On 20 March, in just fifteen days, Germany’s Infection Protection Act expires. If nobody does anything, the whole legislative basis of containment will simply disappear. That is how easy a freedom day could be in Germany, and with the entire attention of the press on Ukraine, you’d think nothing could be simpler than letting that happen. Alas, Karl Lauterbach is our health minister, and we have the worst government since the war. On 16 February, we learned that the plan was to replace the Infection Protection Act and its “more intrusive protections” with “simple, basic protection measures to contain infections and protect at-risk groups.”
Today, in a very bad interview with the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Lauterbach finally explains what he hopes that these “simple, basic protection measures” will amount to. They are anything but simple or basic:
German states must have the capacity to react early to future waves. This includes mask mandates and contact restrictions. It should be possible to set limits on the size of private meetings and public events, as well as access rules for restaurants, for example [vaccination and testing requirements.]
To this end, we must still have the capacity to implement testing requirements for businesses and public spaces. All these instruments should only be used if they are actually necessary. The state parliaments would then have to determine this.
All of this will remain necessary for a very long time. Lauterbach counts on a summer wave, and a fall wave after that. In fact, he envisions just wave after wave, forever:
Corona will occupy us for a long time, a decade or more. HIV appeared 40 years ago, and it’s still there. We’ll always have to deal with Corona variants, perhaps also dangerous variants. There will also always be outbreaks. That’s what you call the endemic phase. And there will always be a group of people, who are not adequately vaccinated, whose vaccine protection is waning, and for whom the vaccine protection is insufficient, because of weak immune systems.
Always new little problems for the new little Lauterbachs of our government to solve.
This new law will be pushed through parliament with as little discussion as possible. Olaf Scholz’s coalition is supposed to present draft legislation to a parliamentary subcommittee by 16 March. A full vote is then planned for the 18th, preceded by a mere 70 minutes of debate. Two years ago, when the law was first passed, things went much the same way; it was all so urgent, you see. Now the reasons are of course much different. The last thing any member of parliament wants to be, is on the record supporting these indefensible rules and the continued destruction of German society. So the most minute aspects of our everyday will continue to be regulated in relative silence, by unreasonable people, for unattainable ends.
As attention wanders from Corona and the virus becomes less dangerous, other countries have found it convenient to end restrictions. Germany, thanks to Lauterbach, will choose a different path. He’s an unbalanced man of limited mental capacity, who ended up in the cabinet because nobody else wanted to touch the health minister position. For him, a spotlight on Ukraine is an opportunity not to fold up the tables and go away, but to pour more poison into the law. Corona will never end in Germany as long as this man is health minister, because the virus is a very large part of who he is. Before March 2020, Lauterbach was a nobody, but ceaseless freaking out about SARS-2 has turned him into one of Germany’s most prominent politicians.
As long as Lauterbach is allowed to preserve the legal basis for containment, pressure will build on state governments to impose closures every time there is a new Corona headline. Every new variant, every infection spike, every rise in hospitalisations or deaths, will see renewed calls to bring out more masks, more vaccines, more tests, more capacity limits, and more closures. These measures don’t even have to be implemented to do their damage; the mere possibility disrupts business models and future plans. The longer these restrictions hang over us, the more deeply they change every aspect of our social and political existence, from music concerts to Oktoberfest to restaurants to schooling to public transit.
Almost as enraging as the continuation of the containment regime, are the near-total absence of good arguments for it. Future variants won’t matter as much as Lauterbach pretends, because almost all Germans have antibodies of one kind or another. A wealth of respiratory viruses, including many varieties of influenza, surge seasonally every year. Many of them are no more dangerous than SARS-2 is right now, and none of them ever inspired any restrictions. The regulatory regime that Lauterbach hopes to continue has become a bizarre superstition, something approaching a collection of religious observances. They are increasingly removed from any stated goals, from any basis in evidence at all, and even from the expectation that they might do anything. It’s just a habit now, stuff we have to do whenever cases rise, because rising cases mean we have to do this stuff.
If we can’t end this now, we may not be able to end it for years or even decades. That seems at least as great a threat, as events in Ukraine.
The current situation in Ukraine has once again invigorated the lying Western media and sent them into an anti-Russian frenzy. For the last two years the media has been enthusiastically pushing the genocidal Covid narrative on behalf of the Globalist faction. Whatever doubtful credibility they had prior to Covid they have destroyed with their relentless lies. With an astonishing lack of self-awareness they are now pushing the anti-Russian narrative like the unprincipled mindless hacks that they are. Ignoring both facts and context they are relentlessly promoting war propaganda to justify this hostility to their own beleaguered populations.
The unfortunate reality is that despite unprecedented distrust in the media that propaganda works. Anti-Russian sentiment is rising throughout the West. We have witnessed the same phenomena with the rabid anti-China narrative emanating from Western governments and their client stenographers in the media. The message is clear, unless you are a pliant puppet of the Anglo-American empire, then obviously you are evil and must be destroyed.
The truth of course is deeper, the real war the Globalists are fighting is against the citizenry of every country on earth. As the Covid atrocity is being rapidly exposed the repression of the people is the only option open to the New World Order Davos cabal. As has always been the case, a war abroad is the best excuse to impose tyranny at home. The Western Neo-liberal governments of America, Canada, Australia and most of Europe cannot afford to be removed from power. The full anger of the people will be unleashed full power against those who imposed the Genocidal Covid lie upon them. Trudeau, Macron et al will be held to account (one way or another) for their pivotal roles in this atrocity. They cannot allow that to happen, they have too much to lose.
The tragic and unnecessary conflict in the Ukraine can be viewed as the “Great Reset War”. Although targeted towards Russia for media purposes, its real objective is the further subjugation of the peoples of their own countries. The Western Neo-liberal agenda is failing on every front, economically, socially and morally. The Cabal has destroyed the once prosperous and free societies that they governed. The dystopian future that they have planned for the world is now plain for all to see. It has been on display in Canada and Australia, New Zealand and throughout Europe. It is a prospect that should alarm everybody.
“The Great Reset” is the Cabal’s way of ensuring that the same Globalists who plunged the world into chaos are still in charge after the coming inevitable collapse. The Green agenda and the 4th industrial revolution are about de-industrialising the world and destroying successful industrial competitors such as Russia and China. Not surprisingly, neither Russia or China, along with India and Iran are going along with this insidious plan. They are not alone, many countries from Africa, South America and Asia are also gravitating more towards the Russian/Chinese orbit. All have good reasons to be distrustful and angry at the Empire. The Cabal is weak and failing, it has created powerful enemies who are formidable obstacles to the New World Order and the Great reset. Expect this to embolden other countries to resist the Empire’s plans.
The Empire doesn’t care about the Ukrainians anymore than they care about the people in their own countries. It is about maintaining control over humanity. President Putin is not in essence fighting the Ukraine, he is fighting the N.W.O. And that is everyone’s fight. The battle being waged by the West is for the minds of the Western people so they can justify the imposition of further tyranny. Until recently, President Putin has demonstrated incredible restraint, despite the incessant lies and aggression he has pursued peace and diplomacy. This has not been reciprocated, it has been meet with more lies and provocations. It has been faced with only two options, capitulate or resist, he has resisted. Russia’s fight is the fight of all peoples who value freedom and resist tyranny.
As longtime readers of my blog know, I have long maintained that it is the national-security branch of the federal government that runs the government, especially when it comes to foreign affairs. The other three branches, while being permitted to have the veneer of running the government, actually operate in support of the national-security branch.
This is also the thesis set forth in a book that I have long recommended, entitled National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon, professor of law at Tufts University.
Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in a case involving the CIA provides a perfect example of this phenomenon.
The case involved a man named Abu Zubaydah, who the CIA accused of being a terrorist as part of its much-vaunted worldwide “war on terrorism.” After taking Zubaydah captive some 20 years ago, the CIA subjected him to brutal torture, including 80 hours of waterboarding, hundreds of hours of live burial, and “rectal rehydration.” It should be pointed out that U.S. officials have never convicted Zubaydah of a crime.
Zubaydah was tortured at CIA “black sites,” such as one that the CIA operated in Poland, one of the former Warsaw Pact countries that was absorbed by NATO. Later, he was transferred to the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s torture and prison center at Guantanamo Bay.
The reason that Zubaydah was tortured was that CIA and Pentagon officials were convinced that he was a high-ranking figure in al Qaeda, which the CIA later concluded was a mistake. Nonetheless, Zubaydah remains incarcerated at Gitmo, where for 20 years the CIA and the Pentagon steadfastly failed to grant him a speedy trial, a right guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.
Zubaydah filed a legal action seeking to take depositions of two private-sector individuals who served as torturers for the CIA. He wanted them to testify under oath as to everything they did to him.
The CIA objected, arguing that Zubadah’s legal action should be dismissed on two grounds: (1) The depositions of the two torturers would inevitably reveal the fact that the CIA maintained a black site in Poland, which, the CIA maintains, falls within the state-secrets doctrine that the Supreme Court, in another act of extreme deference, awarded the CIA decades ago; and (2) It would breach a promise that the CIA entered into with Poland to keep their joint dark-side activities secret.
Not surprisingly, the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, deferred to the CIA and dismissed Zubaydah’s lawsuit. The Court held that “national security” dictated that the CIA would be permitted to keep secret the location of its black sites and the details of its dark-side activities, including torture. It’s just tough luck for victims of CIA and Pentagon torture, kidnapping, rendition, indefinite detention, assassination, and other totalitarian-like dark-side activity.
Needless to say, if a similar legal action were to be brought in Russia, China, or North Korea — all of which also have national-security state forms of government — the judicial ruling would be the same. In every national-security state, most everyone within the government pays extreme deference to the military-intelligence part of the government and gives them free rein to do whatever they want to people.
In October 2020 Dr Andrew Hill was tasked to report to the World Health Organisation on the dozens of new studies from around the world suggesting that Ivermectin could be a remarkably safe and effective treatment for COVID-19.
But on January 18th 2021, Dr Hill published his findings on a pre-print server. His methods lacked rigour, the review was low quality and the extremely positive findings on ivermectin were contradicted by the conclusion. In the end, Dr Hill advised that “Ivermectin should be validated in larger appropriately controlled randomized trials before the results are sufficient for review by regulatory authorities.”
The researcher seeking a global recommendation on Ivermectin had instead recommended against it. A media onslaught against the medicine ensued. What were Dr Hill’s reasons for doing so? Were his conclusions justified? Or were external forces influencing his about-face?
One year on, this film recalls exactly what happened from the perspective of somebody that experienced it first hand; Dr Tess Lawrie; also featuring contributions from Dr Pierre Kory and Dr Paul Marik who worked closely with Dr Hill during the same time frame.
After Canada’s burgeoning fascist regime in Ottawa brutally cracked-down on the historic truckers protest against the Trudeau government’s authoritarian vaccine mandates, other World Economic Forum acolytes saw this as a signal to crush peaceful protests around the world.
One of the more brutal ‘clean-up’ operations was ordered by New Zealand’s embattled Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
If she was prepared to use violence on the steps of parliament then she would be prepared to use it anywhere.
Yesterday was the dawning of a new more violent era by the Ardern regime. The tyrant deployed the strong arm of her jackbooted Police thugs, who used tear gas, pepper spray, batons, riot shields, rubber bullets, sonic weapons and fire hoses on peaceful protestors on the grounds of Parliament. […]
Never before have I been so angry at a tyrannical government. I will do everything within my power to see the end of every party currently in parliament.
This is all on them. They should all be ashamed, but I suspect they will go full Biden and claim that the sanctity of parliament has been desecrated. The tyrant has already done that but, like dutiful lickspittles, so will all the others.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive” – Sir Walter Scott
Throughout the last two years Public Health Scotland (PHS) has punched above its weight by providing reliable data that has quantified the impact of the Scottish government’s COVID-19 response on the health of the Scottish population. In particular, it has documented the unprecedented excess death that occurred in summer and autumn 2021, prompting the establishment of an official enquiry as to the cause, and uncovered a spike in September 2021 in the number of stillbirths in Scotland that is currently under investigation.
However, in its report of 14th February 2022, PHS has declared that it will no longer publish data on COVID-19 outcomes (cases, hospitalisations and deaths) classified by vaccination status, a hitherto valuable component of the COVID-19 vaccination surveillance strategy. The reason given for making this change is that ‘PHS is aware of inappropriate use and misinterpretation of the data when taken in isolation without fully understanding the limitations’.
It is certainly true that claims have been made about the deleterious effects of COVID-19 vaccines that go well beyond what can be supported by the data published by PHS. In this case critical appraisal of these unsubstantiated claims, rather than the blanket withdrawal of valuable information, would seem the better antidote to the spread of misinformation.
However, it is important to note that implicit in the decision made by PHS is that the information they provide is above reproach, both in terms of inappropriate use and misrepresentation of the data to which they alone are privy. To investigate whether PHS analysis is indeed above reproach, we can look in a little detail at the way in which they have presented the information on COVID-19 outcomes by vaccination status in their last report of February 2022. We will concentrate on the analysis of death with COVID-19 by vaccination status, unvaccinated or booster, found in Table 15, using the data for week 29 January – 04 February 2022. The relevant data from that table is reproduced below:
No. of Deaths
Population
Age Standardised Mortality Rate per 100,000 with 95% confidence intervals
Unvaccinated
13
1,524,406
10.95 (3.40 – 18.50)
Booster
73
3,229,938
1.50 (1.15 – 1.85)
A superficial inspection of this table would suggest to the casual reader that the death rate with COVID-19 in those who have received a booster is far lower than that suffered by those who are unvaccinated when the difference in age distributions of the booster and unvaccinated populations are taken into account. Indeed, PHS draw the conclusion that ‘the death rate in individuals that received a booster or 3rd dose of a COVID-19 vaccine was between 4.6 and 9.5 times lower than individuals who are unvaccinated or have only received one or two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine’. Let us look in detail at how the data were treated to arrive at this conclusion, and ask whether this very strong affirmation of the benefits of the booster can be substantiated.
We first look at the way in which the two populations that we are comparing, unvaccinated and booster, are defined. For this we turn to Appendix 6 of the report. Here we learn that the unvaccinated population is not, as we might have assumed, those that have never been vaccinated. Instead, it also includes all those individuals who have received a first vaccine, but for whom the time since vaccination is less than 22 days. Thus, if any deaths occur within the 21 days post first vaccine, these deaths will be attributed to the unvaccinated category. This misattribution may have significant consequences because deaths from adverse vaccination reactions principally occur shortly after vaccination. This idiosyncratic classification of the unvaccinated artificially, and misleadingly, inflates the death rate in the unvaccinated population. Would it not have been better to classify the unvaccinated as those never receiving a vaccine, to preclude the introduction of such bias against the unvaccinated into the analysis?
Turning to the boosted population we find that this is not defined as the number of individuals who have received a booster, but rather the number that have received a booster at least 14 days prior to the reporting period. Therefore, if deaths of boosted individuals occur within the first 14 days of this vaccination, they will not be counted as booster deaths, but as a 2-dose death. The mortality rates given are also dependent on the size of the vaccinated population. If the addition of boostered individuals is a continuous process then, depending on accounting, the last two week cohort added to the boostered population may effectively be excluded from contributing to deaths, while the unvaccinated population during the same time period will not. PHS’s redefinition of the booster population again serves to artificially and misleadingly reduce the reported rate of deaths in the PHS booster population relative to the unvaccinated population. Would it not have been better to classify the booster population simply as those who have received a booster shot, and avoided the inevitable bias in favour of the boosted population that is introduced by the PHS redefinition?
Notwithstanding the biases introduced by PHS’s redefinition of the populations to be compared, we can now concentrate our attention on the methods they have used to correct for the fact that the age distribution of the unvaccinated is likely to be much younger than that of the boosted population. To begin our explanation, it is helpful to use the raw data provided in table 15 for week 29 January – 04 February 2022 to calculate the individual rate of death with COVID-19 per 100,000 per week without making any adjustment for differences in age distribution. This can be compared with the figures PHS calculated from the data to quantify ‘Age Standardised Mortality Rate per 100,000 per week’.
Unvaccinated
Booster
Unadjusted COVID-19 mortality per 100,000 per week
0.85
2.26
Age Standardised Mortality Rate per 100,000 per week
10.95
1.50
The comparison is illuminating and a little worrying. An unadjusted death rate 2.7 times higher in the booster population than in the unvaccinated population has been converted into an age standardised mortality rate that is now 7.3 times higher in the unvaccinated population than in the booster population. To understand what is going on we have to know both how to calculate an Age Standardised Mortality Rate per 100,000 per week, and to understand what this value actually represents.
The Age Standardised Mortality Rate is a measure of the impact, in terms of mortality, on the whole population rather than a particular age group. Rather than calculating a population Age Standardised Mortality Rate based on the age distribution of the Scottish population, Public Health Scotland used the standard WHO age distribution. In this age distribution there is a much lower representation of older people. The consequence is that a very low weight is given to deaths in older age groups and a disproportionately high weighting to deaths in young age groups. In fact, the weighting of a young death can be 10 times higher than for an old death. Through this unjustified weighting a raw mortality rate which was 2.7 times greater in the vaccinated is turned into an age standardised mortality rate which is 7.3 times greater in the unvaccinated.
The age standardised mortality does not relate to individual risk – we may have much higher risk in old age groups individually, but this translates into a very small effect on overall deaths at a population level because the percentage of old people in the population is very low. The point of calculating age standardised mortality is not to compare risks. It is designed to allow comparison of the relative burden of a disease on a population – what proportion of a population will be lost from that population by a particular disease. Its use to somehow correct for differences in age distributions on risk of death is completely inappropriate.
The important thing to note is that what has been calculated is a measure of population impact of COVID-19 in a hypothetical population; what proportion of the population die in this hypothetical population as a consequence of the disease. It is assuredly not a measure of individual mortality risk from COVID-19. As such it is completely inappropriate and misleading to use it to compare the risk of death with COVID 19 between populations of different vaccination status as has been done by PHS. Therefore, their statement that ‘the death rate in individuals that received a booster or 3rd dose of a COVID-19 vaccine was between 4.6 and 9.5 times lower than individuals who are unvaccinated or have only received one or two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine’ is utterly false and misleading and completely unsupported by the data. The simple and transparent way of comparing individual mortality risk would be to use the data in PHS’s possession to estimate individual risk of death for each age category and population, and compare these values within each age category. Rather than compare the whole population, the risk for each age group by vaccination status would provide useful information. UKHSA do provide this data but PHS never have done. The magnitude of the error in using Age Standardised Mortality Rates as a metric calls into question the competence of PHS to analyse and interpret data that are critical to the formulation of Scottish government health policy which directly impacts the wellbeing of literally millions of people.
The final point to make is that in order to receive a booster, an individual must previously have received both a first and a second dose of vaccine. There is a risk of a bias being introduced whereby only survivors, who are by definition less likely to die, are being measured. Therefore, deaths that occurred after first and second vaccinations should be included with deaths after the booster vaccination itself in order to properly assess the overall COVID-19 death rates in the vaccinated population. In other words, the appropriate comparison to make when assessing the effect of booster doses on COVID-19 mortality is between the unvaccinated population and the vaccinated population, where the latter includes anyone who has received any injection.
In conclusion, by announcing that data on COVID-19 outcomes by vaccination status will no longer be provided due to “misrepresentation and misinterpretation of their analyses”, PHS has drawn attention to their own glaring shortcomings in this area. They have been shown to introduce unwarranted bias into their analyses by manipulation of the definitions of vaccination status, and they have used a wholly inappropriate metric to compare the risk of death with COVID-19 among the vaccinated and unvaccinated in the Scottish population.
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine goes on, the world wonders what the reason was behind such a precipitous act. The pro-Ukraine crowd has put forth a narrative constructed around the self-supporting themes of irrationality on the part of a Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his post-Cold War fantasies of resurrecting the former Soviet Union.
This narrative ignores that, far from acting on a whim, the Russian president is working from a playbook that he initiated as far back as 2007, when he addressed the Munich Security Conference and warned the assembled leadership of Europe of the need for a new security framework to replace existing unitary system currently in place, built as it was around a trans-Atlantic alliance (NATO) led by the United States.
Moreover, far from seeking the reconstitution of the former Soviet Union, Putin is simply pursuing a post-Cold War system which protects the interests and security of the Russian people, including those who, through no fault of their own, found themselves residing outside the borders of Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In this age of politicized narrative shaping, which conforms to the demands of domestic political imperatives as opposed to geopolitical reality, fact-based logic is not in vogue. For decades now, the Russian leadership has been confronting a difficult phenomenon where Western democracies, struggling to deal with serious fractures derived from their own internal weakness, produce political leadership lacking in continuity of focus and purpose in foreign and national security relations.
Consistent Leadership
Whereas Russia has had the luxury of having consistent leadership for the past two decades, and can look to another decade or more of the same, Western leadership is transient in nature. One need only reflect on the fact that Putin has, in his time in office, dealt with five U.S. presidents who, because of the alternating nature of the political parties occupying the White House, have produced policies of an inconsistent and contradictory nature.
The White House is held hostage to the political constraints imposed by the reality of domestic partisan politics. “It’s the economy, stupid” resonates far more than any fact-based discussion about the relevance of post-Cold War NATO. What passes for a national discussion on the important issues of foreign and national security are, more often than not, reduced to pithy phrases. The complexities of a balanced dialogue are replaced by a good-versus-evil simplicity more readily digested by an electorate where potholes and tax rates matter more than geopolitics.
Rather than try to explain to the American people the historical roots of Putin’s concerns with an expanding NATO membership, or the impracticalities associated with any theoretical reconstitution of the former Soviet Union, the U.S. political elite instead define Putin as an autocratic dictator (he is not) possessing grandiose dreams of a Russian-led global empire (no such dreams exist).
It is impossible to reason with a political counterpart whose policy formulations need to conform with ignorance-based narratives. Russia, confronted with the reality that neither the U.S. nor NATO were willing to engage in a responsible discussion about the need for a European security framework which transcended the inherent instability of an expansive NATO seeking to encroach directly on Russia’s borders, took measures to change the framework in which such discussions would take place.
Russia had been seeking to create a neutral buffer between it and NATO through agreements which would preclude NATO membership for Ukraine and distance NATO combat power from its borders by insisting the alliance’s military-technical capabilities be withdrawn behind NATO’s boundaries as they existed in 1997. The U.S. and NATO rejected the very premise of such a dialogue.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine must be evaluated within this context. By invading Ukraine, Russia is creating a new geopolitical reality which revolves around the creation of a buffer of allied Slavic states (Belarus and Ukraine) that abuts NATO in a manner like the Cold War-era frontier represented by the border separating East and West Germany.
Russia has, by redeploying the 1st Guards Tank Army onto the territory of Belarus, militarized this buffer, creating the conditions for the kind of standoff that existed during the Cold War. The U.S. and NATO will have to adjust to this new reality, spending billions to resurrect a military capability that has atrophied since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Here’s the punchline — the likelihood that Europe balks at a resumption of the Cold War is high. And when it does, Russia will be able to exchange the withdrawal of its forces from Belarus and Ukraine in return for its demands regarding NATO’s return to the 1997 boundaries.
Vladimir Putin may, in fact, be crazy — crazy like a fox.
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.
There is no doubt that President Kennedy would have handled the Ukraine crisis totally different from the way that President Biden has handled it. Unlike Biden, Kennedy would have resolved the situation so that there never would have been a Russian invasion of Ukraine, which would have meant that all the death and suffering being wreaked in that country today would never have occurred.
Kennedy had a unique ability to step into the shoes of his adversary to determine why he was taking a particular position or course of action. In the case of Ukraine, he would have easily realized that all that Russia wanted was a guarantee that Ukraine would not be admitted into NATO. He would have understood Russia’s reasoning that admitting Ukraine into NATO would have entitled the Pentagon and the CIA to install their bases, missiles, weaponry, tanks, and troops along Russia’s border. He would have understood why Russia would find that unacceptable.
Therefore, Kennedy would simply have issued the guarantee that Ukraine would never be admitted into NATO. He would have concluded that that would be a preferable outcome compared to a Russian invasion of Ukraine, which he would have known would have entailed massive death and destruction of innocent people. He also would have known that there would be a grave risk that such a war could turn into a nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. He would not have believed that such a risk would be worth taking. In his mind, it would have been much more preferable to simply issue the guarantee, no matter how much pressure he would have been getting from the Pentagon and the CIA to do the opposite.
How do we know that this would have been how Kennedy would have resolved the crisis? Because that’s how he resolved the Cuban Missile Crisis.
After the debacle of the CIA’s invasion at the Bay of Pigs, the Pentagon and the CIA were constantly exhorting Kennedy to initiate a full-scale military invasion of Cuba. They maintained that the communist regime in Cuba posed a grave threat to “national security.” The Pentagon even presented him with a plan called Operation Northwoods, which was false-flag operation designed to give Kennedy a pretext for ordering an invasion of Cuba.
The Cubans knew that the Pentagon and the CIA were hell-bent on invading the island and effecting regime change. Thus, once Kennedy discovered that the Soviets had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, he began trying to figure out why they would do that. He concluded that the missiles were intended to deter a U.S. invasion of Cuba or, in the case of an invasion, to enable the Cuban regime to defend itself. He also learned that the Soviets were chagrinned that the Pentagon had installed nuclear missiles in Turkey pointed at the Soviet Union.
Thus, to resolve the crisis, Kennedy simply issued a double guarantee to the Soviets. He guaranteed that the U.S. would not invade Cuba and he guaranteed the removal of the Pentagon’s missiles in Turkey. In return for that double guarantee, the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba and took them home. The crisis was over.
Needless to say, the Pentagon and the CIA were livid. They looked on Kennedy as an incompetent coward who had guaranteed the permanent existence of a grave threat to national security. One member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff compared Kennedy’s actions during the crisis to those of Neville Chamberlin’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich. He called Kennedy’s resolution of the crisis the biggest defeat in U.S. history.
By that time, Kennedy didn’t care what the Pentagon and the CIA thought because he held the entire military-intelligence establishment in deep disdain. Unlike Biden, he was willing to confront and oppose the fierce anti-Soviet and anti-Russian animus that characterized the national-security establishment. In fact, in his Peace Speech at American University the following year, he effectively announced an end to the Cold War and the establishment of a peaceful and friendly relationship with the Soviet Union.
Unfortunately, unlike Kennedy, Biden lacks the intestinal fortitude to oppose the fierce anti-Russia animus that still characterizes the U.S. military-intelligence establishment. As we have seen in the Ukraine crisis, Joe Biden is no John Kennedy.
We are under siege. A nihilistic fanaticism is running free among us thanks to the emergence of a journalistic “ethos” that establishes an almost complete equivalence between the “truth” and those utterances that support the strategic goals of the great economic and digital powers of our time.
A few months ago Facebook censored an article in the British Medical Journal that highlighted serious irregularities in Pfizer’s clinical vaccine trials. Then two weeks ago, fact-checkers from the Spanish websites Newtral and Maldita burst into the public square to accuse professor of Pharmacology, renowned expert in drug safety, and ex-WHO adviser, Joan Ramón Laporte of foisting lies and disinformation onto the Spanish populace. This, in reaction to Laporte’s testimony before a Spanish parliamentary commission investigating the country’s vaccination effort.
Despite his towering credentials, his intervention was quickly tarred as problematic by the media and subsequently banned by YouTube. The crime of this new Galileo Galilei? Alerting the assembled parliamentarians to the existence of grave procedural irregularities in the trials for the vaccines, and questioning the wisdom of a health strategy that aims to inject every Spanish child over the age of six with a new, poorly tested, and largely ineffective medication.
This incident reveals that the fact-checkers will attack anyone who does not accept the truth as dictated by the great economic and government centers of the world. This is not the usual official media obfuscation to which we’ve become accustomed over the years, but rather a brazen McCarthyist intimidation device, designed to frighten citizens into submission by appealing to their lowest and most ignoble instincts, an approach lain bare in Maldita’s smug and Manichaean slogan: “Join and support us in our battle against lies.”
Under this harsh binary logic, an internationally famous scientist like Laporte is not even given the opportunity to be judged wrong or misguided in good faith. Rather, he is immediately accused of being a willful and dangerous liar who must be immediately banished from public view.
Fact-checkers as destroyers of science and the public sphere
Nowadays the word “fascist” is used so profligately that it has lost most of its meaning. But if we are really serious about describing the operational logic of fact-checking entities like Maldita and Newtral we must recur precisely to that term, adding the prefix “neo” to avoid confusion with the original version of this totalitarian sensibility.
Whereas the original model of fascism sought to enforce social conformity through physical intimidation, the new variant seeks to do so by aggressively enforcing the “acceptable” (to big power, of course) parameters of both scientific discourse and the idea of the public sphere, a direct product, like science, of the Enlightenment. Their objective is to liquidate these flawed but essential spaces of debate in all but name, and thus deprive us of two of the only remaining vehicles we have for defending ourselves against the abuses meted out by the liberal state and its corporate and military allies.
The fact-checking industry was born as a consequence of fake news, that great invented crisis whose sole objective was to provide a pretext for enhancing elite control over any democratic impulse that might arise in response to the sudden and often harsh imposition of neoliberalism and digital technologies in our lives.
But what initially began as a pathetic, overreaching and classist attempt to prevent the unwashed from even considering, say, that people in Hillary Clinton’s entourage might have prostituted minors in a pizza-house basement, quickly morphed, during the Covid era, into something much more sinister and consequential.
It is now the menacing cudgel of an ever-growing exercise in illegitimate corporate and state power, a weapon that allows elites to effectively disappear world-renowned experts like Laporte who dare to put the interests of society ahead of the economic interests and control agendas of Big Pharma and Big Tech.
These Digital Brownshirts are just the most visible and forward-leaning elements of a much broader effort to install the logic of the algorithm—a providential and vertically-imposed concept of truth that vitiates traditional fact-finding and admits neither human intelligence nor scientific debate—as a cornerstone of our human interactions and cognitive processes. Under this paradigm, a linear relationship between power and truth is presented as wholly and completely natural.
When analyzed in this light we could say that while the libels launched against Laporte by Maldita and Newtral are not strictly-speaking algorithmic in origin, they are profoundly algorithmic in spirit in that they are designed, like Neil Ferguson’s well-publicized if completely errant epidemiological models, to radically preempt the search for truth over time through empirical observation and informed debate.
The methods these fact-checkers use to dictate what is to be presented to the public as “true” operate under few, if any known, procedural standards. Rather, in forming their “arguments” it seems they simply cherry-pick the opinions of an expert or two who is known to be on board with the particular “algorithmic” project of social change or social mobilization.
This, regardless of the at times massive gap between the slim credentials and in-field experience of the project-compliant experts (not to mention the fact-checking journalists) and the demonstrated international skill and renown of the objects of their efforts in cognitive cleansing like Laporte, or earlier on in the Covid crisis, Michael Levitt and John Ioannidis.
In short, these fact-checking processes follow neither the basic principles of journalistic ethics—which requires that one enter into a given question without any unduly strong presuppositions—or the necessary back and forth of the scientific method, which insures, or is at least designed to insure, that dissident opinions be considered in the process of establishing operative, if still always provisional, notions of truth.
The only recognizable “strength” the new fact-checkers have—and here we see perhaps the clearest link to the thugs that were strategically deployed by Mussolini and Hitler— is their backing from the very highest levels of social and economic power.
The seriousness of the current situation lies in the way the fact-checkers have—before the often dumbfounded acquiescence of much of the academy itself—successfully arrogated to themselves the right, for all practical purposes, to smash the day-to-day freedom and epistemic authority of scientists, as well as the processes designed to insulate intellectual inquiry from the undue impingements of concentrated power, or to put it more simply, from the possibility that an oligarchy-sponsored mediocrity, or pack of mediocrities, can summarily cancel the widely institutionally recognized wisdom of a Joan Ramon Laporte.
The authoritarianism of the fact-checkers not only cripples science but effectively annuls the very idea of the public sphere by naturalizing the idea that the robust, and at times, conflictual exchange of ideas is in some way perverse. Is it any wonder that observing a world like this, many of our students, who should at their age be bursting with a desire for healthy conflicts in the service of growth, have confessed to us both in private how scared they are to express themselves freely and openly in class?
If the largely anonymous fact-checkers are the shock troops of this campaign to override both epistemological rigor and the idea of the public sphere, the media-anointed “science-explainers” are its field generals.
There is, of course nothing wrong with seeking to make often arcane fields of knowledge accessible to the general public. Indeed when done well by a real scientist like Carl Sagan it is a high art.
The problem comes, as is so often the case today, when the popularizer lacks a grasp of the fundamental debates in the field, and from there, the ability to confidently wade into them as a participant. Painfully aware that he or she is in over his head, they will do what most people unable to compete on their own merits in the field to which they have been assigned tend to do: seek the protection in the arms of power.
This produces a perverse reality, in which the people ostensibly tasked with introducing the public to the complexity of both science and public policy, end up shielding them from an acquaintance with either. And knowing their continued prominence depends on pleasing the powers who have elevated them to the spotlight and who are seeking to destroy existing epistemologies of knowledge in order to facilitate the imposition of their algorithmic logic, they take delight in mocking those few highly accomplished people who have decided not to relinquish their principles in the face of the constant propaganda onslaught.
A good example of this practice of hooliganism in Spain is Rocio Vidal, who works for La Sexta, the country’s most-watched TV network. From a swivel chair in her home office, she ridicules anyone, from the singer and actor Miguel Bosé to the head of Allergic Diseases at Ourense Hospital in Galicia who questions the official dogma of the unprecedented virulence of Covid, and the self-evident wonders of the vaccines. The specific crime of the doctor from Galicia? Stating that the not fully tested Covid mRNA vaccines are, in fact, not fully tested and thus are by definition experimental.
What these medical influencers are doing, no doubt with the full knowledge, approval and perhaps even training of the great financial, governmental and pharmaceutical powers is to effect—under the rubric of the freedom of the press—a rapid sorpasso of the institutions that, with all their faults, have long guaranteed a more or less reliable structure for adjudication of competing claims of scientific truth. Unaccustomed to the aggressiveness, relentlessness and speed of these attacks, most doctors have, sadly, reacted like the proverbial deer in the headlights to them, hoping against hope that this plague of intellectual vandalism will somehow, someway be brought to an end. But it would appear that no such relief is in the offing.
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of this inquisitorial logic and praxis in the long run is that it tries to make citizens believe that there is no relationship between science and politics, and that politics—the art of dissent—is a dangerous practice that must be eschewed by every conscientious citizen.
The fact-checkers as the great landowners of the new virtual world
We must face the fact that the news verification agencies are part of the global control framework set in motion by those who claim for themselves the right to be the owners of all our time and and all of our actions. Behind information verification software services like Newsguard, we find fervent defenders of illegal spying on citizens like former CIA and NSA chief and congressional perjurer Michael Hayden, and US army assassination team leader Stanley McChrystal.
The International Fact-Checking Network to which the aforementioned Spanish fact-check agencies Maldita and Newtral belong is financed in part by Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay and a major player in, among many other shady oligarchic pursuits, the NATO-linked Allegiance for Securing Democracy.
There is nothing politically neutral about these people. Nor has any of them ever shown a great predilection or support for disinterested intellectual inquiry. What all three have shown in abundance is an abiding delight in marshaling power for the present US-led global order and the exercise of often brutally administered schemes of control over others.
The prime objective of fact-checkers—as recognized, for example, by Newtral on its website—is to use algorithms to harvest and manage citizen information, and in this way, usher in a new era in which the minds of individuals will be so seamlessly “pre-directed” to “positive” and “benevolent” ends and behaviors (as so defined by the members of the enlightened classes) that politics in all its forms will come to be seen as superfluous.
This explains why, between them, Google and Facebook currently employ 40,000 “verifiers” who exercise an invisible censorship aimed at swaying our perceptions of the world in ways deemed to be “constructive” by the controllers of those firms and those with whom they have forged political and business alliances.
These efforts lie at the core of the post-humanist gospel as preached by people like Klaus Schwab and Ray Kurzweil. Their clear message to us about the coming world is that while you might be born free, your destiny and the design of your being—and what we used to call its unique sensibilities— will be firmly entrusted to others. Like who? Like the aforementioned gentlemen and their friends who, of course, have much more far-seeing minds than your own.
But if there is one thing that the Digital Brownshirts fear more than the Wicked Witch of the West fears water, it is real politics. Thus far, these informational terrorists have been able to exploit our natural indulgence of the value of free speech for their own ends. Let’s be clear. These censors are, in effect, engaging in mass consumer fraud. And if it is illegal to sell horse meat as beef, and refined sugar as a nutritional supplement, then it should also be illegal for hired guns to arrogate to themselves the right to define truth and destroy long-standing deliberative processes and institutions.
Sadly, however, we cannot wait for our deeply compromised political classes to take the lead on this necessary criminal prosecution. Rather we, as informed citizens, must take the lead in denouncing these vandals and the powers that have cynically unleashed them upon our shared scientific and civic spaces.
In this process, we must help our ever more present-minded citizens, enslaved to the idea—so useful to the elites— that the world is fundamentally entropic, that these nihilists did not just appear on their TV screens by accident, but rather that they were placed there to do someone else’s dirty work, and that our survival as free people depends on the tenacity with which we hunt down those “someone elses” and subject them to one of the more fundamental types political action: popular justice.
David Souto Alcalde is a writer and assistant professor of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College. He is specialized in the history of republicanism, early modern culture and in the relations between politics and literature.
The Army’s premier biolab changed its mission statement after a 2014 report by high-ranking officials concluded its work has become less useful since its Cold War heyday and no longer delivers medical products for service members.
The report, which had not been previously released, was obtained through a state public records request by U.S. Right to Know.
The challenges at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, come to light at a time of fierce debate about the degree to which research on novel pathogens contributes tangible benefits. Scientists with different theories about the COVID-19 pandemic’s origins have been tangled in arguments over whether certain work on dangerous pathogens can help predict pandemics or poses unacceptable risks.
Located 50 miles outside of Washington at Fort Detrick, USAMRIID was once charged with responding to the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program, but stopped developing bioweapons in 1969. It now conducts research on biological threats including Ebola, Zika, anthrax and plague, and conducts research for universities and private companies. It employs about 900 military, civilian and contract researchers.
The global biological threat landscape has changed due to gain-of-function technology, the limited capacity of the intelligence community to identify biological threats, and the proliferation of “dual use” research programs that generate pathogens that could be harmful in the wrong hands, the report states.
USAMRIID has in recent years suffered many troubles, including biosafety breaches, a shut down of its high security work, and accusations from Department of Defense leadership of wasting taxpayer funds.
The report by government experts, including former USAMRIID Commander David Franz, describes an agency adrift as America’s first biodefense research facility struggled to deliver on the promises in its mission statement.
The report concludes that the lab’s work may not always generate medical advances, and should not be expected to in the eyes of its funders in Washington.
“The emphasis on products to the warfighter has become less relevant,” the report reads. “Because prophylaxis for ‘biological agents’ (traditional vaccines) requires great specificity and a period of at least weeks before protection is achieved, the era of vaccines for the force, one of USARMIID’s greatest historic strengths, is essentially over.”
The experts behind the report recommended changing the mission of the military lab away from generating vaccines and drugs.
It appears USAMRIID’s leaders listened.
By Jan. 2015 – several months after study’s authors had convened in June 2014 – the vision of the lab had changed on its website from “right product, right time for the Warfighter” to a more general statement about leadership in medical biological defense, according to changes accessed via the WayBack Machine.
“To be the leader in the advancement of medical biological defense with world renowned experts dedicated to protecting our military forces and the nation,” USAMRIID’s vision statement now reads.
In the years since USAMRIID’s 2014 consultants fought to prove its importance to the Pentagon, the lab has faced allegations of “financial mismanagement,” according to a Defense Department letter reported by CQ Roll Call.
Other problems
USAMRIID is one of two facilities at Fort Detrick with laboratories designed to handle the most dangerous pathogens in the world, so-called BSL-4 labs. There are 14 BSL-4 labs in North America.
These labs have come under greater scrutiny amid concerns by Republicans and some independent biosecurity experts that the COVID-19 pandemic may have arisen from a lab accident in China.
USAMRIID has not developed a COVID-19 vaccine candidate, though the lab has tested COVID-19 vaccines in the pre-clinical trial stage, according to Caree Vander Linden, public affairs officer at USAMRIID.
Vander Linden also provided U.S. Right to Know with a spreadsheet of 43 scientific papers produced by the lab about COVID-19. For example, the lab recently announced engineering hamsters to increase their expression of the human ACE2 receptor — a key protein used by SARS-CoV-2 to enter airway cells — to enable the study of more severe disease. Remdesivir, the first therapeutic with approval from the Food and Drug Administration to treat COVID-19, was also developed with the help of USAMRIID.
Vander Linden did not respond to questions about the report and the change of the USAMRIID mission statement. Franz did not respond to requests for comment.
Morale has plummeted since the deadly release of anthrax from the lab in 2001, the 2014 report suggests. That has been worsened by the expansion of work on biorisks at other labs. Now USAMRIID struggles to retain talent. Much of the work at USAMRIID is that of a contract research organization performing tasks for the private sector.
“The concept that USAMRIID is more of an ‘insurance policy’ to deal with the unknown and unexpected than a ‘factory’ to produce medical ‘things’ for the soldier should be understood by all,” it states.
The report criticizes the biosafety regulations at the Fort Detrick lab, saying the routine presence of inspectors is a distraction.
“The heavy regulatory burden … and oversight following the 9-11 attacks and the anthrax letters has diverted both funding and human resources from the research mission,” the report states.
Yet in the years since, serious safety breaches have occurred at USAMRIID. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flagged failures to “implement and maintain containment procedures sufficient to contain select agents or toxins” in biosafety level 3 and 4 laboratories, the Frederick News-Post reported, culminating in a shutdown of USAMRIID’s two top security labs and a suspension of its registration with the Federal Select Agent Program.
Though work resumed in November 2019, the lab’s Defense Department funding remained frozen until April 2020.
Both the Biden and Trump administrations have sought cuts to USAMRIID. But members of the Maryland congressional delegation have fought to maintain funding levels.
Congress appropriated $130 million for the expansion of USAMRIID in fiscal 2021.
Unpredictable threats
While USAMRIID once focused on responding to the Soviet Union, new biological threats are more diverse and harder to nail down, according to the report.
“The intelligence community is limited in its ability to identify specific threats,” the report states.
This unpredictability is due in part to so-called “gain-of-function” research, a term used to describe research that can make pathogens more virulent or transmissible.
“Threat agents … might include traditional ones to those that blur the line between chemistry and biology or even those modified through ‘gain of function’ techniques,” the report reads.
Potentially dangerous biological research is now characterized by “small footprint, dual-use offensive capabilities that might be found in a few large and medium nation states,” according to the report.
Two of the 2014 report’s authors – Franz and former director of the National Science Foundation Rita Colwell – have connections to EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit under investigation for its gain-of-function work on coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Colwell is on the board of directors, while Franz was a booster of the organization, according to a 2019 social media post.
Other consultants who coauthored the report include former secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig; former deputy commander-in-chief of United States Strategic Command Robert Hinson; former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority Carol Linden; and former chief of staff of the U.S. Army Dennis J. Reimer; executive director of the Maryland Biotechnology Center Judy Britz; distinguished research fellow at National Defense University Seth Carus; Harvard professor of biologically inspired engineering David Walt; and NIH researcher Richard Whitley.
The “majority” of children in the U.S. have already been infected with COVID-19, The Washington Post today reported, after reviewing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The Post’s report begs the question: If so many kids have natural immunity to the virus, and, as reported Monday, the vaccines aren’t very effective in children 5 to 11 years old, why are public health officials, schools, businesses and others pushing to vaccinate kids?
During a security conference in Munich on Feb. 18, Bill Gates said:
“Sadly, the virus itself, particularly the variant called Omicron, is [a] type of vaccine — that is, it creates both B cell and T cell immunity — and it’s done a better job of getting out to the world population than we have with vaccines.”
Did Gates actually admit natural immunity to Omicron is succeeding where vaccines have failed — and that he’s “sad” about that?
Gates isn’t the only one talking about natural immunity these days.
Eric Topol, executive vice president of Scripps Research last month argued for including an option of natural immunity in the definition of “fully vaccinated.”
Even vaccine advocate Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee, is going to bat for recognizing natural immunity to COVID.
During a Jan. 25 interview, Offit described a meeting with Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy where Offit was asked, along with three others, whether he thought natural immunity should count as a vaccine.
Offit and one other person said yes, natural immunity should count. But they were out-voted, leading U.S. health officials to decide natural immunity should not be recognized in the U.S, as an alternative to a vaccine mandate.
To this day, the CDC maintains this position in its official guidance for the public — despite the agency’s own studies showing natural immunity against COVID is superior to the immunity provided by COVID vaccines.
Some U.S. lawmakers think the CDC is wrong, as evidenced by the introduction of two the Natural Immunity Is Real Act in the Senate (S.2846) and the House (H.R. 5590).
The bills would require “all federal agencies to acknowledge and consider natural immunity to COVID-19 when promulgating any regulation related to the COVID-19 public health emergency.
But for now, in the U.S. at least, those states, businesses and schools requiring “proof of COVID vaccination” make no exceptions for people — including kids — who recovered from COVID, and therefore have natural immunity.
UK data show most unvaccinated kids already have natural immunity
Unfortunately, the CDC doesn’t provide up-to-date seroprevalence data for children in the U.S., but UK data may shed light on children and natural immunity.
“In the week beginning 10 January 2022, the percentage who would have tested positive for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 ranged from 90.2% to 93.3% for children aged 12 to 15 years and from 63.3% to 72.7% for those aged 8 to 11 years across the UK. Estimates show the percentage of children testing positive for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 at or above 42 ng/ml.”
In the UK, vaccines have not yet been made available for the under 12 age group (except those who are at very high risk). The 63.3 to 72.7% is thus overwhelmingly due to natural immunity and not vaccination.
Also, as noted by the ONS, individuals testing below the threshold level may also have natural immunity, presumably in the form of T cells and B cells, where the antibodies have waned. Thus these data may be underestimates of the true population-level immunity.
“It is estimated that over 85% of all children aged 5 to 11 will have had prior SARS-CoV-2 infection by the end of January 2022 with roughly half of these infections due to the Omicron variant. Natural immunity arising from prior infection will contribute towards protection against future infection and severe disease.”
The UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) on Dec. 22, 2021, authorized the vaccine only for high-risk children ages 5 to 11.
Yet despite the encouraging data on natural immunity in this age group, the JCVI on Feb. 16, in updated guidance, expanded its recommendations to include a “non-urgent offer” of the vaccine to children who are not in a clinical risk group.
To be clear, the UK government authorized an mRNA vaccine for the original SARS-CoV-2 strain, to be made available in April, to a group of 5 million young healthy children — 85% or more of whom are expected to have natural immunity.
As John Campbell, Ph.D., said, if and when a future COVID wave ever comes, any possible beneficial effect from these shots will likely have waned.
Studies may explain why children are protected from SARS-COV2
A study in 2020 reported that cross cellular immunity and immunomodulation from previous existing childhood vaccines may provide protection against COVID infections.
A more recent study of children as young as 3 years old measured spike-specific T cell responses and found they were twice as high as those in adults. The authors suggested this is in part due to pre-existing cross-reactive responses to seasonal coronaviruses.
A January 2022 study demonstrated a protective effect from high levels of pre-existing immune cells generated by other coronaviruses like the common cold, which attack the proteins within the virus (nucleocapsid), rather than the spike protein on the virus.
According to the senior author of the study:
“The spike protein is under intense immune pressure from vaccine-induced antibodies which drives evolution of vaccine escape mutants. In contrast, the internal proteins targeted by the protective T cells we identified mutate much less.
“Consequently, they are highly conserved between the various SARS-CoV-2 variants, including omicron. This suggests that the existing cross-reactive T cells may provide better protection than an mRNA vaccine that focuses only on the original variant spike protein.”
Despite these studies, the latest data on how many children likely have immunity because they’ve recovered from COVID and the well-established scientific theory that natural immunity to a pathogen is superior to vaccine-induced immunity, places like New York City continue to demand proof of vaccination for all children age 5 and over in order for them to participate in extracurricular school activities, visit museums, zoos, theaters, gyms, and restaurants.
For the most comprehensive list of 150 research articles on natural immunity visit the Brownstone Institute.
LAST Thursday a group of senior doctors and scientists, alarmed by the Government’s deaf ear to their call for child Covid vaccination to be paused, convened a press conference to set out each and every reason, scientific and ethical, why this is so urgent. That the JCVI went into terrorist lockdown in response to four female doctors delivering yet another letter to its ‘chair’, Professor Wei Shen Lim, prior to a press conference that not one MSM health editor bothered to attend, is a scandal in itself. Far worse is the scandal of ‘guinea pig’ science that ever younger children are being subjected to, risking their health and futures for no need. This is what the press conference presentations, starting today with Dr Ros Jones’s account, make incontrovertibly clear.
Dr Ros Jones
As a retired paediatrician, I signed up for work with the General Medical Council [to assist with the Covid outbreak] back in April 2020; but actually they didn’t need me because what was very obvious early on was that the children’s ward was eerily quiet and they certainly didn’t need retired paediatricians going back to work. So that was a blessing and I went back to retirement. Unfortunately, there have been many other problems for children [arising] from the pandemic management.
It was about a year ago that I first saw advertised, on an evening BBC News, recruitment for a children’s vaccine in Oxford saying they were recruiting children aged five to 15. I was very shocked because at that stage we had no long-term adult safety data at all. I contacted Professor Pollard who was the professor leading the investigation and also, coincidentally, is [joint] chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and immunisation [JCVI].
I emailed him. I’ve known him through work, and he replied within the hour, saying: ‘Ooh, hi Ros, you’re quite right, we don’t know it’s safe, that’s why we’re doing the study’. He assured me it was a small pilot study, and if it was effective, then they would be looking to do a properly powered, full-size study. ‘There’s no way children will be receiving this vaccine within the year.’
I thought, Okay, but it was only two months after that that the Pfizer vaccine got its temporary authorisation in the States, and that’s when I wrote my first letter to the Government’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). We had about 60 names on the first letter, I think, and really we got that letter in before the MHRA had authorised [the vaccine for children]. They didn’t reply. They didn’t reply for ten weeks. We got a reply two hours after they had authorised the vaccine for children.
We wrote again, because every time the letters’ replies are just very bland; they don’t answer any of the individual questions that we posed about potential safety for children. They have usually been to say it’s the responsibility of the MHRA. But the MHRA, when they approved temporary authorisation for the 12s to 15s, they only looked at the Pfizer trial data. They did not look at the real world data. They said they haven’t. So they are looking at the data from a drug company that is going to be making all the profits on this.
So I thought I would start today by reminding us of the basics of how drug safety benefit works.
1. When the disease is worse than the cure, that is, when the disease is quite serious and the treatment has minimal side effects, I think we all understand that all drugs and treatments have potential side effects, but as long as the disease is worse than the cure, you’ve got a potentially useful drug.
2. When the disease more or less balances the cure, this is the next level down which is the sort of thing like you might be able to buy over the counter, but the NHS wouldn’t be spending its money on it, but at least it doesn’t do you any harm.
3. When the disease is milder than the cure. Of course, the worst situation is this, the bottom one, and that’s not a situation we want to be in. Now, obviously, [there are] quite a lot of drugs when they’re being developed, that may be discovered during the development phase, and drugs never reach the market. But it’s not uncommon for drugs to get to market where rarer side effects come to light or perhaps delayed side effects that have not been picked up on the original trials. And when that happens, then a drug gets either withdrawn completely or really restricted in its use.
So just a quick example, of course, with the AstraZeneca [vaccine] and the blood clots. At the beginning we were told, ‘Oh no, ten million doses and only ten cases,’ but when you actually looked at it, there was a very strong age stratification and it was then withdrawn for anybody under 40. So that was acting on a signal. But we turn now to Pfizer. And with the Pfizer, what seems to be the problem largely is myocarditis and that is very much age-related. So we’re in a situation where children have the least impact from Covid itself, but they have the most impact from potential side effects, particularly myocarditis.
In the US, 16-to-17-year-olds are the highest group with an incidence of 1 in 9443 for this complication. Israel, they looked a bit more systematically [and] they were the first people to spot this problem. From the moment they noticed it, they sent letters out to all their paediatricians, all their emergency departments, to tell them to look out for this. And they found [it to be] 1 in 6,230. This is young men after their second dose of Pfizer. And it’s interesting because their data – they looked at all age groups, and for the over-30s it was 1 in 72,000. So there’s a tenfold difference in risk if you are over 30 versus under 20. But the Covid risk is tenfold the other way. So your risk-benefit balance has changed by 100-fold by your age. This mantra, ‘safe and effective’, is not fit for purpose.
Hong Kong rolled the vaccine out to children a bit later, by which time they knew about myocarditis and they have just looked systematically from the beginning of the programme, and they, in fact, decided to halt the second dose when they found – for the Hong Kong 12-17s- it was 1 in 2680 getting myocarditis. And that’s just at the stage that here we went from one dose to two doses.
It’s described as mild and it goes away. But there have been child deaths reported in the States. I’ve personally been in Zoom calls with the group of cardiologists from the States who’ve been doing cardiac MRI scans, and they found that 89 per cent of these children, whose symptoms had gone, had significant changes on the scans with swelling and potential scarring of heart muscle. And the JCVI, in the minutes of their meetings last summer, wanted to have six months to follow that up and see what’s happened to those kids over time. But that was overruled, as we know.
You can watch Dr Jones and her colleagues here in a full recording.
For quite some time the British have accepted that British Jewish organizations have hijacked the political discourse. As has happened in other Western countries, the British political establishment has engaged is a relentless rant against antisemitsm. Sometime the focus drifts for a day or two. An alleged ‘Russian nerve gas attack’ provided a 48 hour pause. Occasionally we bomb Arabs in the name of ‘human intervention’ only to realize a day or two later that we have, once again, followed a premeditated foreign agenda. But, somehow, we always return to the antisemitism debate, as if our media and politicians are a herd of flies gravitating to a pile of poop. … continue
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