinguished scientists and frontline physicians from all over the world without conflicts of interest have called for the immediate use of ivermectin against COVID-19. Numerous randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and expert meta-analyses performed according to the highest standards of science have proven ivermectin’s effectiveness and reaffirmed its safety. Yet, a front of organizations including a significantly compromised WHO as well as wealthy private stakeholders with financial and ideological conflicts of interest have blocked the usage of this life-saving medication. Some observers have called this a crime against humanity which should be subjected to public scrutiny and an official criminal investigation. Ivermectin, meanwhile, should be used immediately to save lives as it has already been done successfully in a number of places worldwide.
Prominent actors within the U.S. government have been lying to the American people about COVID-19 for 18 months and counting, and their latest behavior shows that the individuals in charge of U.S. Government Science have no intention of stopping the charade anytime soon. Over time, their lies have evolved to become so common and so reckless to the point that someone with even the most rudimentary understanding of viruses can instantly debunk the lies. The latest “Delta variant” paranoia peddling has put their incompetence, deliberate spreading of falsehoods, and perpetual gaslighting of their own citizens on display for the world to see.
The Biden Administration, through lifelong government bureaucrat Anthony Fauci, is making a hard push to fear monger about the supposed dangers posed by the “Delta variant” of the virus that causes COVID-19.
A video posted from the White House account made the rounds Thursday morning, stating:
“Here’s the deal: The Delta variant is more contagious, it’s deadlier, and it’s spreading quickly around the world – leaving young, unvaccinated people more vulnerable than ever. Please, get vaccinated if you haven’t already. Let’s head off this strain before it’s too late.”
Fauci has been on a media tear this week hyping up the threat of the Delta variant.
Sometimes it’s easy to reflexively dismiss these warnings of doom and gloom as total nonsense, especially when they are in fact total, bald-faced nonsense.
(Check out this video from Ivor Cummins breaking down how the Delta variant, previously referred to as the Indian variant, is nothing more than a “political scariant.”)
First of all, it goes against all understanding of 101 concepts for a virus to mutate to become both more contagious and more deadly. If a virus becomes more contagious, it spreads faster but does not kill off its host. If a virus becomes more deadly, it doesn’t spread as fast because it has taken out its host. In fact, the best evidence we have on the Delta variant shows that it is probably less deadly than previous mutations. And it’s always good to remember that we’re talking about a disease that sports an original recovery rate well over 99%.
Second, the idea that human intervention can “head off” a strain is an idea straight out of the “COVID Zero” (the idea that you can eliminate the virus from this earth) pseudoscience playbook. Fauci and the gang are by no means brilliant minds, but they are well aware that they cannot eliminate a virus from circulation. This makes it obvious that there are several ulterior motives in play, none of which have anything to do with our health.
Outside of academic models (we all know how well those held up in the past with lockdowns, masks, etc), there is no hard evidence anywhere in the world that this Delta variant is any more or less dangerous than any other mutation of the virus. In fact, the statistics on this variant shows no particular reason for alarm. Yet the government is — let me know if this sounds familiar — baselessly making stuff up about a virus based on absolutely zero real world data.
Since the beginning of COVID Mania, the government has never been on the side of science, evidence, and data. From the infamous Gates-funded panic models and fraudulent Chinese government “science” that encouraged the world to lock down indefinitely, to the absurd mannequin “studies” about the efficacy of masks, this latest Delta variant scaremongering has once again put their lies on display for the world to see. Given the almost two years of immunity building related to the virus, the threat posed by COVID-19 at this point in time is virtually nonexistent. There never was a legitimate reason for a single restriction on our liberties, and today, the “delta variant” argument to curb our rights and transform our society is more baseless than ever before.
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