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Raising the Alarm on Myocarditis After Covid Vaccination

By Dr Clare Craig and Dr Andrew G. Bostom | Lockdown Sceptics | June 29, 2021

There are now 1160 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis after Covid vaccination in the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). The total could be significantly higher due to latency in reports being processed. Myocarditis is a serious condition associated acutely with fatal arrhythmias, and chronically, because myocytes are irreplaceable, with heart failure and significant associated mortality. The rate of myocarditis/pericarditis reports post-vaccination has historically been low. For the 28 years from 1990 to 2018, during which there were close to three billion vaccinations for influenza alone, there were 708 such events reported in VAERS.1 Using methodology described by Su et al,1 to search the VAERS database,2 the 1160 myocarditis/pericarditis cases occurred in only six months, during which a total of around 150 million people had Covid vaccines, mostly mRNA and excluding lagged reporting.

There are understandable caveats about attributing ‘causality’ to VAERS adverse events associated with vaccination,3 however the numbers of adverse events are likely to be underreported.4 As the aetiology of Covid vaccine-induced myocarditis is new it may be unwise to extrapolate the prognosis from what is known about myocarditis due to other aetiologies. However, it is worth noting that 3-4% of those with acute myocarditis require heart transplantation.5 The overall mortality rate after one year was 20%6 and after five years 44%7 to 56%.6 Of the 1160 reported incidences after Covid vaccination, there have been seven deaths so far with three in under 60 year olds.

Of the myopericarditis cases in under 30 year olds, 496 have an ejection fraction recorded in VAERS. Of these 52 were graded as “decreased” and 36 graded as “normal”. At a minimum, therefore, more than 10% have at least transiently decreased ejection fractions indicating measurable damage to the myocardium. A low ejection fraction has been associated with major adverse cardiac events.8 The transplantation rate is as high as 11% within the first year in those with complications.9 A case report of post-vaccination ‘mild’ myopericarditis in a 16 year-old initially admitted to the intensive care unit, and hospitalised for six days, revealed that he had myocardial fibrosis.10 His troponin levels were high enough to predict a tenfold increased risk of mortality.11

The FDA has expressed concerns around the rate of reported myocarditis within the VAERS reporting system, especially in the young. A presentation by the FDA on June 10th 2021 compared the reported rates of myocarditis with background expected rates, with data up to May 31st 2021.12 However, the expected rates to which observed rates were compared were those expected over a 31-day period. For under-18s, 90% of cases had an onset by day five after vaccination, making comparison with expected rates over 31 days unreasonable. A further meeting on June 23rd 2021 examined the reports in a seven day window with data up to 11 June 2021. A four fold increase above baseline was evident in the seven days after the first dose for under-24 year-olds, rising to over 27-fold for the seven days after the second dose. The rate per million doses given in males 12-17 years old was 17 times higher than in men aged over 50 years seven days after the first dose, rising to 74 times seven days after the second dose. (For females the risk was 50% higher and 13 times higher respectively.)13

For over-65 year-olds, half of the reported incidences were within eight days of vaccination and 79% occurred in a 31-day window after vaccination. The expected rate for the over-65 year-old age group was 36 to 358 per million over 31 days, whereas the reported rate was 26.12 This gives an indication of the under-reporting of events in the VAERS system which is not capturing even the background expected rates. For both young and old it is not a clinically obvious diagnosis and it is likely that milder cases will have gone undiagnosed. Even for these mild cases, the long term outcome is unknown and the risks to these patients with re-exposure to SARS-CoV-2 is also unknown. Currently, more than half of the reports in VAERS are from patients under the age of 30. It is unclear whether the high excess of reported cases in the younger age groups compared with the old is a reporting issue, as myocarditis may be mistaken for other cardiac pathology in older age groups and not reported, or a genuine finding of increased incidence in the young. Others have found that younger patients have a higher incidence of adverse effects following Covid vaccination which may be a function of more efficient translation of RNA into protein resulting in a higher dosage or a more vigorous immune reaction.14

For an individual the risk of vaccination must be balanced against the benefits. Under the age of 20, the risk of mortality for someone who catches Covid is less than four in a million.15 The risk of catching Covid is far from 100%, with many having naturally acquired immunity and high levels of population immunity. The risk to the individual must be measured as the sum of risks of every adverse effect. With estimates of the incidence of myocarditis alone after Covid vaccination in men 16-24 as high as one in 3-6000, the benefit for young people does not justify this risk.16 Immediately, this summer, controlled one-month longitudinal studies (see “A prospective study of the incidence of myocarditis/pericarditis and new onset cardiac symptoms following smallpox and influenza vaccination”,17for example) of the incidence of myopericarditis should be conducted comparing Covid vaccinated and unvaccinated groups under 30 years of age, undergoing serial echocardiography, electrocardiography, and blood cardiac injury markers (notably, troponin). Pending completion of these studies, and rapid analyses of the data, there should be a moratorium on mass Covid vaccination of healthy, extraordinarily low-Covid-risk persons18 under 30 years old. The FDA’s intention to only continue monitoring is a dereliction of duty.

Dr Clare Craig is a Diagnostic Pathologist in London @clarecraigpath and Dr Andrew G. Bostom, MD, is MS Research Physician at Brown University’s Center For Primary Care and Prevention at Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island @andrewbostom

1  Su JR, McNeil MM, Welsh KJ, et al. “Myopericarditis after vaccination, Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)”, 1990-2018. Vaccine 2021;39:839–45.

2 The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) Request (accessed June 21st 2021).

3 Shimabukuro TT, Nguyen M, Martin D, et al. “Safety monitoring in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)”. Vaccine 2015;33:4398–405.

4 Baker MA, Kaelber DC, Bar-Shain DS, et al. “Advanced Clinical Decision Support for Vaccine Adverse Event Detection and Reporting”. Clin. Infect. Dis. 2015;61:864–70.

5 “UNOS Registry Myocarditis Heart Transplantation Outcome” – ATC Meetings Abstracts. 2020 (accessed June 23rd 2021).

6 Mason JW, O’Connell JB, Herskowitz A, et al. “A Clinical Trial of Immunosuppressive Therapy for Myocarditis”. The Myocarditis Treatment Trial Investigators. N. Engl. J. Med. 1995;333:269–75.

7 Grogan M, Redfield MM, Bailey KR, et al. “Long-term outcome of patients with biopsy-proved myocarditis: comparison with idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy”. J. Am. Coll. Cardiol. 1995;26:80–4.

8 Wong BTW, Christiansen JP. “Clinical Characteristics and Prognostic Factors of Myocarditis in New Zealand Patients”. Heart Lung Circ. 2020;29:1139–45.

9 Ammirati E, Cipriani M, Moro C, et al. “Clinical Presentation and Outcome in a Contemporary Cohort of Patients With Acute Myocarditis”: Multicenter Lombardy Registry. Circulation 2018;138:1088–99.

10 Talman V, Ruskoaho H. “Cardiac fibrosis in myocardial infarction-from repair and remodeling to regeneration”. Cell Tissue Res. 2016;365:563–81.

11 Roos A, Bandstein N, Lundbäck M, et al. “Stable High-Sensitivity Cardiac Troponin T Levels and Outcomes in Patients With Chest Pain”. J. Am. Coll. Cardiol. 2017;70:2226–36.

12 FDA. Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee June 10th, 2021 Meeting Presentation.

13 COVID-19 Vaccine safety updates Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) June 23, 2021.

14 Menni C, Klaser K, May A, et al. “Vaccine after Effects and Post-Vaccine Infection in a Real World Setting: Results from the COVID Symptom Study App”. 2021. doi:10.2139/SSRN.3795344

15 Ghisolfi S, Almås I, Sandefur JC, et al. “Predicted COVID-19 fatality rates based on age, sex, comorbidities and health system capacity”. BMJ Glob Health 2020;5. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2020-003094

16 Israel reports link between rare cases of heart inflammation and COVID-19 vaccination in young men. 2021 (accessed June 21st 2021).

17 Engler RJM, Nelson MR, Collins LC Jr, et al. “A prospective study of the incidence of myocarditis/pericarditis and new onset cardiac symptoms following smallpox and influenza vaccination”. PLoS One 2015;10:e0118283.

18 Ioannidis JPA. “Reconciling estimates of global spread and infection fatality rates of COVID-19: An overview of systematic evaluations”. Eur. J. Clin. Invest. 2021;51:e13554.

July 1, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Scandal of the suppressed case for ivermectin

By Edmund Fordham | The Conservative Woman | June 29, 2021

‘We don’t doubt this is an important paper,’ wrote the senior editor of Lancet Respiratory Medicine on March 9 in response to our paper ‘Ivermectin for prevention and treatment of COVID-19 infection: a systematic review and meta-analysis’, the brainchild of Dr Tess Lawrie and the world’s first Cochrane-standards ‘meta-analysis’ of clinical trials of the long-established anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, for treating, and preventing, Covid-19.

Four expert reviewers were satisfied by revisions already made. ‘The effort of the authors is praiseworthy in this pandemic situation,’ one said. Their critiques had been technical: some of the statistical methods break down when there are no ‘events’ (in this case, deaths) in both ‘arms’ of a clinical trial. Our lead statistician ran more checks; we fixed the criticisms. This is what ‘peer review’ is supposed to do. It’s normal.

One might take such a comment from the senior editor as the preamble to acceptance for publication. But no, this was the editors’ reason for not publishing the paper. This isn’t normal. What was the problem?

‘We don’t doubt this is an important paper, and would likely be widely taken up.’ Hang on, Lancet Respiratory Medicine wants to avoid printing something it recognises as an important paper, that four of their own experts have passed, because it might be ‘widely taken up’? This is what they usually want.

Of course, the Lancet has a lot to live down, having moved into the business of publishing fake news, as with the notorious hydroxychloroquine fraud which I reported on for TCW last year. Not only did the Lancet publish an obvious fake, it did so with hostile editorial commentary and briefing to BBC Radio 4 Today for maximum impact. So media briefing for planted fake news, but a Lancet specialist title won’t touch an ‘important paper’.

I was told in January, by a senior clinical researcher who knows him personally, that Richard Horton, editor in chief of the Lancet, was ‘very ashamed’ at having let through the fake news. Horton, whose Twitter bio reads ‘welcome to a permanent attack on the present’, wrote in 2015:

‘Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness . . . Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours . . . Our love of “significance” pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale. We reject important confirmations . . . And individual scientists, including their most senior leaders, do little to alter a research culture that occasionally veers close to misconduct.’

Horton was right. The only aspect that the fake news had going for it was the huge sample size: 96,000 patients. Except that the true number was actually zero, since the paper was fake. The Lancet was certainly seduced by a ‘fashionable trend of dubious importance’, namely ‘Big Data’, a flavour-of-the-month set fair to corrupt many other sciences as well as medicine. The Lancet ‘aided and abetted the worst behaviours’, not just those ‘veering close to misconduct’, but those clearly crossing the line.

Has anything changed? In 2015 Horton bemoaned journals that ‘reject important confirmations’, but in March 2021, ‘after lengthy discussions with the editorial team’, Lancet Respiratory Medicine did it again, rejecting our ‘important confirmation’ (passed by four of their own experts, remember) that yes, ivermectin works for Covid-19.

So there we have it. Horton’s 2015 editorial remains true, but he doesn’t seem to have done anything about it. He’s only the man in charge, after all.

I had feared as much, but we were all keen to give our findings maximum visibility. But Lancet Respiratory Medicine did what its friends wanted, which was ‘kill the story’ for as long as possible, which in the event has been over three months, whilst we searched for a journal with enough integrity to publish an article which had already passed four-fold peer-review at the Lancet, and would get yet further examination elsewhere. As of last Friday the paper is now published in the American Journal of Therapeutics, and you can read it here. More importantly your doctor, or your family’s doctors, can read it too. Take it to them, as many as possible.

So what does this dry-as-dust research paper actually show?

The starting point was another review article on ivermectin for Covid-19, also in the American Journal of Therapeutics, published on May 1. Take that paper to your doctor too. Dr Pierre Kory and his Front-Line Covid Critical Care alliance (FLCCC) of US-based intensive care doctors had their four-times peer-reviewed paper accepted for a special issue on repurposed drugs for Covid-19, but then revoked, by the journal Frontiers in Pharmacology. This unprecedented volte face was charted recently in TCW by Dr Michael Yeadon. The same ‘kill the story’ orders delayed publication by over five months.

The FLCCC know what they are doing with Covid-19. Their ‘MATH+’ treatment delivers the world’s best survivals from serious, late-stage, hospitalised  Covid-19. It remains almost unknown in the UK and unused in the NHS. (All Brits should be very angry about this). FLCCC luminary Dr Joseph Varon, mentioned en passant in my coverage of the Oxford RECOVERY trial, has the best track record of them all. The FLCCC have used several anti-virals in their continuing evolution of the best treatments, but by late autumn realised that one drug, ivermectin, stood out because it worked at all stages of the Covid-19 disease, from prophylaxis through to the intensive care that the FLCCC specialise in. They wrote up the evidence, posting a preprint in mid-November.

They explain the back-story to ivermectin, little-known in Western countries but worldwide one of the most widely-used drugs at 3.8 billion doses and counting. Earning the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for its discoverers, it has crushed the hideously disabling infestation of onchocerciasis or ‘river-blindness’ across the tropics. A potent anti-parasitic, it is used for threadworms, scabies and head-lice. It costs pence per pill. It is a known anti-viral, working across a range of RNA viruses, (and some DNA ones). It may even be an anti-cancer drug, and has prolonged lives in leukaemia. Specifically against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a team at Monash University in Australia showed that ivermectin killed off the virus in vitro in April 2020. The usual suspects declared that this meant nothing (which on its own is true), that that you couldn’t get it strong enough in vivo; nevertheless the Monash paper set off a series of clinical trials of ivermectin for Covid-19, usually in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs), or in plain English poor countries. There is a good reason for this: if you are dirt poor, you need your medicines to be dirt cheap. Nothing else will be any use. What did they find? Ivermectin works for Covid-19, at entirely tolerable doses.

Kory’s paper showed how cases and deaths in Peru came crashing down where ivermectin was freely distributed, and not where it wasn’t. The same phenomenon has been repeated in India more recently; states such as Goa that adopt mass distribution of ivermectin crush their cases; those that refuse it such as Tamil Nadu (Chief Minister M K Stalin) don’t.

Dr Kory’s paper identifies and charts the evidence, but doesn’t do a formal meta-analysis, which is where Dr Tess Lawrie came in. Her Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy does nothing but rigorous systematic reviews, and only for public clients such as the NHS and the WHO. Their objectives are clinical practice guidelines, providing the evidence for decisions on licensing and implementation.

A ‘meta-analysis’ is a synthesis of data from multiple sources – typically clinical trials of a new drug – using recognised statistical methods. A meta-analysis of clinical trials that are themselves ‘randomised’ clinical trials (where patients are allocated at random to receive, or not, the treatment) lies at the summit of the ‘evidence quality’ pyramid, in the doctrines of Evidence-Based Medicine, ruthlessly insisted upon by regulatory authorities. To rehearse a cliché, the Randomised Controlled Trial or RCT is the ‘gold standard’ of medical evidence. If so, a meta-analysis of RCTs is platinum.

What makes the paper a first is being carried out according to the standards of the Cochrane organisation, requiring a protocol to be observed (i.e. no favouritism), data extraction from primary sources by two researchers independently, and the ‘grading’ of those sources for the quality of the evidence. Indeed the paper began life as a Cochrane Review, and was finished by the end of January. But to cut short a long story (parts of which are covered elsewhere by the ever-vigilant France Soir ) the Cochrane organisation did not want a systematic review on a topic already approved by a specialised researcher and colleagues whose consultancy does nothing else, and who have contributed nearly 80 such reviews between them. Sounds familiar? It should do by now: the ‘capture’ of learned journals by powerful interests who will suppress, by fair means or increasingly by foul ones, any knowledge that threatens those interests.

The reason for doing a systematic review is that that is what is required by regulatory authorities such as the FDA (in the US) the European Medicines Agency (for the EU), our own Medical and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the World Health Organisation (WHO). It’s what they require to decide on licensing new drugs (though ivermectin isn’t new at all).

Dr Lawrie didn’t stop at the meta-analysis, but pressed on to a ‘Evidence to Decision’ process, the formal procedure which those regulators are supposed to use in coming to decisions. On February 20, the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD) panel voted  that ‘ivermectin should be adopted to reduce morbidity and mortality associated with Covid-19 infection and to prevent Covid-19 infection among those at higher risk.’

That was February. The essentials were already clear from Dr Kory’s paper in preprint in November, his testimony to the US Senate in December, Dr Lawrie’s first meta-analysis issued on January 3, and our submission to the Lancet on 5 February (preprint posted March 11). BMC Systematic Reviews were kind enough to post a preprint on March 18 but though they still say it’s ‘under review’ we haven’t heard from them in three months, so it looks like ‘kill the story’ orders apply there too. Our published paper has since been revised and updated.

The paper makes clear that there’s no real doubt that ivermectin is an effective medicine for Covid-19. Multiple clinical trials show it. The Randomised Controlled Trials that our paper analyses are just the tip of the iceberg. Plenty of other trials show it too, but if they were not randomised, according to regulators they don’t count, so our meta-analysis did not include them. Although Risks of Bias are carefully evaluated, disregarding the mountain of evidence from elsewhere, not least the experience and testimony of doctors actually using it, is itself a potent source of bias. You are throwing away all the data that might force you to think. A critic of our paper wrote: ‘a technical tour-de-force based on ritualised ideas’. He’s right, but let’s not argue: our meta-analysis was upon the Regulators’ terms. We played by their rules. That was the point. You want a strict meta-analysis of RCTs only? Take two dozen.

How many do they need? When governments, or regulatory agencies, want to approve medicines, one will do. Dexamethasone, to huge fanfare, was approved last summer on the evidence of just one RCT, though it helps only ventilated patients in the inflammatory stages of the illness, and on its own, by not very much. The FLCCC doctors had been using a different corticosteroid, methylprednisolone, and at higher equivalent doses, long before. In our analysis, ivermectin reduces deaths overall by around 62 per cent, and works at all disease stages. As a prophylactic, it prevents 6 out of every 7 infections that would otherwise occur, and stops household transmission in its tracks. Corticosteroids are vital in the inflammatory phase of the illness, but are useless in the purely viral stage or for prophylaxis.

So where does all this leave ivermectin, for those affected by Covid-19, those worried about it, and vulnerable people at risk?

Ivermectin isn’t new. Its safety record, from those billions of doses, is second to none. Its cost is negligible. The WHO, in its BC (Before Covid) era, listed it as an ‘Essential Medicine’ in their catalogue of the ‘minimum medicine needs for a basic health-care system’ (though our ‘envy of the world’ NHS doesn’t have it).

In the USA, ivermectin is licensed by the FDA, albeit not for Covid, so is available to any American doctor to prescribe ‘off-label’ (i.e. not according to the originally licensed ‘advertising label’). However the fact that it isn’t ‘labelled’ for Covid makes it easy to refuse. Patients’ families have had to go to court for injunctions ordering hospitals to give ivermectin. The FLCCC still swims against the tide, though legal barriers are lower than elsewhere, for open-minded doctors.

In the UK, ivermectin has never been licensed by the MHRA. This makes it easy for doctors to refuse, and for those who want to help to be obstructed. My GP refused me ivermectin for prophylaxis, even after I showed him the evidence. Hospital doctors can’t get it except to special order at pharmacies. The bureaucracy won’t allow them to prescribe it. Listen to Dr Nyjon Eccles  having to bring his own ivermectin for his 84-year-old mother in hospital with Covid-19, dependent on oxygen, and failing every time she came off. She was discharged five days after her first dose.

As for the WHO itself, on March 31, 2021, its ‘Living Guideline’ for Covid treatments was updated, declaring: ‘We recommend not to use ivermectin in patients with Covid-19 except in the context of a clinical trial.’ The cherry-picking of studies that helped give the Right Answer, and rejection of those that didn’t, the cavalier appraisal of risks of bias and evidence certainty, make their analysis a complete travesty, but nevertheless potently influential.

In India, seeing the damage that the WHO had done to their Covid-19 policy, and finding the pile of evidence compiled by the FLCCC and BIRD, the Indian Bar Association served two legal notices upon the chief scientist of the WHO, Dr Soumya Swaminathan (an Indian national). The first (May 25) accuses her of a ‘disinformation campaign against ivermectin’ and the second June 13) ups the ante by joining Dr Tedros (director general of the WHO), and accusing them of ‘contempt of court and aggravated offences against humanity by spreading disinformation’. If these move to actual litigation, watch this space.

Meanwhile, patients and their families, and even Bar Associations, should not have to go through the courts or to smuggle medicines into hospital to get treatment for sick patients. At some point, officials who obstruct access to safe medicines are going to have to explain the moral difference between their actions and corporate manslaughter.

Will our own MHRA see sense and ‘license’ this WHO Essential Medicine of unparalleled safety record and negligible cost for use in the UK for treatment and prophylaxis of Covid-19? There’s none so deaf as those that will not listen. We have a Government that has lied to us throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and continues to do so. The oxymoronic Sage, fronted by the Gruesome Twosome, receive no challenges from equally or better qualified scientists, except through volunteer groups like HART or BIRD. The Prime Minister, having ‘landed from another planet and having absolutely no clue of what he is talking about’ appoints a Task Force to have ‘antiviral treatments ready for deployment by autumn 2021’.

This article has been about an anti-viral treatment that is already known, already exists, with an unparalleled safety record, is on the Essential Medicines list of the WHO, costs virtually nothing, and has anti-inflammatory properties to boot. It requires only formal endorsement. Johnson’s Task Force is redundant.

Preparing a formal application to the MHRA, we take comfort from the editors of Lancet Respiratory Medicine: ‘We don’t doubt this is an important paper’.

July 1, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

JCVI Scientist: “Let Kids Catch Covid Instead Of Jabbing Them!”

By Richie Allen | July 1, 2021

Robert Dingwall, a member of the JCVI (Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation) has suggested that allowing children to catch Covid and build up natural immunity to the infection, may be safer than vaccinating them.

Dingwall (pictured) sits on the JCVI. The committee advises the government on who should get vaccinated and when. It is currently considering whether 12-18 year-olds should receive the jab. Dingwall took to Twitter yesterday and stated:

“Teenagers are at intrinsically low risk from Covid. Vaccines must be exceptionally safe to beat this. Given the low risk of Covid for most teenagers, it is not immoral to think that they may be better protected by natural immunity generated through infection than by asking them to take the possible risk of a vaccine.”

He went on to say that the pandemic, “would end through population immunity, whether from vaccination or prior infection”.

However, SAGE member John Edmunds told BBC Newsnight last night, that the country should not fully reopen until all secondary school children are vaccinated. He said:

“At some point we do have to dismantle all of these measures that we’ve put in place. I think, for me, the safest time to do that is when children have been vaccinated, certainly secondary-school-aged children at least. That’s the safest way.”

John Edmunds is a lunatic. As Robert Dingwall pointed out, Covid presents no real risk to children. Children should not be coerced into taking a medicine on behalf of someone else.

In fact, Dingwall should go further. The great majority of the population are at no serious risk from Covid. The evidence is overwhelming that the jabs present a far greater risk than the virus.

 

July 1, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Are regular health checks good for you?

By Sebastian Rushworth, M.D. | June 30, 2021

Regular health checks (a.k.a routine visits) are probably the bane of many a primary care physician’s existence. I can’t imagine many things more boring than running through a standardized list of questions with a patient who feels absolutely fine, then going through a list of lab values that are almost invariably within the normal reference range, and finally topping it off with a perfunctory physical examination. Nothing converts a highly trained professional into an unthinking automaton more than the regular health check.

Of course, the physician’s feelings about regular health checks aren’t really what matters (except in so far as they cause physicians to choose not to work in primary care, and thereby cause a shortage of primary care physicians). What matters is whether the regular health check results in objective benefits for the patient. Well, do they?

A review was recently published in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) that sought to answer that question. Regular health checks are a big part of what primary care physicians do in many countries. In the US for example, 8% of doctor’s appointments are for a regular health check. This means that a lot of money is poured into them, and it therefore makes sense to try to figure out whether or not they actually do any good. Otherwise that money could be better used elsewhere, like for example launching Jeff Bezos into space.

The review included both randomized trials and observational studies, with the only requirements for inclusion being that a study have at least 200 participants, that there be a control group, that the health check be conducted in a primary care clinic, and that it be a “general” health check, i.e. not designed to screen specifically for any one disease. 19 randomized trials and 13 observational studies were identified. The smallest study had 240 participants, while the largest had almost 500,000 participants, and the length of follow-up varied from six months to thirty years. The oldest included study was published in 1973, and the most recent was published in 2017. Virtually all were carried out in western Europe or north America, with a disproportionately large proportion of the studies being carried out in Denmark, because apparently the Danes are disproportionately interested in health screening.

The frequency of the health check varied quite a lot. Some of the studies had a single visit, some had a visit annually or bi-annually, and some had irregular intervals.

So, what were the results?

13 randomized trials studied the effect of health checks on mortality, and eleven of these failed to show any benefit. This includes the study that ran the longest, a Danish trial with almost 18,000 people that provided health checks at baseline and then after five years and again after ten years. It failed to show any difference in mortality after thirty years. It also includes the largest study, another Danish trial with almost 60,000 people that provided health checks at baseline and again five years out (and also at the one year and three year marks for those deemed to be at high risk). It failed to show any mortality benefit after ten years of follow-up.

As mentioned, two of the thirteen studies did show a mortality benefit. The larger, another Danish study with 50,000 participants, which provided a single health check and then followed participants for five years to see what happened, showed an extremely marginal benefit (10% vs 11 % dead five years out), but the result only just crossed the threshold for statistical significance and could thus easily be a fluke. The other of the two was a smaller study with 4,195 people conducted in the US, which provided a health check at baseline and at one year out. It showed an improvement in mortality at two years (8% vs 11%) and four years (19% vs 22%).

Overall, though, I think it’s safe to conclude that the totality of studies that have so far been done of regular health checks fail to show that they result in any reduction in mortality. Of course, whether you’re dead or alive isn’t the only thing that matters. So let’s look at other outcomes too.

Five randomized trials looked at whether regular health checks helped prevent cardiovascular disease and cardiovascular events (a.k.a. heart attacks and strokes). All five failed to find any benefit. This is a bit odd, since one rationale for regular health checks is that they catch problems like high blood pressure and high cholesterol early, one major goal of which is to prevent cardiovascular events.

Four randomized trials and six observational studies did seek to understand whether the health checks increased detection of disease. A randomized trial conducted in Denmark (of course), in which 1,104 participants aged 45-64 were randomized to either a health check or “usual care” (i.e. don’t bother the doctor unless you feel sick) and then followed for one year, the health check had resulted in more than twice as many people being treated with anti-depressants (5% vs 2%). As I’ve written about previously, anti-depressants don’t work (better than placebo), but do result in significant side effects, so it’s questionable whether this is a good thing.

The health check did not however result in an increase in the diagnosis of high blood pressure, hypercholesterolemia (high cholesterol), or diabetes. Which is a bit surprising, quite frankly. Other trials did find a difference, however. An American trial in which 906 adults were randomized to a single health check or usual care and then followed for a year found that the health check resulted in a significant increase in the number of people diagnosed with high blood pressure (14% vs 10%). A British observational study including over 85,000 people found that attending regular health checks was associated with an increased likelihood of being diagnosed with high blood pressure, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease. Participants were also more likely to be diagnosed with hypercholesterolemia and treated with statins.

So the totality of evidence suggests that regular health checks do result in an increase in the number of people being given diagnoses and thus the number of people being put on medical treatment. But they don’t improve mortality or the frequency of cardiovascular events. That is strange, isn’t it? How do we explain that?

Here’s what I think.

Firstly, some of these diagnoses don’t actually result in any treatment. Take chronic kidney disease, for example. As people age, their kidneys gradually wear out. Once your kidneys’ capacity is at around 70% of the normal value in a healthy young person, you will be diagnosed as suffering from “chronic kidney disease”. Luckily, the kidneys have an enormous amount of spare capacity, and you don’t actually develop any symptoms until the kidneys are down to 10 to 15% of their original capacity. Most people who have been diagnosed with chronic kidney disease die of other causes long before their kidney function gets to that point. So regular health checks might increase the number of people diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, but the diagnosis doesn’t actually change anything in reality (except for the psychological harms of now thinking that you have a chronic disease, of course).

Secondly, there are many diagnoses that are treated, but where the benefits of treatment are so marginal that it isn’t clear whether treatment actually improves overall outcomes. This applies to mildly elevated blood pressure and blood sugar. Treating very high blood pressure and very high blood sugar is undoubtedly a good thing. But when they are only marginally raised, then treatment is much more questionable, and it’s not clear that the benefits outweigh the harms. The reason this is relevant is that most of the people identified with these conditions through health checks are at the milder end of the spectrum, and thus statistically unlikely to benefit from medical interventions.

Another condition that falls in to this category is the aforementioned hypercholesterolemia. Reducing cholesterol levels in the blood results in a reduction in deaths from heart disease (at least, that’s what the trials produced by the corporations that own the cholesterol lowering drugs say), but it doesn’t result in a reduction in overall mortality. Which does rather beg the question why we even bother to treat high cholesterol.

Thirdly, if regular health checks increase diagnoses and thus increase drug prescriptions, then they also increase the problem of polypharmacy, which is now a leading cause of death. Polypharmacy (taking many drugs simultaneously) frequently cancels out the benefits seen in clinical trials, where unusually healthy and young patients are being treated with a single drug or just a few drugs (i.e. a situation very far from the clinical reality).

It is thus easy to see how regular health checks could result in an increase in diagnoses and an increase in prescriptions without there being any noticeable improvement in survival.

Let’s move on and look at some more results.

Overall, health checks were associated with small improvements in blood pressure and cholesterol, as would be expected given the increase in prescriptions. However, it is hard to see what the value of an improvement in a surrogate marker is if there is no actual improvement in survival.

There was also a consistent increase in the uptake of disease specific screening services in people who took part in health checks. Which intuitively sounds like a good thing, except that again the reality is far more complicated. As I’ve written about before, both breast cancer screening and prostate cancer screening harm far more people than they help, and don’t result in any reduction in overall mortality. So increasing uptake of screening interventions can actually be a bad thing overall. It all depends on which particular screening interventions are being recommended.

Ok, let’s sum up. Regular health checks result in an increased probability of receiving a diagnosis and an increased probability of being put on drugs. They do not however improve longevity. With that being the case, the increase in diagnoses and drug prescriptions is of questionable value, and might even be a net negative, when side effects of the drugs and the negative psychological consequences of thinking of yourself as someone with a “chronic disease” are considered.

June 30, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Hydroxychloroquine and its friends

IHU Méditerranée-Infection | June 25, 2021

Dr. Harvey Risch, MD, PhD, Professor of Epidemiology Yale University.

June 30, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

World Economic Forum makes censorship pledge to “tackle harmful content and conduct online”

By Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net | June 29, 2021

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.

And last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, pushed for “more guidance and regulation” from world leaders on what people are allowed to say online.

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.

June 29, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Covid19 – the final nail in coffin of medical research

By Dr. Malcolm Kendrick | June 28, 2021

“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.

1: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

2: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/10/magazine/the-fall-and-rise-of-kilmer-mccully.html

3: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033062021000670

4: https://www.timesofisrael.com/1-in-4-hospitalized-covid-patients-who-lack-vitamin-d-die-israeli-study

5: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/14383321_Antiviral_and_Immunomodulatory_Activities_of_Ascorbic_Acid

6: https://off-guardian.org/2021/06/25/canadian-surgeon-fired-for-voicing-safety-concerns-over-covid-jabs-for-children/

June 29, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

NOVA SCOTIA FEARS PEOPLE GATHERING AND SPREADING THE TRUTH

Lockdowns are being used for prevention of free discourse

Fact Seekers | June 28, 2021

They finally admit it.

June 29, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Biden administration to “encourage” private companies to use vaccine passports

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | June 28, 2021

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.

That’s not to say all US states are playing along. Florida is outright banning both private and public entities from mandating proof of Covid vaccination status.

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.

June 28, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

U.N. Rejects Its Own Data to Claim ‘Climate Change’ Threatens Mass Starvation in Madagascar

Mainstream Media is Onboard with the Lie

By H. Sterling Burnett | ClimateRealism | June 24, 2021

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.

A story titled “Climate change has pushed a million people in Madagascar to the ‘edge of starvation,’ UN says,” by CNN is typical of the mainstream media’s uncritical coverage of the UN’s claims.

“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.

June 28, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

American Medicine, American Malfeasance

By Dr. Gary Null and Richard Gale | Global Research | June 26, 2021

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 Affairs observed,

“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.

June 28, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , , | Leave a comment