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.
The contrast between the evidence sessions of Prof. John Edmunds (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, SAGE modeller) and Prof. Carl Heneghan at the Covid Inquiry yesterday was absolutely shocking and raises huge questions about the professionalism of the Inquiry.
The King’s Counsel in the morning spent hours questioning Edmunds in a friendly, at times obsequious manner, as he explained how misunderstood the modelling was, how it wasn’t needed to justify lockdowns – as the indicative Basic reproduction number (R0) and Indicative Fatality Rate (IFR) were enough – to justify earlier and harder lockdown measures. Yet, according to Edmunds, the modelling would still be needed in the future. Truly an “all things to all men modelling” – useful when needed to justify future lockdowns, yet hides in the corner when retrospectively scrutinised and compared with real-world data. Three key flaws in the Covid modelling have been highlighted:
These aren’t flaws that can be explained away by saying the scenarios changed with the reality of lockdowns. For example, ICU rates are unaffected by shelter-in-place orders and school closures.
The dangerous implication here is that the Covid Inquiry is lining us up for future restrictions based on indicative RO and IFR, a lockdown hair-trigger switch that gives more authority to the modellers.
The soft-ball questioning and praise from the Inquiry continued as the discussion moved to Summer 2020, circuit breakers and the elision from “flatten the curve” to “zero Covid”.
Then the Inquiry moved on to the Downing Street Summit, where other voices – counsel highlighting as the ‘let it rip’ brigade – were invited at short notice. The big reveal was that Angela McLean, who has replaced Sir Patrick Vallance as Chief Scientific Officer, referred to Carl Heneghan as a “f*ckwit” in a contemporaneous WhatsApp chat, while Edmunds challenged Heneghan’s epidemiological knowledge. In my view, the Inquiry raising the point in this way is indicative of a lack of professionalism.
The Inquiry was also keen to include another pet villain – Doctor Death – the sobriquet applied by McLean to refer to Rishi Sunak, for the perceived crime of pushing for Eat Out to Help Out to reinvigorate the pub and restaurant industry, and providing a much needed moral boost to the nation.
The questioning continued for hours, covering the narrative classics of Long Covid, why the Vaccine rollout should have been broader, etc., all carried out in a cosy relationship included Baroness Hallett’s freely-given praise for Edmund, Ferguson and the whole modelling team.
By contrast, the interrogation of Carl Heneghan started out with a blatant attempt to undermine his credentials, strongly re-buffed by Carl, setting a tone for the only adversarial evidence session I have seen at this Inquiry so far. Any discussion that strayed from the narrative was met with aggressive and hostile demands for ‘yes/no’ answers.
Counsel objected to Carl’s answer rightly pointing out the danger of lockdowns to care homes, as he wanted to concentrate on focused protection and the misrepresentation of it by Counsel as hermetically sealing up the old and vulnerable. The minimum of critical thinking could have told Counsel that it was about reducing risk where it was highest, rather than across the board.
Carl was challenged on his views on the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) – he broadly agreed with it, he explained, but didn’t sign at the time as he needed more evidence on the details as you would expect, before Counsel dived into the Downing Street conference call.
Carl was challenged on his definition of ‘Endemicity’ on that call (presumably Edmunds’ gotcha epidemiological point), with Counsel demanding that the spread of infection be “broad and predictable” for it to qualify as endemic, when seasonal spikes shown on a graph means it wasn’t. This was rebuffed in a strong response from Prof. Heneghan, emphasising the seasonal pattern of endemic respiratory viruses and the variability of testing data and evidence on the ground.
Carl’s response to being challenged on the “f*ckwit” comment was dignified and professional, indicating it signified a lack of professionalism from the author as well as a lack of willingness to engage in debate, and an assumption of certainty where there was great uncertainty. He further pointed out that the entire lockdown response was driven by modelling and failed to take into account empirical data or the reality on the ground. Counsel scuttled along to that favourite fallback of the lockdown zealots – Long Covid – where Carl educated the Inquiry by telling it there was no greater risk of lingering disease from Covid than from any other seasonal respiratory disease.
At this point, Counsel decided to end the very short proceedings, presumably to shield the carefully constructed narrative to live another day.
It was hard not to notice the stark contrast in the attitude and approach to the two witnesses and it raises further serious questions on the ability of this long and expensive public inquiry to professionally and impartially challenge the decision making that led to lockdowns.
I appeared on American Sunrise (10/18/23) with Dr. Gina Loudon to let America know I am not recommending COVID-19 XBB.1.5 Boosters, influenza, or respiratory syncytial virus vaccines for healthy adults or children. None of these vaccines are compelling and conditions are easily treatable. The EUA COVID-19 injections have been determined to be unsafe for human use by the World Council for Health and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.
None of these vaccines have compelling efficacy. For example, the RENOIR Trial in 34,284 adults tested the unadjuvanted RSVpreF vaccine at a dose of 120 μg (containing 60 μg each of RSV A and RSV B antigens) (17,215 participants) versus placebo (17,069 participants). RSV-associated lower respiratory tract illness with at least two signs or symptoms occurred in 11 participants in the vaccine group and 33 participants in the placebo group, (vaccine efficacy, 66.7%; 96.66% confidence interval [CI], 28.8 to 85.8); 2 cases and 14 cases with least three signs or symptoms (vaccine efficacy, 85.7%; 96.66% CI, 32.0 to 98.7). RSV-associated acute respiratory illness occurred in 22 participants in the vaccine group and 58 participants in the placebo group, vaccine efficacy, 62.1%; 95% CI, 37.1 to 77.9). There were no hospitalizations or deaths mentioned in either group. Because data are sparse, we must rely on the lower limit of the confidence interval for treatment effect, which is unacceptable being far below 50% for all outcomes.
RSV, like influenza and COVID-19 are easily treatable infections at home. As you can see RSV is very rare with <1% of adults contracting the virus. Vaccinating the entire adult population is an excessive use of a poorly effective new product. For healthy persons, it is perfectly reasonable to skip fall vaccines and seek early treatment in the rare circumstance that one of these viral infections is contracted.
James A Shannon, director of the US National Institutes of Health 1955-68, said: ‘No vaccination can be proven safe before it is given to children.’
When he made that statement, it was still possible in the US to sue vaccine manufacturers under tort law for vaccine-induced deaths and injuries, which is no longer the case.
Today the US has the world’s most aggressive vaccine schedule and ranks as the sickest country, with the highest infant mortality, in the developed world. The UK does not lag far behind.
Vaccines carry three separate areas of potential risk. Firstly, they artificially stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies, which temporarily inhibits another part of the body’s defence mechanism. In an infant, whose immune system is just developing, this high demand of energy can in some cases overwhelm its metabolic reserves, and cause brain inflammation. The brain is the highest energy-consuming tissue in the body, followed by the gastro-intestinal tract and the immune system.
Secondly, vaccines contain chemicals, metals and drugs. Thirdly, according to the former pharmaceutical R&D executive Sasha Latypova, traditional vaccines are consistently contaminated with plant and animal proteins which hyper-sensitise the body, especially in children, giving rise to allergies.
In the US in the 1970s there were three inoculations recommended for children: the combined diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (whooping cough) (DTP), polio, and the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), introduced there in 1971. The DTP which was used in the US until 1992 contained the carcinogen formaldehyde. Both the DTP and the MMR contained the preservative thimerosal, which is almost 50 per cent mercury, and in infants can pass through the blood-brain barrier.
A wave of sudden infant deaths (SIDs), severe brain injuries, seizures and other neurological problems were linked through studies to the DTP. In 1977, a study published in the Lancet established that the risks of the whole-cell pertussis used in the DTP vaccine exceeded the risks associated with wild pertussis. Six years later, in 1983, a National Institutes of Health-funded study found that Wyeth’s DTP vaccine was killing or causing severe brain damage to 1 in 300 vaccinated children.
Lawsuits against the manufacturers shot up. In 1984, the president of pharmaceutical manufacturer Lederle declared that the dollar demand of DTP lawsuits against the company was 200 times greater than their total sales of DTP vaccine in 1983. Another vaccine manufacturer, Connaught Laboratories, had damages suits filed against it in 1985/6 amounting to a billion dollars. Wyeth, now Pfizer, faced a similar plight, and bankruptcy threatened the industry as insurers withdrew their indemnity cover.
The industry therefore lobbied Congress for a liability shield from damages, which led to the passing of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act in 1986, and the establishment of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) in 1988, administered by the US government through the Health and Human Services Department.
Parents of vaccine-injured children from 1988 were directed to apply to what is commonly referred to as the ‘Vaccine Court’ to present their cases. This was supposed to be a neutral forum where the adversarial nature of civil litigation was removed, their cases would be dealt with swiftly and compensation, where applicable, paid in a timely manner. The reality could not be more different, and how the ‘Vaccine Court’ actually operates will be described in Part 2.
Meanwhile, freed from any consequences and related costs of selling unsafe products, vaccine manufacturers wasted no time in creating new lucrative vaccines and lobbying Congress to include them in the Childhood Vaccine Schedule. That same year of 1988, Hepatitis B and the Hib vaccine, against haemophilus influenza type B, were introduced, both containing mercury-laden thimerosal. In The Real Anthony Fauci, Robert F Kennedy Jr writes that more than 450 studies attested to thimerosal’s devastating toxicity, and because testosterone amplifies the neurotoxicity of the mercury molecule, boys were disproportionately affected.
Cases of autism, ADHD, speech delay, and other neurological conditions soared, in direct parallel with the fast-expanding vaccine schedule. In 1986 autism cases in the US were approximately 1 in 2,500. By 2017 they had jumped to 1 in 36. From the three recommended vaccines in 1986, by 2017 the schedule had risen to 69 doses of 16 vaccines.
Not one paediatric vaccine has ever been tested for safety against a genuine placebo. In 2017 TV producer Del Bigtree asked the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) how it justified licensing any paediatric vaccine without first conducting a long-term clinical trial in which the rate of adverse reactions in the subject group was compared with a control group receiving an inert placebo. In January 2018 the HHS replied: ‘Inert placebo controls are not required to understand the safety profile of a new vaccine.’
If randomised control trials (RCTs), the so-called gold standard of safety testing, are kicked aside, how can any conclusions reached on the safety profile of a product be scientifically valid?
There are, however, real-life comparison studies between cohorts of vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
As reported by RFK Jr’s Children’s Health Defense, for years American paediatrician Paul Thomas, now retired, witnessed healthy 12-month-olds regress into severe autism following the MMR vaccination, so in 2010 he devised a new, bespoke approach to the vaccination of children in his practice Integrative Pediatric. He offered parents a comprehensive discussion and autonomy over whether to vaccinate their children as per the US schedule, selectively vaccinate them, with longer intervals between shots, or not vaccinate them at all.
As reported in TCW yesterday, he and colleague James Lyons-Weiler PhD studied the health outcomes of the children over almost ten years, and in 2020 published the results in a groundbreaking paper which showed unequivocally that unvaccinated children enjoy better health than vaccinated children. The results showed a dramatic reduction of cases of ADHD and autism. They were almost entirely absent in the unvaccinated cohort, and greatly reduced in the partially vaccinated cohort. The same applied to anaemia, asthma, allergies, dermatitis, eczema, ear and eye infections and sinusitis.
In a recent discussion with Paul Thomas, the mother of an autistic son explained that he had been developing normally until he received the MMR vaccine, when his temperature shot up, he came out in an appalling rash, and screamed incessantly while hitting his head against the wall. She said she kept telephoning her paediatrician, who said it was ‘normal’.
Dr Thomas explained that when paediatricians say it is ‘normal’, what they mean is it is ‘common’. Many in the medical profession have become so blinded by dogma that they see frequency as indicating normality and cease to recognise what is profoundly abnormal.
That one vaccine-generation child in two graduates from high school in the US taking medication for a chronic condition should be regarded as both highly abnormal and an indictment of US public health policy.
How this has been allowed is, at least in part, down to the corrupted working of the US Vaccine Court, and the total protection from liability this gives to Big Pharma and its profit driven vaccine enterprise, and I will discuss this in Part 2.
I am really sorry to have to do this to long-established TCW readers, who must be weary of the mass of scientific evidence we have reported over nearly three years about the ineffectiveness and dangers of the Covid jabs – and the continuing lack of response from regulators. But a peer-reviewed study out last week in the British Journal of Pharmacology provides an important piece of the puzzle of why heart damage has emerged as prominent among side-effects from the mRNA gene injections.
It shows for the first time that rat heart cells, isolated in the laboratory, become disordered 48 hours after exposure to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in ways that correlate with heart muscle damage in humans. The scientists involved, at the Giessen Institute of Physiology in Germany and the National Heart Laboratory of Semmelweis University, Hungary, say the findings mean the policy of giving people mRNA vaccines should be reconsidered. This adds even further weight to Professor Angus Dalgleish’s call for the mRNA vaccines to be banned once and for all made in these pages three weeks ago.
The vaccines were designed to induce our bodies to make a specific protein, the toxic ‘spike’ of the genetically engineered Covid virus, in the hope that this would increase our immunity to the virus. It was originally claimed that the genetic material would act only at the site of the injection, and that it would soon disappear. Both claims have been disproved, with studies showing that the nanoparticles carrying the genetic instruction for ‘spike’ travel all over the body, and can be long-lasting.
In the new study, the Moderna and Pfizer products had different, specific effects, but both altered heart cell function and structure in ‘hidden’ ways that ‘may significantly increase the risk of acute cardiac events’, the researchers say.
Commenting on the study, the US cardiologist Dr Peter McCullough said yesterday: ‘There have been many drugs that have never made it to the market because they cause heart rhythm disturbances. Because the Covid-19 vaccines were rushed in development, pre-clinical cardiac toxicity studies were skipped. Now, three years into the disastrous Covid-19 vaccine campaign, we are learning that probably every person sustains some degree of heart dysfunction or damage within 48 hours of the shot . . . This and many studies support a complete moratorium on mRNA research, given these very serious findings.’
Mathematician and businessman Igor Chudov, who closely monitors Covid vaccine science, also drew attention to the study, commenting: ‘I wish this research had been done before billions of people were poisoned. Sadly, little will change now – but the truth is finally coming out.’
The finding comes after a long line of warnings about heart damage from the jabs. As early as December 2020, US physician Dr Patrick Whelan, a paediatric specialist, wrote that vaccines based on the spike protein may themselves trigger symptoms of severe Covid, including blood clots, brain inflammation and damage to the heart, liver and kidneys. He urged particular caution over giving the vaccine to children and young adults, who normally fight off the coronavirus infection in its early stages.
The following May, an international group of doctors and scientists published an appeal – the first of many – to halt mass vaccination programmes until safety issues were resolved.
A month later, in June 2021, pathologist Dr Roger Hodkinson said the vaccine should never have been released, warning that myocarditis – inflammation of the heart muscle – was being seen increasingly in the wake of the jab, especially in young men. The long-term consequences, he said, were ‘totally unpredictable’ and never ‘mild’, as regulators were describing it. ‘It may only present 20 years later because of the reserve of the heart having been destroyed. We are talking here about cardiac arrhythmias, abnormal heartbeats, heart failure and so on . . . The bottom line is that this vaccination of everybody should stop immediately.’
The same month Dr Byram Bridle, associate professor of immunology at the University of Guelph, Ontario, said it had become clear that ‘the spike protein, on its own, is almost entirely responsible for the damage to the cardiovascular system, if it gets into circulation’.
And in November 2021 Dr Steven Gundry, a renowned American heart specialist, reported ‘dramatic’ biochemical changes predictive of heart trouble in most of his patients after their second mRNA jab. ‘These changes persist for at least two and a half months post second dose of vaccine,’ he wrote in an alert to the American Heart Association.
More recently, another biochemical signal of hidden heart damage in the wake of the jabs was reported last month in the journal Radiology. Patients known to be suffering from post-vaccination myocarditis show this abnormality, and a study on hundreds of symptomless patients, who were in hospital for check-ups and other reasons, found the same signal to be more common among the vaccinated than in the unvaccinated. The effect was seen for up to 180 days after their second jab.
McCullough has given evidence supporting his call for a moratorium on the jabs at hearings in the US Senate and European Parliament. He has published a ‘note of concern to colleagues’ in which he says that as of August 25 this year, the US CDC (Centers for Disease Control) has recorded 18,015 deaths reported under the VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) by healthcare professionals or pharmaceutical companies who believe the vaccine is related to the death. The largest autopsy study to date indicates that 73.9 per cent of deaths are directly caused or significantly contributed to by the Covid jabs, he says. Around 1,100 deaths occurred on the same day as vaccination.
His statement continues: ‘There are around 3,400 peer-reviewed manuscripts in the medical literature concerning fatal and non-fatal Covid-19 vaccine injuries including those recognized by regulatory agencies around the world such as myocarditis, neurologic injury, thrombosis, and immunologic syndromes.
‘The World Council for Health, June 11, 2022, has produced a pharmacovigilance report which is factual, scientifically grounded, and consensus-driven, calling for global market withdrawal of Covid-19 vaccines based on lack of safety.’
Citing other similar calls, he says the evidence indicates that not only are the vaccines not safe for human use, but ‘no large-scale, conclusive, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials have demonstrated reduction in infection transmission, hospitalization or death as primary endpoints.’
Elsewhere, he has said that the moratorium should apply to all mRNA vaccines, including those being developed for other purposes, until the effects on the heart are fully studied.
People who consume higher-than-normal quantities of erythritol, a popular sugar substitute sold under a variety of brand names, are at greater risk of having a heart attack or stroke, according to a study in Nature Medicine.
The risk of heart disease can last for years after consuming erythritol. This is concerning because “the very people who are being targeted for foods that contain erythritol” — those with diabetes, obesity, or a history of cardiovascular diseases — “are the same people who already are at increased risk for cardiovascular events,” according to one of the study’s authors.
Stanley Hazen, M.D., Ph.D., a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, led the study, which consisted of four experiments.
The first two experiments considered associations between erythritol blood levels and cardiovascular events. The third experiment found erythritol caused blood platelets to become stickier. And the fourth found ingesting erythritol raised blood levels to concerning levels for over two days.
Breaking down the study
Among 1,157 patients undergoing heart-health exams, those whose blood contained non-sugar sweeteners and their breakdown products were more likely to have a heart attack or stroke during a three-year follow-up period.
Researchers identified several artificial sweeteners in the patients’ blood, but erythritol seemed to have the strongest connection with heart attack and death.
Because the sweeteners are related chemically and several were present, researchers initially could not be sure that erythritol was to blame.
They began a second investigation among 2,149 U.S. and 833 European subjects undergoing heart tests. This time, they analyzed blood in a way that allowed them to detect only erythritol and its effects.
After categorizing subjects into four groups of increasing blood erythritol levels, those in the highest-level group were more than three times as likely to have a heart attack or stroke during the following three years.
In both the U.S. and European study groups, the highest erythritol blood levels were found in patients with the most serious heart conditions and those who went on to suffer a serious cardiac event during the study.
The risk for heart attack or stroke in the highest-level group, compared with the lowest-level group, increased by 164% for the U.S. subjects and 348% for the European subjects.
Results did not change when investigators factored in sex or existing cardiovascular risk factors like obesity or smoking.
This led Hazen to conclude that erythritol was “independently associated” with death, heart attack and stroke — meaning that consuming it is risky regardless of a person’s health status or risk factors.
In a third experiment, researchers found that adding erythritol to blood samples made platelets stickier, which could lead to increased clotting and higher heart attack and stroke risk.
Finally, investigators were interested in seeing if erythritol reached unhealthy blood levels after ingestion of a drink containing 30 grams of the sweetener — a dose typically found in one diet drink or serving of diet ice cream.
Baseline levels started low, increased a thousandfold just 30 minutes after consuming the drink, and remained elevated for more than two days. Levels surpassed thresholds established earlier in this study linked to platelet changes and a higher risk of heart problems.
The dangers of sugar alcohols
People use sugar substitutes to replace natural sweeteners like sucrose (table sugar) or fructose (the main sugar in fruit) in order to reduce or eliminate calories in drinks, snacks and other foods.
Many sugar replacements, like aspartame, saccharin and sucralose, are not found in nature but are produced in chemical plants.
Stevia is sometimes grouped with artificial sweeteners but is a natural (albeit processed) product chemically related to table sugar.
Erythritol, another natural sweetener commonly found in commercial baked goods, drinks, candies, snacks and sweetener packets, belongs to the “sugar alcohol” family, which includes mannitol, sorbitol, xylitol, lactitol, isomalt and maltitol.
Sugar alcohols have long been considered safer than artificial sweeteners but recent data, including the Hazen study, suggest otherwise.
Erythritol occurs naturally but sparingly in melons, pears, grapes and in fermented foods like cheese and soy sauce. Red blood cells also naturally make very low levels of erythritol.
Erythritol is most often manufactured from corn sugar (dextrose), typically derived from genetically modified organism (GMO) cornstarch, but can also be made from wheat, maize or potatoes.
Because it is not metabolized and contains less than 6% of sugar’s calories, erythritol’s caloric contribution to foods is minimal despite being only 70% as sweet as sugar. And since it does not feed bacteria as well as sugar, erythritol does not promote dental cavities.
Some Americans consume 30 grams (a bit more than an ounce) of erythritol per day, which is a thousand times greater than what they would consume through natural foods plus the body’s own production.
U.S. and European Union regulators designate sugar substitutes as generally safe and recommend them for individuals with metabolic diseases like Type 2 diabetes and obesity.
Long-term safety studies on sugar substitutes, even for older sweeteners like sucralose and aspartame, are lacking.
Study strengths and weaknesses
This was a prospective, observational study, meaning investigators first observed the hypothetical cause (erythritol consumption) and looked for effects (heart attack and stroke) occurring afterward.
Establishing a potential causal relationship was therefore easier than retrospective studies, which look first at an effect and then at some exposure or event in the past that might have been the cause.
Yet on this note, Hazen was cautious: “By design, these studies can only show association and not causation.”
As the authors noted, their investigation tested subjects’ erythritol levels just once, but measuring levels at several time points may have provided better predictive value. As all subjects were undergoing testing for heart issues, the study subjects were already sicker on average than people in the general population.
Angelo DePalma, Ph.D., is a science reporter/editor for The Defender.
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