Dr Keith Berkowitz is a founding member, with Dr Pierre Kory, of the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC). He is treating a lot of vaccine-injured patients at his practice in midtown Manhattan. Dr Berkowitz was kind enough to answer a few questions on the Covid vaccine and the vaccine injured.
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Who is most at risk for vaccine injury?
One thought is that if someone had Covid first, and then got the vaccine after being sick, the rates of vaccine injury were higher because they already had an antibody response, their immune system was already revved up, and then they got an injection of another antigen. Another group I see is people with autoimmune disease, they seem to be more triggered. I have several cases of people who had dormant autoimmune disease, such as ulcerative colitis and rheumatoid arthritis, and post vaccine it got retriggered. What people forget about vaccines is that they have an immunosuppressive effect. So in that two- to three-week period, the immune system takes a hit, which makes the body vulnerable to other illnesses. The third group I see that are most at risk of vaccine injury are people with high histamine levels.
What are the most common symptoms of vaccine injury?
Mildest is probably loss of taste and smell, mild digestive issues, or a cough. More severe are the autoimmune responses, the neurological symptoms, like brain fog, and tinnitus (which is one of the toughest to treat), myocarditis and pericarditis (inflammation of the heart), cancer, which I would call the most severe.
Is that new cancers, or cancers that have returned?
I’m seeing both.
Which autoimmune diseases are you seeing?
First, autoimmune disease is what I’m seeing most in vaccine injury. Specifically thyroid disease, more than anything else. What’s interesting is that I’m seeing normal thyroid function, and positive thyroid antibodies. So typically we wouldn’t check for thyroid antibodies if thyroid function was normal. So that group is often missed for that reason.
Would you say any vaccine was worse than the others?
It seems to be batch-related. That’s the question. There’s a theory that 10 per cent of the batches, roughly, caused 90 per cent of the issues. If you look at the original technology, the mRNA was created at a 70 per cent purity. There’s speculation that, because of manufacturing issues, they weren’t able to create that level of purity, and achieved only 50-55 per cent purity. So does one really know if that level of purity works? Especially being that it was never tested.
Why is there so much denial around vaccine injury?
I think there was a blind trust of the government and the pharmaceutical companies, coupled with a fear aspect of Covid (remember people thought that 50 per cent of hospitalised Covid patients died, when it was more like less than 1 per cent). Fear made people not think any more, and now they’re in denial about the choice they made. Another thing I can’t figure out: If you’re vaccinated, how does an unvaccinated person put you at risk? Also, why did doctors not do their own research? It was blind faith. Medications all have side effects – why was this one different?
How do you respond to the proponents of the vaccine who say, regarding vaccine injury, correlation is not causation?
That’s true, but why are they not even looking into it? If they are so confident, then just study it. What do they have to lose? Why not disprove it? Why is disproving it a major issue for them? If you don’t agree with me, prove me wrong.
Traditionally, vaccines take 10-15 years to get approval, because all that time they are studying long-term effects. The Covid vaccine, which was administered as soon as it was created, is still only about three years old. Therefore, have we yet to see the potential damage it can cause?
Absolutely. Do you know what percentage of drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration are withdrawn within five years? 31 per cent. One out of three drugs are taken off the market within five years. That’s incredibly high. That tells me we’re not checking properly. Now with this vaccine, one of my biggest questions is why did we decide to use new technology? Is a pandemic the right time to test new technology? I would argue probably not. And why did some countries around the world, like China and Russia, not use this technology? And at the end of the day we have to ask, was the treatment worse than the problem? And should medical products be tied to financial incentives? That creates a huge conflict. There were incentives to use the vaccine. If a drug or a treatment was really that good, would you need to push it like that?
Any final comments?
This is going to take years to figure out. It isn’t going away any time soon. I feel bad for the people who took something which they thought they were doing for the right reason, and now they are suffering. And they’re not being helped. Why does the government create a long Covid initiative, but not a vaccine-injured initiative? Why are we ignoring these patients? And why are we [in the US] approving a product for over six-month-olds when other countries are saying over 65 years? Another thing that doesn’t make sense is a study on teenagers showed that we have to vaccinate a million young men to prevent one hospitalisation. And the potential in a million doses is 1,000 with side effects. So the hospital to side effect rate is one to a thousand. It doesn’t make any sense! My worry is the trust in the medical system may never come back. And I’m not sure that it’s not deserved.
Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill is a pediatric allergist in Toronto. She condemned COVID rules as irrational, political, harmful, and inconsistent with scientific data. In the eyes of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO), Gill was dangerous.
In 2021, the CPSO issued three “cautions” (formal warnings) against her. In 2022 it began disciplinary proceedings. The College alleged that she was undermining confidence in public health measures. Its senior counsel wrote that her communications were unprofessional and unbalanced. In its persecution of Gill, the CPSO has made the case for its own demise. Self-regulated monopolies do not work. The CPSO and other professional regulators need competition.
Gill’s inquisition was not an isolated case. Like other medical regulators in North America, the CPSO forbade its doctors from publicly contradicting COVID orders and recommendations. Its Discipline Tribunal revoked the licence of Patrick Phillips, one of several Ontario doctors pursued for their COVID dissent.
The Nova Scotia medical college investigated Dr. Chris Milburn for writing an op-ed on the death of personal responsibility in the criminal justice system. The Ontario College of Psychologists ordered Jordan Peterson to undergo re-education on the use of social media for tweeting about politics. The BC College of Nurses seeks to discipline Amy Hamm for believing in the biology of two sexes.
The Law Society of Ontario compelled its members to state their concurrence with the ideology of “equity, diversity, and inclusion” until a group of rebel lawyers (of whom I was one) managed to repeal it, although the agenda remains. In British Columbia and Alberta, law societies are instituting politically laden “cultural competency” requirements. Teachers, occupational therapists, engineers, and accountants cannot safely voice doubts about transgenderism or “anti-racist” agendas.
This regulatory bullying is occurring within self-regulated professions. Like “ordinary” regulation, self-regulation is coercive. The state delegates authority to their governing bodies. Some doctors rule over other doctors. A licence from the CPSO is voluntary only in the sense that a driver’s licence is voluntary. You don’t get fines or prison time if you don’t get one, but then you can’t drive or practice medicine. Gill’s livelihood was on the line.
Civil servants do not run self-governing professional bodies, but they are part of the executive branch of government nonetheless. Legislation creates them and they are subject to the constitution. Self-regulation exists only for as long as the legislature says that it does.
Legislatures delegate authority, the theory goes, because professionals have the expertise to ensure competence and ethical practice in the public interest. Your surgeon should know how to cut. Your corporate lawyer should be able to draft articles of incorporation and not skim funds off your trust account. But focusing on technical competence and honest conduct no longer satisfies professional regulatory bodies.
We live in a managerial age. As C.S. Lewis wrote:
“The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.”
Professions have become managerial cartels. Governing bodies are their godfathers, permitting only proper people and perspectives. Their purpose is not to ensure public access to a variety of professional opinions. Instead, they seek to herd people into “correct” attitudes and behaviors. Propaganda is not evil, but merely a tool to facilitate right results.
Ironically, managerial cartels turn out to be terrible managers. They excel at exercising control but not at producing good outcomes. During COVID, even propaganda was patently incoherent. Yet Gill was one of a scant few doctors and scientists to decry the public health debacle unfolding in front of them. As her lawyer Lisa Bildy wrote in response to the College’s accusations, Gill provided the public with substantiated facts on lockdowns, masking, and COVID vaccines, relying on credible and respected scientific sources and opinions.
The College had scheduled a two-week disciplinary hearing for early 2024. But in September 2023, it abruptly cancelled the hearing with no explanation. Gill’s disciplinary ordeal had come to an end, although her formal warnings remain. Bildy will challenge their validity by judicial review in spring 2024.
Self-regulation protects professions from government interference. That is ironic, given the CPSO’s insistence that their members toe the government line. But self-regulation does not protect individual professionals from the oppression of their peers. A different model beckons: multiple, private regulators competing for members, credibility, and public trust.
Professional cartels benefit the bullies who run them. There’s no reason to grant them the power of monopoly.
Bruce Pardy is executive director of Rights Probe and professor of law at Queen’s University.
Dr. Malik writes:
My name is Ahmad Malik and I am an honest surgeon passionate about free speech and medical ethics.
I have been suspended without pay and cancelled because I dare to challenge the Government narrative, defend informed consent, oppose mandates and lockdowns, question experimental jabs and insist that there are only two biological sexes.
I am raising funds to take legal action against the hospital to lift my suspension and stop the attempts by organisations to censor me.
It will set a precedent that organisations cannot bully, harass and censor those that speak up for medical ethics, and encourage others to speak out.
I am up against large organisations and my case is complex. Legal costs will easily run into the thousands. I need a decent fighting fund which will give me the best chance of being successful.
Recently, our golden retriever, Bailey, got kennel cough. She hasn’t been in a kennel in years, but that’s what they called it: kennel cough.
Please forgive my ignorance in the matter. You see, I’m just a people-doctor. I’m not a veterinarian like, say, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. I can’t claim to be an expert on kennel cough.
But as far as I can tell, “kennel cough” appears to be vet-speak for a nonspecific respiratory tract infection in dogs. It seems to be a term veterinarians use much as I would “bronchitis.”
Do you know what a golden retriever with kennel cough sounds like? After all, people-doctors have historically described kids diagnosed with croup as having a “barking” cough.
Well, based on my limited experience, a golden retriever with kennel cough sounds like a Canada goose. Bailey was repeatedly emitting a medium-pitched grunt/honk, lower in register than a duck’s quack but higher than one of those old-fashioned ah-oo-ga automobile horns.
It’s kind of a Honk! Honk! Honk! with the H’s partially dropped. It’s actually quite alarming. Trust me, you don’t want to hear your golden retriever sounding like something it retrieved.
Now, Bailey is a good girl, and I love her dearly. But my wife loves that dog more than life itself. Sometimes I wonder if she’d donate her own liver if it were necessary to save her.
So my wife calls Bailey’s veterinarian, and she tells them about her symptoms.
I should mention that my wife is a doctor, too. Just a people-doctor like me, mind you, not an expert on kennel cough like Albert Bourla. But a medical case presentation is a medical case presentation, and she knows how to present a case.
So what did Bailey’s Primary Care Provider tell my wife after hearing the medical history from a fellow medical professional? Well, they told her that it sounds like kennel cough, and that they can see Bailey in 2 or 3 weeks.
Incidentally, this veterinary practice – I am not making this up – had recently been bought out by some kind of veterinary investment firm which, over the past couple of years, also bought multiple other practices in the area, including the only veterinary emergency room in town. Soon after those acquisitions, they closed down the emergency room.
My wife says to them, “2 or 3 weeks? Bailey will either be fully recovered or dead by then.”
“Well, we’ve been chronically short-staffed,” they replied. “We’re blocked up for urgent appointments…etc., etc.”
A brief, polite back-and-forth ensued, but ultimately Bailey’s “provider” didn’t offer an urgent appointment.
In their defense, this veterinary group knows what really is important. A couple of months earlier, at Bailey’s routine checkup, her doctor noted concerning “plaque buildup” on her teeth.
Do you know what Bailey’s doctor recommended? Doggie dental cleaning. Under general anesthesia. Seven hundred dollars, cash on the barrelhead.
They also have never delayed care when it comes to Bailey’s vaccines.
You see, according to the American Animal Hospital Association Guidelines (generously supported by Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health, Elanco Animal Health, Merck Animal Health and Zoetis Petcare), all dogs should be vaccinated for:
Distemper
Adenovirus
Parvovirus
Parainfluenza
Rabies
while many or most dogs, depending on “lifestyle and risk”, should be vaccinated for
Leptospirosis
Lyme disease
Bordetella
Canine influenza
and some should even be inoculated with Rattlesnake Toxoid.
I will add, these vaccines are not one-and-done shots. Most of them are recommended to be boosted annually, or at minimum every 3 years.
But again, the experts know what is really important. For example, while Bailey has fortunately avoided any major orthopedic problems to date, we know at least one golden retriever who has had both ACLs reconstructed, and other dogs who have had total hip replacements. Advanced orthopedic surgeries, while admittedly costly, are an essential component of the golden retriever’s healthcare armamentarium.
(This probably sounds selfish, but I just hope and pray Bailey doesn’t develop gender dysphoria. I don’t think we can afford to take her down to Cornell to have them surgically construct a neophallus for her.)
Whew. Let’s step back and review. As I said, I’m no expert on these matters, like Albert Bourla. I want to make sure I’ve got all this correct.
Our golden retriever must navigate a healthcare system that cares so much for her health and well-being that it’s willing to intubate and anesthetize her for a tooth cleaning. Cha-ching!
In the name of vaccination, it will repeatedly inject her with numerous inoculations, up to and potentially including rattlesnake toxoid. Cha-ching!
It offers any number of extensive and expensive Orthopedic surgeries – as long as Bailey’s owner pays. Cha-ching!
And yet, when she gets sick with an acute respiratory infection, it tells her to stay home and wait, offers no treatment, and refuses to see her. Even though, should she become severely ill, her emergency health care system has been decimated by corporate profiteers.
Do I paint an accurate picture, or do I exaggerate?
Fortunately, Bailey’s story has a happy ending.
As so many other concerned patients and family members do, we consulted Dr. Internet. I know, I know, patients are supposed to trust the experts, and refrain from doing their own research – but you’ll have to forgive us. After all, it’s the family dog we’re talking about here. And we did discover some interesting information.
According to our research, the most common first-line treatment for kennel cough is doxycycline, an inexpensive, generic, people-antibiotic that’s been around since the 1960’s. The primary purpose of prescribing it here is to treat against Bordetella, the most common bacterial cause of the disease.
Incidentally, Bailey is up to date on all her recommended vaccines, so the fact that she got kennel cough in the first place raises its own set of questions. I won’t head down that rabbit hole here, except to ask:
If a disease doesn’t merit the patient being seen, assessed, and treated when they contract it, why is obsessive vaccination against it so necessary?
My wife called back, and in her very polite but insistent way, explained that if they weren’t going to see Bailey, we were ‘requesting’ a prescription, which in the end they wrote. I half expected them to say, “Doxycycline, but that’s human paste!” To their credit, they didn’t.
You’ll be glad to hear that after commencing empirical, early treatment with a cheap, decades-old, repurposed drug, Bailey improved almost immediately. Whether this was due to the doxycycline, her own immune system (God gave her one too, we must not forget), or both, we cannot be certain. Anyway, the goose honk is gone, her appetite is back, and she’s got the frequent zoomies again.
But the whole episode left me with a lingering, uneasy, even unhealthy feeling. It’s not exactly déjà vu, but rather the sensation that I’d been through something very similar – and similarly unpleasant – before.
Whatever could that be?
C.J. Baker, M.D. is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.
Pfizer-BioNTech delayed reporting vaccine-associated deaths among BNT162b2 clinical trial participants until after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the product.
The vaccine makers also failed to account for a large number of subjects who dropped out of the trial.
The authors of the paper described it as a “forensic analysis,” defined by the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology as “the use of scientific methods or expertise to investigate crimes or examine evidence that might be presented in a court of law.”
What the analysis shows
Corinne Michels, Ph.D., retired distinguished professor of biology at Queens College, New York, led the DailyClout Pfizer/BioNTech Documents Investigations Team on what the authors claim was the first independent examination of original data from the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA vaccine (BNT162b2) clinical trial.
Investigators looked at each of the 38 deaths occurring between July 27, 2020, the start of phase 2/3 of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine trial, and March 13, 2020, the end date culminating in Pfizer-BioNTech’s 6-month interim report.
This trial phase involved 44,060 subjects. Half received a dose of BNT162b2, half got a placebo consisting of an inactive sterile salt solution.
The trial was unusual because at week 20 after the FDA issued the EUA for the vaccine, trial subjects in the placebo group were allowed to switch to the vaccinated group and receive their first BNT162b2 shot.
Switching from the placebo to the vaccinated group — or “unblinding” — normally occurs when the benefit of the drug is so great that not treating subjects becomes unethical. For example, investigators might consider unblinding a cancer trial if at some point all untreated patients deteriorated or died but all treated patients improved.
Unblinding conditions may be specified in the study design, but they usually involve input or review from medical ethicists.
Of 20,794 unblinded placebo subjects in the Pfizer trial, 19,685 received at least one dose of BNT162b2.
Normally the decision to unblind a vaccine trial would be based on the product’s safety and effectiveness in reaching certain endpoints or objectives. Endpoints for a drug to prevent viral infections might be a positive test or self-reported COVID-19 illness (the “case” numbers that drove much of COVID-19 policy), illness requiring hospitalization or death.
But, perhaps unexpectedly, after 33 weeks the data revealed no significant difference between deaths in the vaccinated and placebo groups for the initial 20-week placebo-controlled portion of the trial.
After week 20, after most former placebo subjects had received the vaccine, deaths among those in the vaccine group continued unabated.
The authors revealed “inconsistencies” between data presented in Pfizer-BioNTech’s 6-month interim report and subsequent publications by Pfizer-BioNTech trial site administrators:
“Most importantly, we found evidence of an over 3.7-fold increase in the number of deaths due to cardiac events in the BNT162b2 vaccinated individuals compared to those who received only the placebo.”
This means that 79% of relevant deaths were not recorded in time to be included in Pfizer’s regulatory paperwork.
By not including relevant subject deaths in the case report, Pfizer obscured cardiac adverse event signals, allowing the EUA to proceed unchallenged.
How did Pfizer get around legal, ethical obligations?
The Pfizer-BioNTech data, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, uncovered four additional deaths in the vaccine group and one more in the placebo group — but Pfizer failed to include these data in their FDA submission despite an explicit study design requirement to do so.
These data, and how they differ from what Pfizer-BioNTech reported in their applications, are summarized in Table 3 of Michels’ study.
One case involved a 63-year-old woman who died 41 days after receiving the shot, but whose death only entered the data pool 37 days later. Another was a 58-year-old woman whose death 72 days after vaccination went unreported for 26 days.
Had Pfizer-BioNTech met their legal and ethical obligation to report all serious adverse events their data would have shown equal deaths in placebo and vaccine groups — which would have shown no clear benefit for the vaccine.
How were they able to skirt those obligations?
For one, they were able to hide behind the the 2005 Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act, which provided an almost impenetrable liability shield for vaccine manufacturers for “medical countermeasures” in response to any “public health emergency.”
Second, because COVID-19 was viewed as a national health emergency, regulators abandoned the established, patient-centered, safety-based approval process requiring years of preclinical animal testing — and Pfizer-BioNTech unsurprisingly went along.
Timing of death reports raises questions
Michels also raised issues regarding total death reports and their timing.
Since the death total from both study groups, 38, appeared “surprisingly low” to study authors — particularly during a pandemic — they undertook their own analysis based on population mortality expectations at the time.
Assuming that age-adjusted death rates for the study subjects were similar to those of the general population, they estimated that 222 subjects should have died from July 27, 2020, to March 13, 2021. The reported number, 38, is just 18% of the expected number.
Michels explained this by the large number, 4.2% of “discontinued subjects.” The most concerning of these were subjects “lost to follow-up,” which means missing scheduled visits or other required activities.
Pfizer-BioNTech tried to reach these subjects via phone, certified mail or through their emergency contact but despite their efforts could not account for 395 subjects who had dropped out.
The authors wrote:
“These are not insignificant numbers and could easily account for the low number of deaths reported in this safety period of the trial. Given the importance of knowing the status of each trial subject, there should have been greater effort to locate these individuals.
“Additionally, Pfizer/BioNTech was responsible for oversight of the trial sites. Sites with excessive numbers of lost to follow-up should have been evaluated for performance.”
Michels was also concerned over how certain trial centers had many dropped-out subjects while others had none or just a few.
Ninety-six of 153 trial sites (63%) reported 0 or 1 subjects lost to follow-up and 34 (22%) reported 2-5 dropouts. But four sites reported more than 20 subjects lost to follow-up, amounting to about 5% of all trial subjects.
Since the vaccine makers were responsible for trial site oversight, the authors wrote, “Sites with excessive numbers of lost to follow-up should have been evaluated for performance.”
Finally, based on the data, it appears Pfizer-BioNTech was in no hurry to enter death reports before the EUA submission deadline, particularly for the BNT162b2 group.
Of the 38 reported deaths only one case was added on the day the subject died. Delays of 20+ and 30+ days were common.
One death took 72 days to find its way into the database, and all were entered as occurring on the reporting day, not on the actual date of death.
Of the eight subjects in the vaccine group that should have been reported by Dec. 10, 2020, the EUA application cutoff, the average reporting delay was 17.5 days for subjects in the vaccine group, but just 5.9 days for deaths among subjects in the placebo group.
Angelo DePalma, Ph.D., is a science reporter/editor for The Defender.
In 2011, the United States experienced more than 500 deaths and over $30 billion in losses from tornadoes. As is now common, climate activists were quick to claim that the destructive tornadoes that year were due to climate change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rejected such claims, advising:
[A]pplying a scientific process is essential if one is to overcome the lack of rigor inherent in attribution claims that are all too often based on mere coincidental associations.
The 2011 tornado season motivated us — Kevin Simmons, Daniel Sutter and I — to take a close look at trends in tornadoes and their impacts across the United States. The result was a peer-reviewed paper with the first comprehensive normalization of U.S. tornado losses, for 1950 to 2011.
Our results surprised even us — U.S. tornado damage and tornado incidence appeared to have decreased dramatically, contrary to conventional wisdom:
The analysis presented in this paper indicates that normalized tornado damage in the US from 1950 to 2011 declined in all three normalization methods applied (two are statistically significant one is not). The degree to which this decrease is the result of an actual decrease in the incidence of strong tornadoes is difficult to assess due to inconsistencies in reporting practices over time. However, an examination of trends within sub-periods of the dataset is suggestive that some part of the long-term decrease in losses may have a component related to actual changes in tornado behaviour. Further research is clearly needed to assess this suggestion.
You can see that we were exceedingly cautious in how we framed the possibility that things were not actually getting worse. even so, our work was ignored by the Fourth U.S. National Climate Assessment, which instead claimed the opposite, contrary to the evidence and peer-reviewed research:
[T]here is reason to expect increased tornado frequency and intensity in a warming climate
[B]oth the severity of damage from individual events and the total annual losses from tornadoes are seen to have reduced over time.
Their analysis confirms our earlier work:
[O]ur findings reiterate the results of Simmons et al. (2013) who emphasize the importance of normalizing loss data to draw adequate conclusions about the severity of natural hazards
You can see the results of their normalization for 1954 to 2018 in the figure below.
Normalized U.S. annual tornado losses, 1954-2018. Source: Zhang et al. 2023
Compare their results with ours in the figure below, which I have just updated through 2022.
Normalized U.S. annual tornado losses, 1950-2022. Source: Updated from Simmons et al. 2013.
Zhang et al. also find that the strongest tornadoes have also declined appreciably since 1950. The figure below shows their presentation of trends in tornadoes of various intensities (with F1 the weakest and F5 the strongest). You can see that the incidence of tornadoes of F2 strength and stronger have decreased. In our 2013 analysis we found that ~90% of damage results from tornadoes of F2 strength or stronger.
In the 11 full years following our analysis, 9 of 11 have seen overall below average tornado incidence in the United States — 2023 will wind up slightly above average. There is simply no evidence to support claims that tornadoes are getting worse or causing more damage. In fact, the evidence indicates the opposite and peer-reviewed research is strongly in agreement.
Why has the downward trend occurred? Might climate change play a role? You rarely see such questions asked or explored in the scientific literature.
Misinformation on extreme weather and disasters sits out in plain sight, and is easily refuted — yet there seems to be exceedingly strong social norms and political pressures to simply not call things straight. It is really remarkable.
I am confident that good science will win out in the end. It just might take a while. Meantime, here at THB, I’ll keep sharing the science behind the curtain.
Of all the crass misappropriations of scientific principles during the pandemic, none did more harm than the corruption of the ‘precautionary principle’ — the notion that an action or an intervention is justified only once one is clear that the benefits exceed the harms and that, as one sociologist put it, “you have looked very hard for the harms”.
That principle came to be almost wholly inverted in the context of the pandemic: an intervention seemingly could be justified on the ‘precautionary’ basis that if it might have any beneficial effect in slowing the course of the pandemic, it would be worthwhile. This justified indiscriminate measures ranging from universal masking, mass testing (including of young children), 14-day isolated quarantines and even lockdown itself for entire healthy populations, on the basis that even though the evidence base was often weak or non-existent, the intervention just might achieve something, and opened the door to a slew of harms impacting almost all cohorts of the British population.
It was to be hoped that a core task for the Covid Inquiry in this key Module 2 would have been a dispassionate objective assessment of whether the costs (financial costs, direct harms, probable indirect harms, risk of unquantified future harms) of the Government’s population-wide interventions outweighed possible benefits. So, it was deeply disappointing last week to see not only key witnesses but the inquiry Chair herself repeat the same dangerous misconception of the precautionary principle.
In one of the most jaw-dropping interjections of the inquiry to date, Baroness Hallett revealed a prejudgement that if masking people could have had even the slightest of benefits, and seemingly without even contemplating that risks and known harms might need to be weighed too, she pressed Sir Peter Horby, an esteemed epidemiologist at Oxford University, who had indicated that he believed universal masking was not a straightforward decision: “I’m sorry, I’m not following, Sir Peter. If there’s a possible benefit, what’s the downside?”
Coming from the independent Chair of a public inquiry, this is an astonishing comment. It betrays a presumption, or at the very least a predisposition, to accept that it was better to act than not to act — the reverse of the precautionary principle. When a comment such as this, from the Chair of the Inquiry, goes unchallenged, it risks anchoring the entire frame of reference for the inquiry’s interrogation of this critical topic. In our view it was a surprising and serious error of judgement for an experienced Court of Appeal judge.
What made Baroness Hallett feel this to be an appropriate thing to think, let alone say out loud? We suggest the issue lies in the fact that the Chair and the official counsel to the inquiry seem already to have the storyline of the pandemic wrapped up.
The inquiry’s counsel has been at pains to paint a picture of the country facing an almost existential threat from the virus. From the outset, counsel has framed his questioning on the basis that it was indisputable a “highly dangerous fatal viral outbreak was surely coming”, and “by February this viral, severe pandemic, this viral pathogenic outbreak is coming, and it can’t be stopped”. Even hardened lawyers and epidemiologists, it has seemed, were bunkering down because “the virus was coming, it was a fatal pathogenic disease”.
And, with the precautionary principle inverted in the collective mind of this inquiry, almost anything the Government then did against that backdrop was justified.
With preference…
Worse still, it is now starkly evident that the witnesses whose opinions and perspectives support that proposition are being overtly praised and pedestaled, while those whose opinions and perspectives might cast doubt are treated with prejudice and hostility.
For those witnesses who were part of the ‘home team’ — Government-appointed advisers, and those who have already publicly ascribed to the inquiry’s apparently favoured storyline — impeccable credentials and impartiality have been assumed.
Sir Jeremy Farrar, for example, former Director of the Wellcome Trust, member of SAGE and currently Chief Scientist at the WHO gave oral evidence to the inquiry in June. One can almost picture counsel for the inquiry scattering rose petals as he sums up Farrar’s illustrious credentials:
You trained, I believe, in medicine, with postgraduate training in London, Chichester, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Oxford and San Francisco. You have a DPhil PhD from the University of Oxford. You were a director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Institute at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam from 1996 to 2013. From 2013 you were Director of the Wellcome Trust, and from May 2023 have you been the Chief Scientist at the World Health Organisation? Have you throughout your professional career served as a chair on a multitude of advisory bodies, for governments and global organisations? Have you received a plethora of honours from a number of governments, institutes and entities?
Farrar is then treated to counsel’s softest underarm bowls and allowed to give unchallenged testimony in favour of an intervention-heavy approach to pandemic management: “when you have the countermeasures you’re talking about, diagnostic tests, treatment and vaccines, together they create a Swiss cheese model of what our public health is”.
Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, and chief architect of the dramatic scientific modelling on which the global lockdown response was predicated, was warmly welcomed to the witness box by counsel last week “as a world leading specialist in this field”, and was later thanked profusely for his hard work by Baroness Hallett: “Thank you very much for all the work that you did during the pandemic.”
Gushing perhaps, but nothing compared to the farewell given to SAGE modeller Professor John Edmunds, who had been affirmed upfront by counsel as, “a de facto expert in epidemiology”, and one of “a number of brilliant scientists and advisers who assisted the Government and the country in the remarkable way that you did”. At the end of his evidence, Baroness Hallett delivered the eulogy:
Thank you very much indeed. If I may say so, professor, I think you were unduly harsh on yourself this morning. You had a job, and you described it yourself, your job was to provide expert advice to the policy and decision-makers, and if the system is working properly that advice is relayed to them, then they consider advice coming from other quarters about economics and social consequences and the like. I’m not sure you could have done more than you did, consistent with your role at the time, but you obviously did as much as you felt was appropriate. So I’m really grateful to you, I’m sure we all are.
This is a far departure from the rigorous testing of credentials and potential conflicts that one could expect as an expert witness in any court proceedings, and of the studious impartiality of the presiding judge. It is certainly far short of what the public should rightly expect for an exercise set to spend over £55m on lawyers alone.
None of these witnesses were asked whether their senior positions within organisations that rely on very valuable relationships with global pharmaceutical groups and private pharma-focused organisations could have had any bearing on their advice at the time or their evidence to the inquiry now.
Farrar was director of the Wellcome Trust throughout the pandemic. The Wellcome Trust is one of the institutions behind CEPI, a global vaccine development fund created in 2015 which partners with vaccine manufacturers, including Moderna. During the pandemic Farrar frequently and vocally promoted his view that vaccines would be the means for us to exit the pandemic. He is plainly someone whose professional success and credibility has become indelibly attached to the pharmaceutical industry and in particular the use of pharmaceutical interventions in public health, yet counsel and the inquiry Chair seemed uninterested in that colouring of Farrar’s evidence.
Likewise, Ferguson, of Imperial College London was not asked a single question about potential conflicts or risk of bias. Again, the inquiry seemed unaware, or at least uninterested, that a month after Ferguson’s seismic March 2020 paper had concluded that “epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time” and that “the major challenge of suppression is that this type of intensive intervention package – or something equivalently effective at reducing transmission – will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available”, it was reported that Imperial College had received £22.5 million in funding from the U.K. Government for vaccine research and development; and that in that same year, 2020, Imperial received at least $108 million in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).
BMGF is a private philanthropic organisation which has been open about its ideological commitment to vaccine-based solutions for global health issues and which itself has very significant financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry.
… and with prejudice
For witnesses such as Professor Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, but not a member of SAGE, and (unhelpfully for the inquiry) not an enthusiastic supporter of lockdowns, the inquiry appeared to have made somewhat less glowing presumptions:
You are a professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University. Could you explain what that discipline entails?
Heneghan’s explanation was swiftly followed with a presumptive conclusion as to the strength of his credentials:
As you know, because I think you have been following the inquiry, we have heard this week from a series of academics who have spent, in the main, their professional careers researching, analysing the spread of infectious diseases, developing models, to analyse how such diseases are spread and how they can be controlled, and considering large-scale public health issues relating to pandemic preparedness and so on. You don’t have a comparable type of expertise in this area, do you?
Not satisfied with having attempted his own disparagement of the man, counsel took the opportunity while having Heneghan in the witness box to ask for his perspective on two ‘home team’ scientists having described him in a private discussion as a “fuckwit” (Dame Angela McLean and Professor Edmunds) — to what ends, other than to rattle, rile or embarrass, was not clear. It was the cheapest shot of the inquiry so far.
During Heneghan’s evidence session, and having seemingly felt entirely comfortable to rely on the expert opinions of Farrar, Ferguson, Edmunds et al. — the ‘good guy’ home team scientists — Baroness Hallett gives short shrift to the notion that Professor Heneghan’s opinion might be relied upon. When talking about the broad scope of evidence-based medicine Heneghan explains that “even my opinion” amounts to evidence, Baroness Hallett retorted dismissively: “Not in my world it doesn’t, I’m afraid.”
Spoiler alert
Here’s what the inquiry is going to conclude, after three to seven years and perhaps £200 million: the Government and its official scientific advisers mostly did their best in the face of what they rightly and fairly believed to be the most devastating viral threat the world had ever seen; those scientists gave the best advice they could, and were entitled to assume that the Government was taking account of other factors; if it hadn’t been for Brexit, we would have been better prepared; the Government perhaps could have thought a bit more about the impact of lockdowns on the economy, but ultimately lockdowns were unavoidable; if it had all been done faster and harder, the U.K. might have come out in a better place, clinically and economically; the sacrifices imposed on children, the isolated and those who missed diagnoses and treatments, were regrettable but had to be done (the ‘precautionary principle’); if we could have saved one more person who died of Covid we should have done; the NHS did a superb job in difficult circumstances. Oh, and COVID-19 vaccines saved us so we should devote more public funds to partnerships with heroic pharmaceutical groups and irreproachable public scientists such as Jeremy Farrar at the WHO.
The inquiry is now hopelessly compromised by the partisan and presumptive words of its own Chair and leading lawyers which are setting us up for a doom-loop of catastrophic errors we cannot afford to repeat. It has become an embarrassment to the legal profession and is jeopardising the reputation of the English legal system. Its exorbitant costs already cannot be justified, and there is only worse to come. It should be abandoned.
People commonly ask me for “comprehensive” publications on vaccine side effects. It is fair to point out that the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein is contained in the virus and it is uncontrollably produced by the mRNA and adenoviral DNA COVID-19 vaccines. Because the vaccines failed to stop COVID-19, most vaccinated persons have had the illness, thereby having multiple Spike protein exposures.
Parry, et al, published a comprehensive review on the litany of Spike-protein diseases that occur after its widespread distribution in the body. Here are some of their evidence based teaching points:
SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is pathogenic, whether from the virus or created from genetic code in mRNA and adenovector DNA vaccines.
Biodistribution rodent study data show lipid nanoparticles carry mRNA to all organs and cross blood-brain and blood-placenta barriers. Some of these tissues are likely to be impervious to viral infection; therefore, the biohazard is particularly from vaccination.
Lipid-nanoparticles have inflammatory properties.
The modification of mRNA with N1-methylpseudouridine for increased stability leads to the production of spike proteins for months. It is uncertain how many cells and from which organs mRNA spike proteins are produced, and therefore, the exact effective dose delivered per vaccine vial is unknown.
The long-term fate of mRNA within cells is currently unknown.
The mRNA and adenovector DNA vaccines act as ‘synthetic viruses’.
In the young and healthy, and even in many older individuals with vulnerable comorbidities, the encoding-based COVID-19 vaccines will likely transfect a far more diverse set of tissues than infection by the virus itself.
Evidence suggests reverse transcription of mRNA into a DNA copy is possible. This further suggests the possibility of intergenerational transmission if germline cells incorporate the DNA copy into the host genome.
Production of foreign proteins such as spike protein on cell surfaces can induce autoimmune responses and tissue damage. This has profoundly negative implications for any future mRNA-based drug or vaccine.
The spike protein exerts its pathophysiological effects (‘spikeopathy’) via several mechanisms that lead to inflammation, thrombogenesis, and endotheliitis-related tissue damage and prion-related dysregulation. Interaction of the vaccine-encoded spike protein with ACE-2, P53 and BRCA1 suggests a wide range of possible biological interference with oncological potential.
Adverse event data from official pharmacovigilance databases, an FDA-Pfizer report obtained via FOI, show high rates and multiple organ systems affected: primarily neurological, cardiovascular, and reproductive.
Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines’ clinical trial data independently interpreted has been peer-review and published to show an unfavourable risk/benefit, especially in the non-elderly. The risks for children clearly outweigh the benefits.
Repeated COVID-19 vaccine booster doses appear to induce tolerance and may contribute to recurrent COVID-19 infection and ‘long COVID’.
“The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has revealed deficiencies in public health and medicines regulatory agencies. A root cause analysis is needed for what now appears a rushed response to an alarming infectious disease pandemic. Treatment modalities for ‘spikeopathy’-related pathology in many organ systems, require urgent research and provision to millions of sufferers of long-term COVID-19 vaccine injuries. We also advocate for the suspension of gene-based COVID-19 vaccines and lipid-nanoparticle carrier matrices, and other vaccines based on mRNA or viral-vector DNA technology. A safer course is to use vaccines with well-tested recombinant protein, attenuated or inactivated virus technologies, of which there are now many for vaccinating against SARS-CoV-2.”
Did Pfizer deliberately deceive regulators about contamination of its COVID-19 vaccine? Yes, according to Kevin McKernan, chief scientific officer and founder of Medicinal Genomics.
Appearing on CHD.TV with Children’s Health Defense (CHD) President Mary Holland and Brian Hooker, Ph.D., CHD’s senior director of science and research, McKernan explained how Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine is contaminated with plasmid DNA, which should not be present in an mRNA vaccine.
He said this raises concerns that the plasmid DNA could lead to cancers or autoimmune issues in some vaccine recipients.
McKernan said that annotating Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine sequence with a simple online tool — which any trained person can do — reveals the presence of DNA from simian virus 40 (SV40).
But in the data it gave to regulators, Pfizer deleted the annotation of the SV40 DNA and did not disclose its presence. That deletion, McKernan said, shows “intent to deceive.”
This raises serious questions about the vaccine’s safety that must be investigated, McKernan said. It also suggests major problems with the mRNA vaccine regulatory process.
After McKernan’s lab made its findings public, and other researchers confirmed them, Health Canada also confirmed that the Pfizer vaccine contains this DNA. However, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has neither confirmed nor denied the presence of these billions of plasmid DNA fragments in Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.
The FDA told reporter Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., who questioned the agency on the issue, that it remains “confident in the quality, safety, and effectiveness of these vaccines.”
McKernan and his team stumbled accidentally on what Holland called an “incredibly important finding” when they used the RNA from the Pfizer vaccine — which they assumed was a functional pharmaceutical grade RNA — as a control to test the RNA purification system they were using in other work the lab was conducting.
In the process, they tested vaccines and found that instead of only containing mRNA, the Pfizer vaccines also contained DNA plasmids — small, circular, double-stranded DNA molecules distinct from a cell’s chromosomal DNA.
How did the contaminant DNA get into the vaccines?
McKernan explained that to synthesize the RNA for the vaccines, labs use a process called “in vitro transcription” whereby an RNA-making enzyme called an RNA polymerase uses a DNA template to synthesize RNA molecules.
“It’s like the ink for your Xerox machine,” McKernan said.
But the DNA first has to be amplified. For the clinical trials, Pfizer amplified the DNA using PCR (polymerase chain reaction), a method it called “Process 1.” McKernan said this process is ideal because it amplifies the DNA a millionfold. As a result, “There’s no residual background. You get a really clean piece of DNA that you can make your RNA from.”
But to scale up the process to mass produce vaccines for the public, McKernan said, Pfizer did a “bait-and-switch,” producing the vaccines using “Process 2.”
Process 2 includes “changes to the DNA template used to transcribe the RNA and the purification phase, as well as the manufacturing process of the lipid nanoparticles,” Josh Gueztkow and Retsef Levin wrote in a letter, published in the BMJ, which raised concerns with the process.
For Process 2, rather than amplifying DNA with PCR to make the template, vaccine makers amplified the DNA by plugging it into a bacterial plasmid vector, which uses E. coli for rapid amplification, but runs the risk of introducing sequences not present in the initial DNA, McKernan said.
This creates a practically infinite supply of DNA much more cheaply and easily than using PCR, he added.
But this DNA template comes with additional risk because the DNA of the plasmid used to create the template has to be removed from the vaccine before it can be injected into people.
He said it is clear the vaccine makers tried to get rid of that DNA by “chewing it up with an enzyme” called deoxyribonuclease, or DNase, which breaks down DNA, but they failed to eliminate it completely.
Why didn’t the DNA-destroying enzymes eliminate the DNA?
McKernan told Holland and Hooker the DNase failed to fully eliminate the contaminant DNA fragments from the vaccines delivered to the market because of the modifications they made to the RNA in order to make the mRNA vaccines function, and because of “blind spots” in how they measured the amount of residual DNA.
To make the mRNA vaccines work the way they wanted to, the vaccine designers had to make the RNA slightly more durable than usual, he said.
DNA, he said, is like a hard drive — it’s a long-lived form of information storage. RNA is temporary — like the task manager of the programs that are opening and closing on the hard drive.
Those programs and the RNA itself, get turned on and off. For RNA, an enzyme called RNase functions as an on/off switch.
The makers of the mRNA vaccines added a nucleotide, N1-Methylpseudouridine, that stopped the RNA from turning off right away so it would remain present to ensure the spike protein was produced “long enough to matter,” McKernan said.
That made the RNA “extraordinarily sticky,” so when the RNA polymerase copies the RNA off of the DNA template, it accidentally makes some RNA-DNA hybrids, a triple helix.
In that context, the DNase enzyme that was supposed to get rid of the template DNA can’t function properly.
McKernan said it was likely that the vaccine developers didn’t anticipate that would happen and they would therefore need to develop different enzymes.
“I think with the Warp Speed program, they didn’t really have time to investigate this,” he said.
The second reason the DNA is still there, he said, is because of the tools Pfizer used to measure the DNA and the RNA. Pfizer could measure them both with a single tool, called fluorometry, which can identify very tiny pieces of DNA and RNA.
But, he said, instead Pfizer is using fluorometry only for the RNA, which will give the vaccine developers inflated numbers, and the vaccine maker is using a different tool, called qPCR for the DNA, which can’t identify such small pieces of DNA and so will produce deflated numbers.
“They are playing some games” with these measuring tools, McKernan said, because regulators will want them to have high RNA numbers and low DNA numbers — and by measuring RNA and DNA with different tools, that’s exactly what they get.
That, he said, suggests “intent to deceive.”
What’s in the DNA and why should we be concerned?
Hooker asked McKernan to explain what “is hiding” in this remnant DNA and why people should be concerned.
McKernan said “hiding” was an apt term, because Pfizer gave the whole sequence to the regulators, but only annotated certain parts of it, which allowed it to hide some of the contents.
He said anyone can plug the sequence into a standard annotation software tool like SnapGene, and it automatically annotates the entire sequence — and he wrote a Substack post showing people how to do this.
He also showed Holland and Hooker a side-by-side comparison of the software’s annotation and Pfizer’s annotation, and he showed them where a key annotation was missing in Pfizer’s regulatory submission.
McKernan said that annotation marked the location of the fragments of SV40 virus— which Pfizer used as the necessary promoter and enhancer to drive gene transcription during the vaccine manufacturing process.
Someone had to delete those annotations before giving them to the regulators, he said.
SV40 is controversial because it was an artifact of the live polio vaccine and some experts say it is a cancer risk due to potential integration with the human genome.
To really understand the possible risks, McKernan said, more data have to be collected.
“We have a lot of reasons to believe this is a bad idea. They don’t need this DNA in there. They didn’t tell the regulators about it.”
He added:
“So all of that is a train wreck. If you’re putting in 200 billion of these molecules per shot and you’re doing them five times a year … I don’t know how many times people are taking them, but if you think of your schedule, you should be past your fifth by now. So there’s a cumulative dosing problem here. There’s a high number of these fragments in there.”
Even though the amount of DNA overall may be small, McKernan said, it has been fragmented into tiny pieces that make it “like a buckshot,” meaning it scatters like a shotgun bullet, hitting a broad area, which makes them “much more potent as integration tools because you have more active ends of DNA.”
Concerns beyond SV40: gene therapy and ‘open reading frames’
The U.S. regulatory structure is completely outdated, McKernan said. The current regulations allow for fairly high quantities of DNA because they are based on the idea that the DNA takes the form of a dead virus.
Hooker said, “We were told this [mRNA] would not target the nucleus. Is the nuclear targeting sequence the SV40 enhancer?”
McKernan said it is. In fact, he said, SV40 has been successfully researched as a gene therapy tool.
“There’s just no debate anymore. The plasmids that are in there are gene therapy tools, and they’re injected into billions of people,” he said.
Holland asked, “So not only was there no informed consent for anybody, and this was Emergency Use Authorization, so, by law, they weren’t able to give truly informed consent, but it looks like this was a gene therapy, and people were not told that this was a gene therapy. Is that right?”
“That’s right,” McKernan responded.
Holland asked McKernan whether, now that Health Canada acknowledged the presence of SV40, he thought all governments should take the vaccine off the market until this issue is investigated.
“I would think so,” McKernan said. “If they don’t do this, what are they there for?”
McKernan said he also identified other concerns in Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine sequence.
For example, he showed Holland and Hooker that the sequence contains an Open Reading Frame — a DNA sequence with no “stop codon” or stop signal — that is 1,252 amino acids long on the reverse strand of the spike protein in the Pfizer sequence.
Despite extensive research, he said, he can’t identify what it is. “I don’t know what this does, but I know that this is an artifact of their codon optimization that should not be there and is a massive risk and they should get rid of it.”
Hooker asked what the implications of that might be. McKernan said it was unknown, but regulators should never have let it through because it is “risk with no gain and it’s unnecessary.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
Best years of their lives, or society-induced teenage trauma? In the second decade of this century, mainstream media gave much attention to a ‘mental health crisis’ in young people. Children and adolescents were a huge growth area for psychology, psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry. This campaign was interrupted by Covid-19, when concern for the impact of lockdown, social distancing and school closure was overridden by the priority of pandemic control.
Until the turn of the millennium, youth had been a vast untapped potential for Big Pharma. A child starting on antidepressants is a customer for life.
My research at King’s College London showed that the ‘mental health crisis’ was mostly contrived: despite the constant barrage of fearful messages in the mass media, there was no sharp rise in psychiatric admissions or suicides. This was an application of the problem-reaction-solution strategy: people are persuaded of a pressing problem (mental health crisis), provoking a reaction (clamour for something to be done) leading to a solution (expanded surveillance and treatment).
This strategy was blatant with Covid-19. Experimental mRNA vaccines were pumped into arms, with only a steadfast minority refusing the injections which proved neither safe nor effective. The entire industry of vaccination is based on deception. The official story is that deadly diseases of the past, such as poliomyelitis, were eradicated by vaccines. The truth is that the contagious killers which ravaged industrialised society had faded by the mid-twentieth century thanks to sanitation and smaller broods of healthier kids. Mortality plummeted.
The same dubious causality was used in psychiatry. In the 1950s the resident population of mental institutions reached its peak. Although asylums had been renamed hospitals earlier in the century, there was no effective treatment for insanity, and conditions in antiquated and overcrowded wards were shameful. In the 1930s an onslaught of physical interventions (insulin coma therapy, shock treatment and frontal lobotomy) failed to fulfil the promise of heroic medicine.
In the mid-1950s antipsychotic drugs were discovered and for the first time the delusional and behavioural symptoms of schizophrenia could be effectively controlled.
Chlorpromazine (brand name Largactil) had profound impact: wards were calmer, rehabilitation units were created and rows of beds were removed as patients were discharged. The drug revolution led to legislative reform: in England and Wales, the Mental Health Act 1959 required review of all certified patients, and within five years, fewer than a quarter were detained. The signs were so promising that the minister for health Enoch Powell declared in 1961 that the mental hospitals would become obsolete, replaced by care in the community.
Yet the major tranquillisers of chlorpromazine, haloperidol and thioridazine, while transformational, were not the only impetus for the decline in the mental hospital population. It began to fall in 1954, before the brown syrup appeared. As with the vaccination myth, the ‘wonder drugs’ of psychiatry went down in history as a sudden turning point, overlooking the social conditions for change after the Second World War. The anti-psychotic drugs caused problems of their own in debilitating side-effects.
In the 1960s mental health was declared a new frontier for medicine. The message was that mental illness was no different from physical health problems, and deserved the same level of resources. The pharmaceutical industry was keen to destigmatise mental health and change attitudes so that people perceived nervous disorders as common and curable. The drug companies worked with the psychiatric profession to revise and expand the classification of diseases, defining illnesses on the basis of emerging treatment, rather than the other way round.
With the growth of therapy in the US, the drug companies focused on middle-class neuroses and in 1961 Merck distributed 50,000 copies of a book Recognizing the Depressed Patient. As the early classes of antidepressant drugs had toxic effects, doctors prescribed anxiolytics such as Valium, which was doled out in great quantity for neurotic disorders (one of the first was thalidomide, but that’s another story). Valium was notorious for addiction.
In 1987 a new antidepressant entered the market. Prozac was an instant success, heralding the era of mass antidepressant therapy. With direct consumer advertising in the USA, Prozac was described by psychiatrist Peter Kramer as ‘a feminist drug – liberating and empowering’. Kramer hosted a popular health programme on National Public Radio, funded by Eli Lilly, featuring numerous ‘key opinion leaders’ promoting antidepressants as a panacea for life’s ills.
In my experience as a psychiatric nurse, these drugs did not deserve the promise given to patients. I cringe on remembering colleagues spouting the line that the tablets will ‘kick in after about ten days’. Gradually I discovered that treatment was not really evidence-based, but an enterprise controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. I worked for a health informatics company, dealing in pharmacovigilance. It found drug company researchers buying data from a licensed primary care database to show that reported adverse effects of new products such as statins were caused not by the pills but by the disease. Seroxat, an antidepressant, was thus excused blame for suicides: it was their depressive symptoms rather than the drug.
Although naïve at the time, I found the Andrew Wakefield controversy troubling. Much effort went into allaying public concerns about the MMR jab, introduction of which Wakefield and 16 fellow researchers had found correlated with autism and inflammatory bowel disease. If Wakefield was wrong in his assertions, surely science would correct his error with refuting evidence? But he was made a pariah, and booted out by the General Medical Council. A charismatic figure, Wakefield was a danger to Big Pharma because he threatened the lucrative vaccine business.
Years later, I wrote a critical appraisal of antidepressants, drugs now taken by about one in eight adults in the UK and an increasing proportion of teenagers. I submitted a carefully researched review to the only journal likely to consider it. The new British Journal of Mental Health Nursing was edited by Professor Peter Nolan, an Irishman who had worked as a personal aide to the Libyan leader Gaddafi after the revolution. Peter was a true radical, a rarity these days. He agreed with my concern about Big Pharma, but had been forced to take drug company advertising. My article was published but with a lengthy retort by another mental health scholar, who poured scorn on my objective analysis.
What is to be done? The problem-reaction-solution structure of mental health care must be dismantled. Instead of increasingly relying on technology which feeds corporate profits on a false curative premise, care must return to human endeavour.
If they are really antidepressants, why are people taking them for months, years or decades?
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Reclaim)
“We have experienced more excess deaths since July 2021 than in the whole of 2020.
Number of excess deaths according to Office for Health Improvements and Disparities
Mar-Dec 2020 (there were fewer deaths than expected in Jan and Feb 2020 according to ONS)
69,293
Jul 2021 – Sept 2023
76,554
Unlike during the pandemic, however, those deaths are not disproportionately of the old. In other words, the excess deaths are striking down people in the prime of life… Full text with graphs
Ambulance calls for life-threatening emergencies ranged from a steady 2,000 calls per day until the vaccine rollout, from then it rose to 2,500 daily and calls have stayed at this level since.
The surveillance systems designed to spot a safety problem have all flashed red, but no one’s looking.
Payments for Personal Independent Payments (PIP) for people who have developed a disability and cannot work, have rocketed with the vaccine rollout and have continued to rise ever since.
The trial data showed that one in eight hundred injected people had a serious adverse event, meaning the risk of this was twice as high than the chance of preventing a Covid hospitalisation.
There were just over 14,000 excess deaths in the under 65-year-olds before vaccination, from April 2020 to the end of March 2021. However, since that time there have been over 21,000 excess deaths in this age group alone.
There were nearly two extra deaths a day in the second half of 2021 among 15 – 19-year-old males, but potentially even more if those referred to the coroner were fully included.
The US childhood vaccine schedule ballooned after 1986, when vaccine makers were no longer liable for deaths or injuries caused by vaccines and responsibility for compensating victims shifted to the US government.
In his bookVaccine-nation: Poisoning the Population One Shot at a time, Andreas Moritz relates that by the mid-1990s autism rates in the US had soared so high that parents of autistic children vaccinated during the period when the childhood vaccine schedule had twice expanded, 1988 and 1991, began to protest publicly. Alarm bells were ringing loudly and Congress responded by ordering the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to review the use of the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal in all biologics including vaccines.
Similarly, in 1999 the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) epidemiologist Thomas Verstraeten was asked to assemble a research team to analyse the medical records of 100,000 children from the vast repository of health and vaccination data stored in the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) and compare the health outcomes of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children.
Robert F Kennedy Jr writes in The Real Anthony Fauci (p327) that the raw data showed that infants who had thimerosal-containing hepatitis B vaccines in their first thirty days suffered a 1,135 per cent higher rate of autism than infants who did not.
A ‘secret’ conclave was convened in June 2000 at a retreat, Simpsonwood in Georgia, called the ‘Scientific Review of Vaccine Safety Datalink Information’, where Verstraeten presented his findings to selected senior government officials and scientists, vaccine specialists from the World Health Organization (WHO), specialists in the fields of autism, paediatrics, toxicology and epidemiology, and representatives of the major vaccine makers.
Several sources, including RFK Jr, maintain the CDC subsequently took a series of ‘damage-control’ measures to conceal the evidence, including issuing a public statement that the original data had been lost, commissioning another study by the Institute of Medicine, and instructing Verstraeten to ‘rework’ his findings. These were published in 2003 and, predictably, showed no link between the mercury-containing preservative and autism.
Andreas Moritz writes that the agency handed over its vast databases to a private company to remove the damning thimerosal-related data from the purview of the Freedom of Information Act. Other sources dispute this account and depict the meeting as routine and transparent.
What is unquestionable is that the epidemic of neuro-developmental, allergic and autoimmune diseases in children post 1986, coupled with more than 450 studies attesting to thimerosal’s devastating toxicity (cited in the highly referenced The Real Anthony Fauci), led Congress to ban the mercury-containing preservative from use in paediatric vaccines in 2001.
By this time, however, the ‘Vaccine Court’ was inundated with autism-related claims alleging the MMR vaccine as cause. The three hypotheses of cause were: that the cocktail of antigens caused ‘neuroinflammation’ by ‘hyperarousal’ or ‘overexcitation’ of the immune system; that the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal alone was responsible; that it was a combination of both.
Claimants had witnessed their toddlers who had met normal developmental milestones up to receiving the MMR at 12 months react to the vaccination with high fever, sometimes accompanied by gastrointestinal symptoms, and from that point on cease to develop normally. This is described as ‘regressive’ autism. Many had good video evidence of normal development prior to the vaccination.
The ‘Vaccine Court’, however, is not a court of law. It is an administrative proceeding in which the most basic rules of law do not apply, such as the rules of evidence, the rules of civil procedure, the rules of discovery. None of this framework of balanced rights applies. Instead, it is presided over by a politically appointed government attorney called a ‘Special Master’ who is given ultimate discretion and authority over the proceeding.
In 2006, with 5,400 cases awaiting adjudication, the Special Masters decided to select half a dozen test cases as stand-ins for the rest. Test cases 1 to 3 alleged a combination of the MMR vaccine and the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal had caused their child’s autism, whilst test cases 4 to 6 alleged that thimerosal alone was responsible. Known as the Omnibus Autism Proceedings, they began in 2007.
Rolf Hazlehurst, an attorney and father of the second test case claimant, explained how his lawyers were denied discovery of the pharmaceutical company’s documents, normal in civil litigation. More unconscionable still, his lawyers and their scientists were denied access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink, which the government itself relies on. Far from being non-adversarial, Hazlehurst describes the process as highly adversarial.
Becky Estepp, mother of a vaccine-injured child, observed the intimidation used against parents at a proceeding. She explained that on entering the court one sees two rows of government lawyers on one side, and four rows of smartly dressed professionals on the other – the lawyers for the drug companies – constantly passing notes to the government attorneys. Petitioners are supposedly presenting their claims to the US government, so why are the drug companies represented at the hearing at all?
With all official discovery routes by which parents can plausibly prove causal link barred, they are left with the one resource of expert witness testimony, only to find these respected and experienced doctors viciously maligned in court by the government attorneys. Becky Estepp observed that government lawyers did not need to counter any arguments put forth by the claimants, or do anything procedurally to end the cases, because she witnessed on the day of the hearing the media attack the reputation of the claimants’ expert witness on national TV. She added that the prospect of national vilification would deter any professional from giving expert testimony on behalf of victims. Judy Mikovits PhD, who served as an expert witness at the Vaccine Court, gave a detailed account in her 2020 book The Plague of Corruption of the treatment they received.
Rolf Hazlehurst illustrated the travesty of these proceedings by relating the Special Master’s decision that, while the claimant had succeeded in proving that mercury was a neurotoxin, and that it was hazardous if inhaled, ingested or came into contact with the skin, in the case of vaccines it was injected into the bloodstream, therefore the evidence was not applicable!
All six test cases failed.
Years later, in 2019, it came to light through a sworn affidavit by the government’s own autism specialist and primary expert witness, paediatric neurologist Dr Andrew Zimmerman, that during the Omnibus Autism Proceedings he had taken the government attorneys aside and explained to them that his written opinion in the first test case, which refuted vaccine causation, was not intended to be a blanket statement for all the cases. He had clarified that in some children, those with mitochondria dysfunction, vaccination could cause autism. According to his affidavit, his services were promptly dispensed with and his opinion misrepresented for the public record. (Mikovits: The Plague of Corruption)
The central question, however, is why would we think injecting antigen cocktails, metals, preservatives, turbo-chargers and contaminants into the bloodstream of infants was not courting disaster? This case of a healthy two-month-old baby, who died hours after receiving a vaccine cocktail of eight antigens and corresponding adjuvants, exemplifies the human cost of this practice.
NBC News on Tuesday led its online broadcast with what the network said was the biggest news in the world: “President Biden to visit Israel and vaccine hesitancy on the rise for pregnant women.”
As the winter respiratory illness season rapidly approaches, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for the first time is recommending four vaccines during pregnancy: the flu vaccine, Tdap vaccine (tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis, or whooping cough), RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) vaccine, and the COVID-19 vaccine.
But more women are saying “no” to their doctors who recommend COVID-19 and the other vaccines — even shutting down conversations with, “I’m not going to talk about it,” according to the NBC News report.
“We are meeting more resistance than I ever remember,” said Dr. Neil Silverman, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at UCLA Health. “We didn’t get this kind of pushback on this scale before the pandemic.”
“Now all vaccines are lumped together as ‘bad,’” he said.
Medical experts interviewed by The Defender criticized the CDC’s recommendations and its report on vaccine hesitancy.
One of those experts, Dr. James Thorp, a Florida physician, board-certified in obstetrics and gynecology who has practiced obstetrics for more than 42 years, urged more women to say no to COVID-19 vaccines, in particular, which he called “an abomination of science and an abomination of a corrupted health care system.”
By continuing to push dangerous mRNA COVID-19 vaccines on pregnant women, Thorp said, the CDC is breaking the “golden rule” of pregnancy.
“The golden rule of pregnancy is you don’t ever, ever use a novel substance in pregnancy, ever,” he said. “And you don’t have to be a physician or nurse, you don’t have to have any education, to know that.”
Only 27% of survey respondents took COVID booster shot
The CDC study analyzed data from an internet panel survey conducted from March 28 to April 16, 2023. The CDC surveyed 1,814 respondents who were pregnant at any time from October 2022 to January 2023.
Only 27.3% of women chose to take the COVID-19 bivalent booster vaccine before or during pregnancy during the 2022-23 flu season, nearly half the percent who agreed to take some other vaccines, the signal in the study indicating fear of COVID-19 vaccines tainted other vaccines, public health experts said.
Skepticism about vaccines has ballooned to taint the flu shot in the eyes of pregnant women, though the flu shot has been given to millions of pregnant women over several decades. Last year, the CDC study found, 47.2% of expectant mothers got their flu shots, down from 57.5% who got their flu shots during the pre-COVID-19 2019-20 season.
Among most of the 2,000 women who were pregnant during the peak of last year’s cold and flu season, or when the survey was conducted in March and April, almost a quarter said they were “very hesitant” about getting a flu shot, a significant increase in “vaccine hesitancy” over the 17.2% who said they had reservations during the 2021-22 respiratory illness season.
55.4% of women with a recent live birth elected to receive Tdap vaccination during pregnancy, a number inching back from pre-pandemic levels, but “self-reported hesitancy towards influenza and Tdap vaccination during pregnancy increased among pregnant women from 2019–20 to 2022–23.”
Dr. Denise Jamieson, vice president for medical affairs at the University of Iowa Health Care and a spokesperson for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told NBC News that “even prior to the pandemic, it was a struggle to get pregnant women vaccinated.”
She said she is dismayed that “Tdap is just barely recovering from pre-pandemic levels” and “the number of women vaccinated for Covid is disappointing.”
Dr. Linda Eckert, an OB-GYN and global health and immunization expert at the University of Washington, said more of her patients have “a bias … about how they feel about a vaccine.”
Dr. Melissa Simon, an OB-GYN at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, decried the rise in vaccine “myths, what I would call blatant disinformation that is intended to be more politically charged, not based in science.”
Pregnancy ‘much safer’ without ‘risks of vaccination’
Thorp, a specialist in maternal-fetal medicine who sees 6,000-7,000 high-risk pregnant patients a year, said he was horrified by the unprecedented level of complications, miscarriages and fetal deaths among his pregnant patients and their unborn children after the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.
The mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are “the deadliest drug in the history of medicine, whether you call it a vaccine, a drug, a gene medicine, a medical intervention, whatever you call it,” he said. “And they knew it. The CDC knew it. HHS knew it. Pfizer knew it and tried to bury the data, which showed 1,223 deaths from its vaccine in the first 10 weeks, for 75 years.”
“If you take all the other vaccines in the U.S. in the last century and do a literature search,” he said, “the deaths and illnesses associated with the mRNA vaccines dwarf the dangers of all other vaccines combined.”
Captured government agencies and major media have for nearly three years continued to ignore the most dire vaccine impacts in U.S. history, which are especially tragic for pregnant women and their unborn children, Thorp said.
In December 2022, Thorp was the lead author of a groundbreaking preprint article on the dangers of COVID-19 vaccines to pregnant women and unborn children. The article was peer-reviewed and published in spring 2023 in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
The study analyzed adverse events after COVID-19 vaccines experienced by women of reproductive age, focusing on pregnancy and menstruation. It used data collected by the VAERS database from Jan. 1, 1998, to June 30, 2022, to compare injury reports on flu vaccines versus COVID-19 vaccines.
The study found that COVID-19 vaccines, when compared to flu vaccines, are associated with a greater than double rate of reported “menstrual abnormalities, miscarriage, fetal chromosomal abnormalities, fetal malformation, fetal cystic hygroma, fetal cardiac disorders, fetal arrhythmias, fetal cardiac arrest, fetal vascular malperfusion, fetal growth abnormalities, fetal abnormal surveillance, fetal placental thrombosis, low amniotic fluid, preeclampsia, premature delivery, preterm premature rupture of membrane, fetal death/stillbirth, and premature baby death.”
“Pregnancy complications and menstrual abnormalities are significantly more frequent following COVID-19 vaccinations than Influenza vaccinations,” the authors concluded.
According to Thorp, when he first alerted the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology — the most powerful of the three medical boards in his specialty — about the signals in VAERS, the board threatened to decertify him for spreading “misinformation.”
The board has since backed off, Thorp said, because “they know they’re wrong and I’m right.”
Thorp said he proved, with documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, another one of the three major OBG-YN medical societies, took “large sums of money” from the federal government to participate in “the largest 5th generation psyops warfare in the history of the world, a massive propaganda program to bury the data,” and threatened 61,000 doctors with loss of board certification that would end their careers if they deviated from the government line that the vaccines were “safe and effective and necessary.”
The CDC and other public health authorities, backed by major media, “targeted my patients with their propaganda,” Thorp said.
“They targeted women because women make all the healthcare decisions, not men,” he said. “And they went after women because pregnant women are the most vulnerable population in the world, not children, not the elderly. If you can capture pregnant women when you’re implementing a drug you can convince everyone in the world they should follow.”
Dr. Pierre Kory, president and chief medical officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, disputed that any of the four CDC-recommended vaccines during pregnancy is necessary, but he said the COVID-19 vaccine is especially dangerous.
“It is my belief that the safety of those vaccines have never been truly proven, especially in terms of them leading to increased rates of many chronic illnesses in childhood,” he said.
Kory said he was appalled by what he said was an ongoing propaganda campaign of misinformation. “This is both absurd and unsurprising,” he said. “The level of pharmaceutical industry influence is being revealed to more Americans on a daily basis.”
Kory pointed to the CDC’s “truly alarming,” maternal mortality data for 2021. “My recommendation to the CDC is to focus more on why so many American mothers died suddenly in 2021, rather than continuing to blindly recommend mass vaccination of that patient population.”
Using the CDC’s mortality data from its March 16, 2023, report, Kory created a chart breaking out mortality rates for pregnant mothers under 25 years old. It showed a 38% increase in deaths for all mothers of all races and more than an 83% increase for young Hispanic mothers.
Why is the CDC and JAMA finding an explosion in maternal deaths in 2021? https://t.co/NTYFlVYsAc I made a table for mom's under 25. Either men started having babies (higher risk?) or the U.S aggressively vaccinated pregnant women with mRNA. Take your pick. #stoptheshotspic.twitter.com/18Dj2bxQrt
Dr. Peter McCullough told The Defender he was “concerned that unnecessary vaccines during pregnancy will cause fever in some women.”
“Fever is one of the most common triggers for miscarriage, stillbirth and premature labor,” he said. “Pregnancy is much safer when left to the natural progression of gestation without the risks of vaccination.”
“As a mother, the first thing I did, the first thing all mothers do, is evaluate what you’re consuming because it’s going directly into your baby,” said Laura Sextro, CEO of The Unity Project, a California-based nonprofit that fights for medical freedom and parental rights. “Pregnant women cut out fish because of high levels of mercury and lead, or maybe stop drinking Diet Coke.”
While mothers “go to great lengths to protect their child in the womb,” she urged more to become aware of the dangers of “injecting yourself” with the mRNA vaccine, which poses risks, both proven and unknown, to mothers and children.
“It’s an atrocity we’re seeing,” she said. “We’re seeing a dramatic uptick in spontaneous abortion in certain trimesters after women are given this vaccine.”
Sextro advised pregnant women that “the best way to protect you and baby is always make sure you’re asking questions.”
“If you’re not getting answers, it’s your right as a parent — just because the baby is in the womb doesn’t mean you’re not a parent — it is your responsibility to make sure that you stay informed and protect your child.”
Mike Capuzzo is the managing editor of The Defender. He is a former prize-winning reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald, a science writer, and a regional magazine founding editor and publisher who has won more than 200 journalism awards as a writer, editor and publisher.
By Dr. Elias Akleh* | Sabbah Report | May 24, 2010
A build up of heightened tension in the Middle East is escalating in the last few weeks. American and Israeli postures towards Lebanon, Syria, and Iran have become more threatening. Listening to speeches of political leaders one hears talks only about war not peace. Iranians and Israelis are continuously training hard for a possible showdown. Both sides are conducting extensive war games every month. This led Syrians to claim that Israel is preparing for a soon-to-come another war. The Jordanians also are warning that current stalemate of the peace process is an indication of a war breaking out this summer. The Russian President and his army chief hinted, a few months ago, that the US and Israel were planning for an attack on Iran.
Indeed Iran is, as it has been for last few years, the target of most of the threats and accusations of supporting terrorism. Escalating incitement against Iran the American Defense Department sent last month (April) to Congress a report on Iran’s military claiming Iran could develop intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the US by 2015.
Ignoring the fact that N. Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel are proven to have nuclear weapons while Iran does not, the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chose in her speech, to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference at the UN, to focus on Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions putting the whole world at risk as she put it. According to Clinton Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, rather than Israel’s more than 200 nuclear bombs, is destabilizing the Middle East. She called on the world’s nations to rally around US efforts to hold Iran, not other nuclear countries, to account.
The accusation that Usama Bin Laden is living comfortably in Iran had received a boost after the broadcast of a documentary called “Feathered Cocaine”. This echoed the June 2003 claims of the Italian newspaper Corre de la Sierra that Bin Laden was in Iran according to some intelligence report, and according to Richard Miniter’s book “Shadow War”. … continue
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