Before I get to the financial bonanza, I have to make a few comments about the COVID RNA vaccine itself.
This shot-in-the-arm gene treatment should be seen AS AN EXTENSION of genetic research into altering humans.
Because that’s what it is.
The field of gene research includes “creating better humans” and eugenics.
Eugenics involves what American Rockefeller and Nazi researchers were setting up: depopulation; population control; selecting out “superior genetic strains” for survival.
William Engdahl and Dr. Peter Breggin have done excellent historical analysis of the eugenics movement. [1] [1a] [1b] [2] [2a]
Another point: In recent articles, I’ve pointed out that ALL genetic research—beyond its motives—is also fraught with unintended ripple-effect consequences. Never believe that the targets and the consequences can be contained. [3] [4]
For example, the notion that the COVID shot will do nothing more than force cells of the body to produce one protein is absurd. It’s on the level of saying, “During rush hour, on the most crowded high-speed highway in the world, we can engineer a two-car crash that will only result in two minor fender-benders…” [4]
Both short and long-term effects of the COVID shot are unknown and unpredictable.
The perpetrators of the COVID RNA shot are criminally insane.
And with that… on to the MONEY.
Bring on the angels and trumpets. Bring on the cash.
A year ago I told you COVID vaccine-testing was rocketing ahead, because Bill Gates, the Rockefeller institute, NIH, the manufacturers, and Fauci saw the light at the end of the tunnel— [5]
The fake pandemic was their golden opportunity to win approval for the first RNA pharma product in history, and once that victory was achieved—
They would beat the drum for new RNA vaccines, WHICH ARE CHEAPER, EASIER, AND FASTER TO MANUFACTURE, AND FAR MORE PROFITABLE. [6]
They would hype new genetic treatments across the board—on the back of the fact that there is not a single genetic cure for any disease. But who cares about facts?
Now, as massive numbers of injuries and deaths from the COVID RNA vaccine pile up, Stephen Ubl, president and CEO of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), gushes: “… We’re really entering the golden era of medicine.” He goes on to sell blue-sky “RNA platforms” for reversing child blindness and MS. [7] [7a]
Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, bloviates about coming genetic cures for flu and cancer. [7b]
Biospace.com: “mRNA tech used in COVID vaccines could be used to cure HIV, cancer, and other diseases.” [8]
Nature/Biotechnology (“Messengers of hope,” 29 December 2020; 39, page 1 (2021)): “Emergency Use Authorizations for two mRNA COVID-19 vaccines represent a turning point in the pandemic. They also herald a new era for vaccinology.” [9]
Think of these hustlers as cartoon characters dancing on a sea of real blood and death created by the RNA COVID vaccines.
In case you’ve forgotten, Moderna, whose COVID shot is now firmly entrenched, had never brought a single product to market in its brief history, but with Fauci’s guidance, managed to snatch $500 million in US government funding to develop the vaccine. Moderna was committed to RNA technology; that was its ticket to fame and fortune. [10]
The landscape of fake promotion about genetic cures is basically a cover for extreme damage created by corporations and governments.
“Confidentially, the truth is, what we’re calling autism isn’t a disorder or a disease. It’s neurological INJURY caused by vaccines and other environmental toxins. But we SAY autism is genetic. We can keep raising money for research—if you want to call it that—and hide what’s really going on.”
Some of these researchers are true believers in the Gene Cult. They actually think the day will come when a person can strip naked and bathe in a pool of poisonous effluent pouring out of a factory pipe—and because that person has received a genetic treatment (like the RNA COVID vaxx), no harm will come to him.
Look for this to happen soon: it’ll be a child, a child with “a rare disorder.” Perhaps blindness. And now: the child can see. Breakthrough. Genetic treatment. Of course, the details of the published study will be somewhat murky. You know, “proprietary technology.”
And quite possibly, only four children in the world have this rare disorder. That means the genetic treatment is 25% effective—an unbelievable marvel.
“Was it RNA, Doctor? Is that what you injected?”
“Well, Lesley, I can’t take you and the 60 Minutes crew into the lab. It’s a high security facility. But yes, for your audience, I can reveal that we deployed the most up to date CRISPR gene-editing technology, and it worked exactly as we hoped it would…”
“Is the cure permanent?”
“Lesley, I remember something my mentor at NIH, Doctor Goldbrick Hogcrusher, told me a long time ago. In this world, we live one day at a time. Who can say what tomorrow brings? We count our blessings, and we move on…”
Behind the propaganda: money and population control.
And unpredictable genetic ripple effects.
Seven billion “experimental subjects.”
SOURCES:
[1] http://williamengdahl.com/
[1a] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faJu6kzqkxQ
[1b] http://www.williamengdahl.com/englishNEO22Jun2018.php
[2] https://breggin.com/
[2a] https://breggin.com/peter-breggin-md-psychiatric-totalitarianism/
[3] https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2021/05/17/report-covid-vaccine-adverse-effects-huge-numbers/
[4] https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2021/05/18/covid-vaccine-and-genetic-thunder-nobody-is-listening-to/
[5] https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/12/15/the-covid-vaccine-and-the-commercial-conquest-of-the-planet-the-plan/
[6] https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2021/05/12/pandemic-follow-the-real-money-the-unthinkable-amount-of-money/
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwtFCp1_UDU
[7a] https://youtu.be/gwtFCp1_UDU?t=1369
[7b] https://youtu.be/gwtFCp1_UDU?t=1851
[8] https://www.biospace.com/article/mrna-tech-used-in-covid-19-vaccines-could-be-used-to-cure-hiv-cancer-and-other-diseases/
[9] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-020-00807-1
[10] https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/01/26/vaccine-for-the-china-virus-the-planet-is-the-guinea-pig-for-a-vast-experiment/
May 24, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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I haven’t written a blog for a while. Instead, I have been sorting out two complaints about my blog made to the General Medical Council. Also, a complaint from NHS England, and two irate phone calls from other doctors, informing me I shouldn’t make any negative comments about vaccines.
For those in other countries, who don’t know about such things, doctors in the UK are ruled by many different organisations, all of whom feel able to make judgement and hand down various sanctions. The deadliest of them, the ‘Spanish Inquisition’ if you like, is the General Medical Council (GMC) who can strike you off the medical register and stop you working as a doctor. They have great power, with no oversight.
Prior to this, I had been phoned by, and attacked by, two journalists and a couple of fact-checking organisations that have sprung up which can decide your guilt or innocence with regard to any information about COVID19. Of course, no-one can check the fact-checkers. They are the self-appointed guardians of ‘truth.’ quis custodiet ipsos custodes – indeed. (Who guards the guardians?)
In truth they have not scared me off, just greatly annoyed me. The problem is that if they really decide to hunt you down, then you are wiped from the system. Dr Mercola, for example, is having to remove information from his site in great haste. Once wiped from the internet, it becomes very difficult for anyone to read anything you write or listen to anything you say. A major problem if this is how one makes a living.
I was removed from Wikipedia a couple of years ago, but I do have a couple of insulting pages on Rational W (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Malcolm_Kendrick) to take their place. Edited and controlled by – who knows?
I think it is the extreme wing of the Vegan party who decided to write my history, and thoughts, on rational Wikipedia. I say this because a large number of other people I know who are critical of the diet-heart hypothesis, those who dared to suggest that eating animal products is perfectly healthy, were also obliterated from Wikipedia at pretty much the same time.
I did rather like the idea of Wikipedia when it started, but it has been taken over by people, some may say zealots, with their own agendas. This is particularly true of a few scientific areas I am particularly interested in. Diet, heart disease and COVID19.
Frustratingly, there is nothing you can do if Wikipedia decides to wipe you out. There is no appeal. Those who have gained the power to edit Wikipedia are answerable to no-one. They rule their little empires with absolute power. They are, of course, exactly the sort of people who should have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with science. Their minds were made up years ago. They have agendas, they are the anti-science, anti-scientist brigade.
The main purpose of science is to question and attack. To subject ideas to the greatest scrutiny. Those who decide to shut down and stifle debate … whatever they may believe themselves to be doing, they are in fact traitors to the cause of science. Stranglers of the enlightenment, assassins of progress.
They are not alone, and things have got far worse, in the last year or so. Science has taken a terrible battering with COVID19, I have always known that dissent against a widely held scientific hypothesis is difficult.
Just trying to get published is a nightmare. The peer-review system is one of the many weapons used against innovative thinking. ‘Let’s see what the current experts think of this new idea which threatens to overturn everything they have researched and taught over the last thirty years, and have built their reputations on… I wonder if they will like it, and approve it?’
Experts certainly create a formidable barrier to change. As described by David Sackett (a founding father of evidence-based medicine) in his article ‘The sins of expertness and a proposal for redemption.’
‘….I t then dawned on me that experts like me commit two sins that retard the advance of science and harm the young. Firstly, adding our prestige to our opinions gives the latter far greater persuasive power than they deserve on scientific grounds alone. Whether through deference, fear, or respect, others tend not to challenge them, and progress towards the truth is impaired in the presence of an expert.
The second sin of expertness is committed on grant applications and manuscripts that challenge the current expert consensus. Reviewers face the unavoidable temptation to accept or reject new evidence and ideas, not on the basis of their scientific merit, but on the extent to which they agree or disagree with the public positions taken by experts on these matters.’ 1
And his proposal:
‘But there are still far more experts around than is healthy for the advancement of science. Because their voluntary retirement does not seem to be any more frequent in 2000 than it was in 1980, I repeat my proposal that the retirement of experts be made compulsory at the point of their academic promotion and tenure.’
Expertise is great. ‘Experts’… well, that is a completely different matter. We certainly have a few formidable ones kicking about with COVID19. In the UK we have the great and good of the SAGE committee made up of – who knows? – chosen for whatever reasons. They wield enormous power, and never disagree on anything. In the US we have Fauci and the CDC. Ditto.
In the background we have the WHO … who can tell you what way the wind is blowing if nothing else. They remind me of Groucho Marx’s famous comment. ‘These are my principles. And you if you don’t like them…. I have others.’ However, we at the WHO would like to make it clear that nothing about COVID19 has anything to do with China, in any way. Can we have more money please?
Anyway, where are we with COVID19, and science?
In my opinion COVID19 succeeded in breaking my last vestiges of faith in medical scientific research. I cannot believe anything I read. I accept no mainstream facts or figures.
We are told such utter nonsense. For example, the ‘fact. that vaccination protects against COVID19 more effectively than having had the disease itself… This is just utter nonsense.
We were told that COVID19 was spread by touching contaminated surfaces… Really? We were told it spread though droplets, not aerosols. Which is the most complete garbage. We were told that everyone has to wear a mask. We were told it could easily be passed on by asymptomatic people. Based on nothing at all. I could go on.
Yet, no-one seems remotely bothered by any of this utter nonsense. The public seem to lap it up, and attack anyone who questions the current narrative. I feel that I am clinging onto a dying religion. The religion of Francis Bacon and the enlightenment.
‘Baconian method, methodical observation of facts as a means of studying and interpreting natural phenomena. This essentially empirical method was formulated early in the 17th century by Francis Bacon, an English philosopher, as a scientific substitute for the prevailing systems of thought, which, to his mind, relied all too often on fanciful guessing and the mere citing of authorities to establish truths of science.
After first dismissing all prejudices and preconceptions, Bacon’s method, as explained in Novum Organum (1620; “New Instrument”), consisted of three main steps: first, a description of facts; second, a tabulation, or classification, of those facts into three categories—instances of the presence of the characteristic under investigation, instances of its absence, or instances of its presence in varying degrees; third, the rejection of whatever appears, in the light of these tables, not to be connected with the phenomenon under investigation and the determination of what is connected with it.’ 2
This way of thinking it seems, lasted from 1620 to 2020. Four hundred years of immense scientific progress. The age of enlightenment. We are moving back to the prevailing systems of thought… on fanciful guessing and the mere citing of authorities to establish truths of science.
The Dark Ages are returning.
1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1118019/
2: https://www.britannica.com/science/Baconian-method
May 24, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, UK |
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EVIDENCE is growing that Covid-19 vaccines may worsen the disease in some recipients. The danger arises when a vaccinated person meets the actual virus. Antibodies developed as a result of the jab can end up enhancing disease rather than protecting against infection.
Previous warnings about this potentially lethal effect, known as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), have been downplayed or dismissed as theoretical by the manufacturers. The phenomenon has been seen with vaccines against other viruses but is considered very rare.
After reviewing published evidence concerning the effect, however, two US experts [1] have concluded it is ‘non-theoretical and compelling’. Receiving the vaccine could convert a subject from someone who experiences mild disease ‘to someone who experiences severe disease, lasting morbidity or even death’.
They say that to meet the ethical requirement of informed consent, all potential vaccinees, as well as trial participants, should have this risk specifically drawn to their attention.
Meanwhile, an international group of doctors and scientists have published an appeal to governments, regulators and vaccine developers worldwide to halt mass-vaccination programmes until safety issues, especially ADE, have been resolved.
They say that given the high rate of adverse effects there is a need for better understanding of the benefits and risks, particularly in sections of the community who were excluded in most of the clinical trials. These included the elderly and people with prior exposure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19.
Exclusion of the latter, the group says, is particularly unfortunate ‘as it denied the opportunity of obtaining extremely relevant information concerning post-vaccination ADE in people that already have anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.’ Without careful monitoring, cases of ADE or similar immune pathology caused by the vaccine would be indistinguishable from severe Covid-19.
The same may be true of damage caused by a toxin, the so-called ‘spike’ protein, production of which is triggered in our body cells by the vaccine. The protein is a uniquely dangerous characteristic of the virus, and the aim of the vaccine is to alert the immune system to it so as to block infection.
But not a single study has examined how long the toxin continues to be produced in us following vaccination, the doctors say. The jab itself may be causing the very symptoms it is designed to protect against, symptoms then erroneously diagnosed as ‘coincidental’ cases of infection. ‘If so, the true adverse effects of the current global vaccination strategy may never be recognised unless studies specifically examine this question.’
This an extraordinarily serious concern, since across the world sicknesses and deaths seen immediately in the wake of vaccination are regularly attributed to the virus itself. This has been the case even with dramatic increases in deaths concurrent with vaccination drives, such as last January in Gibraltar.
A family doctor in Texas highlighted the risk of ADE in evidence this month to the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs. Dr Ben Edwards said more than half of Texans now have natural immunity to the virus, and this confers ‘a more robust immunity’ than the vaccine. But two different studies have shown that ‘vaccinating someone who is already robustly immune increases their risk of adverse reactions 2-3-fold.’
He told the committee that in the past four months, 4,178 deaths associated with the Covid vaccine had been reported to the US Government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), almost the same as the 4,182 deaths reported from all vaccinations combined over the past 20 years.
The deaths included those of a 15-year-old boy in Colorado, two 16-year-old girls in Wisconsin, a 17-year-old girl in Wisconsin and a 17-year-old boy in New Hampshire, all previously healthy.
Pointing to studies indicating that only a tiny percentage of adverse reactions reach VAERS, Dr Edwards added: ‘To give context, in the 1976 swine flu epidemic, after recording 500 cases of paralysis, with 53 deaths, the vaccine was pulled off the market.
‘I have received numerous reports from family members of my patients, and close friends of my patients, that within hours to days of receiving the vaccine they’ve suffered stroke, heart attack, pulmonary embolism, blood clots, sudden death; and as far as these family members know, none of these were reported by the medical staff as being associated with the vaccine. So my concern is that there is indeed vast under-reporting.’
He said there was no need for the jab in people who have acquired immunity, whether through having had the disease, or having been exposed to the virus without developing symptoms.
Asked by the committee chairman if people can do anything to strengthen their immune system, Dr Edwards said: ‘Absolutely . . . through proper nutrition, hydration, exercise, sunlight, and most importantly, peace – not the spirit of fear which in my opinion has overcome this nation.’
Last week former White House Covid-19 adviser Dr Scott Atlas made a similar criticism of fear-based policies which, he said, had caused rational and critical thinking to disappear. Lockdowns in the United States and across the globe had not only been a ‘heinous abuse of power’ by public health experts, but had also failed to protect the elderly and vulnerable. The harm caused would be felt for decades to come.
In an interview with Epoch TV, Atlas said he believed lockdowns were appropriate in the early stages of the pandemic, when it was thought the virus could be more lethal than turned out to be the case. But a ‘frenzy’ took over, and the goal gradually shifted from protecting health care facilities to stopping Covid-19 cases altogether.
‘Fear is very powerful, and it was really shown how powerful fear is during this pandemic,’ he said. Americans bought into the initial control measures because they thought they would be temporary, and a small price to pay to get things under control. But poor leadership by ‘the faces of public health’ led to persistent lockdowns that defied logic, causing loss of medical resources for countless others.
Child abuse and domestic abuse skyrocketed, opioid deaths and suicides surged, and there was a dramatic rise in young people suffering from depression and anxiety. Children were kept out of school – ‘sacrificed’ – out of fear for adults, even though the children had no significant Covid risk.
‘I think it is still somehow held by many people that OK, the lockdowns are an economic harm, but we’re saving lives. No, you’re destroying families, you’re destroying lives, and you’re literally killing people. It’s a disgrace.’
Fear-based public health responses to the Covid crisis as described by Dr Atlas have caused immeasurable harm in many countries, including the UK. We still don’t know the full outcomes of this ‘frenzied’ period, including whether the vaccines are fit for purpose.
At least some are weathering the crisis well. As Saturday’s Daily Mail revealed, nine executives from four vaccine companies have become billionaires during the pandemic, reaching a combined net wealth of $19.3billion. The list was compiled by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a campaign group that includes Oxfam, UNAIDS, Global Justice Now and Amnesty International.
And according to a January report by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies, 651 existing US billionaires, including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Elon Musk, saw their collective wealth grow by more than $1trillion during the first nine months of Covid-19, even as the less fortunate faced economic hardship and hunger.
May 23, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, UK, United States |
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Amid growing safety concerns, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dr. Meryl Nass, on behalf of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), filed a Citizen Petition with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asking the agency to immediately revoke the Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for COVID vaccines and to refrain from licensing them.
Millions Against Medical Mandates (MAMM), a coalition of health freedom organizations and individuals, joins CHD and other vaccine safety and health freedom groups in inviting the public, including healthcare workers, parents and military members, to submit comments on the petition.
CHD compiled and submitted 72 references supporting the request for revocation and restraint. To read the full petition text, download it from the FDA website or read the full petition here — then submit your comments using this form.
According to the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System data, there have been 192,954 reported adverse events following COVID vaccination, including 4,057 deaths between Dec. 14, 2020 and May 7, 2021.
These numbers stand in stark contrast to those reported following the aborted 1976 swine flu vaccine campaign that ended abruptly following approximately 30 reported deaths and 400 cases of Guillain–Barré syndrome.
Citing the extremely low risk to children from COVID, the petition calls on the FDA to immediately refrain from allowing minors to participate in COVID vaccine trials and to immediately revoke all EUAs permitting vaccination of children under 18.
“It’s time for the FDA to make a dramatic course correction before more deaths and injuries occur,” said Maureen McDonnell, MAMM founder.
The petition also urges the FDA to revoke its tacit approval for pregnant women to receive COVID vaccines.
The law stipulates that to grant EUA status, no other effective intervention may exist. The petition calls upon the FDA to immediately amend its existing guidance for the use of chloroquine drugs, ivermectin and any other safe and effective drugs against COVID.
“It’s time for the FDA to make effective COVID treatments available and to revoke the vaccine EUAs,” said CHD President and General Counsel Mary Holland. “It’s shocking that the FDA has ignored the unprecedented reports of injuries and deaths for five months.”
CHD and MAMM are asking the FDA to take these seven actions:
- FDA should revoke all EUAs and refrain from approving any future EUA, NDA [new drug application] or BLA [biologics license application] for any COVID vaccine for all demographic groups because the current risks of serious adverse events or deaths outweigh the benefits, and because existing, approved drugs provide highly effective prophylaxis and treatment against COVID, mooting the EUAs.
- Given the extremely low risk of severe COVID illness in children, FDA should immediately refrain from allowing minors to participate in COVID vaccine trials, refrain from amending EUAs to include children, and immediately revoke all EUAs that permit vaccination of children under 16 for the Pfizer vaccine and under 18 for other COVID vaccines.
- FDA should immediately revoke tacit approval that pregnant women may receive any EUA or licensed COVID vaccines and immediately issue public guidance to that effect.
- FDA should immediately amend its existing guidance for the use of the chloroquine drugs, ivermectin and any other drugs demonstrated to be safe and effective against COVID, to comport with current scientific evidence of safety and efficacy at currently used doses and immediately issue notifications to all stakeholders of this change.
- The FDA should issue guidance to the secretary of the defense and the president not to grant an unprecedented presidential waiver of prior consent regarding COVID vaccines for service members under 10 U.S.C. § 1107(f) or 10 U.S.C. § 1107a.
- The FDA should issue guidance to all stakeholders in digital and written formats to affirm that all citizens have the option to accept or refuse administration of investigational COVID vaccines without adverse work, educational or other non-health related consequences, under 21 U.S.C. § 360bbb-3(e)(1)(a)(ii)(III) 1 and the informed consent requirements of the Nuremberg Code.
- Pending revocation of COVID vaccine EUAs, FDA should issue guidance that all marketing and promotion of COVID vaccines must refrain from labeling them “safe and effective,” as such statements violate 21 U.S.C. § 360bbb-3.
The petition is available for review and comment. CHD urges parents, healthcare practitioners, military members and others to comment and to share the comment link with friends and colleagues.
May 22, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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The WHO Says COVID-19 Asymptomatic Transmission Is “Very Rare”
There are two ways in which people are controlled: first of all frighten them, and then demoralise them. An educated healthy, and confident nation is harder to govern.
Tony Benn
Biologists tell each other stories. These stories might involve lots of acronyms and use strange and wonderful verbs and nouns but, unlike say mathematics, the mechanism by which biologists convey their science is at heart through the use of language. But unlike works of creative writing, the language used by biologists needs to be precise because bad English can lead to bad science. Which is why it jarred so much when I first read the following statement:
A third of people with COVID-19 have no symptoms.
The more technically correct statement (assuming that “a third” is accurate) is:
A third of people infected with [more correctly, testing positive for] the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus have no symptoms.
So why did the first statement raise my biological hackles so much when at first glance these two statements might appear to be essentially very similar? It is because from a biological perspective they are profoundly different. The first statement asserts the existence of a disease with no symptoms i.e., a sickness that is indistinguishable from being healthy, while the second statement asserts that a viral infection does not necessarily result in a disease. It is not a question of semantics but accuracy and mixing these two concepts up is the sort of thing that would have resulted in an ‘F’ if I were to have submitted it in an essay to one of my professors. Yet, this is exactly the inaccurate language that has been used throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and not by students learning their discipline, but by experienced senior scientists who, one assumes, are well aware of what they are saying.
One could argue that this is unimportant as surely the point is to convey the idea that you could be infectious with coronavirus and be unaware of it and the first statement is an easy way to do this for the layman. Not only does this assumption treat the public as if they were children unable to understand the nuances of infection and disease, but I’d argue that the second statement is just as easy to understand as the first. No, the reason to create a disease with no symptoms is based on a profound decision, one that I believe was made with the intention of ensuring compliance but has, since its inception, grown to dominate our entire response to COVID-19.
First, let’s see why defining having a disease based purely on the presence of a pathogen is a flawed concept. This is best illustrated by reference to another virus, Epstein-Barr Virus or EBV. You’ll be forgiven if you’ve never heard of this virus, but it could be argued to be one of the most successful human pathogens because almost everyone is infected by it. Most people are infected early in life and if this happens then EBV takes up residence in your B-cells (the cells in your immune system responsible for making antibodies) where it quietly persists throughout your life. Every now and then the virus goes into active replication and makes copies of itself which get shed into your mouth, a process that you are blissfully unaware is happening. The problems with EBV generally occur if you don’t get infected early in life but avoid infection until you’re much older. Now when you get infected with EBV, you can develop a disease called infectious mononucleosis or, more commonly, glandular fever. This often happens in young adults when they become interested in close physical contact with members of the opposite (or same) sex… which is why glandular fever is sometimes referred to as “the kissing disease”.
Now let’s apply the new asymptomatic COVID-19 orthodoxy to EBV where we define having a disease purely through the presence of a viral genome. So, according to this definition, almost everyone in the U.K. (and the world) is suffering from a new disease, asymptomatic glandular fever, and if we were to do a large-scale mass screening campaign we’d discover that there were millions of ‘cases’ of asymptomatic glandular fever in the U.K. alone!
Of course, this is complete nonsense. We aren’t all ‘suffering’ from asymptomatic glandular fever. Glandular fever requires infection by EBV, but EBV infection does not necessarily lead to glandular fever. The same is true of COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 and so the concept of asymptomatic COVID-19 as a disease is as ridiculous as that of asymptomatic glandular fever.
But as is the case with EBV, being infected with SARS-CoV-2 means that you can still pass it on even if you aren’t sick. However, it is a matter of degrees and the reason that people can be healthy carriers is simply because they have less viral replication and a lower viral load, which is why they aren’t sick. Of course, if the lower levels of SARS-CoV-2 in an asymptomatic individual were sufficient to mean such an individual was as infectious as someone with symptoms, then from an infectivity perspective the distinction between asymptomatic carriers and people with COVID-19 is unimportant and our statement would need to read:
A third of people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus have no symptoms but are just as infectious as those with COVID-19.
However, this situation would mean that the R number for SARS-CoV-2 would likely be much greater than it is, and that coronavirus infection and COVID-19 would have crashed through the population in one huge tsunami at the start of last year. This wasn’t the case, and all the evidence is that healthy, asymptomatic carriers (and pre-symptomatic sufferers) are much less infectious than those with symptoms and a disease (see Will Jones’s summary of COVID-19 facts for links to supporting evidence).
Given that this is all so blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever been near a biology textbook, the only reasonable conclusion we can draw about the creation of an asymptomatic disease is that it wasn’t done by a biologist but instead by individuals (probably on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B)) whose agenda is not to convey accurate information to the public but something different: fear and uncertainty.
The effect of the asymptomatic disease is to blur the lines between being healthy and being sick and means that people will consciously, or subconsciously, transfer some of their understanding of symptomatic COVID-19 and apply it to asymptomatic COVID-19. The implication being that the absence of symptoms is somehow not relevant and that just because you feel fine, you are in fact suffering from a deadly disease. This naturally creates fear, fear for oneself (what if I have it?) and fear of everyone else (they look O.K., but what if they have it?). This fear is useful if you now want to control the behaviour of people and drive compliance with policies designed to limit the spread of COVID-19, but the problem is that having created the asymptomatic monster as a mechanism to ensure compliance, it soon starts to consume everything because you now need to manage this disease with no symptoms.
The first thing asymptomatic disease needs is a way of identifying who has it. By definition, asymptomatic individuals have no symptoms and so in order to identify who is sick we need a test. Not only do we need a test, but because anyone who is healthy could be silently suffering from this illness, we will need a lot of tests. And because healthy people can become sick without any change in how they feel or look, then the testing needs to be endless. Also, because the disease is only defined by the presence of the virus, then positive screening results (real or false positives) naturally become ‘cases’, confirming the ongoing presence of the asymptomatic disease. Testing begets more testing.
The whole host of non-pharmaceutical interventions – including lockdowns – can also be seen as logical steps to take in fighting an asymptomatic disease. If sick people have no symptoms, then we need to employ strategies in everyday life to manage them. In effect, we have to treat the entire population as if it were ill and deploy measures across the whole of society with this in mind. This effectively leads to ‘reverse quarantine’ where we lock up the healthy to try and protect the few genuinely sick people.
Likewise, vaccine passports are also driven by the need to manage asymptomatic disease because it is only by proving that you’ve had a medical intervention that we can be sure that your lack of symptoms are not a cause of concern. But being immune doesn’t stop an individual from becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2, it just means their immune system more rapidly and effectively recognises and deals with this infection and as a result they may never develop symptoms. In other words, vaccination is no protection from asymptomatic COVID-19 and suitably sensitive screening will continue to detect asymptomatic ‘cases’ amongst the immune population. Proponents of vaccine passports acknowledge this and argue (correctly) that if immune individuals are infected with coronavirus, they will carry a lower viral burden and so are less infectious. However, they then go on to demonise unvaccinated, naïve healthy individuals because they might be asymptomatic carriers. In reality, healthy people are healthy and even if they are carriers are unlikely to infect other people in normal social situations regardless of vaccination status. In fact, if you support the notion of asymptomatic COVID-19 ‘sufferers’ being a significant source of infection, it could be argued that we need vaccination certificates to protect the non-vaccinated from the vaccinated!
Finally, there is the whole question of variants. Clearly, a new, virulent more deadly strain of coronavirus that evades current immunity is a very concerning thing as it would essentially reset the clock back to the start of the pandemic: in effect it is a new disease. But because we have blurred the distinction between infection and disease and our focus is on the presence (and sequence) of viral genomes, every new variant is now treated as if it actually were a new disease. This in turn drives the need to continue to monitor (picking up more and more new variants) and manage ‘the spread of cases’ irrespective of the severity of disease they cause or the prior immunity within the population. Again, testing begets more testing in an endless cycle that will never stop unless we decide to stop it.
What all this means in practice is that the management of asymptomatic COVID-19 has become the the focus of the Government’s coronavirus policy, but if we go back to the original (mis)statement about asymptomatic COVID-19 and swap it around we get:
Two thirds of people with COVID-19 have symptoms.
Of course, this should read “three thirds (all!) of people with COVID-19 have symptoms” but the point I’m making is that hiding in plain sight is the fact that most people infected with SARS-CoV-2 get ill to varying degrees. We also know that people with symptoms account for the majority of onward transmission of the infection (again see Will’s summary for evidence). So, if we were designing an effective policy to manage COVID-19 we would focus our efforts on the sick as this is where we’re going to get the most bang for the buck.
What would this mean in practice? First, we would only need diagnostic testing capacity for the minority of the population with symptoms, rather than the industrial-scale screening that we have had to deploy to deal with asymptomatic COVID-19. Second, restrictions would be focused on ill people, and this would be much easier, not only because these individuals are easier to find, but because sick people behave as if they were, well, sick and as such may not require much encouragement to prevent others getting ill. (“Don’t come too close, I’m not very well.”) They also probably wouldn’t want to go to work, or the gym, or the pub, or visit Granny. These restrictions would be time limited as they only apply to an individual while they are ill. We could use the billions of pounds saved on not destroying the economy in a futile attempt to quarantine the entire healthy population to ensure that these individuals were supported until they got better. We could invest in extra capacity in the healthcare system to manage any increase in hospitalisations and focus resources on improved treatments rather than testing and managing healthy people. The need for vaccination certification becomes irrelevant because healthy people are treated as healthy people and new variants only become of concern if they make individuals sicker. Essentially, we could stop treating COVID-19 as a special case with all the collateral damage this causes to non-COVID-19 related health and manage it as we would any other potentially serious infection. None of this is surprising as it is based on centuries of accumulated wisdom about how to manage infectious diseases. Unfortunately, the creation and focus on asymptomatic disease has drawn our eye away from the real illness and devoured huge amounts of time, effort, and money.
Being told that you are sick with a major illness can be a devastating piece of news, not just for the individual themselves but for those around them. Even if this news is couched in terms of positive treatment outcomes, it would be impossible to not be fearful and run hundreds of ‘what if’ scenarios through one’s mind. Regardless of how you feel today, the worries are all about progression and how you will feel tomorrow. Normally, clinicians would have a duty of care to their patients and spend time in discussing a diagnosis and helping their patients come to terms with this news. But for COVID-19, people receive the results of their diagnosis with no support. Worse through track-and-trace they might even receive this news completely unsolicited; imagine if a complete stranger phoned you to tell you that you might have cancer? Then, rather than offer support and comfort, we demand that individuals cut themselves off from others (self-isolate); you’re ill but on your own. All of this has consequences, especially for those who have bought into the concept of asymptomatic COVID-19, and so is it not surprising that some people want to cling to mask wearing, social distancing and lockdowns. In the end, it turns out that – ironically – asymptomatic COVID-19 might not be asymptomatic after all because for any number of vulnerable people the very existence of this asymptomatic disease has the potential to make them sick – sick with fear, worry and anxiety.
The author, who wishes to remain anonymous, is a senior research scientist at a pharmaceutical company.
May 22, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 |
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Tornadoes killed 553 Americans in 2011, the deadliest year since 1925. May 22 marks the 10th anniversary of the Joplin, Missouri tornado that killed 161, the first triple-digit toll since 1953. The U.S. had been averaging 60 tornado deaths annually.
This death toll shocked the public, weather forecasters, and researchers. Improvements in weather radar, National Weather Service warnings, and the advent of real-time, street-level tracking had seemingly rendered such death tolls a historical relic.
Some experts had a ready answer for the devastation: man-made climate change. Bill McKibben took a tongue-in-cheek tack in the Washington Post, with a headline, “A Link Between Climate Change and Joplin Tornadoes? Never!” He opined, “When you see pictures of rubble like this week’s from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that.” Researchers Kevin Trenberth and Michael Mann also stated that global warming is making tornadoes worse.
When the unexpected happens, researchers need to ask why and examine the data. Kevin Simmons and I had just published a book on the societal impacts of tornadoes. We sought to assess whether the 2011 death tolls were due to the tornadoes which occurred, societal vulnerability, or perhaps some other factor. We published our findings in a book, Deadly Season: Analysis of the 2011 Tornado Outbreaks, and a paper in Natural Hazards Review.
Our conclusion: it was the tornadoes. The total number of tornadoes rated EF-5 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale for tornado damage, the highest rating, provides a short answer. Six EF-5 tornadoes occurred in 2011, including four in Mississippi and Alabama on April 27. The nation averages less than one per year (59 since 1950), with only one since 2011. The year’s activity was extreme, but not unprecedented. For instance, seven EF-5’s occurred in the April 3, 1974 tornado outbreak.
Historical ratios of fatalities per injury, per millions of dollars of property damage, or per building damaged provide more detail and context. For example, prior to 2011, violent tornadoes killed one person for every $20 million of property damage; this and similar ratios held steady in 2011. The year’s many long-track, violent tornadoes produced enormous damage, with the corresponding casualties.
We further applied statistical models of tornado fatalities we used to examine the impacts of Doppler radar and NWS warnings. The models controlled for tornado and path characteristics like EF-scale rating, path length, and the numbers of persons and mobile homes in the affected counties. Plugging the characteristics of 2011 tornadoes into the model would give a fatality estimate, based on recent patterns.
The analysis predicted more than 500 fatalities for the year’s tornadoes with a high likelihood of a tornado killing more than 100. Keep in mind, the deadliest tornado over the years used in the statistical analysis (1990-2010) killed 36 people. The tornadoes of 2011 were unlike anything we had witnessed for decades.
There was no upward trend in violent tornadoes prior to 2011; the year was a clear statistical outlier or Black Swan type event. Consequently, we concluded that fatalities should return to the prior normal or decline further due to continued warning process improvements. By contrast, proponents of climate change told us that Joplin and Tuscaloosa were the new normal due to global warming.
The U.S. has averaged 43 tornado deaths over the past nine years, with 76 in the deadliest year (2020). We have had only 11 deaths so far in 2021 (although please knock on some wood when reading this).
Mother Nature can be extreme, variable, and fickle. Events and years unlike recent experience are inevitable. When unexpected (or inconceivable) weather events occur, we should try to figure out what happened and why, instead of lazily attributing it to man-made global warming.
Daniel Sutter (dsutter@troy.edu) is the Charles G. Koch Professor of Economics and the Director of the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy at Troy University and host of Econversations on TrojanVision.
May 21, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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The Manhattan Institute says their “fact-checking” is actually “fact-blocking”
Facebook’s fact checkers are “fact-blockers,” according to Manhattan Institute’s John Tierney, whose article on the downsides of mask-wearing in children was flagged. Mask-wearing in children still remains a controversial topic, where there’s no scientific consensus.
In April, Facebook flagged Tierney’s article on the risks of mask-wearing in children, adding a warning label that the information in the article was “mostly false.”
In the article, published by the City Journal, Tierney argues that masks are not only ineffective, but also psychologically harmful for kids, because they harm the development of their linguistic skills, and cause psychological damage, and other effects.
“City Journal appealed the ruling, a process that turned out to be both futile and revealing,” Tierney wrote. “Facebook refused to remove the label, which still appears whenever the article is shared, but at least we got an inside look at the tactics that social media companies and progressive groups use to distort science and public policy.”
A major flaw in Facebook’s appeals process is the lack of a neutral arbiter. Instead, the fact-checker, in this case Science Feedback, was allowed to be its own judge and justify why flagging the article was right.
“This exercise obviously wasn’t about accuracy. The fact-checkers were actually fact-blockers,” Tierney wrote.
Part of the reason Science Feedback flagged the article was because it cited a study by German researchers who interviewed parents about the effects of mask wearing in children. The fact-checker deemed the study flawed and self-selective.
“Any study can be faulted for methodological shortcomings, but that doesn’t mean its results should be ignored or suppressed, particularly when the findings are consistent with a large body of evidence from other researchers,” Tierney argued. He referred to another German peer-reviewed study, that concluded there is “statistically significant evidence of what they termed “Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome.’”
Another issue Science Feedback noted in Tierney’s article was the reference of a Swedish study that concluded that there was no significant difference in the spread of the virus in older kids studying online and unmasked kids attending in-person classes.
“This makes it seem as if mask-wearing is implemented primarily to protect kids or parents from dying or getting hospitalized. But in reality it is used to limit the spread of the disease in the population, control the epidemic, and prevent the death of individuals at risk,” Science Feedback said.
“To the extent that I can make any sense of this objection, it seems that the fact-checkers at Science Feedback believe that the unmasked schoolchildren were infecting large numbers of Swedish adults while miraculously leaving their own parents unscathed. And I’m the one guilty of ‘flawed reasoning’?” Tierney wrote.
According to Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, the censorship of such articles harms the trust the public has in science.
“Science depends on dissent, free speech, open debate. Yet in the name of science, they’re actually censoring those tools of the scientific method itself,” Ramaswamy said, in an appearance on Fox & Friends on Wednesday.
May 21, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, Facebook |
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We hear so much in woke Britain about ‘hate crime’ and how terrible it is. But right now, we’re in the midst of an extremely nasty campaign against those who don’t wish to take a Covid vaccine and somehow that’s deemed acceptable.
“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.” From George Orwell’s ‘1984.’
“Selfish idiots.” “Refuseniks.” “Anti-vaxxer loonies.” “Holding the country to ransom.” “A menace to their own health and ours.” “They’re like drink drivers.” Just a few of the insults that have been hurled at Brits who, despite the biggest drug promotion campaign in our history, have decided they don’t wish to take one of the new-on-the-market Covid vaccines.
Freedom of choice? Bodily autonomy? They seem to have gone out of the window, along with all the other basic rights we have lost in Britain these past 15 months. The date is 2021, but we’re actually living in Orwell’s ‘1984,’ with its daily ‘Two Minutes Hate.’
A whole succession of obnoxious newspaper columnists, radio ‘shock jocks’ and some ‘celebrities’ have gone out of their way to be as rude as possible to those who don’t want to have a jab – and call for extreme measures to be used against them that would be more associated with a totalitarian state in mid-1930s Europe than a country which still styles itself a ‘democracy’. Or, indeed, with Pretoria, circa 1965.
Apartheid – which we all denounced when in place in South Africa – has had a 2021 public health makeover and is back in vogue, with ‘Covid vaccine passports’ replacing ‘pass laws.’
“Love the idea of covid vaccine passports for everywhere: flights, restaurants, clubs, football, gyms, shops etc. It’s time covid-denying, anti-vaxxer loonies had their bullsh*t bluff called & bar themselves from going anywhere that responsible citizens go,” tweeted media motormouth Piers Morgan.
Nick Cohen penned an article for the Observer entitled “It’s only a matter of time before we turn on the unvaccinated.” “Rational people will ask why they should continue to accept restrictions on their freedoms because of ignorant delusions,” he wrote.
Columnist Richard Littlejohn went even further by calling for the unvaccinated to publicly declare themselves ‘Unclean.’ “If some people don’t like the idea of getting the jab, tough. I wouldn’t force them. But maybe refusniks should have to wear a bell round their necks and sport a sandwich board declaring themselves ‘Unclean’”, he wrote in the Daily Mail, in an article entitled “No jab, no job – it’s a no brainer.”
In similar vein there was Sean O’Grady, an associate editor of the supposedly ‘liberal’ Independent. His article, published earlier this week, was entitled “This is what we do about anti-vaxxers: No job. No entry. No NHS access.”
“The time has come when the hard choices are looming closer,” O’Grady opined. “If we don’t want this Covid crisis to last forever, we need some new simple, guidelines: No jab, no access to NHS healthcare; no jab, no state education for your kids. No jab, no access to pubs, restaurants, theatres, cinemas, stadiums. No jab; no entry to the UK, and much else.” I think we’ve got your point Sean. You wouldn’t make vaccination mandatory, but the unvaccinated wouldn’t be able to go anywhere, or do anything. And if they got ill? Well they’d just have to die because they shouldn’t have access to NHS healthcare. All in the name of ‘the common good’.
On the same day that O’Grady’s piece was published, we had one Sarah Vine weighing in with her penny’worth, too. “We can’t let idiots who don’t want Covid vaccines hold us hostage” was the title of her screed published in the Daily Mail. “You are stupid. Weapons grade stupid,” is how she addressed those who don’t want to take the Coronavirus vaccine. Who cares what this poisonous Vine thinks, I can hear you ask? But actually, it does matter, because her husband is none other than Michael Gove, the UK government minister currently heading a review into vaccine passports. If Gove’s wife thinks the unvaccinated are “weapons grade stupid” then it hardly gives us confidence that her husband won’t decide to discriminate against them.
It’s not just in print that the attacks on ‘refuseniks’ are coming. It’s on the airwaves, too. Iain Dale berated the unvaccinated on his LBC radio call-in show earlier this week. “The fact that people still refuse to get the vaccine for whatever reason, I don’t really care what the reason is, they are not only putting themselves at risk – they are putting other people at risk,” he said. “If you are 50, 60, 70, 80 years old and you still haven’t availed yourself of the opportunity of having the vaccine, I’m afraid you need your head read. You need your head examined. You are a selfish individual.”
Repeat after me: “I am a selfish individual. I am a selfish individual.” Gaslighting really doesn’t get any more obvious.
At least Dale didn’t suggest putting poison into ‘refuseniks’ coffee as his LBC colleague Shelagh Fogarty did. “I’d literally be in fights with these people (vaccine decliners),” she told a caller. “How do you keep seeing them at work without wanting to poison their coffee.”
Let’s not mince words: We are dealing here with the very open, plain-view demonisation of a group of people, with no consequences for those who are doing the demonisation. And all this is happening, lest we forget, in ‘woke’ times when anything you say might be seen as ‘offence’, ‘racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘genderism’ or a form of ‘ism’ or ‘phobia.’
To see the egregious double standards, just replace the ‘unvaccinated’ with a minority racial or religious group. But the unvaccinated are fair game. Hate crime, according to the Crown Prosecution Service website, “can be used to describe a range of criminal behaviour where the perpetrator is motivated by hostility or demonstrates hostility towards the victim’s disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity.” Vaccine status is not a “protected characteristic” so it seems people can be as hateful to the unvaccinated as they like.
But that doesn’t make what’s going on right. Far from it.
If someone is vaccinated, why should they care if someone else isn’t? We never had these arguments before about the flu jab. Either the vaccine works to protect the vaccinated, or it doesn’t. Nor were those who decided not to have a flu vaccine labelled ‘anti-vaxxers.’ You can be generally pro-vaccination, but have rational ‘wait and see’ reservations about the new-on-the-market Coronavirus ones, especially if your chances of becoming ill or indeed dying from Covid are extremely low. But that nuanced position is simply not recognised in the current, coercive ‘Just take the bloody jab’ hysteria.
As for the line that it is the unvaccinated who are holding the country hostage by putting in jeopardy an end to Covid restrictions? Sarah Vine really needs to look closer to home. Literally. It was the government of which her husband is a prominent member which assured us that life would be back to normal as soon as the most vulnerable were vaccinated. In an interview with The Spectator in January, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said he would “Cry freedom” as soon as the most vulnerable were vaccinated.
But we still don’t have freedom. The goalposts have moved from vaccinating the ‘most vulnerable’ to now vaccinating everyone. Is it any surprise there are those who wonder if this is motivated by the introduction of vaccine passports, which in turn could lead to other digitised social credit systems?
But, conveniently, it’s the vaccine ‘refuseniks’, the current subject of the daily Orwellian Two Minutes Hate, who are being blamed for continued restrictions and not the authorities. In these toxic times, ‘divide and rule’ has never been more blatant.
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com.
May 21, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK |
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This the fourth and final part of a series
My series on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (GF) has revealed the unparalleled influence one man, Bill Gates, has over:
· the WHO and global health policy;
· British public health and Covid-19 policy, through the Gates Foundation’s funding of a number of powerful and interconnected scientific institutions, charities and companies and their personnel crossover with the government’s science advisers;
· The Government’s appointed science advisory bodies Sage and Nervtag through the many members and subcommittee members who are employed by academic institutions funded by GF over many years.
This is only a partial picture of the long reach of Bill Gates into our scientific institutions. On Monday I focused on three GF-funded universities which have informed Sage on doomsday Covid-19 modelling: Imperial College London (ICL), Warwick University and the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine (LSHTM). There are many more academic universities and centres which have taken the GF dollar, including those involved in the research and manufacture of vaccines, who between them set parameters of approved research and gave their research leads significant clout.
They are thus able ‘to ignore or cherry pick science and indulge in anti-competitive practices that favour their own products and those of friends and associates’, as the executive editor of the BMJ Kamran Abbasi explained it recently. This toxic combination of scientific bias by commission and omission, exacerbated by GF funding, has led to the shutting down of science debate, to active censorship and even to dissemination of scientific untruths, as has been reported elsewhere in TCW pages.
Many scientists and academics have been worryingly silent about the government’s anti-science response to Covid-19. The few who have spoken out have been scorned and smeared by Sage and their nodding dogs, the MSM. Can this culture of silence can be traced back to the extensive GF funding of British universities?
Let’s take Britain’s pre-eminent universities, Oxford and Cambridge, first.
The GF’s funding of Oxford University goes back 21 years, to a first $4.7million grant for malaria and global health research in 2000. Its giving has risen exponentially since then. In 2019, the GF gave Oxford $40million, including $9.6million for vaccine development. In 2020 it gave $10.8million, including $310,970 to improve understanding of Covid-19. To date this year, Oxford has received $152,553 from the GF.
Oxford University is the site of the Covid-19 Recovery trial (Randomised Evaluation of COVid-19 thERapY), promoted as the world’s largest randomised clinical trial. The trial’s chief investigator, Professor Peter Horby, is a key member of Sage and Nervtag.
The Recovery trial is funded by the Wellcome Trust, the GF, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the ‘Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator’, the latter being a collaboration between the GF, Wellcome Trust and MasterCard. In March 2020, Oxford University was one of three institutions to share $20million from the GF via its Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator.
Professor Horby’s co-investigator at the Recovery Trial, Wei Shen Lim, is also a Nervtag member and chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation.
The deputy investigator of the Recovery trial, Professor Martin Landray, has further links to the GF. He is a Lead at the UK Biobank, which is partnered with the Wellcome Trust and also a Lead of the NIHR (National Institute for Health Research) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre at Oxford University.
In April 2017, the GF gave the NIHR Centre funding to study antibiotic resistance in tuberculosis, and a further grant in September 2017 to study typhoid vaccines.
Further funding was provided in September 2020 to research treatments for Covid-19 in care homes.
The NIHR Centre is funded as well by the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, as noted above itself a collaboration between the GF, Wellcome Trust and MasterCard.
In March 2020, the Wellcome Trust gave £7.5million via the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator to see if hydroxychloroquineand chloroquine ‘can prevent the spread of Covid-19’ (not treat it, strangely). During the same year the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator also gave $9.5million to the University of Washington to study the effects of hydroxychloroquine on Covid-19.
Professor Horby has sold the Recovery Trial as a success story, but other scientists have disputed this. Last June, hard on the heels of the retraction by the Lancet of its now-notorious paper purporting to show that hydroxychloroquine not only did not help Covid-19 patients, but actually made them worse, came news of the termination of the hydroxychloroquine ‘arm’ of the UK’s Recovery clinical trials.
As reported by Edmund Fordham in TCW, this ‘huge embarrassment was conveniently overlain by news from Oxford University that sorry, hydroxychloroquine really isn’t any good’. So even if the Lancet paper was fake, ‘a political hit job’ as one American doctor had it, Oxford’s clinical trial showed the same result.
But the trial design had already been savaged within days of launch; it was never likely to help very sick late-stage Covid-19 patients and what Professor Landray found himself struggling to explain in an interview were ‘the very heavy doses of the drug that were given – 2400 mg in the first 24 hours, a ‘dose fit for a gorilla’ as one critic had it.
Needless to say Professors Horby and Landray glossed over the inadequacies of this particular trial and quickly dismissed the use of hydroxychloroquine, vowing to concentrate on ‘more promising drugs’. And the possibility of a cheap and easy early treatment for Covid-19, from re-purposed generic drugs, especially hydroxychloroquine to prevent hospitalisation, was trashed.
Probing alleged conflicts of interest, France Soir noted the co-authorship of Professor Horby on papers reporting trials of Gilead’s remdesivir (there was no benefit in mortality), an agreement between his department and AstraZeneca for development of Oxford’s vaccine candidate, and generous funding from the GF. Curiously, there is a connection too between Professor Landray’s interests in Big Data and Gilead, a pharmaceutical company which was in merger talks with AstraZeneca last year. Vaccines are profitable, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are not. No wonder the GF invests so heavily in the organisations which research, fund and manufacture vaccines, rather than pursuing investment in better constructed early treatment trials.
A further cluster of Sage members, Professors Dame Angela McLean, Michael Parker, Gideon Henderson, Charlotte Deane and Dr Laura Merson, all work at Oxford University.
SPI-M-O members Drs Thomas Crellen, Joshua Firth and Professor Deirdre Hollingsworth are likewise all employed at Oxford University too.
Cambridge University’s GF’s funding started with an initial grant of $8.1million for agricultural development in 2012. The GF awarded a grant of $998,891 in 2019 to fund research into pneumonia, and $420,000 in 2020 for global education.
More significantly, Cambridge is the site of the Cambridge Science Park, another GF-funded venture. In May 2020, GF and Google Ventures gave $45million to Cerevance, a pharmaceutical company based at Cambridge Science Park.
AstraZeneca is opening its new R&D centre at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus this month. The vaccine giant is supported by the GF, although no details are available on funding. Cambridge University and Imperial College London, both GF-funded institutions, collaborate extensively with AstraZeneca. Sage member Professor Kamlesh Khunti has received grants from AstraZeneca and has also worked as a consultant and speaker for the company.
The Wellcome Trust is also involved in scientific research at Cambridge. Together with the Medical Research Council Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, it awarded the Cambridge-based Institute of Metabolic Science £24million in 2013. Professor Julia Gog of Sage is employed at Cambridge University, as are Nervtag member Professor Ravindra Gupta and Independent Sage member Dr Tolullah Oni.
Professor Daniela DeAngelis and Dr Joshua Blake, members of SP-I-M, also work at Cambridge University.
The GF has also funded University College London (UCL), giving its first $25.2million in 2006 for HIV research. UCL was granted a total of $10.8million in 2019 and $484,000 in 2020, including $144,000 to research vaccines last March. The GF has committed funding from 2020-2023 to study postpartum haemorrhage. UCL also collaborates with the GF and the Wellcome Trust on a research project called Global Health.
Sage members Professors Dame Anne Johnson, Andrew Hayward and Alan Penn work at UCL.
Professor Susan Michie is the Director of the Centre for Behaviour Change at UCL and sits on both Sage and Independent Sage. Her fellow Independent Sage members Professors Anthony Costello, Christina Pagel, Deenan Pillay, Ann Phoenix and Robert West all work at UCL in some capacity.
Other less prominent academic institutions, such as the University of Southampton, are also beneficiaries of the GF’s vast financing. In 2009, Southampton received $100,000 for scientific research from the GF, and was also given specific grants of $335,800 in 2014, $3.6million in 2015 and $476,214 in 2020 for vaccine research. Sage member, Professor Guy Poppy, is employed at this university, as is Professor Lucy Yardley, a member of both Sage and SP-I-MO.
The UWE Bristol also has connections with the GF, the latter funding its climate change project called Robial. Peter Case, a UWE Bristol Law Professor, wrote a report on malaria for the GF. Sage member, Professor Jonathan Benger, is employed at the UWE Bristol.
The GF has donated to a multitude of universities unconnected to Sage too, like Liverpool University, giving them a total of over $4million between 2010-2020, with the largest grant being $1.5million in 2010 for pneumonia research.
The GF also funds British charities. The Dementia Discovery Fund, part of Alzheimer’s Research UK, received $50million from the GF in 2017. A small science company in Wales, the Sure Chill Company, was given £1.4million in 2014.
The GF has also invested in the private security firm Serco, buying 3.74 million shares worth $6.6million. This collaboration is not as bizarre as it first seems. Serco is one of the companies hired by the British government to run its Test and Trace system and is likely to make up to £410million from a contract it has with the Department of Health and Social Care.
It seems that no corner of British industry lies untouched by the long reach of the GF. As my research shows, it certainly seems to be the largest funder of British science, giving Gates influence and control exceeding all others, with an ownership of scientists and scientific research as a critical dimension of his global control agenda.
The level of dominance which Gates holds over British science companies, institutions and universities is more than concerning.
Could the combined anti-science and harmful responses to Covid-19 by members of Sage, Independent Sage and Nervtag have anything to do with their multitude of connections to the GF? This is certainly jackpot time for these GF-funded scientists and academics, some of whom are having their moment in the sun pontificating on television to the supine masses. Fame is an addictive drug.
It’s not just the Tories have turned into Gates’s lapdogs. A controlling group of scientists and academics, with unaccountable power over our lives, have too.
Science and scientists that question the new groupthink or fall outside the parameters of the GF approved research have little chance. Neither do we while Bill Gates remains omnipotent.
May 20, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, Gates Foundation, UK, Wellcome Trust |
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We have written about this topic of no COVID-19 vaccination for children several times, raising our strong objections against vaccinating America’s children with the current COVID-19 vaccines, and our work was previously published in the American Institute of Economic Research (references 1, 2). Our core thesis for this op-ed offering encompasses a resounding “NO” against vaccination of children for COVID-19. There is zero science to support this, and there is potential serious harm. It is as simple as that. The benefits do not outweigh the harms, and the CDC and Dr. Fauci, and all who are pushing vaccinating our children with this set of COVID-19 vaccines are being very reckless, unscientific, specious, and dangerous with regard to our children. We call on them to reverse course. We argue that it is very dangerous and reckless to push to vaccinate low-risk children with untested vaccines for safety that could leave children with decades of severe disability if something goes wrong.
We make our argument now and we make it based on ‘No liability incurred by the CDC, NIH, FDA, and vaccine developers translates into no trust by parents’. Parents want to trust what is being done in this regard but how could they at this time when there is no basis for the vaccine? We ask the CDC in general, NIH, FDA, Dr. Fauci, the CDC’s new Director Walensky, and vaccine developers, to show us the evidence, show us and the public the data they are looking at, the science they are looking at, to warrant vaccinating our children. We can see none, we found none. If such exists, we certainly want to see it, if they would like to share it. These so-called ‘medical experts’ make statements and take positions often with no evidence or science to support what they are saying. In this case, we say no more. We want to see the evidence before we vaccinate our children.
Mask Mandate for Children
Firstly, let me/us be as clear as we can. All face masks must be removed from all children immediately unless you are a high-risk child and this is needed. Other than that, all other children, in the US, in Canada, Britain, France etc., all, must immediately rip up the masks and go on with life freely. Throw them away, they are not needed for our children. Nor is social distancing and definitely not in school. It is ridiculous. The CDC and the television medical experts, these talking head senseless and highly illogical people in these Task Forces like Fauci and Birx, have become (and became) contemptible with the drivel they spewed at the public 24/7 about these masks that are ineffective (they do not work and never worked, they just cannot as used) and very harmful. These experts in the CDC, NIH, FDA etc. costed jobs, businesses, and even lives with their corrupted pandemic response—denying early treatment when it existed. Especially the lives of our African-American and minority young people and children who could have least afforded the specious, unscientific, and unsound lockdown edicts.
Many good people and children lost their lives in desperation due to the crushing harms and devastation from the lockdowns and school closures that continue even today due to the CDC and the AFT teachers’ union collusion. Our statements on masks pertain to adults too but our focus here is on our children today, and urgently. These CDC, NIH, and similar agency and medical experts and advisors are all clueless, disgraceful, hysterical, illogical, irrational, specious, and patently absurd. Pure nonsense has been showcased with these masks mandates that they know do not work. After 20 minutes, they are garbage with the moisture they accrue. These CDC and NIH etc. experts reveal a depth of academic sloppiness and cognitive dissonance to any real science or anything that does not line up with their twisted unsound politicized narratives.
We always knew this. They the CDC, have never followed the science on masks as the science says it is junk and useless but do not tell “CDC 365” this (as described below). The surgical and cloth masks are and were all junk. We knew the science, reported it repeatedly, and spoke to it. How insane are these CDC experts? How embarrassing that they are the marque agency, and I am hoping the CDC can return to its former days of glory for at present, it is a non-scientific, pseudoscientific clubhouse for inept political representatives. The CDC does not do science, it does politics. The CDC is like the furniture store where with payment options, you do not pay for one year; you may think you are buying furniture, but they are really selling you ‘money’. You may think you are reading a scientific report from CDC when in fact, it is a political report.
Questions for Our Leaders
We open this op-ed with seven urgent questions for Dr. Fauci, Dr. Walensky (CDC’s Director), the NIH’s Dr. Collins, and the FDA, as well as the vaccine developers:
1) Would Dr. Fauci and Dr. Walensky as well as Dr. Collins of the NIH sign paperwork placing liability on themselves (their agencies) should any child be harmed or die from these vaccines?
2) Since the risk of Covid-19 infection is less than 1% and the Pfizer vaccine reduces the risk of infection by only 0.7% (absolute risk reduction), why are we vaccinating children with a non-FDA approved vaccine that is currently on EUA when their survival rate from Covid-19 is 99.997% according to the CDC? Near zero risk of severe illness or death. So, what is the benefit?
3) We have not seen any clinical trial data for children 12-15? Can we see it, can the public see it? What is the Absolute Risk Reduction measure, NOT the relative risk reduction?
4). How can the vaccine recipients (children) legally provide Informed Consent? Informed consent is not just ‘hey you, roll up your sleeves’…
5.) How do you plan to inform vaccine recipients about the Antibody-Dependent Enhancement risk (ADE) and similar risks, for if not properly informed of these “non-theoretical and ‘real’ compelling” risks, it violates medical ethics standards?
6.) Since studies show that those who have recovered from Covid-19 are at a greater risk of a severe vaccine reaction if they took the vaccine, do you plan to conduct antibody testing first of our children, to see if they have already been infected with Covid-19?
7). Are you aware that the vaccines cannot prevent infection or stop the spread according to Pfizer’s clinical trial data, and Topol/Doshi (New York Times )… it is and was only set up for mild COVID… nothing else… no transmission, no infection, no severe illness, no hospitalization, no death… so if children can get immunity harmlessly and naturally, and are at such low risk of spreading it or getting ill or dying, what is the benefit? It cannot be to drive herd immunity numbers for if you consider cross protection from common cold coronavirus and immunity from prior COVID infection that is cleared, then you do not need children for this… so why place our children at such unnecessary risk?
If our children are to take a vaccine that is not needed based on their risk (a child’s) of becoming infected and spreading the infection or becoming severely ill (and this is clear, stable global science), and a vaccine with questionable efficacy and very real potential harms based on emerging CDC VAERS adverse reporting database reports and anecdotal reports, then the CDC, NIH, FDA, and vaccine developers must take on the risk and consequent liability if our children are harmed.
Must be Held Accountable
We are vehement, that if any child dies or is harmed by these vaccines, then the CDC, NIH, FDA, Dr. Fauci, etc. must be held accountable. The CDC, NIH, FDA, and vaccine developers must be willing to immediately take on the risk if they stand by these vaccines for this is the safety of our children we are talking about. They must be willing to be accountable and put skin in the game. This is a very different situation than that for adults. No liability by the CDC, NIH, FDA, and vaccine developers equals no trust from parents and the public when it comes to our children. As a risk management question, we see no benefit from this vaccine and only potential downsides.
We consider vaccinating children for COVID-19 as dangerous and reckless, as reckless as the recent administering of this set of vaccines that lacks proper safety data, in pregnant women as per CDC’s guidance. We have read the enabling study and it raises many questions particularly the key one being the optimal time duration of study conduct was not done. How do you assess harms for a drug or medical device or vaccine when you are running studies for roughly 4 months? How? It is not possible. Safety signals (especially rare) cannot emerge during this time nor the optimal sample size for study (or event numbers). Where is the correct comparative group to assess the impact of vaccination on pregnant, vaccinated, positive women? Moreover, the initial decision for EUA for the vaccines was based on very small event numbers e.g. one key study had 170 events (162 placeboes and 8 in the intervention arm). This is incredible that such small event numbers enabled EUA for vaccinating hundreds of millions/billions of persons.
Many Questions Raised, With Little Answers
The vaccine trials have raised many methodological questions and we are concerned given the reports of over 3,000 participants’ data being omitted in one study as they were ‘suspected’ but not ‘confirmed’ positive. We find this incredible especially how there is no full accounting by the vaccine developers of why this was done, and when we back calculate and do our own crude modeling, we find the efficacy declines from the reported 95% to 19-20%.
But here is the core issue as we look at the risk for children and this obsession by Fauci and Walensky to vaccinate our children:
i) children do not acquire it readily e.g. studies show less ACE 2 receptors in nasal epithelia
ii) children do not readily spread infection to other children
iii) children do not spread it readily to adults, it is the other way around
iv) children do not readily take it home; arises mainly from home clusters and the adults there
v) children do not become severely ill
vi) children do not die from it
vii) MISC is very rare, very treatable, and almost all leave the hospital… could it be that masking and locking kids down have driven MISC? how come nations with no lockdowns do not report MISC? or strong children masking?
So, given all of this, what is the benefit of vaccinating kids? It cannot be that kids are needed to drive herd immunity threshold for it can only be that, if you disregard cross protection that exists from prior common cold coronavirus, and also that there is existing immunity from persons who had COVID infection and cleared it. So, once you include those portions in the math, there is no need for children to achieve herd immunity, that’s a bogus reason, Dr. Fauci.
Children & the Risk of Spreading Infection
Let us for a moment, look at the issue of masking of our children and when outdoors. This will help demonstrate the ludicrousness and harmfulness of the CDC and what it is advocating for in vaccinating our children. The CDC’s guidance raises serious questions if harms emerge and comports itself to ridicule as much as wearing mask outdoors if vaccinated. As we view the CDC guidance from an eagle-eye perspective, we come to a conclusion that the CDC is not talking science anymore. It is purely nonsensical and confusing. For example, regarding the risk of outdoor transmission, the CDC knows of the Chinese study that showed only one of 7,324 infection events following careful contact tracing was linked to outdoor transmission. They, the CDC, know that the Irish analysis showed that only one in 1,000 infections out of 232,000 infections were linked to outdoor transmission. They know that outdoors has ample ventilation and thus spread is virtually non-existent (CDC originally reported that less than 10% of infection occurs outdoors and one is near 20 times more likely to be infected indoors than outdoors; however CDC’s 10% figure was inaccurate and proper research shows this to be 0.1% and CDC has now backtracked due to their startling error on outdoor transmission).
There remains an absence of evidence supporting the notion that children even spread the COVID-19 virus in any meaningful way, but there is direct evidence showing that they simply do not spread this infection and disease! This has been shown in school settings and as published in other papers. Children typically, if infected, have asymptomatic illnesses. It is well-noted that asymptomatic cases are not the drivers of the pandemic; something particularly important in relation to children as they are generally asymptomatic. A study published in the journal Nature found no instances of asymptomatic spread from positive asymptomatic cases among all 1,174 close contacts of the cases, based on a base sample of 10 million persons. The World Health Organization (WHO) also made this claim that asymptomatic spread/transmission is rare. This issue of asymptomatic spread is the key issue being used to force vaccination in children. The science, however, remains contrary to this proposed policy mandate.
Supporting Evidence
In terms of masking children, which we are vehemently against (in school or out of school), Ludvigsson evidenced the low risk in children by publishing this seminal paper in the New England Journal of Medicine out of Sweden on COVID-19 among children one to 16 years of age and their teachers in Sweden. From the nearly 2 million children that were followed in school in Sweden, it was reported that with no mask mandates, there were zero deaths from COVID and a few instances of transmission and minimal hospitalization.
Similarly, a high-quality robust study in the French Alps examined the spread of the COVID-19 virus via a cluster of COVID-19. They followed one infected child who visited three different schools and interacted with other children, teachers, and various adults. They reported no instance of secondary transmission despite close interactions (to any child or teacher). These data have been available to the CDC and other health experts for over a year. It is not ‘new’ evidence as the CDC seems to allude to. We have science on deck for near 14 months now and the CDC is clearly out of step with the science. Each turn we make. Why?
They, the CDC, also know of a high-quality review study by Madewell published in JAMA that sought to estimate the secondary attack rate of SARS-CoV-2 in households and determine factors that modify this parameter. The study was a meta-analysis of 54 studies with 77 758 participants. Secondary attack rates represented the spread to additional persons and researchers found a 25-fold increased risk within households between symptomatic positive infected index persons versus asymptomatic infected index persons. “Household secondary attack rates were increased from symptomatic index cases (18.0%; 95% CI, 14.2%-22.1%) than from asymptomatic index cases (0.7%; 95% CI, 0%-4.9%)”. This study showed just how rare asymptomatic spread was within a confined household environment.
The CDC also knows of a high-quality randomized controlled trial Danish Study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine sought to assess whether recommending surgical mask utilization outside of the home would help reduce the wearer’s risks of acquiring SARS-CoV-2 infection in a setting where masks were uncommon and not among recommended public health measures. The sample included a total of 3,030 participants who were assigned randomly to wear masks, and 2,994 who were told to not wear masks (i.e. the control arm). The authors concluded that there was no statistically or clinically significant impact of mask-use in regard to the rate of infection with SARS CoV-2.
As a result of the nonsense guidance by the CDC, Dr. Leana Wen (emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University; former Baltimore City Health Commissioner) has just about had it with the nonsensical capricious CDC guidelines and is reportedly shocked’ by new CDC Mask Guidance and rightly so. “They went from this overly cautious, nonsensical approach to another nonsensical approach — but one that is dangerous, one that throws caution out the window”. We agree, what the CDC is putting out is utter nonsense and actually dangerous. Dr. Marty Makary (Johns Hopkins) has also weighed in stating that this is the “most political CDC in history”, where guidance is “based on discretion not science”. We argue, CDC guidance is based on whimsy and is as far removed from science as possible.
Even the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is now saying to take off the mask when outside. The WSJ knows that the gig is up with the ineffective masks but also that it is insane to consider masking outdoors when it is properly ventilated and the risk of spread is near zero, if at all. It is insane, illogical, irrational, and pure nonsense that the CDC and Dr. Fauci are advising children and teenagers to wear masks at summer camp, but not if they are vaccinated. It defies logic what is coming out of the CDC at present as to scientific guidance.
Disastrous Public Policy
It is incredible that a marque public health agency like the CDC could be making such disastrous public policy statements and guidance when they are constantly flat wrong and constantly having to reverse them or adjust them. What is going on at the CDC? We want the CDC to succeed and shine and be the ‘go to’ public health agency. But how could they, the CDC, provide guidance that masks are needed outdoors even ‘if vaccinated’. The totality of their argument remains meritless and absurd to date. It is nonsensical. We have argued that masks as currently used, the blue surgical and white cloth masks (or any cloth masks) are ineffective and essentially worthless. It is actually harmful and particularly for our children. We have raised this issue many times as to no benefit and possible harms of masking and it is catastrophic to our children, emotionally, socially, and health-wise. These masks do nothing and it is beyond being ‘neutral’, they are ineffective. It did nothing. Mask mandates have all failed. And now we refocus on the issue of vaccinating our children for COVID.
In this regard, the CDC knows (at least we would hope they do) that if fully vaccinated, if these vaccines do what they were purported to do by conferring sterilizing immunity (which we argue the vaccines fail to do), with the high titers of neutralizing antibodies, then you are effectively immune. You can toss your masks and you are liberated after your second shot. But do these vaccines really work as effectively as reported? Does the CDC know something that the public does not know, and hence the insistence on mask-wearing and distancing away from others, even if vaccinated? Ours is not merely a curiosity, but a legitimate question that remains without a scientific answer from the CDC. We are in full support of vaccines once developed properly with the proper safety testing.
We also find the current mechanisms being employed by the media and some people in shaming others for not being vaccinated is deplorable, while they take selfies and parade on the internet social media and denounce others. Why would you shame someone who is not vaccinated when you are fully vaccinated, if you are immune? If you are immune and, again, if you think you are, then why does it matter if someone else has not taken the vaccine, for they could be COVID recovered and have decided that they do not need the vaccine as they have robust and durable natural exposure immunity? They have this right to make a personal ‘informed’ decision. You are immune, so why be concerned with someone else’s vaccine status? Why infringe on others’ rights and freedoms and use public shaming as a venue to exploit your compliance.
Risk of Death?
But, what does the epidemiological data show as to the risk of death for children? Are children at such elevated risk to warrant vaccinating? Well, the most updated data by the American Academy of Pediatrics showed that “Children were 0.00%-0.19% of all COVID-19 deaths, and 10 [US] states reported zero child deaths. In states reporting, 0.00%-0.03% of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in death.” This is the data.
Based on reporting of CDC data, 266 children aged 0 to 17 years in the US have died of COVID-19 and we mourn each death and we cannot understand the pain for the grieving parents and family. But let us put this in perspective to yearly seasonal influenza. During the 2018-2019 influenza season, 477 children 0 to 17 died of the regular flu, and we did not mask the nation, did not close schools, and did not seek to mass vaccinate children, and did not push them to cower under their beds in fright. This is all so illogical and insane what they have done in terms of COVID-19! In 2019, 2,545 children died in traffic accidents, 776 died due to drowning often in their backyard pools by accident, and 2,156 died due to homicide. As a result, did we stop sending them to school? Did we pave over our swimming pools or ban the driving of cars? No, we have as a society accepted this level of risk and we have learned to live with it. Life goes on. We get up, dress, go to work or school, and we pray for each other daily that we get through the day and live to see another day and we make it home.
Esteemed Dr. Marty Makary out of Johns Hopkins weighed in with his expertise and appeared to suggest that children 12 to 15 years old should be vaccinated. We were surprised and disagree fully with Makary as the risk to these children which he also admitted, was essentially zero. Exceedingly rare. Then why would he advocate for vaccinations? This is confusing as we find no clear evidence, in fact none, that children are at any appreciable risk. He even stated that the ‘rare’ MISC inflammatory condition that is reported, typically ends with the children fully recovering. This is completely treatable also. Again, why would he recommend the vaccine when the risk is so low for severe outcomes and the children can develop natural robust immunity? The immunity conferred by this narrow ‘spike-specific’ immunity cannot provide the broad-based, robust, durable, comprehensive immunity that natural exposure immunity can.
This is basic immunology and the risk-management decisions for parents in our view suggests ‘no’ vaccines when there is no benefit and no potential for tremendous harms. There are adverse events and deaths being reported in the CDC’s own VAERS database due to the COVID-19 vaccines that the media medical cartel is not reporting. We find it is reckless and dangerous for CDC and Fauci and NIH to be advocating for these vaccines in children when they know there are no safety studies to rule out harms and what is planned cannot rule out harms.
At the same time, and we do applaud his bravery, Makary re-iterated that CDC has been ‘consistently late or wrong’ since the pandemic began and on most everything, and the latest CDC guidance on masks in summer camps and school reveals just how out of touch the CDC is with the science. We agree fully with Makary on this and advocate for a renaming of the CDC to ‘CDC 365’ given they are routinely at least nine months to one year behind the science! He claimed that we needed the updated guidance by Fauci 14 months ago. Overall, Makary says para CDC school guidelines are scientifically flawed and being used by Biden to stall reopening and appease teacher’s unions. We agree fully with this too! There is no sound, scientific, no good reason to keep schools closed, no sound reason to mask children in schools, and no sound scientific reason, none, no justification for children to wear masks indoors in school or in summer camps. It is illogical, irrational, hysterical, unscientific and actually absurd guidance by the CDC 365. As usual! What CDC and Dr. Fauci are advocating for in terms of children being vaccinated is dangerous and reckless in our opinion and has no basis, none!
Benefits Do Not Outweight Risks
We again argue that it is very dangerous and reckless to push to vaccinate low-risk children with untested vaccines for safety that could leave children with decades of severe disability if something goes wrong. We are for vaccines but they must be properly developed, and the emerging adverse effects and the lack of safety data raises serious concerns for these vaccines in children. The benefit just does not outweigh the risks and to claim that we need kids taking the jab to get to population-level herd immunity is absurd because you are not, Dr. Fauci and CDC and NIH, factoring in the natural immunity that already exists in the population, and you are not factoring in cross-protection from prior common cold coronaviruses etc. It is also very dangerous to mask our children. There is no basis for this, none! It defies basic common sense.
Thus, we cannot understand, once again, why public health agencies such as the CDC and Dr. Fauci, along with the nonsensical bureaucrats and technocrats would make such senseless statements and provide no basis for them, in that children require vaccination for prevention of COVID-19 when he and they know they are at little, vanishingly small risk! We have serious concerns about the safety of these vaccines for all persons (including questionable efficacy as it has been reported). Let us not pretend. Why? We applaud the tremendous feat under the Trump administration of seeking to bring vaccines in such a short period by cutting the regulatory red tape and circumventing and squeezing out the ‘dead’ time across the different phases of vaccine development. However, this does not obviate us from raising questions when there are troubling signs as to safety signals (rare or otherwise).
We are now seeing reports of the mRNA and adenovirus vector vaccines promoting blood clotting, blood disorders, various bleeding disorders, and that the spike protein on its own is potentially pathogenic. Besides the real documented adverse effects, there are also theoretical risks such as to the brain from lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) that will not manifest for years. Such that we may be mistakenly injecting people with a pathogenic protein. The AAPS has also stated that “blood Clotting Needs to Be Watched with All COVID Vaccines”.
No Liability Means No Trust
With this, the phrase we want the public to adopt is ‘no liability means no trust’ and by this, we mean that we want the FDA and Dr. Fauci, and the vaccine developers to remove the liability waiver from the vaccines for children. We waiver is one thing for adults but not for children given the low risk for infection and spread. The benefit does not outweigh the risk and if our children are being asked to take this untested vaccine, then the vaccine developers must have risk in the game. They must be willing to stand up for the vaccine and as such, be willing to attest to its safety by removing the liability waiver. This will give parents the confidence they need for as it stands, they have none. No liability means no trust in the vaccine. It is that simple. If the vaccine developers and all linked to the vaccine have no liability, then we can have no trust in it. Furthermore, the criteria for emergency use authorization (EUA) in children is not met and thus no EUA is warranted for children.
Building on this, Dr. Patrick Whelan (UCLA pediatrician) (Regulations.gov) shares our grave concerns especially regarding the nascent evidence about the pathogenicity of the spike protein the vaccine is injecting. In December 2020, Whelan warned the FDA that mRNA vaccines could cause microvascular injury to the brain, heart, liver, and kidneys in ways NOT assessed in safety trials. He stated, “I am concerned about the possibility that the new vaccines aimed at creating immunity against the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (including the mRNA vaccines of Moderna and Pfizer–BioNTech) have the potential to cause microvascular injury to the brain, heart, liver, and kidneys in a way that is not currently being assessed in safety trials of these drugs”. Yes, we are concerned the vaccine developers have been less than forthcoming, and the government and their medical experts are being evasive with their statements. And we are now going to play with the safety and lives of our children? We say NO. No liability equals no trust.
An Uninformed Public
The public is not properly informed about the risks and the safety data is not there. It is just not there and we are being asked to trust? Trust who, the CDC? When on one day the CDC says you do not carry COVID virus if vaccinated then the next day having to retract it? When on one day they advise all pregnant women to get the COVID vaccine and then the next day say only if they are eligible to get it? The CDC has lost its credibility. No liability equals no trust. And what about ‘informed consent’? It is not simply “hey you, roll up your sleeve’.
Alarmingly, additional evidence is emerging that COVID-19 is less of a respiratory disease and more of a vascular disease with the ensuing ill effects all generally having vascular underpinnings. But we are arguing that the spike itself may be ‘potentially’ pathogenic and if it has a role in the damaging of vascular cells (damaging/impairing vascular endothelial cells via downregulating the ACE 2 receptor), then by injecting mRNA code to build the spike protein to derive an immune response, or injecting the complete spike itself, then we may be naively or unwittingly injecting the very deleterious spike protein that will wreak havoc on vaccinated persons. Potentially, but there is a real theoretical risk and some may argue, it is already unfolding based on the nascent reports of blood clots and bleeding disorders. The spike protein may emerge as one of the more damaging ingredients in COVID disease and we are giving it to people deliberately, unknowingly.
Whelan further reports “that ACE-2 receptor expression is highest in the microvasculature of the brain and subcutaneous fat, and to a lesser degree in the liver, kidney, and heart. They have further demonstrated that the coronavirus replicates almost exclusively in the septal capillary endothelial cells of the lungs and the nasopharynx, and that viral lysis and immune destruction of those cells releases viral capsid proteins (or pseudovirions) that travel through the circulation and bind to ACE 2 receptors in these other parts of the body leading to mannan-binding lectin complement pathway activation that not only damages the microvascular endothelium but also induces the production of many pro-inflammatory cytokines. Meinhardt et al. (Nature Neuroscience 2020, in press) show that the spike protein in brain endothelial cells is associated with the formation of microthrombi (clots), and like Magro et al. do not find viral RNA in brain endothelium. In other words, viral proteins appear to cause tissue damage without actively replicating virus”.
Whelan as a pediatrician, has gone even further and must be applauded for his bravery by stating openly that “before any of these vaccines are approved for widespread use in children, it is important to assess in vaccinated subjects the effects of vaccination on the heart… vaccinated patients could also be tested for distant tissue damage in deltoid area skin biopsies… important as it is to quickly arrest the spread of the virus by immunizing the population, it would be worse if hundreds of millions of children were to suffer long-lasting damage to their brain or heart microvasculature as a result of failing to appreciate in the short term an unintended effect of full-length spike protein-based vaccines on these other organs”.
As we consider the implications of the spike itself being potentially pathogenic (and this has to be further validated), we have argued prior against children vaccination for COVID and that the science is clear and settled that children do not transmit COVID-19 virus and that the concept of asymptomatic spread has been questioned severely, particularly for children. Children rarely get infected and biologically, it seems, based on nascent findings, they may be unable to due to less expression of the Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme 2 receptor (ACE 2) in their nasal epithelium (references 1, 2).
The accumulated evidence suggests that children have been less impacted than adults in terms of severity and frequency, accounting for <2% of the cases. Children (as opposed to other respiratory illnesses) do not appear to be a major vector of viral transmission, with most pediatric cases described inside familial clusters. There has been no documentation of child-to-child or child-to-adult transmission and this has remained the trend across the last 15 months of the pandemic and reported pediatric data. This was demonstrated elegantly in a study performed in the French Alps. The pediatric literature is settled science on this.
NO Vaccination of Children for COVID-19
This brings us to our core thesis, this being NO vaccination of children for COVID-19. The reality is that our stance on children getting COVID vaccines is similar to our stance on why children must not be forced to wear masks, and especially children as young as two years old. There is no science or data to support this, vaccine or masks. Whatsoever. Israel has now released data showing that all age group infections have declined substantially, while not vaccinating children under 16. Why? Could it be a clear example that children are not the drivers but rather adults are and that by protecting adults using vaccines, children are automatically protected? The Israeli data seem to provide clear evidence why vaccines are not needed in US children.
We have been arguing this and we ask, why would we do this to children then? Why would CDC and Dr. Fauci take such steps when they know that the safety testing will not be suitable and that our children will be at risk to these vaccines if they are not tested properly? We may be setting vaccinated persons up for a disaster, naïvely, and as such, could we be doing the same to our children? We call for an immediate stop! We must not expose our children to ‘unnecessary’ harm. We must not expose them to a substance that has not been tested on children (or plan to be adequately) in the way it should be and for as long as necessary. We cannot circumvent ‘time’ with elevated sample size or any other tactic. This is a nonsensical methodology. These vaccines must be studied for the appropriate length of time. We must not expose children to a vaccine that based on their risk is absolutely not needed. Moreover, they can become infected naturally, if their immunity is needed.
As such, we are asking for a pause on vaccinating all persons with these vaccines until we understand what is emerging and safety is fully declared. Yet beyond that, we find it so very repugnant and dangerous an idea to submit children to these untested vaccine platforms, that once again we realized that we had to take a stand against testing and/or provision of any of the current vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 in children. Moreover, our view is that the risks of the vaccine far outweigh the benefits of persons under the age of 50, and we even argue up to 70 years of age. There should be no coercion or threat of reprisal if one does not want to be vaccinated and we call for a mass suspension of the vaccination in the US and maybe worldwide to assess the serious safety concerns we have. We are calling for proper ‘informed consent’ for all who decide to take the vaccine. We are being threatened when we raise this issue of safety and we are trying to inform the public.
We find it disturbing that the media has never pressed Dr. Fauci on overtly erroneous assertions and other major self-contradictory statements and continues to let him express an opinion without a deeper probing. We have great respect for his career and his bench work, but he is highly inaccurate and out of step with the science on most things COVID-19, the immunology, and the vaccinology, and I/we do not pretend to be any level of expert. Given what is at stake here now, this being the safety of our children, we felt we should take a stand and demand more. If this goes wrong as we think the potential is certainly there and based on what we are seeing with the adult administration of the vaccine, then our children may be left with a lifetime of morbidity, disability, and far worse, death. We demand that Dr. Fauci layout the childhood vaccination evidence for the scientific community (and the public, the parents) to evaluate.
Runinng Behind, and in the Wrong Direction
That said, we are being declarative in our position that our public health agencies like CDC, NIH, and FDA are running 9 to 12 months behind contemporary data and science and are routinely wrong. Dr. Fauci and CDC are wrong on the vaccination of children science as they were on all of the catastrophically destructive societal lockdown, school closure, and mask/mask mandate policies they advocated and implemented. We believe that the currently promulgated policies by the CDC and Dr. Fauci concerned with vaccinating pregnant women is both reckless and perhaps dangerous, since no long-term data exist on the mother or the fetus and the potential ill effects from mRNA and adenovirus vector vaccines. We believe they are wrong as it relates to our children as well, with these sub-optimally developed vaccines that are largely long-term safety untested and being administered as ‘investigational’ under the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) without the time-tested and honored Biological License Application.
For example, in the Daily Herald article, whereby Dr. Fauci advocates for kids as young as first-grade to be vaccinated by September 2021, he was quoted stating when asked about vaccinating by September 2021, “I would think by the time we get to school opening, we likely will be able to get people who come into the first grade.” We find this by Fauci to be incredibly dangerous and without any merit. Is Dr. Fauci thinking clearly? We believe that the very low circulating virus especially among children prevents a proper study from being undertaken conclusively and would require a large “n” to get meaningful results. The study will also not be conducted for the proper duration to collect the safety data.
The article expressly admitted it will not be possible to do this by stating, “Since children rarely are hospitalized due to COVID-19, the vaccine’s ability to reduce severe cases would be hard to measure unless the trials enrolled an enormous number of children”. The potential harms to the children must always be considered for any intervention in children. This must not be construed as an anti-vaxxer stand, but a sane and logical argument that must be meted out with the requisite intellectual curiosity and scientifically proven evidence. We, therefore, call for no vaccine for our children in this illness and we only discuss this option after we have properly collected long-term safety data collected from children and including safety data from adults.
Current Vaccination Indications & Supporting Evidence
Currently, in the U.S., the vaccine is indicated only for those ages 16 and up. The article referred to several pediatricians and infectious disease experts opining that “vaccinating children is essential to helping the country, as a whole, reach herd immunity and decrease the threat of new variants”. This is a dangerous and inept statement. The global evidence is quite settled that children do not spread the infection or get severely ill if infected, and that they can become immune naturally with regular exposure that is natural and harmless. If children ‘numerically’ are needed to achieve population-level immunity, then why would they not be allowed to achieve immunity naturally, that confers robust protection e.g. T-cell immunity, for many years? Why expose them to an untested and potentially unsafe vaccine that could damage them lifelong? Moreover, we argue that their math is clearly wrong for they routinely discount the contribution made by prior exposure to coronaviruses (common cold) and thus the cross-protection they already have (T-cell immunity). They also discount in their math the vast amount of immunity that prior exposure and recovery from COVID-19 confers. Thus, the nation and states are potentially near or at herd immunity already.
Currently, we have no evidence that any variants are more lethal and the real issue with the variants is the mistake in making vaccines with a very narrow ‘spike-specific’ immunity. Selection pressures from the vaccine as well as from the natural immunity will cause mutations to continue to happen at a pace commensurate with the replicative ability of the virus. A broad natural immunity is more desirable as protection so long as there is minimal risk involved, as we believe is the case with children.
We are very concerned that the American Academy of Pediatrics has been pushing this childhood vaccination and “really advocating to try and make these trials happen with the same urgency that they happen for adults”. This is very troubling and we ask, do they read the science that is available and that has accumulated on the risk to children? Is the Academy of Pediatrics willing to take this safety risk with our children?
The article states that we are mistaken in thinking that children were immune from SARS-CoV-2. We never said this and we do not think anyone has meant this, for what we did state and still strongly believe is that the risk for children is very small, exceedingly rare in all aspects of this virus and illness (acquiring the infection, spreading it to other kids and to adults, and becoming seriously ill). “Children experience lower infection rates, accounting for less than 10 percent of cases in the United States”. If Dr. Fauci and the CDC think otherwise, again, we request such information to be made public. Stating that children spread the virus “to some extent” is grossly misleading. The CDC, Dr. Fauci, and the writer of this slanted inaccurate piece know that this should have been stated as ‘vanishingly small or exceedingly rare, if at all.’ These people know that evidence from Sweden with fully opened schools showed no significant evidence of spread and no deaths.
Key Drivers of SARS-CoV-2
In this regard, it is evident that neither children (nor asymptomatic adults) are the key drivers of SARS-CoV-2. In the rare cases where a child is infected with SARS-CoV-2, it is exceptionally rare for the child to get severely ill or die. And to reiterate, teachers are not at risk of transmission from children and schools are to be reopened immediately with no restrictions. Schools remain the safest place for children and teachers. They should have never remained closed and we knew this for 15 months now, and our children are being harmed by the unholy alliance between unions and government leaders in certain states. The New York Post recently reported of this relationship whereby the Teacher unions have a hand in the devising of CDC school re-open policy. “Emails show a call between Walensky and Weingarten — the former boss of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers — was arranged for Feb 7. The lobbying paid off. In at least two instances, language “suggestions” offered by the union were adopted nearly verbatim into the final text of the CDC document”. However, despite what the media and the CDC and unions are trying to tell the public, the pediatric literature suggests that this is now settled science as to low risk in children. This is not ‘new’ evidence, this has been settled for over one year now, and certainly since last fall 2020.
Dr. Sarah Lang stated para that the issue of children not being in school will be solved if they got immunized. We find this to be reprehensible for this is a blackmail of parents when the children are being denied schooling with no basis due to risk, but by both the Teacher’s unions and the respective state governments and the federal government. Exact words were “Our current chaos about children not being in schools is just terrible for children, and I think a lot of the concern would be assuaged if children were immunized”. We would ask Dr. Lang if she will like to state conclusively that the vaccines as currently devised are ‘safe’ and what is planned will be safe, knowing what is currently occurring in terms of the emerging adverse events and deaths due to the vaccine. Is she prepared to place our children at this unnecessary risk?
O’Leary also stated para that as young as 6-month-old infants can get vaccinated. He knows that the trials will not be powered to detect meaningful differences (a sample size of 3,000 will not allow for the statistical power) and that the duration will not allow for assessment of safety. What this expert has stated is very dangerous. “That’s enough to prove safety and benefit, experts said, in part, because the adult trials have already paved the way”. We find this statement to be incredibly flawed science and dangerous given there are now emerging adverse effects of the vaccines and also, Pfizer as an example, failed to include over 3,000 suspected but unconfirmed infections (with no explanation) and our own calculations showed that the efficacy for mild COVID would have dropped from 95% to 19% if this omitted data was included.
The article reported, “In the absence of a definitive immune correlate of protection, the trials would compare antibody levels in children with those found in adults and extrapolate that the efficacy should then be similar”. We argue that children are not adults and their biological response will differ and we must not extrapolate especially given the harms we see accumulating with these vaccines. Children are still in a growing phase when their brain, neural, vascular and other systems are developing and thus may be subject to developmental anomalies from these untested vaccines.
The article reported that “Pfizer’s and Moderna’s adolescent trials will focus on evaluating participants’ immune response by measuring antibodies”, and it is likely the trials with younger children will do the same. We ask the vaccine developers and Dr. Fauci, do they think this is an appropriate end-point? We do not, and feel that this does not tell us if the recipient will be protected from infection or from acquiring infection, or from getting seriously ill or dying from it. This in no way tells us if the recipient will be immune once vaccinated. This is what parents will want to know if they are going to make a risk management decision to give their child this vaccine. This again raises many questions as to how these trials will be run, what the end goal is, and why the vaccine is needed in our children in the first place.
The article reported, “In the absence of a definitive immune correlate of protection, the trials would compare antibody levels in children with those found in adults and extrapolate that the efficacy should then be similar”. We argue that children are not adults and their biological response will differ and we must not extrapolate especially given the harms we see accumulating with these vaccines.
It is unfortunate that we have arrived at this stage where untruths are elevated to a daily briefing.
And these daily briefings cause irrational fear, panic, and hysteria among the public. These briefings driven by the media cause unnecessary fear despite “a thousandfold difference in risk between old and young.” Such conflation of the risks between the young and the elderly population with comorbidities and at risk is wrong-headed and creates unnecessary fear for all. It is well known that there is a distinct stratified risk (strongly associated with increasing age and comorbidities).
Ending Statements
We end by again stating that the recent push by the CDC, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and other television medical experts who suggest that we can only get to herd immunity by vaccinating our children is absurd and patently false. They continue to inaccurately discount cross protection immunity from prior coronaviruses and common colds. They are pushing a vaccine that is potentially unsafe to our children especially since we have no data on their safety.
Furthermore, data thus far suggest that the COVID ‘variants’ do not drive infection in children and harm them any more than the original strain. There is no basis for such a statement. For those who are trying to frighten parents by the illogical and absurd statements that a lethal strain may emerge among the variants, then we argue that you are using terms like ‘may’ and ‘could’ and ‘might.’ We can find no evidence to support such claims. It is simply rampant supposition and speculation and fear-mongering! Making such claims is not science, and decisions based on such claims are not evidence-based. We need to see the actual science and not just rampant speculation and supposition by often nonsensical media medical experts. We regard the retraction of the double-mask needs as a rampant abuse of the term “science-based.” Because it wasn’t as was the statement that Covid-19 is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu? A very prominent Professor out of Johns Hopkins, Dr. Marty Makary, gets it right now when he calls out these experts and agencies for their foolishness and fear mongering that is often inaccurate. He recently eviscerated CDC’s guidelines and called out Dr. Fauci for his inaccurate claims on herd immunity.
We advocate for the safety of all our children. Parents have a responsibility to ask for and get accurate information from the public sector that governs policy decisions. Parents, so armed, can make appropriate decisions for their children. It is better science to use a more ‘focused‘ protection and targeting that is based on age and known risk factors especially, regarding the children. We abide by the Hippocratic principle of “Primum Non Nocere.”
We conclude that our children must be exempt fully from any of the existing COVID-19 vaccines, and until proper studies are conducted with the proper safety data, and until it can be shown that the benefits far outweigh the risks in the need for the vaccine. There must be no vaccination of our children with these potentially unsafe, untested for safety vaccines. Period! No liability equals no trust and we close by again calling on the CDC, the NIH, the FDA, Dr. Fauci, and vaccine developers to remove the liability waiver. There is no benefit. None. In fact, we call on the CDC, the NIH, the FDA, Dr. Fauci, and vaccine developers to meet with us at any time, to their convenience, collectively or however, to discuss with us, debate with us, why our children should be vaccinated with these vaccines given their risk. We wish this open public discussion to your convenience.
Contact
Paul E. Alexander, PhD … email: elias98_99@yahoo.com
Howard Tenenbaum, DDS, PhD … email: hctkbt822@gmail.com
Parvez Dara, MBA, MD … email: daraparvez@gmail.com
i) Paul E Alexander MSc PhD, McMaster University Canada, University of Oxford, and University of Toronto
ii) Howard Tenenbaum DDS, Dip. Perio., PhD, FRCD(C) Centre for Advanced Dental Research and Care, Mount Sinai Hospital, and Faculties of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
iii) Parvez Dara MD, FACP, MBA, Consultant, Medical Hematologist and Oncologist
May 20, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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It is sad to see what used to be a serious, scientific body prostitute itself to global warming scaremongering:
New maps launched by the British Geological Survey (BGS) reveal how climate change is likely to drive an increase in subsidence-related issues for British homes and properties over the next 50 years.
Experts at the BGS, the UK’s geoscientific advisor which helps to advance our knowledge about changes in the environment, warns that the number of properties in Great Britain facing subsidence issues and damage to property from shrink-swell is on the rise, with figures of just 3 per cent in 1990 likely to reach 10 per cent by 2070. … Full article
Note that there is no evidence offered that any of this has actually gotten any worse in recent years. Instead, the report is all based around UKCP18, the Met Office’s modelled projections for what might happen if global temperatures rise significantly. We are of course familiar with previous Met Office projections, which have proved wide of the mark.
London has always been a hot spot for subsidence, as London Clay is one of the most shrinkable of soil types of all. However there is no evidence that the London region is getting wetter or drier. In particular, summers were frequently drier in the past than recently, which totally undermines the BGS’ conclusions.
Opinion polls show that very few people are seriously concerned about climate change, which is no doubt the reason why the BGS has decided to publish this farcical study.
May 20, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | UK |
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This is the third article in a series
IN THE previous instalments I explored the extraordinary hold Bill Gates has over global health policy and the spread of its influence right into the heart of British public health policy via the funding by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (GF) of science businesses, foundations and public bodies through a complex web of interconnection and crossover of personnel.
This, however, is not the sum total of the GF’s reach into the world of British science and public health. It has been funding British university science departments, projects, and individuals for more than two decades. The topics involved include research into and manufacturing of vaccines.
No government-appointed science committee has influenced public health policy as much as Sage. Many of its members, who cross over with Independent Sage and Nervtag and are already somewhat compromised by connections to the GF-funded GlaxoSmithKline and Wellcome Foundation, are also employees of universities and colleges which have received massive GF grants and, in some cases, work in partnership with them. Three of Sage’s members, Professors Graham Medley, Andrew Rambaut and Matt Keeling, are individual recipients of grants from the GF.
Earlier this year a Sage subcommittee, the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational sub-group (SPI-M-O), commissioned three university departments to conduct modelling research, a scaremongering exercise that was to be the basis of Sage advice to the Government.
Readers may remember the three modelling papers produced by Imperial College London (ICL), Warwick University and the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine (LSHTM) which received considerable press attention at the end of March, and their dramatic simultaneous warnings of a ‘third’ Covid-19 wave and new lethal variants; cautioning (yet again) how this will put the NHS under stress. All recommended stricter lockdowns, Test and Trace and, tellingly, booster vaccines.
SPI-M-O had assigned each university a specific task: ICL’s was ‘Evaluating England’s Roadmap out of Lockdown’, Warwick’s to produce ‘Road Map Scenarios and Sensitivity’ and LSHTM’s to make an ‘Interim roadmap assessment: prior to Step 2’.
Promoting the ICL paper was none other than the multi-tasking Sage member Professor Neil Ferguson, co-founder and Principal Investigator of the Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis (MRC GIDA) at Imperial College, a centre that works closely with the GF, the Global Fund and Gavi, Vice Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, School of Public Health at ICL, a Director and Adviser at the World Health Organisation (WHO) and a recipient of cloud computing time from Microsoft and Amazon for Covid-19 modelling.
Notorious for churning out alarmist modelling and for advocating Chinese lockdown policy, in this latest paper Ferguson turned his attention to vaccines. It said that current vaccines on their own would be ineffective in keeping new variants under control. A few weeks later, though neither a virologist nor immunologist, he was insisting on the necessity of vaccine boosters.
Warwick’s paper emphasised the ‘danger’ of new variants to an even greater degree than the ICL paper. It warned that ‘stringent methods’ would be needed to counteract them and that the current vaccination programme might not adequately contain them.
The paper produced by the LSHTM group was the most pessimistic of all. It warned that a ‘third wave’ and new variants would bring a high death toll. It also stressed the need for Test and Trace which, together with that other Sage recommendation, vaccine passports, is the new formula for digital slavery and a surveillance state.
How Ferguson, whose modelling methodologies and predictions had been so comprehensively discredited, was getting away with this repeat performance seemed baffling, but for the fact that as a key member of the SPI-M-O subgroup he had been able to commission the new modelling research as well as that of supportive colleagues at Warwick University and the LSHTM.
Curiously, several SPI-M-O members turn out to be affiliated to one or another of these three universities too and are the very same academics who wrote these modelling papers. Given that they have commissioned themselves and sit on the subgroup, no independent assessment or scrutiny of their work has taken place. This is the epitome of jobs for the boys and girls.
Here are the SPI-M-O members connected to ICL:
Professors Neil Ferguson (Sage), Stephen Brett, Nicholas Grassly, Steven Riley, Wendy Barclay (Sage) and Drs Marc Baguelin, Samir Bhatt and Tim Lucas. Ferguson and Baguelin contributed to the ICL paper.
Here are the SPI-M-O members who work at Warwick University:
Professor Matt Keeling and Drs Louise Dyson, Edward Hill, Michael Tildesley and Joe Hilton. Keeling, Dyson, Tildesley and Hill are four out of five authors of the Warwick paper.
The following SPI-M-O members are connected to the LSHTM:
Professors John Edmunds (Sage), Mark Jit, Graham Medley (Sage), Drs Nick Davies, Rosalind Eggo, Sebastian Funk, Thibaut Jombart, Petra Klepac, Adam Kurcharski, Rohini Mathur, Sam Clifford, Elizabeth Fearon, Gwen Knight and Bill Quilty. Edmunds, Jit and Davies are three out of four of the authors of the LSHTM paper.
The Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, is a member of both Sage and SPI-M-O.
It will surprise few readers to learn that ICL, Warwick University and the LSHTM, are historically heavily funded by the GF.
The GF made its first grant to ICL of $31.9million in 2000. ICL received a further $46.7million from the GF in 2006 to research tropical diseases. The GF granted ICL a total of $446,205 in 2019 for research into enteric and diarrhoeal diseases, technology solutions, malaria, and ‘Discovery and Translational Sciences’. In 2020 it gave ICL a total of $91.5million for studies into polio, tuberculosis, global health, technology solutions, malaria, HIV, Discovery and Translational Sciences and family planning.
Last January, Sage member Professor Sir Mark Walport was appointed chair of the Imperial College Academic Health Science Centre (AHSC) Strategic Partnership. His ICL colleagues Professor Robin Grimes and Dr David Halpern sit on Sage too. Professor Ferguson and two ICL colleagues, Professors Wendy Barclay and Peter Openshaw, are members of Nervtag as well.
Warwick University’s GF funding goes back to 2015. An initial grant of $20,000 from the GF rapidly increased to a current total of $8.3million. In 2017, the GF awarded Warwick University $3million to research disease modelling, and in 2020 $2.2million to study neglected tropical diseases.
The LSHTM received a $40million GF grant for malaria research in 2000, with other grants in 2008 totalling $60million. More recently, in 2019, it was awarded a total of $15million, including £1million for Aids research, and in 2020 a further $1.5million for vaccine development.
Sage member Professor Yvonne Doyle works at the LSHTM as does Nervtag member Professor John Edmunds and Independent Sage member Professor Martin McKee. Professor Edmunds was recently a recipient of a grant worth £5million from UKRI, which collaborates with the GF, to study disease modelling in Africa.
The late Professor Val Curtis, a member of Independent Sage, also worked at the LSHTM.
Predictably, none of the recent modelling by this closed shop takes into account the economic damage, social disintegration or consequences of lockdown, or the neglect of non-Covid-19 diseases as a result of lockdown and social distancing policies. Yet all this is now extensively catalogued. The conflicts of interest and cross over with these government advisers and highly directed research in universities heavily funded by GF, which has one narrow vision global vaccination agenda, is alarming.
Even more alarming is that it is on this basis that an unaccountable and unelected body has effectively dictated Government policy and our lives this past year. Its controversially modelled predictions of worst-case scenarios, none of which to date have been borne out, have been useful for two things: terrifying the populace into submission and priming the government, and us, into further lockdowns next autumn and winter – and establish them as the ‘new normal’.
Whether the men and women named here are useful idiots for Gates, or self-servers without moral compass, such scientific narrow vision reflects very poorly on them and their institutions.
The tentacles of the GF are everywhere. In the final part of this series I will be looking at its funding of the Oxford Recovery trials, Cambridge Science Park, its interconnections with the AstraZeneca project, its funding of several other universities, and finally at its investment in Serco, one of the outsourcing companies behind the Test and Trace programme.
May 19, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Gates Foundation, UK |
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