HEALTH HEADS KNEW COVID SHOT WASN’T ‘THE WAY OUT’
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | August 31, 2023
Weight Loss Drugs for Kids: A ‘Minefield of Health and Emotional Problems,’ Researchers Warn
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 30, 2023
The use of popular weight loss drugs to treat childhood obesity may have serious unintended negative consequences for children, according to a group of researchers at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), UCI News reported.
In an article, which will be published in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, the researchers outlined the likely dangers of more widespread use among children of glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs) — the drug class that includes blockbuster drugs Wegovy and Ozempic, among others.
The researchers warned against the unknown effects of prescribing the drugs to children, given the “dearth of research” on these drugs in children and adolescents and the likelihood that the drugs would be prescribed for long-term use.
The article includes a call to action for better research on the drugs’ effects on the pediatric population and oversight to mitigate threats to pediatric health.
High-profile research touting the success of the injectable drugs for treating childhood diabetes and promoting weight loss, along with the likelihood that the drugs will soon be available in oral form, makes it “inevitable” that more children and adolescents will be taking them, according to the UCI researchers.
Doctors will be more likely to prescribe the drugs, particularly among populations with high obesity and low fitness levels, and more children and teens may find ways to access and abuse the drugs on their own.
Children, they wrote, need energy for physical activity, like adults. But they also need extra energy from their diet for growth and development. Any change in the balance of caloric intake and energy expenditure, which the drugs may easily cause, could adversely affect children’s health later in life.
For example, an energy intake-to-expenditure imbalance could cause insufficient bone mineralization in youth which could lead to osteoporosis and fractures later in life. Lack of necessary caloric intake could also adversely impact metabolism, causing harmful growth patterns and inflammation, the researchers said.
The researchers found children already know about these drugs from social media. That knowledge, along with teens’ proclivities toward risk-taking, and the availability of the drugs in oral form will “create a perfect storm” for potential abuse.
“With the increase in social media, young people are already exposed to a diet culture and body images which may not be attainable and, ultimately, unhealthy,” said Jan D. Hirsch, Ph.D., article co-author and dean of the UCI School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. “These drugs administered without proper supervision could cause a minefield of health and emotional problems for children as they age.”
The risks are particularly high among youth with eating disorders or body image issues, or youth who participate in weight-sensitive sports such as gymnastics or wrestling, they added.
The paradigm for addressing weight issues through medication, they wrote, is indicative of:
“the increasing medicalization of pediatric conditions … many of which result from environmental and societal rather than biological mechanisms, and the lack of progress in particular made in addressing the environmental and lifestyle issues that have contributed immeasurably to the childhood obesity epidemic.”
The researchers raised concerns about the lack of studies the drugs have undergone in pediatric populations. “Children are not miniature adults and as newer formulations emerge it cannot be assumed that pharmacokinetics [how a drug moves through the body] or adverse effects in adults are the same in children or adolescents,” they wrote.
They raised concerns about dosage, lifelong reliance on the drugs and other lifestyle interventions that may be necessary for children.
Other known side effects not mentioned in the article include pancreatitis, thyroid cancer, gallbladder swelling, renal failure, diabetic retinopathy and suicidal thoughts.
The drugs also carry serious and under-discussed risks for pregnant women, and experts have raised concerns about the use of the drugs by young women of childbearing age.
The authors concluded that given the “inevitable” overuse and abuse of these drugs among pediatric populations a network of academic centers called “Clinical and Translational Science Award Hubs” ought to take up the responsibility of mitigating the problem.
These hubs ought to build multidisciplinary teams to study the effects of these drugs on children and adolescents, use real-world data to identify where the drugs are most likely to be used, and update recommendations for lifestyle interventions, they suggested.
No mention of the AAP Guidelines
The paper did not mention another key driver of increasing prescriptions for weight-loss drugs among kids and teens — the new clinical guidelines for treating childhood obesity issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) earlier this year.
The AAP issued the guidelines in January, recommending weight loss drugs for obese children as young as 8 and consultation for bariatric surgery for children with severe obesity as young as 13.
The AAP issued the new recommendations less than a month after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Wegovy as a treatment for teenagers with obesity.
There are no long-term studies on the effects of the drugs in adults or teens.
The authors of the guidelines maintain their support for them. Lead guideline author Sarah Hampl recently told STAT News the guidelines urgently needed to be updated and, “We feel that this was a good continuation of previous work that had been done and reflected the latest state of the evidence, which, as we all know, is evolving rapidly.”
But when the guidelines were released, experts told The Defender they were “shocked” by the recommendations. They said the focus on drugs and surgery would have devastating adverse effects for children but would make big profits for Big Pharma.
Mary Lou Singleton, a midwife and family nurse practitioner, told The Defender the new AAP guidelines “offered no meaningful analysis or explanation of what is driving the childhood obesity epidemic.”
Dr. Michelle Perro, a pediatrician, executive director of GMO Science and author of “What’s Making Our Children Sick?: How Industrial Food Is Causing an Epidemic of Chronic Illness, and What Parents (and Doctors) Can Do About It,” added:
“Unless we remove the pesticides and other toxicants, the promotion of drugs and surgery are panaceas, bandaids, and foster the ‘pill for ill’ model, rather than root-cause real solutions.”
Experts in obesity medicine, nutrition, eating disorders and sociology, have also criticized the guidelines. They say the guidelines focus on weight instead of health, that they lack clarity about who the recommendations are for, they rely on limited data, and they downplay the long-term implications of drug treatment and surgery, STAT News reported.
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.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
New research shows mRNA jabs could weaken immune responses
Experts say mRNA vaccine can make cells of the immune system “lazy” when it comes to fighting off viral and bacterial infections
Maryanne Demasi, reports | August 31, 2023
Last week, a new peer-reviewed paper published in Frontiers in Immunology has sparked concern over whether mRNA shots could be weakening a person’s immune response.
The small study involved 29 children aged 5-11 years. Blood samples were taken from the children before and 28 days after a second dose of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine. Samples from eight children were also analysed at six months.
Researchers found that vaccination resulted in reduced levels of cytokines – molecules that play a crucial role in mobilising an immune response against viruses and bacteria.
“Our study showed that, in children, SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination decreases inflammatory cytokine responses,” wrote the authors.
This study builds on a previous pre-print in adult volunteers, that showed Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine could modulate the response of immune cells to non-specific viral fungal and bacterial infections.
The two studies are small, and the clinical outcomes were not assessed, so researchers cannot prove that mRNA vaccines increase a person’s susceptibility to “non-specific” infections in the real world.
However, this phenomenon has been shown to occur with other vaccines that are currently on the market.
In low-income countries with a high infectious disease pressure, so-called “non-live” vaccines such as the diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTP) vaccine have been associated with increases in all-cause mortality and morbidity.
Christine Stabell Benn, epidemiologist, and professor at the University of Southern Denmark, is at the forefront of studying the phenomenon of “non-specific” effects of vaccines.
Christine Stabell Benn, epidemiologist and professor at University of Southern Denmark
“We found in our work that three months after subjects received the DTP vaccine, they showed lower immune responses in vitro to other infectious stimuli,” said Stabell Benn.
“Essentially, the immune cells become lazy, and they simply don’t respond as vigorously when they are challenged with an infectious agent,” she added.
The opposite was true when “live” vaccines were administered to people, such as the BCG (tuberculosis) vaccine.
“After BCG vaccination, immune cells would react more actively in response to other bacterial stimuli by reprogramming cells in the bone marrow to spit out more active innate immune cells,” said Stabell Benn.
The covid-19 vaccines are non-live vaccines, and Stabell Benn says the recent studies looking at reduced cytokine levels may be the “wakeup call” needed to do further studies.
“We now have two immunological studies that suggest the mRNA vaccines could suppress your ability to respond to other viruses, at least for a period of time, and it warrants urgent investigation,” said Stabell Benn. “Especially in children, because we are talking about a population at very low risk of severe covid-19 disease.”
Denmark stopped recommending vaccinating young children against covid-19, but in the US, it’s now part of the childhood immunisation schedule for individuals 6 months or older.
Stabell Benn said, “In the US where they are still vaccinating young children, they should immediately do a randomised study with mRNA vaccines, and investigate whether the reduced effect on cytokines translates into poorer clinical outcomes.”
Stabell Benn says it cannot be excluded that widespread use of the mRNA vaccines could be linked to recent unusual global outbreaks of bacterial infections, as well as viral infections.
This year for example, cases of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) have skyrocketed across Australia, with some states reporting close to 10 times the number of cases compared to the same time last year.
Stabell Benn said, “A major factor for increased infections is the lockdowns that weakened immune systems because they are meant to be continuously stimulated, but we cannot exclude that the vaccines have also played a significant role.”
Currently, her team is conducting a study comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated children aged 5-11 years in Denmark.
“We will assess the clinical outcomes of these children, and most importantly, answer the question of whether there are any clinical differences in terms of the risk of other infections, other diseases in the children who were vaccinated or not,” she said.
Stabell Benn recently called for a new framework for testing and approving vaccines, in a paper published in the journal, Drug Safety (see key points below).
Stabell Benn said this framework should have been applied to the covid-19 trials. A major flaw in testing was that they did not assess whether the mRNA vaccines affected the risk of contracting other infections.
“While they reported covid-19 cases, they overlooked the possibility that people might’ve developed other infections like pneumonia down the track due to a weakened immune response after mRNA vaccination,” said Stabell Benn.
The climate scaremongers: Playing fast and loose with the facts
By Paul Homewood | TCW Defending Freedom | September 1, 2023
Climate alarmists love summer. It gives them an opportunity to exploit every heatwave, wildfire and hurricane. It is much harder to scare people in winter, when snow is supposed to be a thing of the past, and who doesn’t welcome a nice spring day or Indian summer?
So here are some of the silly scare stories which have appeared in the few weeks while we’ve been away.
1 Wildfires in Portugal
THE BBC went into full alarmist mode after some fires during a bit of hot weather in Portugal early last month. They reported: ‘Firefighters in Portugal are battling to contain wildfires engulfing thousands of hectares amid soaring temperatures. Around 800 personnel attended a fire near the southern town of Odemira overnight on Monday, with more than 1,400 people having to evacuate. At least nine firefighters have been injured tackling the fires. Temperatures in excess of 40C (104F) are expected to hit much of the Iberian peninsula this week.’
The BBC would like you to believe that hot weather is somehow unusual in Spain and Portugal! And as usual they provide no context at all. The big fire near Odemira burned 6,700 hectares (16,500 acres) but this is a tiny figure compared with the annual wildfire area in Portugal each year. And the data clearly shows there is no upward trend.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/08/09/shock-news-its-hot-in-portugal/
As for temperatures of 40C, what is so unusual about that? Temperatures of 39C in Cadiz are certainly not unheard of:
2 Wildfires in Hawaii
THE media quickly tried to link the wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui to global warming, with the BBC blaming a ‘dry summer’. The Guardian went one step further saying the fires were made worse by the climate crisis.
Summers in Maui are always dry. But as local experts have been warning for years, the intensity and rapid spread of this fire was the direct result of the spread of savanna-type grasslands in the last couple of decades.
Clay Trauernicht, a professor of natural resources and environmental management at the University of Hawaii, said it would be misleading simply to blame weather and climate for the blazes. Millions of acres of Hawaii was cleared for plantation agriculture in the early 20th century, principally pineapple and sugar cane. Plantations were by and large fairly resistant to fire. However since 1980 they have shut one by one because of economic pressures, and now there are barely any left. In their place have come uncontrolled invasive species of savanna plants, such as Guinea grass which grows rapidly in the wet winters to a height of 10ft. In summer, these grasses quickly dry out, creating a tinderbox. All it needs is a spark and a strong wind to spread it, and the inevitable disaster will follow, just as it did last month.
Local fire and agricultural experts issued this very warning in a 2014 report, and recommended that the grasslands be properly managed and fire breaks be constructed. The authorities did nothing.
I doubt if you will read any of this in the Guardian.
3 The heatwave that never was
CAN the Met Office become an even bigger laughing stock than they are already?
On Wednesday August 16, they and the clowns at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) announced a Yellow Heat Alert for most of England, saying that temperatures would peak at 28C (82F) on Friday the 18th. This in itself was absurd as 28C is hardly life-threatening!
Friday arrived, and most of us were trying to keep warm under grey skies and rain. If you were lucky enough to find a bit of sunshine, you might have got temperatures of 23C.
How can the Met Office have got it so wrong? Maybe in future they might try getting their forecasts right instead of spending their time pumping out global warming propaganda.
4 The storm that never was
ON THE same day that the Met Office announced the Yellow Heat Alert, they also issued a Yellow Warning for Storm Betty, as the Irish Met Office were to name it, which was due to hit us on the day on Saturday August 19.
According to the Met Office forecast on Friday morning, we could expect up to 80mm (3in) of rain and winds in excess of 70mph in exposed places, and 50mph more widely, particularly in West Wales which would see the strongest winds.
The reality was much more mundane. Ballypatrick in the hills of Northern Ireland saw the most rain, 36mm (1.4in), and the extremes in England and Scotland were much less. As for winds, the Met Office managed to find a handful of extremely exposed sites. Capel Curig, for instance, at an altitude of 216m (708ft) in the middle of Snowdonia, recorded 66mph.
Down in the real world it was no more than a breezy day. Even on the West Wales coast, which was supposed to be worst affected, gusts reached only about 20mph, with sustained winds of about 10mph. According to the Beaufort Scale, that would be described as a ‘gentle breeze’.
But Gentle Breeze Betty does not have quite the same ring about it!
5 It does rain in Southern California
TROPICAL storms rarely hit California, but that does not mean they never do. The reason has nothing to do with climate, it is simply that Eastern Pacific hurricanes usually head west, away from the coast.
Last week, Hurricane Hilary headed north instead, and made landfall in California as a weaker tropical storm. Naturally the BBC went into full alarmist mode, blaming it on climate change in an article full of misinformation. They claimed that rainfall records had been broken across the state and in particular in Palm Springs, though why one solitary town should be of any consequence is a mystery to me.
To push home their message, they said that Los Angeles was in ‘recovery mode’ after 2.48 inches of rain, a record for August apparently.
In reality, Hilary was no wetter than other tropical storms to hit California, and 2in of rain in a day is not unusual at all in Los Angeles:
As for Palm Springs, even that record claim does not stand up to scrutiny, since it was wetter in 1922.
The September 1939 tropical storm, El Cordonazo, followed the same path as Hilary, and dropped twice as much rain on Los Angeles as Hilary, as well as larger amounts elsewhere. Hurricane Kathleen in 1976 is generally accepted as by far the wettest to hit California, with the 14.76 inches that fell on Mount San Gorgonia in a day still the official state record. Kathleen was described as a 1-in-160-year event, with hundreds of homes damaged and parts of California declared a disaster area. The highest rainfall recorded from Hilary was 11.74 inches, and the damage was considerably less than in 1976.
So once again we find that the BBC is playing fast and loose with the facts so that it can promote its political agenda. The same applies to the MSM and the Met Office.
Problem-Reaction-Solution
Big Pharma excels in creating customers for life
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | August 31, 2023
For those of us who started pulling uncomfortable threads of ‘hang on a minute, that doesn’t seem quite right’ and kept going, the world is now a strange landscape. When it comes to our health, many of us have had life-long assumptions smashed to smithereens.
The last few years have been a brutal introduction to the harsh realities of the medical industrial complex. Its recent behaviour has completely shattered public trust. Overnight, medical ethics including bodily autonomy and informed consent were tossed out. The dying were unable to see loved ones, blanket DNRs were applied and people were subjected to forced procedures (e.g. PCR testing) or were discriminated against based on their covid vaccination status. Most went along with these inhumane diktats that came from ‘on high’. Is it any wonder that many people would now be reluctant to enter a hospital even where there was a genuine need? There has to be a balance where people regain the confidence to seek care if genuinely needed. Throwing the baby out with the bath water will not lead to fewer excess deaths. Patients rightly want the best available care but in the current system of protocolised medicine, that pathway is far from guaranteed.
What is striking, when spending time amongst those still firmly planted behind the Overton window, is the notion that for any ailment – particularly with advancing age – the answer is always pharmaceutical or surgical interventions rather than lifestyle changes. This is clearly superb for Big Pharma. Less certain, is the benefit for the end user. Blanket approvals of the novel, mRNA injections across all age groups – in spite of total lack of long-term safety data – showed us clearly, in real-time, how money and politics corrupts health regulators. This renders the current system totally defunct. This article in The Epoch Times reports how 65% of drug recommendations by the FDA are approved based on a single study. In the meantime doctors who want to promote lifestyle changes as first line treatment ahead of more dangerous interventions, find themselves increasingly working in a system opposed to them.
Trying to make an informed assessment of risks and benefits becomes almost impossible, once you realise how untrustworthy scientific literature has become. Or perhaps always was. ‘But it says so in the Lancet…’ Hopefully, many have now realised how empty this sentence sounds. Research outcomes are heavily influenced by the desires of those funding them, who just happen to be the ones manufacturing the drugs. This meme, whilst humorous, is worryingly accurate:
From statins to HRT, to proven-to-be-ineffective surgeries, to antidepressants, there is almost zero discussion in modern ‘medicine’ of preventative measures that do not benefit Big Pharma. Diet, exercise, breathing techniques, stress management, ensuring proper balance of micronutrients, enquiring about emotional and relationship causes of ill health. These should be the basic lines of enquiry for any competent physician, long before offering various magic bullets following the luxurious seven minute consultation via Zoom. GPs offering this paltry level of service are complicit in ensuring their own redundancy within a few short years. AI would serve just as well, the human factor having been almost entirely scrubbed out.
Most people with elderly parents know that they often need special plastic containers to house the numerous medications that they take on a daily basis. Often many of these drugs were added in sequence to deal with side effects (or more correctly, ‘effects’) of the medications that were introduced first. This close-to-the-bone satire that has been circulating online really sums it up:
“I took ASPIRIN for the headache caused by the ZYRTEC™ for the hay fever I got from the RELENZA™ for the upset stomach and flu-like symptoms caused by the VIAGRA™ for the erectile dysfunction from the PROPECIA™ for the hair loss caused by the RITALIN™ for my short attention span caused by the SCOPODERM TTS™ for the motion sickness that I got from the LOMOTIL™ for the diarrhoea caused by the XENICAL™ for the weight gain caused by the PAXIL™ for the anxiety that I got from the ZOCOR™ that I’m taking for my high cholesterol, because a good diet and exercise is just too much trouble.”
There seems to be the prevailing belief that human beings can only stay alive with constant interference from the medical profession. But what if the entire system keeps you sick, in order to retain you as a loyal customer to The Firm? What if much of the so-called ‘safety’ data are in fact just as flawed as those used to push the covid ‘vaccines’ in 2020? For those of us who became curious (suspicious?), we felt it might be worth having a retrospective look at other trends in medical diagnostics and treatments.
As it turns out, the more you look, the more you find…
Doing more harm than good?
A deep dive into questionable drugs and surgical practices that are built into standard protocols here in the UK would fill a book. Maybe several books. That is beyond the scope of this article, however here are a few ‘top picks’ to get started:
- Statins: This has been allowed on occasion to seep into mainstream consciousness, but it is still worth reading the book written by Dr Malcolm Kendrick, entitled The Great Cholesterol Con. There is simply no good evidence for the widespread use of statins. The notion that they don’t have harmful effects is also nonsense. A 17-year study on the elderly showed that low serum cholesterol was associated with increased frailty, accelerated mental decline, and early death. This should get any sensible clinician asking questions about what effects deliberately lowering it might have on long-term health. During ward rounds one senior consultant says to his juniors, ‘let’s stop this wonder drug’, scoring it off the prescription list. The juniors ask why he calls it that, to which he replies ‘I wonder what use it is!’
- SSRIs: a growing number of studies show they are less effective than thought. Has this resulted in a decline in prescriptions? Of course not. In fact psychiatry in general is an area that many medics describe as barbaric. The links between gut and brain health are now widely accepted and yet almost no money goes into mainstream R&D in this area. Cures are simply not as profitable as life-long customers.
- HRT: There is evidence for an increased risk of blood clots and stroke as well as an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer in women using HRT. In researching this article and questioning women who had recently started on these drugs, most had not been adequately informed as to any associated risks. Many had no idea what kind of HRT they were even taking. This shows the level of blind faith people still have in a system that, judging by the history of criminal fines paid out, does not have a very good track record, to say the least.
- Angioplasty: For decades, we were led to believe that angioplasties are an effective treatment for not only angina (chest pain) but also served as protection from a heart attack. Now, the evidence seems to point to the procedure being ‘useless’ or even worse than useless. Lifestyle and diet changes are more effective and have the capacity to reverse the progression of coronary heart disease. This hardly seems like rocket science but somehow has taken decades to ‘realise’.
- Childhood Vaccinations: or as we like to call them, The Sacred Cows. Daring to even utter the words that these interventions may carry risks as well as benefits, or pointing out that there are no long-term safety studies using a genuine placebo, seems to create an allergic reaction in even the most sceptical of folks. However, at HART the adage ‘everything is back on the table’ is one we hold dear. Many people who now have the appetite to question The Science™ are quietly murmuring the name of the book Turtles All the Way Down. Perhaps it is worth reading, just to know what the alternative view point is. We do not need protection from theories. We need them to be aired and debated, so we can reach full and informed decisions. No topic should be out of bounds, including this one. Perhaps especially this one.
This list could go on ad infinitum, but instead we will end with a list of suggestions given by various practising medics when asked about drugs or interventions that they question. Once again, we point out that people are individuals. Protocols are not good for individuals. Do your research, take responsibility and remember that The Experts may have their hands tied firmly behind their back by The Money.
List of drugs with questionable efficacy/safety from currently prescribing doctors:
- Dementia drugs: noted poor efficacy, serious side-effects;
- Anticoagulants: should be used more judiciously due to risks of bleeds after falls;
- Bisphosphonates: this drug for osteoporosis has notoriously bad side effects, and shows questionable efficacy;
- Benzodiazepines and other so-called ‘Z’ drugs (zopiclone, eszopiclone, zaleplon and zolpidem): habit forming with evidence of severe side effects such as dementia, infections, respiratory disease exacerbation, pancreatitis, and cancer. They cause severe withdrawal symptoms;
- Gliflozins: the new ‘wonder drugs’ used in diabetes and heart failure. Concerns about kidney damage and they come with no long-term safety profile;
- GLP-1 agonist injectables: originally marketed for diabetes, now being sold as weight loss drugs. Concerns over risks of thyroid and pancreatic cancer and can cause pancreatitis;
- Psychiatric drugs in general. Recommended reading: Toxic Psychiatry by Peter Breggin;
- Antivirals: For example Tamiflu, which is now labelled a ‘fiasco’. The drug caused severe side effects such as hallucinations, self-injury, abnormal behaviour and renal impairment;
- Proton Pump Inhibitors (PPIs): evidence of major side effects with long-term use, including dementia, chronic kidney disease and increased cancer risk;
- Beta Blockers: evidence that long-term use is not associated with improved cardiovascular outcomes, with considerable side effects, such as depression and fatigue;
- Anti-arthritis drugs: Overuse of NSAIDs in particular can cause bleeding, heart attack, stroke, and renal damage.
To quote Aldous Huxley: ‘Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well’.
UN Publishes Final Draft of Declaration That Targets “Misinformation,” Backs WHO Pandemic Treaty
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | August 31, 2023
The United Nations (UN) is no fan of free speech and one of its plans to “address” so-called “misinformation, disinformation, hate speech and stigmatization” is on the verge of being finalized.
This unelected intergovernmental organization, which wields significant influence over its 193 member states, recently published the final draft of its Political Declaration of the United Nations General Assembly High-level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response.
The final draft contains several agreements from heads of state and government to crack down on lawful speech. Additionally, it contains pledges from these heads of state and government to back two instruments that will give the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) enhanced powers to target “misinformation” and build out its surveillance networks.
These instruments, the international pandemic treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005), have been in the works since 2021 and despite facing major pushback, are on track to be completed by May 2024.
The final draft of this political declaration is being developed for the UN’s High-Level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response which will take place on September 20, 2023 in New York. The political declaration outlined in this draft will be finalized at this meeting.
While UN political declarations aren’t usually legally binding, they do wield significant legal influence. According to the UN, declarations “represent the dynamic development of international legal norms and reflect the commitment of states to move in certain directions, abiding by certain principles.”
The proposed speech crackdowns are outlined in several sections of the final draft of this political declaration.
In section OP35, the heads of state and government agree to “take measures to counter and address the negative impacts of health-related misinformation, disinformation, hate speech and stigmatization, especially on social media platforms” and counter “vaccine hesitancy in the context of pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.” Additionally, section OP42 includes an agreement to combat “misinformation.”
The UN member states back the pandemic treaty in section OP15 and agree to encourage the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (the group that’s responsible for drafting and negotiating the pandemic treaty) to conclude their negotiations on the “WHO convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response” (the full name of the WHO’s pandemic treaty).
Not only do UN member states give explicit backing to the pandemic treaty and push for it to be finalized but they also encourage the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) to prioritize the “need for equity.” Equity is framed by its proponents as something that encourages fairness but critics have warned that equity policies can lead to bias and the injection of “radical ideology.”
The support for the amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) is contained in section OP16 of the final draft. This section encourages the working group that’s focused on these amendments to continue its work with respect to the intended finalization date of May 2024.
This political declaration is one of the many ways the UN is tightening its grip on speech. This year alone, it has started building a “digital army” to fight against “deadly disinformation”, encouraged people to snitch on each other for “hate speech”, and claimed that censoring “disinformation” and “hate speech” will protect “free speech.”
The UN has also consulted with several governments and blocs on their censorship work. Specifically, it has attended multiple “disinformation sessions” with a UK government censorship agency and held discussions with the European Union on how to address “disinformation” on digital platforms.
Related:
The FDA Can Say (and Do) Anything It Wants
For example, they can’t be sued for providing false or dishonest information
By John Droz Jr. | Critically Thinking About Select Societal Issues | August 10, 2023
This is an extraordinarily important commentary!
The gist of a current court case that you’ve likely never heard of, is that three heroic doctors are suing the FDA about the loss of their jobs, about their careers being derailed, about the loss of their reputation — all because their professional, scientific opinion as to what was in the best interest of their patients, was different than the political agenda of the FDA. (Here is a bit of background.)
What is at stake here could not be more significant, and it applies across the board to EVERY federal agency. The question is: do federal agencies have the unsupervised right to replace Science with political science? Put another way: can they act dishonestly, incompetently, etc. with essentially no meaningful consequences?
Here is the doctors’ Complaint. Although it was filed a year ago, it is now being appealed this week — and some fascinating audio clips have emerged. There are three judges on a panel, asking the attorney representing the FDA some probing questions.
Five of these short audio clips (3-5 minutes each) are posted here. (The recording of the full proceeding is here.)
IMO some of the key takeaway revelations (so far) are:
1 – The FDA seems to claim that their published warnings are little more than offhand observations. For example, their slamming of Ivermectin was evidently just casual commentary (what the FDA calls “informational”).
Note the title here, on this FDA page which is STILL up! It says “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19”.
Note 1: This is a deceptive headline because that article is mostly saying: a) citizens should not self-medicate, and b) using any veterinary medications can be dangerous. Both of these are legitimate concerns. So, if the FDA was honestly trying to benefit the public their heading should be: “Why You Should Not Self-Medicate Using Veterinary-Grade Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19”. BIG DIFFERENCE!
Note 2: This FDA page has changed quite a bit over time. Here is the 2021 version.
Note 3: The current page makes outright false statements like: “Ivermectin has not been shown to be safe or effective for these indications.” I’m one of the few people who has taken the time to put together a spreadsheet of ALL the studies on ALL the major COVID early treatment therapies: see it here.
There have now been 99 Ivermectin scientific studies, and the overall early treatment effectiveness is 62%. IVM’s extensive safety record is extraordinary, with adverse effects (e.g., see here) in the ballpark of only one in a million usages!
Now, also on my spreadsheet, compare what the FDA has approved for early treatment of COVID-19 therapy: Paxlovid = 32% effective with these adverse safety issues, and Molnupiravir = 16% effective with these problematic safety issues!
Despite these LARGE benefits of Ivermectin in effectiveness and safety, the FDA continues to say that “Ivermectin has not been shown to be safe or effective” for early treatment of COVID-19. This is stunningly inaccurate.
Note 4: Even though the FDA now has access to 99 Ivermectin studies, their statement against Ivermectin is stronger now than when the page originally appeared in 2021! IMO this is what happens when a federal agency feels that there is no meaningful oversight, so effectively they can say anything they want.
2 – The FDA says that Courts have no business in reviewing anything they say or do!
Considering the above facts in #1, it’s obvious why this would be their self-serving position. Listen carefully to the second short audio clip, where the FDA’s attorney appears to say that the FDA’s communication to the public can be knowingly false, dishonest, etc. with no oversight or consequences — even when deaths result!
Regretfully, to date, the courts have played along with this game of charades. For example, the Chevron case is frequently cited by non-aggressive attorneys to say that courts will stay out of determining whether FDA processes, documents, and claims are legal, accurate, honest, warranted, etc.
However, that is an oversimplified opinion. Even the Chevron case states that the FDA’s actions must be “reasonable” — but that is rarely argued. BTW, the case we are discussing here would never have been filed if the doctors’ attorneys bought into the bogus idea that federal agencies have unlimited deference. Kudos to them that they did not accept that absurd argument!
Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but based on the judges’ questions and comments in these clips, it seems to me that this case might eventually upend Chevron. That would be EXTRAORDINARILY beneficial for US citizens, as it would apply to all national policies: from immigration to education, energy to climate change, etc.
3 – The FDA asserts that the only recourse that US citizens have about even egregious errors and deceptions by the FDA is through the “political process.” Astounding!
4 – The FDA indicated that the “political process” means that citizens need to elect a competent and attentive President, whose responsibility it is to see that the FDA acts responsibly — or else. The flip side is that when we do not have such a President, all federal agencies have a four-year time period to wreak whatever political havoc that suits them — again, across the board, and without real consequences to the guilty parties.
5 – The FDA’s attorney implied that there would be no compensation given for inaccurate or knowingly false FDA statements — including those that lead to Americans unnecessarily dying — other than an FDA person may lose their job.
6 – Based on these select audio clips, the fact that hundreds of thousands of Americans likely died needlessly due to the FDA’s COVID actions and inactions (see here), was not fully addressed. Hopefully, this will be brought up in this trial.
7 – In clip #3, the FDA attorney makes the startling claim that the FDA has the authority to give citizens medical advice! How is that possible when they know nothing of the medical history of any American citizen? Further, once they assert that right, how is a conflict resolved between what the FDA says and what a citizen’s medical provider says? That is one of the major issues in this important case.
8 – In clip #4, the FDA attorney acknowledges that doctors have lost their jobs, etc. due to their scientific conclusions on such matters as Ivermectin, and their science-based actions that they believed were in the best interest of their patients. However, the FDA attorney then stated that no losses, etc. were due to anything the FDA did. (!)
……….
Note that a lot of the bad behavior with the FDA (and CDC) would be reduced if the Medical Establishment refused to play politics and instead supported real Science for the public. Regretfully, that has not happened and the COVID-19 fiasco exposed this ugly underbelly. See my Report on the COVID failings of the Medical Establishment.
In another Report, I compared the FDA’s approval process for Remdesivir to Ivermectin. This appears to show stunning incompetence at the FDA.
I have made this point before, but it’s worth repeating. The war we are engaged in is that powerful Left-wing forces (exterior and from within) are trying to take America down. One of their primary strategies to do this is to replace Science with political science. That is what this case is about, as the FDA is specifically arguing that they have the right to scrap Science and substitute political science — with impunity!
Draw your own conclusions, but to me, this case is like a Molotov cocktail thrown into the Federal Government bureaucracy. Astoundingly, all three branches of our government are complicit with this nonsense.
Some obvious questions that need to be answered and fixed are: 1) How did Congress give pharmaceutical companies such broad protections against self-serving unscientific actions? 2) How did the Executive branch allow agencies like the FDA to be run by parties that they are supposed to regulate? 3) How did our Judicial system allow bad actor agencies to arrange to have no real legal oversight?
Considering that these failings are applicable to multiple federal agencies, is there any question why such things as COVID policies (and energy, and climate, and education, and immigration, and elections, etc., etc.) are a disaster?
Hopefully, this lawsuit will crack open the door to fixing this horrific mess…
……….
PS — What needs to be done now :
1) Competent attorneys should file friend of the court briefs to support this nationally important case. Overturning the Chevron precedent would have extraordinarily positive benefits for almost ALL US citizens.
2) Competent federal legislators should introduce a “Save America” bill (aka Agency Oversight Act). This legislation will rein in ALL federal agencies, by providing timely and meaningful oversight (plus real penalties) to them all.
Retraction of paper saying there is no climate emergency illustrates dependence of climate activists on scaremongering
BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 29, 2023
The recent cancellation of Alimonti et al shows clearly that catastrophising bad weather events and attributing them to a collapse of the climate is now the main weapon deployed to scare populations into embracing the Net Zero agenda. Of course, reference is still made to global warming, but most recent rises seem to owe more to frequent upward retrospective adjustments of temperature, rather than any significant natural boost. Perhaps we should not be surprised by this turn of events. In a short essay titled ‘The New Apocalypticism’, the science writer Roger Pielke Jr. noted: “For the secular millenarian, extreme events – floods, hurricanes, fires – are more than mere portents, they are evidence of our sins of the past and provide opportunities for redemption in the future, if only we listen, accept and change.”
The climate is collapsing all around us, shout the headlines – they require we ignore the data, the historical record, even common sense. When all is said and done, the Earth is not actually boiling! Well Professor Gianluca Alimonti and three other Italian scientists didn’t ignore the past data, much of it in fact from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and they found little change in extreme weather events. They published a paper concluding that there was certainly not enough to justify the declaration of a ‘climate emergency’. A year later, the publisher Springer Nature bowed to the demands of a group of activist scientists and journalists led by the Guardian and Agence France-Presse and retracted the non-conforming paper. An addendum was proposed and sent to four reviewers for comment. Three reviewers argued for publication. The fourth stated that typical readers were not climate experts and “editors should seriously consider the implications of the possible publication of this addendum”.
We own climate science, boasted UN communications flak Melissa Fleming at a recent World Economic Forum disinformation seminar, and we partner with Google to keep our version at the top of the search list. What a great service these climate experts provide in telling us what to think and see as we unsophisticated rubes struggle towards the path of true enlightenment!
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently said we are on a pathway to climate hell, with our foot on the accelerator. Steve Koonin, President Obama’s Energy Under-Secretary for Science and the author of Unsettled, recently charged that climate scientists were negligent for not speaking out and saying Guterres’s comments were “preposterous”. Koonin is not very impressed with mainstream media click bait weather stories. “I can take current media and almost any climate story I can write a very effective counter,” he recently told Peter Robinson, host of Uncommon Knowledge. “It is like shooting fish in a barrel.”
The mainstream media has an agenda to set, namely the de-carbonisation of society. Noting the influence of green billionaire-funded operations like Covering Climate Now, Koonin said the mission was to promote the narrative. The MSM will not allow anything to be broadcast or written that is counter to the narrative. And the narrative is: “We have already broken the climate and we are heading for hell.”
You just need to look out of the window, claim the politicised alarmists. These days any half-decent storm, or scorchio summer’s day, gets them going. This year some unusual weather patterns are put forward as Exhibit A for Thermogeddon. Such deception depends upon the rubes failing to spot the difference between weather and long-term climate trends. Nobody should ask why carbon dioxide has been up to 20 times higher in the atmosphere in the past and life on Earth thrived. CO2 might gently warm the atmosphere up to a certain point, but temperatures naturally go up and down, ocean currents get warmer and cooler, change direction and melt and freeze polar ice. The idea that single events can be linked to any long term effects of CO2 is not just unproven, it’s unprovable. Computer models that ‘attribute’ single events to 30-year trends are laughable pseudoscience.
That wise sage Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, who’s spent decades trying to figure out how the atmosphere works, summed up all this fraud and corruption:
What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world – that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.
For the distinguished climatologist Dr. Judith Curry, the Alimonti affair is “why I no longer publish in peer-reviewed papers”. She described the behaviour of the journal editors as “reprehensible” in retracting a widely read climate paper just because it contained “politically inconvenient conclusions”. She is right of course – the Alimonti affair is another shocking scientific scandal that casts further doubt on the climate science peer-review process. But then, Dr. Curry is merely a scientist in all this – she doesn’t own the science.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Employers Walk Back Mask Mandates Amid Employee, Public Backlash
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 29, 2023
Kaiser Permanente and Lionsgate Studios in California reversed mask mandate policies last week, just a few days after imposing them.
Kaiser Permanente, the largest healthcare provider in California, on Aug. 22 announced it had “reintroduced a mask mandate for physicians, staff, patients, members, and visitors in the hospital and medical offices in the Santa Rosa Service Area,” in a statement obtained by The Press Democrat.
Kaiser said the mandate was in response to an increase in the number of patients testing positive for COVID-19.
But just two days later, on Aug. 24, Kaiser officials told The Press Democrat the mask reinstatement applied only to physicians and staff, not to patients and visitors.
“Our intent was to communicate that as of Tuesday, we have expanded the masking requirement for our employees and physicians to medical offices and clinic settings; we apologize for any confusion among Press Democrat readers,” Kaiser said in its latest statement.
It also said, “We have not changed our masking requirements in the hospital, which have been in effect since April: employees and physicians are required to wear masks and we ask visitors to wear masks when in the hospital.”
But Kaiser also confirmed to Becker’s Hospital Review on Aug. 23 that it had reintroduced the mask mandate.
The Press Democrat reported the reversal happened after people noticed many visitors to the hospital were not masking.
Local media reported that some Northern California residents supported the mask mandate policy when it was first announced, but others were skeptical and frustrated in response to the mandate announcement.
“I think it’s more political than anything, just think they’re trying to do what they did in 2020,” said Carmichael resident Craig Roberts.
Lionsgate also reverses mandate
Lionsgate on Friday also notified employees that the mask mandate it had imposed about a week prior for employees on the third and fifth floors of the studio’s five-story office building in Santa Monica was over, Deadline reported.
Lionsgate imposed the mandate after multiple people in its Santa Monica headquarters came down with COVID-19. The company told Deadline it imposed the mandate in compliance with rules set by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
Lionsgate told The Wrap the health department informed the company it could lift the mask requirement after several days of no new infections.
The company also distanced itself from responsibility for the mandate, stating that:
“Lionsgate never changed its own mask policy. The LA County Department of Health ordered us to institute the temporary masking requirement after we reported a cluster of COVID cases to them and we have an obligation to comply with their orders.”
In addition to mandating “a medical grade face covering (surgical mask, KN95 or N95),” every Lionsgate employee was required to perform a daily self-screening before coming to the office and was told to stay home if they exhibited any symptoms or had traveled internationally in the last 10 days.
Lionsgate was conducting contact tracing and providing at home COVID-19 test kits. It is unclear if those practices are still required.
Reversals come amid pushback and more evidence of mask failures
The mask policy reversals come amid pushback from critics after a growing number of businesses and hospitals in recent weeks reinstituted mask mandates and social distancing requirements, and a new report warned that broader mandates may be coming this fall.
Many doctors have also called for mask mandates to return to healthcare settings.
Meanwhile, documents recently released from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) revealed that public health officials privately questioned the effectiveness of masks and the guidance issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) promoting their use.
And an NIH study suggested surgical N95 masks, held up as the gold standard for COVID-19 protection, may expose users to dangerous levels of toxic chemicals, the Daily Mail reported.
The study found the chemicals released by these masks had 8 times the recommended safety limit of toxic volatile organic compounds, which can cause symptoms ranging from headaches and nausea to organ damage and cancer, with prolonged use.
Since the original mandates ended, several studies concluded the mandate policies failed to achieve their promised results.
The Wall Street Journal on Monday published an op-ed criticizing mask mandates.
And dissenters have taken to X (formerly Twitter), calling on people not to comply with mandates.
“This is what can be done when people stand together against tyrannical, unscientific and dangerous so-called public health policies,” author and health freedom activist Meryl Dorey wrote in a Substack post reporting on the policy reversals.
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.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
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Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda
Dr. Joseph Mercola | July 9, 2022
“Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda,” is the fourth vaccine-related documentary by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. It tells the story of an intentional infertility vaccine program conducted on African women, without their knowledge or consent.
While it’s been brushed off as a loony conspiracy theory for years, there’s compelling evidence showing it did, in fact, happen, and there’s nothing to prevent it from happening again. … continue
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