Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ): The Suppression of a Proven COVID Remedy
By Barry Kissin | Global Research | December 22, 2020
Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) has been an FDA approved drug for over 65 years. It has been on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines since the list began in 1977. People have been safely treated with HCQ billions of times for malaria, lupus, HIV and rheumatoid arthritis. HCQ exerts both anti-inflammatory and antiviral effects.
Nevertheless, the FDA has caused many states to ban the use of HCQ to treat COVID-19 and made it very difficult to obtain a prescription elsewhere in the U.S. by foisting studies that greatly exaggerate a potential heart rhythm problem. In contrast, the CDC website says this about HCQ:
“With frequent dosing, rarely reported adverse events include cardiac arrhythmias in those with liver or kidney dysfunction … CDC has no limits on the use of hydroxychloroquine for the prevention of malaria … It can also be safely taken by pregnant women and nursing mothers … and children of all ages.”
On Nov. 19, Dr. George Fareed from California testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee about successfully treating over 1000 COVID patients with HCQ. On Dec. 10, Fareed responded as follows to follow-up questions from Senator Josh Hawley:
“The earlier the treatment can be started after the start of the infection, the better … Sadly, many infected people and primary care doctors and doctors in ERs follow the NIH and Dr. Fauci stipulations with no effective treatments offered. We need to have the NIH/FDA/CDC formally acknowledge the importance of early treatment with moderately acting, safe anti-virals [like HCQ] so readily available. When (if ever) that happens, everything would improve dramatically.”
At c19study.com is an up-to-date list of the countries successfully treating COVID with HCQ, mostly in combination with zinc and an anti-biotic (azithromycin or doxycycline): India, South Korea, Indonesia, China, Greece, Russia, U.A.E., Turkey and countries throughout Africa, South America and Central America.
Suppression of HCQ is a central factor in why the U.S. has among the very worst rates of illness and death from COVID-19.
For example, BBC News published an article titled “How Turkey took control of Covid-19 emergency”: “Chief doctor Nurettin Yiyit says it’s key to use hydroxychloroquine early. ‘We have no hesitation about this drug. We believe it’s effective because we get the results.’”
A study in India, where HCQ is being widely used as a prophylaxis (preventative medication), concluded that:
“The pivotal finding of our study was the noteworthy benefits of HCQ prophylaxis … [T]he National Task Force for COVID-19 in India recommended once a week maintenance dose for seven weeks …”
Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., is a renowned Professor of Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health, author of over 300 peer-reviewed publications. This is how he describes the situation:
“There’s been a massive disinformation campaign that stretches from government to the media … The evidence in favor of hydroxychloroquine benefit in high-risk patients treated early as outpatients is stronger than anything else I’ve ever studied … The F.D.A. has relied on Dr. Fauci and his N.I.H. advisory groups to make a statement saying that there is no benefit of using hydroxychloroquine in outpatients … That’s led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans who could have been saved by usage of this drug … People need to be writing or calling their congressmen and senators … [The] bureaucracy is in bed with other forces causing [it] to make decisions not based on the science …” (emphasis added)
HCQ is generic and costs a few dollars for an entire course.
As of the end May, there were over 150 million doses of HCQ in the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS). This stockpile is currently wasting away in government warehouses. On June 22, the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons (AAPS) filed suit for an injunction against the March 28 order of the FDA that prohibits the use of this stockpile except for already-hospitalized COVID patients for whom it is too late. See aapsonline.org/hcqsuit
The only drug approved by the FDA for the outpatient treatment of COVID-19 is Remdesivir, a largely ineffective medicine manufactured by pharmaceutical giant Gilead, that costs over $3000 for a course.
The immensely wealthy pharmaceutical industry which cannot profit from a cheap and available remedy like HCQ is largely responsible for its suppression through its influence upon government agencies and the media.
An illustration of how the system works is described by the editors-in-chief of the two most prestigious medical journals in the world, namely The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, who cite the “criminal” pressures put on them by pharmaceutical companies, thus explaining how a series of negative HCQ studies got published. In the words of the editor of The Lancet, Dr. Richard Horton:
“If this continues, we are not going to be able to publish any more clinical research data because pharmaceutical companies are so financially powerful … Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”
“Medical journals are an extension of the marketing arm of pharmaceutical companies,” wrote Richard Smith, former editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal (BMJ).
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Copyright © Barry Kissin, Global Research, 2020
Why you shouldn’t believe the COVID vaccine is effective
By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | December 21, 2020
I’ve covered the dangers of the vaccine. Now I want to show why it’s ineffective, even assuming the basic theory of vaccination is valid.
Peter Doshi, associate editor of the medical journal BMJ, and Eric Topol, Scripps Research professor of molecular medicine, wrote a devastating NY Times opinion piece about the COVID vaccine clinical trials.
They exposed the fatal flaw in the large Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Moderna trials.
September 22, the Times : “These Coronavirus Trials Don’t Answer the One Question We Need to Know”:
“If you were to approve a coronavirus vaccine, would you approve one that you only knew protected people only from the most mild form of Covid-19, or one that would prevent its serious complications?”
“The answer is obvious. You would want to protect against the worst cases.”
“But that’s not how the companies testing three of the leading coronavirus vaccine candidates, Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, whose U.S. trial is on hold, are approaching the problem.”
“According to the protocols for their studies, which they released late last week, a vaccine could meet the companies’ benchmark for success if it lowered the risk of mild Covid-19, but was never shown to reduce moderate or severe forms of the disease, or the risk of hospitalization, admissions to the intensive care unit or death.”
“To say a vaccine works should mean that most people no longer run the risk of getting seriously sick. That’s not what these trials will determine.”
This means these clinical trials were dead in the water.
The trials were designed to show effectiveness in preventing mild cases of COVID—a cough, or chills and fever—which nobody should care about, because mild cases naturally run their course and cause no harm. THERE IS NO NEED FOR A VACCINE THAT PREVENTS MILD CASES.
Now I’ll explain WHY the clinical trials were only designed to show the vaccine could prevent mild cases.
The vaccine makers assume the SARS-CoV-2 virus is everywhere. Therefore, during the course of a clinical trial, the virus will descend from the clouds and infect a certain number of volunteers in the trial.
All those volunteers are healthy. They’re not old and frail. They’ve already been screened and eliminated, if they have a history of serious allergies.
So, when the SARS-CoV-2 virus attacks a few of these healthy volunteers, what are the odds it will cause serious cases of pneumonia, requiring hospitalization?
The odds are VERY long against.
How long do you think the vaccine makers would have to wait before, say, 150 of the healthy volunteers came down with serious pneumonia?
Five years? Ten? Forever?
Pfizer isn’t going to stand around and wait and wait and wait. Are you kidding?
No, they’re only going to wait until 150 volunteers (the preordained magic number) come down with a cough, or simple chills and fever—a mild COVID case.
Then they’re going to stop the clinical trial.
Then they’re going see how many of those 150 mild cases occurred in the people who got the vaccine, and how many cases occurred in the people who got the saltwater placebo shot.
This is how they find out how effective the vaccine is.
And indeed—according to Pfizer—most of the cases occurred in volunteers who got the saltwater placebo shot.
Therefore, Pfizer could claim the vaccine was effective in protecting against cough, or chills and fever. Mild cases of COVID.
That’s ALL Pfizer could say.
And THAT’S why the clinical trials were a failure. Because the trials were only set up to show prevention of mild cases—which nobody should care about.
I could go on and explain how the vaccine makers could fake even that useless claim, but I’ll leave it there.
The COVID vaccine is designed to prevent nothing important or significant.
All the rave reviews of the vaccine, the babbling about a historic breakthrough, the celebrations—complete and utter nonsense.
Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
There are thousands of Covid strains, so this new scare is NO big deal, but politicians just love the new authoritarianism
By Peter Andrews | RT | December 21, 2020
The UK’s virus mutation is nothing but recycled alarmism, with no substance to justify the cancellation of Christmas and plunging us all into yet more misery. It’s unscientific, unjustifiable and unforgivable.
Let me set the scene. The world (we are told) is in the grip of a deadly plague. Health services (we are told) are on the brink of collapse. And just when you think things cannot get any worse, the horrific news comes down from on high that our invisible enemy has mutated into an even scarier form. Although it is too early to know anything of substance about it, it is entirely possible that it is more contagious, or more dangerous, or – who knows – maybe both.
Was that the situation at the weekend as the UK was plunged into what’s rapidly become its worst crisis since World War II (and certainly the worst self-induced one), just ahead of Christmas?
No, this was the precise situation FIVE MONTHS AGO, when I wrote about Spike D614G, a mutant variant of coronavirus that we were told could be up to NINE TIMES more contagious. You may not remember because that mutant strain turned out to be a total nothing burger. So why would this one be any different?
The name game
This time around, our Covid commissars haven’t even bothered to give the new strain a flashy name – it is called ‘VUI2020/12/01’. For those interested in what evidence ‘the experts’ have to excuse the panic they are sowing, here is their own one-page justification. Unsurprisingly it is a scant, wishy-washy patchwork of hasty findings, centring on already debunked PCR tests and the mystical ‘R number’. There is absolutely no suggestion it poses any additional threat.
These experts, styling themselves as NERVTAG (why do they love to come up with acronyms that sound as they came from a James Bond movie?), say they have “moderate confidence” that VUI2020/12/01 is more contagious than the supermarket-brand coronavirus. (Would it also be fair to say, then, that they have “moderate confidence” that it is not more contagious?)
In any case, I am tickled to see the name of our old pal Neil Ferguson pop up in NERVTAG, the man who screwed his mistress, screwed us all, and – we thought – screwed his career in the process. I think I am actually starting to like this nutty professor, who must have a neck of the purest, untarnished brass. Maybe it’s something you pick up on the London swinging circuit. As the old saying goes, you just can’t keep a good man down!
Meanwhile, a top Scottish doctor has remarked that there isn’t a shred of evidence that this strain is any more contagious (let alone deadly). Professor Hugh Pennington even notes that the timing of the announcement is ‘’very handy to cancel Christmas.” An entire group of anti-lockdown scientists have issued a challenge to Health Secretary Matt Hancock to back up his claims about the new variant. Professor Carl Heneghan is still waiting for evidence for the claim that the new strain is, precisely, 70 percent more contagious. And I hardly need to tell you by now that the fantastic Dr Mike Yeadon is having none of it.
Nothing new under the sun
Back in July, I made the argument that it would actually be a good thing if the Spike D614G strain was more contagious. I explained the school of thought that says that seasonal respiratory viruses, like the one that causes Covid, evolve to become less dangerous as they spread through a population. This is because respiratory viruses always have thousands of variants, some that increase the deadliness and some that reduce it. The deadliest ones sicken or kill their hosts quickly, before they have a chance to spread it to other people. But the least deadly ones, which cause no or mild symptoms, can hitch a ride in their hosts to many people who they can then infect and multiply. Thus, natural selection favours the mildest, most contagious strains.
I still believe in the logic of that theory, and I think it explains why the coronavirus is now endemic (i.e. everywhere) and by extension why all further restrictions are completely pointless and do only harm. I will not give Hancock and the rest of SAGE’s anti-scientific advisers the satisfaction of directly addressing this so-called new strain: as Prof. Pennington has suggested, it looks like a ploy designed to mislead the public into sacrificing Christmas, the only glimmer of hope that had got them through this harshest of winters.
One should be wary of caricaturing Boris Johnson and the rest of his cronies perpetrating this crime on the people as ‘Grinches’. They are nothing so amusing or cuddly. They are far, far worse than that, and make no mistake about it, they know full well what they are doing. The irrepressible Peter Hitchens has pointed out that Britain now resembles the cursed land from CS Lewis’ Narnia books, where it is “always winter but never Christmas.” I never thought the nightmare worlds of my childhood reading would manifest in reality; but this year, they have.
Peter Andrews is an Irish science journalist and writer based in London. He has a background in the life sciences, and graduated from the University of Glasgow with a degree in genetics
Utopia, Coming to a World Near You
Utopia 2013 (Kudos; Channel 4) — Created by Denis Kelly; Produced by Rebekah Wray-Rogers
By Patrick Corbett | OffGuardian | December 21, 2020
We’ve been told by the promoters of the pandemic, Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, and others that it’s ushering in an opportunity for a Great Reset and that Covid 19 is the doorway to it.
Independent reporters like Cory Morningstar and Whitney Web have told a similar story without the glossy optimism.
The WEF has been running ads showing attractive young people having a great time and saying…
It’s 2030, I don’t own anything and I’ve never been happier.
They don’t go into just who will own everything but as they haven’t proposed eliminating capitalism it isn’t hard to guess.
According to the consortium of capitalists and their organizations such as the World Economic Forum, World Bank and even the UN we have a technocratic revolution led by AI, robotics and nanotechnology to look forward to. There will be a huge reduction in the need for workers. Scenarios are proposed which anticipate some form of UBI for the unfortunate masses.
From that majority position it looks like a very gray dystopian future. And maybe that’s what they want the people who are wise to the Covid deception to be thinking as the worst case scenario. Because there’s something far more sinister embedded within the Great Reset. And that is depopulation.
And by depopulation I mean on a grand scale; perhaps taking the planet’s roster of humans down to around a billion.
When I previously thought of this idea, the image that came to mind was of an horrific blood spattered massacre not unlike a scene from The Walking Dead. Now I don’t think they plan actual physical mayhem, although god knows they don’t shy away from that sort of thing .
I suspect they’ve come up with something diabolically clever and, as often is the case, it’s hiding in plain sight.
Are they planning on using their mandatory vaccines they’ve hyped so relentlessly to vaccinate virtually the entire world’s population? And will the vaccine be programmed to sterilize 60% or more of the women in the world? At this point I think most people would have to sit with that for a while, if not outright snort their coffee out their nose.
And I am not a lone nut in considering this or contemplating the possibility. Dr. Mike Yeadon and Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg both warn that the Pfizer vaccine will likely impair our ability to procreate.
The vaccine* contains a spike protein… called syncytin-1, vital for the formation of human placenta in women. If the vaccine works so that we form an immune response AGAINST the spike protein, we are also training the female body to attack syncytin-1, which could lead to infertility in women of an unspecified duration.
* This link no longer takes you to the above quote as WordPress has since suspended Health and Money News for violation of “Terms of Service.”
Dr. Mike Yeadon and Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg are not some fringe medics with pet theories forged in fevered imaginations.
Dr. Yeadon was former Head of Research and vice-president at Pfizer and Dr. Wodarg is an MD, PhD, epidemiologist, lung specialist and former Chairman of the Health Committee of the Council of Europe.
Professor Sir John Bell, top UK Covid advisor and member of SAGE, startled his interviewer when he said:
these vaccines are unlikely to completely sterilize a population… say 60-70%.
Of course they wouldn’t include their own billionaire class. They, along with the Royals, seem to be extremely fertile as well as long lived. And they would need a cohort of people to serve them, both in high level positions and low. Below them (in economic class) are their political operatives, presidents on down, professionals, scientists, and the few specialized workers they still need.
And vaccines being used for birth control is not a new idea. They have been studied for some time for their efficacy towards that goal.
Here’s a worrisome quote from an August 1994 article in the FASEB Journal (Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology), (“highly cited and consistently ranks among the top biology journals” ):
The authors conclude that their “findings provide insights to possible endocrinological effects of an hCG 3CTP-based WHO promoted birth control vaccine on which a phase I clinical trial has already been completed” and that “might not reliably fulfil major expectations with respect to safety and efficacy?’ We submit that the authors provided only a repetition of old information and biased speculation, which could be damaging to progress in this field.
The article is defending the WHO against claims of some researchers about the safety of their birth control vaccine 26 years ago.
Just imagine how neat that is for their plans. While they have the majority of people terrified they vaccinate them. Then, as easily as they ramped up their Potemkin pandemic, they wind it down. People, the great mass anyway, are kept perpetually on the back foot by bizarre policy shifts always in the interest of biosafety, of course. The sterilization plan takes some time for people to catch on. When it becomes apparent there are far fewer children being born they will have a plan to explain it. It was the Cvd; it was something.
It was at this point in writing this I became aware of a streaming television series (late to the game I was here). UTOPIA. Great title, rhymes with Dystopia.
Spoiler alert: I am going to reveal plot lines and incidents in what I consider an extremely well done dramatic series. Whether it was created with a purpose or was just a product of the zeitgeist, I don’t know. It could easily be classified as “predictive.”
It was initially a 2 season series 2013/14 in the UK followed in 2018 by an American version produced by Amazon and released this past September on Amazon Prime (more below).
The plot of both is the same in its essence. A thumbnail off the top of my head: A plucky band of misfits who share an obsession with a graphic novel entitled Utopia discover that a sequel has been produced and they set out to find it. But it seems some very deep state type forces also want it and will maim, kill and steal to get it.
Utopia 2020 (Endemol Shine North America, Kudos, Trallume Productions, Picrow, Amazon Studios; Prime Video) Created by Gillian Flynn; Produced by Huey M. Park
The novel was apparently the work of a somewhat unhinged genius who saw the world as far too populous and wanted to do something about it. The resulting dramas were (imo) very well done, compelling, fast paced frightening with obligatory plot twists and denouements. It was first shown on Channel 4 in the UK. The plot in broad strokes was that a frightening flu pandemic — the Russian flu — is let loose on the world resulting in widespread panic. (Starting to sound familiar?)
In the Amazon version: A mysterious “Mr. Rabbit” (billionaire?) has let loose a deadly pandemic which kills children with a case fatality rate Dr. Fauci would envy. And the billionaire owner of a pharmaceutical company (played by John Cusak) has a vaccine which offers a cure. Pretty soon the population is marching in the streets demanding to get the vaccine. Our ragtag gang of heroes deduces that the vaccine is meant to kill and maim people. That is until the character played by John Cusack tells them that the beauty of the vaccine is that it is not designed to kill, only to sterilize people.
He says (paraphrasing) “Imagine a world of only a billion people. Plenty to go around for everybody and they’ll be free to screw up as much as they want without destroying the planet.”
He is not a ranter like Hitler or even Klaus Schwab, he’s more like, well … Bill Gates. Only John Cusack doesn’t quite reach the level of creepy that Gates is able to convey.
In the UK version there is an oblique reference to the Georgia Guidestones at one point where one of the characters says that the optimal population of the world is 500 million, roughly 7% of what it is now. And another character says that they didn’t need to have a deadly pandemic, only one that people believed was one, to frighten them into taking a vaccine.
In 2014 HBO planned an American version of Utopia but dropped it over budget concerns. Amazon picked it up in 2018 and the American version starring John Cusak was released just months ago, September 2020. The American version keeps the same basic plot and in the beginning is almost identical to it’s British sire. It does diverge somewhere past the mid-point although the core of the plot remains.
Amazon Prime has now cancelled the series although the first season is still online as apparently is the UK version seasons 1 and 2.
Some of the press are saying it was cancelled because it…
failed to connect with an audience.
That is pure bullshit. It was a hit.
The very liberal online magazine, SLATE, vehemently argues that Utopia should never have been shown so they must be at least happy that it was cancelled. I would wager from their point of view far too many people already saw it. SLATE : said:
the results [ of broadcasting Utopia] are catastrophic —
Really? Are we not capable of discerning fiction and reality and if fiction is reality don’t we need to know that too?
This is what SLATE has to say is the problem with showing Utopia (my emphasis, bold and italics):
We are in the middle of an actual pandemic, a staggering number of Americans sincerely believe that that pandemic is a politically motivated hoax, and an equally staggering number believed vaccines were harmful years before COVID-19 emerged. It’s not the filmmakers’ fault we’re in this mess; it’s not their fault so much of the public is superstitious and gullible; and it won’t be their fault if Utopia gives some dumbass the confidence they need to quit wearing a mask and infect and kill you or the people you care about.
It will probably not be a revelation to you that SLATE is totally on board with the Covid narrative and thinks we who aren’t are dumbasses, superstitious, gullible and, without masks, loaded guns ready to kill people.
But even with the hyperbole above SLATE isn’t finished, they have to bring President Trump in via the back door, ie. QAnon (bold emphasis mine):
Even if everyone who sees Utopia is capable of distinguishing fact from fantasy — and that’s vanishingly unlikely in a nation that is sending QAnon followers to Congress — it’s impossible to enjoy a story where the heroes convince themselves that shadowy forces have manufactured a phony pandemic to trick people into taking a dangerous vaccine when those exact beliefs are helping to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Although it’s interesting to speculate, I don’t think it’s vitally important to know the intention of a drama that, sans the action movie veneer, is playing out in real time as we speak.
Leaving fiction aside for the time being, I am one of those “staggering numbers” who believe the novel coronavirus pandemic to be a gross exaggeration and was deployed as a controlled demolition of our lives as we have been living them.
So the question is do they plan a Great Reset of the current population (to 1804’s 1 billion) as well as all of their modern 4th Industrial Revolution wet dreams?
I’m seriously contemplating the prospect that, just as portrayed in Utopia, the vaccine they are clearly desperate for us to take — or else why would they need to force us — will not actually kill people. Or at least that will not be its principal target. It will be to sterilize us.
If that is the case it is genocide on a scale never seen before. Cusak in his role presents it as a benign solution to the intractability of overpopulation. But family is the beating heart of most of our lives. To rob people of the chance to create their own families is to take everything. It will make zombies of the people left.
But, of course, the people left will be too weak and demoralized to do much of anything. They may be offered distractions to live out their years, which will no doubt be shortened by those very same vaccines and the withholding of healthcare. But throughout there will be very little actual state killing. Just the drip drip turning into a tide of unborn children until their Utopia arrives: the world cleansed of the useless eaters. Billionaires can then enjoy their Neverland Ranch of a planet without those unwashed crowds of homo sapiens stinking the place up.
Do I think this is what they’re planning? I don’t know for sure but it’s my primary suspicion. It all fits once you can get your mind around the immense evil of it. They have never had much use for us. Railroad magnate Jay Gould famously said, “I can hire half the working class to kill the other half.”
His musing bespeaks a horrific fantasy of elimination.
We, the working class, were at best only to be tolerated for what use we could be to them. Now that we’re no longer that, it’s sayonara.
There’s one thing that puzzles me greatly though and that’s the role of China and Russia. The Great Reset seems to be run out of Klaus Schwab’s Fuhrer Bunker at the WEF and we can be certain that the globalist billionaire class, aka the ruling class Americans, Europeans and that gang of suckhole countries, the rest of The Five Eyes, are all on board.
Russia and China both seem to be getting along without the need of population reduction. And why would they mind if the West crashes their population? It would actually seem to be a benefit to them, unless the West is planning to be the Sparta of the future. And conversely wouldn’t the prospect of depopulation of their people just seem like an attempt to dupe them? I mean why would Russia and China go along with it when it would probably be seen as an attempt by the West to weaken them?
However I have a sneaking feeling that the Great Reset gang missed something somewhere that is going to backfire on them. I honestly have no idea except that when they destroy what it means to be human in the way that we are and they aren’t, they will have destroyed their own humanity and the result will be a painful implosion of their own selfhood. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking. And if they get that far there won’t be anything left of us either.
Imagine the dinosaurs lived for hundreds of millions of years. We know that because in our great hubris we studied them learning more than we know about ourselves. In comparison our time here will have been a very brief but spectacular strut across the stage.
Patrick Corbett is a retired writer, producer, director and editor who’s worked for every major network in Canada and the US except for Fox. His journalistic credits include Dateline NBC, CTV’s W-5 and the CTV documentary unit where he wrote and directed ‘Children’s Hospital’, the first Canadian production to be nominated for an International Emmy. You can follow Patrick on Twitter.
Government, Not Coronavirus, Is Killing Small Businesses
By Ron Paul | December 21, 2020
A video of a confrontation between Ventura County, California health officials and restaurant owner Anton Van Happen has gone viral. The health officials were ordering Mr. Van Happen to close his business because he allegedly violated California’s ban on outdoor dining. Mr. Van Happen asked the health officials if the government will pay his employees and his rent while his business is indefinitely closed.
Mr. Van Happen is hardly the only small business owner worried about how to pay bills during the lockdowns. Many small businesses operate on a narrow profit margin, so being forced to “temporarily” shut down or limit the number of customers they can serve is a virtual death sentence.
The lockdowns have already caused as many as 200,000 small businesses to permanently close. Lockdowns, by shrinking the number of employers, lead to long-term unemployment or lower wages for many workers.
While governments have terrorized small businesses, they have typically deemed the big chain stores “essential businesses” so they can remain open. The lockdowns are thus another government policy that gives big businesses a competitive advantage over their smaller competitors.
The benefits big businesses get from the lockdowns — including fewer competitors, more customers, and a job market with more workers competing for fewer jobs — may explain why many big businesses are not fighting the lockdowns. Instead, most big retail chains are requiring their workers and customers to wear masks. Many big businesses may soon deny service to those who refuse to receive a Covid vaccine.
One would think that progressives who claim to oppose policies that benefit big corporations like WalMart, Target, and Amazon would oppose the lockdowns. Sadly, even many progressives are unquestioningly parroting the Covid propaganda and demonizing those who dissent.
By slowing down the development of herd immunity among the population, the lockdowns could put those truly at risk in greater danger. Lockdowns have also had negative effects such as increases in drug and alcohol abuse and increases in domestic violence. Meanwhile, many schoolchildren are deprived of the opportunity to interact with their teachers and their peers. Instead, these children are subjected to the fraud of “virtual learning.”
Resistance to Covid tyranny is growing as more people figure out that lockdowns and mandates are both unnecessary and harmful. This resistance was largely started by small business owners faced with a choice between obeying the government or making sure they, and their employees, can feed their families. Small business owners have been leaders in recent anti-lockdown protests across America.
Eventually the resistance will grow to the point where the politicians will be forced to either double down on authoritarianism or admit the lockdowns were a mistake. Either way, those of us who know the truth must resist the Covid tyranny until government officials no longer terrorize small businesses for the crime of serving willing consumers.
Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute.
2020: The Year we Sold Our Liberties For a Medical Tyranny
By Rob Slane | The Blog Mire | December 19, 2020
This year has seen what looks like the birth of a new religion. Let us call it Covidianity. It has its Prophets (eg. Neil Ferguson); its Priesthood of experts (eg. Whitty and Vallance); its own Soteriology (eg. The Vaccine of Salvation); its evangelists (eg. Piers Morgan); its own eschatology (eg. The New Normal); and of course its heretics (anyone questioning the data or the narrative).
Not everyone who has adopted the bizarre practices of Covidianity is a Covidian. Many have been cowed into it somewhat unwillingly; many have been bamboozled into it somewhat unwittingly; and many others just do not seem to have thought through what is being done to them, much less whether it is right, necessary and proportionate. But there are definitely true Covidians, and you can recognise them by their insistence that all bow down to their cult, and that those who refuse should be shamed.
In one sense, this religion has come upon us at warp speed. There we all were, going about our business at the start of the year, not particularly suspecting that there would be anything particularly out of the ordinary in 2020, and suddenly, wham! Yet in another sense, many of the ingredients were already in place long before this year, and they were simply brought together in one large melting pot to produce a toxic brew of fear, hysteria and irrationality on a truly epic scale.
Those ingredients include: A society that had abandoned belief in the Triune God and hadn’t quite managed to find a replacement to fill the void; a society obsessed with Safetyism, and the general sterilisation of life; a society glued to the Propaganda Box in the corner of the room with millions hanging on the every word that proceeds from it as if it were the very Oracle of God; and a society that had, by and large, utterly forgotten what freedom actually means.
What this has given us is a society seeking an arche (first principle) to hold everything together; one trying to stave off death by eliminating every potential risk; one that looks unquestioningly to the Government, the media and assembled experts to tell them how to do this; and one that has proved itself willing to give up freedoms won through blood, sweat and tears centuries ago to achieve it. In short, we have arrived at the planned, technocratic oligarchy that C S Lewis warned of us of over half a century ago:
“The new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend.”
And here’s Dwight Eisenhower saying much the same thing in his farewell address in 1961:
“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Sound familiar?
The irony of all that has happened this year is that in our apparent attempt to eliminate risk, we have given up our lives. That is, we have placed apparent safety so high up on the list of priorities that it has become a god, governing how we are to live, breathe and have our being, and it so dominates our everyday lives, that it makes normal life impossible, sucking out joy, meaning, and purpose. It is, as Lewis said, a tragic way to live:
“Now I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.”
One can understand how people in a plague situation would accept the suspension of normal life for a time, since you don’t mess about with an illness that wipes out something like 60% of the population. But for a coronavirus with an Infection Fatality Rate of around 0.2% – 0.26%? For a virus which has caused deaths — as a proportion of the population — to return to levels not seen since … ooh … those dark days of 2000:
And yes, I know that Covidian Logicians will claim that the deaths are not higher because we did all that weird stuff like shutting down the country and wearing bizarre face gear and making sure we didn’t sing loudly and so on. Then again, Covidian Logic claims lots of things which aren’t true, and the fact is there is no evidence whatsoever to show that these measures had any effect in terms of altering mortality rates.
For the illusion of safety — a mess of pottage — we have sold the heritage, and the liberties that were bequeathed to us by those who have gone before, which it was our duty to preserve for those who are to come. As Edmund Burke taught us:
“Society is indeed a contract … It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
We have betrayed our ancestors and our descendants, and the idea that we will just get these liberties back is a woeful misunderstanding of how the world works. Firstly, human nature being what it is, those in power who have developed a taste for authoritarianism rarely like to give it up. And secondly, liberties take centuries of long hard work to grow up, but can be hacked down in a short time — as has happened to us in 2020. Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for reinstating them speedily.
Having said that, perhaps there is still time. Perhaps there is still a window of opportunity for us to step back from the brink of this absurd Medical Tyranny, with its false promises of safety, and instead embrace life and freedom. But this would mean rejecting this misery of Covidianity without any further delay, and taking a good long draught of whatever it was they used to drink in Rohan:
“Eowyn: I fear neither death nor pain.
Aragorn: What do you fear, my lady?
Eowyn: A cage. To stay behind bars until use and old age accept them and all chance of valour has gone beyond recall or desire.”
2020: The Year we Lost the Plot
By Rob Slane | The Blog Mire | December 14, 2020
“Our Government, along with Governments around the world will shortly announce the quarantining of whole populations for a seasonal respiratory virus which leaves 99.8-99.9% of those who get it in the land of the living. What is more, they will also announce a shutdown of the entire economy for months and then, when the epidemic has actually gone, will mandate that you cover the lower half of your face with a bit of cloth. They will do this by frightening people into compliance with a barrage of propaganda, slogans, data entirely taken out of context, and the threat of massive fines.”
Anyone making this claim at the beginning of the year would rightly have been thought to have mislaid the plot and their marbles, long ago. But here we are, at the end of that same year, and it is precisely what has happened.
Only it is much worse than that.
Had you somehow been persuaded to give credence to this insane prophecy, you would probably have been comforted by the following thought: “They’ll never get away with it. The people will never stand for it.”
Not a bit of it. Somehow, millions of people across the country, and in fact across the world, were persuaded to accept it. By far the majority somehow thought that quarantining whole nations of healthy people for a virus, for the first time in history, was a good idea. Well, actually the second time in history to be precise. It was tried in 2009 by the Mexican Government during the Swine Flu outbreak, but they had the good sense to end it after a couple of weeks after realising how much it would devastate the country.
Yet not only do we have our imaginary conspiracy loon’s mad ravings come true, but those same people who have accepted it look upon those of us who have been pointing out the madness of it all as if we were those who had taken leave of our senses. Oh irony, thou hast had a field day in 2020. As St. Antony the Great put it:
“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’”
To cut to the chase, we have gone and thrown out reason, rationality and proportionality this year. A coronavirus, which posed a danger to a very small proportion of our society, but which actually has an Infection Fatality Rate of around 0.2% – 0.26% (not too dissimilar to a bad seasonal flu), and which could thus have been dealt with proportionality, somehow became the catalyst for the biggest mass hysteria in the history of the human race. Indeed, many were so taken in by the great hypnotic spell set in motion by charlatans with their “hard-hitting emotional messaging,” that they adopted practices so irrational and disproportionate to the threat, one wonders how they managed to live before this year.
The history books tell of one of our great Kings, Canute, demonstrating to his courtiers that contrary to their supposition, he could not in fact control the waves. In our day, it’s like King Canute has gone rogue, telling his subjects that he can control the waves and viruses, and his subjects have responded by not only believing him, but by taking any action he tells them they must do to stop the waves or the virus, including confining themselves to their homes, closing their businesses, wearing cloths on their faces, along with umpteen other truly bizarre and wholly useless diktats. Then, when the waves or the virus continue doing what waves and viruses do, a wave of Covidian Logic bursts over us and we find it is our fault that they have not been controlled. We didn’t shut down hard enough or long enough, or we played board games at Christmas.
In the real world, the only thing that got controlled this year was not a virus, but people. That all went off spiffingly, or spaffingly as Comrade Johnson might put it. People were suppressed, people were controlled, people were — you might say — owned. And by and large they acquiesced in putting their hand to this National Suicide Plan.
Of course, the reply that comes the way of anyone who points this out is, “Ah, but if we hadn’t locked down and masked up, the deaths would have been in the hundreds of thousands.” To which the answer is simply, “Nope. Lockdown cannot be shown to have saved a single life.” Sweden, by not turning itself into a basketcase, failed to have anything like wave of mass deaths predicted by the Enthusiasts for Lockdown. Nor did other nations that took a similar approach. A recent peer-reviewed study from France, looking at 188 countries, has confirmed what should have been obvious all along:
“Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate.”
Then of course there was the Danish RCT study, which showed no significant statistical difference between infection rates of those wearing surgical masks, and those with no masks.
Imagine that!
Imagine that we were put under house arrest for months, made to cover our respiratory passages with bits of cloth, forced to alter our lives, and threatened with fines for non-compliance — and none of it made any difference to mortality.
Imagine that this Government and Parliament caused the complete shutdown of the economy for months, putting millions on the dole, wrecking 1,000s of businesses, causing the worst recession in 300 years, and piling up a future of debt, poverty, mental health issues and reduced life expectancy — and none of it saved any lives.
Imagine that we are still in this situation, with people still acquiescing in the destruction of their own country, the Government and media still feeding us lies, and with no real plausible end to this madness.
Actually, you have no need to imagine it. Even though it is so outlandish that even the most unhinged, basement-dwelling “conspiracy nut” on the planet could not have come up with this, it is indeed the year you just lived through. We lost the plot in 2020, and the most pressing question is: will we get it back in 2021?
This piece is the first in a series of five articles I will be publishing over the next couple of weeks looking at various aspects of our new Covidian State in 2020. These pieces are also due to be published on The Conservative Woman website from 27-31 December.
Update on the Swedish covid response
By Sebastian Rushworth M.D. | December 19, 2020
Since my article at the end of October detailing exactly what had been happening in Sweden in relation to covid up to that point, I’ve been getting a lot of requests for a new update, detailing events in November and December. Here it is.
I ended my previous article by stating that there had been a slow increase in hospitalizations and deaths in October, and that the slope of the curve suggested that the peak would end up being significantly lower than in spring. That slow increase continued through most of November, and appears to have stabilized at a level of around 70 deaths per day at the beginning of December (as a reminder, in spring deaths peaked at 115 deaths per day in mid-April).
This makes Sweden similar to the UK and the Netherlands, two countries that Sweden has been tracking closely throughout the pandemic, with a second peak in deaths per day that is a little over half what was seen in spring.
Here in Stockholm, the number of people being treated in hospital for covid has been stable since late November, with around 800 people being treated simultaneously for covid in hospitals (in spring around 1,100 people were simultaneously being treated for covid in Stockholm at the peak).
Since the total number of hospital beds in Stockholm is around 3,850, it should be plain to everyone that the healthcare system has never been close to being overwhelmed, in spite of claims to the contrary in media. And while it is true that hospitals are currently at 100% capacity, it is false to claim that that situation is in any way unusual. Sweden has among the lowest number of hospital beds per 100,000 population in Europe, and the hospitals are always running at 100% capacity this time of year.
My feeling (shared by multiple colleagues I’ve spoken with) is also that we’re being more generous with which covid patients we admit to the hospital than we were in spring, when we were more worried about the system being overwhelmed. In other words, if we had been as strict with admitting covid patients in autumn as we were in spring, the number of people in hospital in Stockholm with covid would not currently be 800, it would be quite a bit lower.
Other parts of Sweden, that were only hit lightly in spring, have however been hit harder the second time around. For example, Skåne, in the south, has been hit much harder in autumn than it was in spring. Parts of northern Sweden have also been hit harder.
One thing that I think is very interesting, that has received little mention in media, is that the proportion of people with antibodies has been rising by 2-3 percent every week. In Stockholm, 37% of those tested for antibodies in week 49 were positive (up from 20% six weeks earlier). That suggests that the level of immunity is rising very rapidly in the population, and makes it questionable whether the vaccine will arrive in time to have any meaningful impact on the course of covid-19 in Sweden, even if people start to get vaccinated shortly after Christmas, as is currently planned.
Overall, the situation is no more serious now than it was in spring, at least if you look at deaths, ICU-admissions, and hospitalizations. During the spring peak, 2,350 people were being treated simultaneously for covid in hospitals in Sweden as a whole. At present, 2,500 people are being treated in hospitals for covid, but, as mentioned, these 2,500 are on average less sick than the 2,350 being treated in spring, which is likely why deaths are lower even though hospitalizations are up a bit. Another data point in support of this is that at present, 290 people are being treated for covid in Intensive Care Units (where the very sickest people end up). In spring, that number was 550.
In the parts of Sweden that were hit hard in spring, like Stockholm, the situation is clearly less serious now than it was then. Of course, if you ignore hospitalizations, ICU-admissions, and deaths, and just look at cases, the situation looks a lot worse than in spring, but that is due to the fact that we’re now testing ten times as many people per week as we were at the end of April.
Apart from that, we know a lot more about covid now than we did in spring. We now know that the overall fatality rate is less than 0,2%, and that the risk to healthy people under 70 years of age is infinitesimal. But if you see reporting in media, and if you look at the actions of the Swedish government, you get a very different picture. What follows is an update on all recommendations and restrictions coming from the Swedish state during November and December.
As I mentioned earlier, a decision was made in October by the Public Health Authority to start imposing recommendations on a local rather than national basis. This was followed by a tightening of recommendations in multiple counties over the next couple of weeks, so that by November 3rd (when tightened recommendations were imposed in Örebro, Halland, and Jönköping) fully 7 out of 10 Swedes were living in counties with tightened recommendations. On that day, the government also announced that people would be forbidden from gathering in groups of more than eight at the same table in restaurants. And it was reiterated that employers should allow employees to work from home, if possible.
On the 11th of November, the government announced that restaurants and bars would be forbidden from serving alcohol after ten pm, and would need to close at 22.30 at the latest.
On the 16th of November, the government announced that the number of people allowed at all public events (plays, demonstrations, lectures, sports events etc) was being decreased to eight, significantly lower than the previous lowest limit of 50.
On the 19th of November, the government authorized the Public Health Authority to make decisions to stop visits to nursing homes on a county by county basis (during spring and summer, all nursing homes in Sweden were closed to visitors, but this restriction was lifted at the beginning of October). On the 4th of December the Public Health Authority decided to make use of this measure, closing nursing homes to outside visitors in 32 Swedish municipalities (out of a total of 290).
On the 3rd of December, the government announced that high school students (ages 16-19) would return to distance learning, as had been the case during a period in spring. Initially, the plan is that this will apply until January 6th (this has later been extended to January 24th).
And then, on the 18th of December, the government went even further, imposing the most severe restrictions yet. Restaurants and bars are now ordered to stop serving alcohol at 20.00, and groups in restaurants are not allowed to number more than four. Shopping centers and other public venues like supermarkets and gyms are ordered to set a max number of visitors, so that crowding can’t happen. All public venues that are run by the state, such as libraries, public swimming pools, and museums, are ordered to close, and stay closed at least until January 24th. The government has also recommended that people start wearing face masks in public transport during rush hour.
In total, this means that the restrictions and recommendations in place are now much more severe than the ones that were in place in spring. As I think is clear, the Swedish government has played a much more active role in autumn than it did in spring, when it was happy to let the Public Health Authority do most of the decision making.
The rhetoric from the Swedish government has also been more alarmist the second time around, with the Swedish Prime Minister, Stefan Löfven, delivering speeches that make it sound as if Sweden is going to war, for example telling people on November 16th to “do their duty”.
The Health Minister, Lena Hallengren, said in a speech on November 16th “don’t consider these measures voluntary”, about the voluntary recommendations that the government is asking people to follow. To me, that’s pretty clear evidence that the only reason Sweden hasn’t followed other countries in imposing severe legally enforced restrictions is that the Swedish constitution has prohibited it.
In conclusion, the Swedish government has officially lost its mind. In the name of protecting public health, the government is doing its utmost to destroy public health. In spite of the fact that some of the biggest risk factors for severe covid are obesity and lack of exercise, the government is seriously telling people to stop visiting swimming pools and gyms; in other words, to stop exercising.
Why the change in tone from the Swedish government during November and December?
If one were cynical, one might think it was due to the fact that the governing Social Democrats received a big boost to their opinion ratings in April and May, in the usual “rally around the flag” fashion seen when a nation faces some type of crisis, but since then they have been polling worse month on month. Maybe they saw their polling numbers, panicked, and hoped that they would get a boost in the polls if they could appear more assertive. Or maybe they’ve just capitulated to international pressure to “get in line”.
You might also be interested in my article about why Sweden had more covid deaths than neighboring countries, or my article about whether lockdown is effective.
I am rolling out a ton of new science-backed content over the coming months, including:
– Analyses of the benefits and risks of all common supplements and medications
– The keys to a longer, healthier life (possibly quite different from what you may have heard)
– A long-term follow-up of the health consequences of the covid pandemic and global lockdown.
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Fanatical Followers of the Covid Regime: A Jim Jones-Style Cult?
By Professor Roger Watson and Dr. Niall McCrae | The Daily Sceptic | November 15, 2021
As scholars at leading British universities over recent decades, we witnessed the replacement of critical thinking and debate by narrative: facts are discrimination and scientific method is imperialism; truth, instead, is derived from ‘progressive’ values. This educational trend may be a major contributory factor to the ease in which society has been inculcated to the Covid ‘new normal’ of masking, testing, and repeated doses of vaccines for a disease of similar risk to severe influenza.
One doesn’t need much critical reasoning to observe the flawed logic of some vaccination enthusiasts, such as people who respond to experiencing any side effects, however debilitating, by saying “at least I know it’s working”, or, after contracting the disease despite their promised inoculation (over 90% effective, according to initial drug company claims), “I’d have been worse off without the jab.” … continue
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