Last year, cartoons began to appear depicting an endless cycle of variants and government responses. They call to mind the definition of insanity (misattributed to Einstein) as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Or perhaps the less well known line from a 1990s Stephen King miniseries “Hell is repetition.”
The direction of public health policy over the past two years has been difficult to understand. It may be a fool’s errand to use logic and reason for something that by design makes no sense. But coming at it as I do with no prior education in medicine or epidemiology, crude tools such as logic and common sense may still be useful: The basic principles of reality are true for all endeavors. For a plan to work, it must work within a finite time; for every on ramp, there must be an exit.
We started out with “Two weeks to flatten the curve.” If nothing else can be said in favor of this plan, credit must be given for how well it was explained. Pictures like this were clear enough. With my university-level education in math and physics, I understood that the area under the curve was expected to remain equal under both alternatives: the one with and the other without “precautions” (as the label in the diagram euphemistically refers to life under communism). The peak of the curve would be lower, at the cost of the epidemic being extended in duration.
While the plan might or might not work, it is possible to state the premise without contradicting laws of logic or common sense. The flattening plan does accept that nearly everyone will eventually be exposed and the contagion will exhaust itself. If the plan enables some people to delay their exposure, up to a point, that could buy doctors some time to better learn how to treat them. Or perhaps a miraculous vaccine will be introduced that would create sterilizing immunity and halt the outbreak in its tracks enabling those who had delayed to avoid infection entirely.
And doctors did learn how to treat the disease, but treatment is actively fought by the medical establishment. The FDA – the drug regulator in the US – tweeted you should only get treated for covid if you are a horse. Even today, you can get banned from social media for suggesting that it is possible to treat the disease. So any possible advantage in developing a treatment was wasted.
While the plan was clear, it was not guaranteed to work. Subtle effects could undermine the simple story told by the picture. Perhaps everyone staying at home will not help because people will get infected at home. Or perhaps too many people must leave home because essential critical infrastructure workers such as marijuana dispensaries must remain open to keep society running.
Some suggested then a policy that postpones population immunity would give the virus more time to mutate. Given enough time, people who were infected and have developed natural immunity to an earlier variant would face a virus sufficiently different that they might become infected again. Along these lines, biotech executive Vivek Ramaswamy and medical professor Dr Apoorva Ramaswamy MD, writing in the Wall Street Journal, question whether we should even try to slow the spread when “Speeding It May Be Safer.” Cognitive scientist Mark Changzi suggests “slowing the spread among the healthy not-at-risk, which just raises the frail’s chances of getting infected.” “Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, who have been asserting that you can’t vaccinate your way out of a pandemic for months” believe that vaccination during an outbreak accelerates the evolution of the virus away from the version targeted by the vaccine.
Quite likely the “precautions” did nothing to make the curve flatter. With the benefit of hindsight we can observe that outbreaks of the virus in proximate US states (or neighboring nations that are similar in size and demographics in other regions of the world) rise and fall side by side in cyclical surges, regardless of when or if efforts to slow the spread were made. There is no impact on the variability of any public health metric based on when a “precaution” was undertaken.
After the hospitalizations peaked and then declined to near zero in the spring of 2020, I naively expected that we had done what we could, and it was over. Whether we had flattened the curve, or, the virus did what it would have done anyway, was at that point irrelevant. Instead of ending the precautions, there was an unstated shift from the original strategy to a new one. Unlike the original, the new policy was not clearly explained. I suspect the reason is that it could not have been explained without it becoming obvious that it did not make any sense.
“Flatten the curve” assumes contagions come to an end – either through immunity or viruses burn themselves out for reasons we do not fully understand. All things come to an end. Even the plague of the Black Death ran out of gas before it wiped out the entire human race. If an outbreak ends when most of us have been exposed (and either died or developed immunity), how can slowing it down be said to save lives? Is it not the best we can hope for that some people are exposed and suffer the consequences later rather than sooner?
Evidence of the new reality appeared to me one day when I was stuck in a traffic jam, on a trip I (and many of my neighbors) made in violation of my locality’s “shelter in place” order. As I puzzled over this new reality, I noticed overhead digital signage (paid for by my governor’s massive ad spend on Covid propaganda), stating: “Stay at home: save lives.” This was the initial wave of a propaganda tsunami imploring us to “slow the spread.”
A story about a superspreader who went to a party and infected multiple people who subsequently died attributed the deaths to the careless person who probably did not wear a mask. Was there some alternate version of reality in which the dead partygoers lived out the rest of their natural life never being exposed to a virus to which they were vulnerable? Should the superspreader be held responsible for their exposure, or was it only a matter of time until the virus found them, one way or another?
Sanctimonious lockdowners heaped scorn and ridicule on countries that did not slow the spread. A small industry of curve-fitting explanations were offered to explain the “success stories:” they locked down, they wore face masks, they tested, they quarantined, they contact-traced, they social distanced. They did as they were told. They obeyed authority. And we should do likewise.
According to Dr. Anthony Fauci MD, it was the time for us ornery Americans to do as we were told. In retrospect every one of the virtuous nations had its own spike or two, or three, often after getting fully vaccinated, taking a victory lap, and dislocating both of their shoulders by patting themselves on the back overly vigorously.
Consider testing. Some virtuous nations tested. Based on the long lines of cars to get into the popup centers, the United States tested a lot too. When former president Donald Trump suggested that – perhaps – we were overtesting, he was subjected to enormous ridicule. Yet how could testing help slow the spread of a virus? By itself testing does nothing other than identify sick people.
Can a test do a better job at identifying sick people than they can do on their own simply by noticing whether they have symptoms? If testing once a week does not help, does testing twice a week? And if so, then why do we care about a test result, if asymptomatic people are not contagious? In reality testing produced too many false positives to be useful.
Testing could in theory help if combined with contact tracing and quarantines to isolate the infected people. Contact tracing was another ritual of the success stories – yet contact tracing could not possibly work if someone could be infected by coming within six feet of a sick person or walking down the same side of the street because the second-order contacts of contacts would rapidly explode to include everyone in an entire city or region. This was another instance of Yogi Berra’s observation that “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”
I wondered what the goals of the new policy of “slow the spread” could be. Was it zero-covid? Zero-covid was the objective of a small cult of fanatics that never gained much traction in the US. A serious go at it would require a country to permanently ban inbound international travel. This was done in a small and tightly controlled nation where a friend of mine lives. According to my friend, they had very low levels of infection; however, the nation’s economy was tourism-based and the continued success of the policy requires that travelers not enter the country. The operation was a success, the patient died.
Several other countries tried and failed zero-covid. Antarctica, which should have been a slam dunk, could not pull it off. Nor could an isolated island in the Pacific. In one hilarious story from the zero-aspiring nation of Australia, the virus escaped from jail when a Covid security guard hooked up with a detained person at a quarantine facility.
We were not flattening the curve, nor did it look like a strategy of total eradication. We were in a strange middle ground. At best we were pushing the pain into the future but with no plan to ever deal with it. The goals and exit conditions of the plan were not clearly explained. I did at one point find a statement by Dr. Fauci that preventive measures could drive the disease down to a very low level. Was it assumed to remain low forever? If not, then from that low base, outbreaks could be somehow contained?
University of California Professor Dr. Vinay Prasad MD wrote about a similar message from President Biden:
So when people heard in Summer 2020 that Biden aimed to “get covid under control,” some people imagined an optimistic state of affairs whereby, once we all got vaccinated or wore masks for just 100 days (link), covid might be suppressed to such a permanently low level that most of us could forget about it, just as we forget about polio. Such people imagined a one-time, short-term effort to “get covid under control,” like unlocking a door.
If we are to believe that a worldwide pandemic grew from an outbreak of twelve people in Wuhan, China to infect nearly the entire world (even indigenous tribes in the Amazon jungle who are by definition quarantined) why would it not do the same when we emerged from our underground fallout shelters? What if through assiduously standing in small circles painted on the floor in grocery stores and wearing underwear on our faces, we succeeded in driving the number of Covid infections down to a very small number? To pick a number, for example, twelve people. Why would the contagion not, in the absence of broader acquired immunity, spread again from that new base of twelve, until eventually reaching all of those remaining uninfected?
It took me some time to give it a name. I settled on “suppression.” The fundamental reason that suppression is not a policy is that it has no exit. For a thing to work it must work within a limited time. If the measures to slow the spread succeeded in slowing it, then what? The nature of the off ramp is the answer to the question, “What happens when we stop doing it?” If the answer is, “It would go right back to what it was doing before,” then there is no exit.
During 2020 I had people tell me that we could not end the lockdown because the epidemic would pick up right where it left off and millions would die AND (sometimes the same people ) that if we keep up the restrictive measures for a while then we could stop because the virus would not come back. A bit of logic rules out the possibility that the virus could both come back and not come back.
Do we then spend the rest of our lives acting out Covid theater? Dr. Fauci said that he would never shake hands again. Blue check marks fret about quarantining their children. Jenin Younes reflected on a survey in which hypochondriac epidemiologists who are afraid to open their mail explain that they now consider a normal life to be dangerously reckless. Substack author Eugyppius writes about a medical journal editor who “can’t work out what we’re even doing here, but he wants us to keep doing it.”
Dr Prasad explained the difference between finite and infinite strategies:
Even if most of Biden’s voters agreed with his campaign promise to “get covid under control” in the abstract, this slogan does not specify whether the state of being “under control” involves a one-time effort, or a sustained effort over time. If you unlock a door, you do it once and you can forget it; if you lift an overhead hatch, maybe you have to keep holding it up so that it doesn’t fall back down again.
Slowing the spread – if such a thing is even possible – means we get to the same place later rather than sooner. Flat or not, it is over when you reach the right tail of the curve. The strange middle ground of slowing the spread with no exit condition, would, if tried, ruin our lives forever. Are you willing to live under covid restrictions for the rest of your life? And your children for the rest of their lives and all subsequent generations? For some measures that slow the spread of disease, such as indoor plumbing, garbage removal and better diet, the answer is yes. But if our forebears during the plague of the Black Death had adopted a covid-like attempt at suppression, no one would have gone outdoors since the 15th century.
During this time of insanity, some of us went about our lives as best we could and ignored the restrictions. The rest of the world is now coming to terms with the understanding that the “precautions” don’t do much. At best what is going to happen anyway, happens. If there is no off ramp then the change is either permanent or it will go on until failure is evident and people stop caring. Then they will go back to normal one by one.
Robert Blumen is a software engineer and podcast host who writes occasionally about political and economic issues.
February 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights |
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Former Premier of Newfoundland expresses pure passion for his country.
OTTAWA – The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms today filed a lawsuit in Federal Court seeking to strike down the federal government’s mandatory Covid-19 vaccine requirements for air travellers. The court action is on behalf of several Canadians from across Canada whose Charter rights and freedoms have been infringed.
On October 30, 2021, the federal government announced that anyone travelling by air, train, or ship, must be fully vaccinated. The travel vaccination mandate has prevented approximately 6 million unvaccinated Canadians (15% of Canada’s population) from travel within Canada and prevents them from flying out of Canada. Some of the Canadians involved in the lawsuit cannot travel to help sick loved ones, get to work, visit family and friends, take international vacations, and live ordinary lives.
The main applicant in the case is former Newfoundland Premier, The Honourable A. Brian Peckford. Mr. Peckford, pictured, is the only surviving drafter and signatory 40 years after the 1982 Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted.
“It is becoming more obvious that being vaccinated does not stop people from getting Covid and does not stop them from spreading it”, says the former Premier. “The government has not shown that the policy makes flying safer—it simply discriminates”, he notes. “When I heard Prime Minister Trudeau call the unvaccinated ‘racists,’ ‘misogynists, ‘anti-science’ and ‘extremist’ and his musing ‘do we tolerate these people?’ it became clear he is sowing divisions and advancing his vendetta against a specific group of Canadians—this is completely against the democratic and Canadian values I love about this country”, adds Mr. Peckford.
“The federal travel ban has segregated me from other Canadians. It’s discriminatory, violates my Charter rights and that’s why I am fighting the travel ban,” explains Mr. Peckford.
The Justice Centre’s legal challenge cites violations of Charter rights including mobility, life, liberty and security of the person, privacy, and discrimination. The lawsuit also challenges whether the Minister of Transportation has the jurisdiction to use aviation safety powers to enforce public health measures.
In discussing effective border control measures at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, Canada’s chief medical officer, Dr. Tam, said: “As you move further away from that epicentre, any other border measures are much less effective. Data on public health has shown that many of these are actually not effective at all… WHO advises against any kind of travel and trade restrictions, saying that they are inappropriate and could actually cause more harm than good in terms of our global effort to contain.” (Canada House of Commons, Standing Committee on Health Meeting, February 5, 2020)
The World Health Organization (“WHO”) continues to maintain that position and on January 19, 2022, urged all countries to: “Lift or ease international traffic bans as they do not provide added value and continue to contribute to the economic and social stress experienced by States Parties. The failure of travel restrictions introduced after the detection and reporting of Omicron variant to limit international spread of Omicron demonstrates the ineffectiveness of such measures over time.” The WHO repeated that countries should: “not require proof of vaccination against COVID-19 for international travel.” (World Health Organization, Statement on the tenth meeting of the International Health Regulations (2005) Emergency Committee regarding the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, January 19, 2022.)
“Despite the confirmed science that the vaccine does not stop people from getting or spreading the virus and the repeated warnings from the WHO, it’s clear the federal government is out of step and arbitrarily restricting Canadians fundamental rights and freedoms,” says Keith Wilson, Q.C., lead counsel for the legal challenge. “It is profoundly disturbing that a marginalized group in Canada—the unvaccinated—are essentially prohibited from leaving the country,” he adds.
“Canadians have been losing hope in the Charter and our courts. We are going to put the best arguments and evidence forward so that the court can clarify where governments overstep,” concludes Mr. Wilson.
The court will be asked to hear the case on an expedited basis given the serious infringement on Canadians’ mobility and other rights. Canada is the only country in the developed world that has banned Covid vaccine-free travellers from air travel.
Notice of Application, Filed and Served
February 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Canada, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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The ongoing Truckers for Freedom convoy in Ottawa has triggered a shockwave that is reaching all around the world. Even as our authoritarian federal regime continues to double down on measures and threatens to use brute force tactics against peaceful protesters, many provinces are nervously beginning to lay out a timeline for ending mandates.
But there is something important missing from the conversation surrounding the end of mandates. If the mandates are simply dropped today without calling out the underlying legal and ethical fallacy that was used to justify them, government overreach will have become normalized. We will be left without the legal protections to stop them from doing this to us again after the truckers go home. All it will take to put us back in a cage is for the government to point at the next wave, the next virus variant, or the next non-Covid emergency. We will have normalized that our rights, our freedoms, our bodily autonomy, and even access to our lives are conditional privileges, subject to opinion polls and technocratic impulses, and that they can be withdrawn again at any time, “for our safety.”
In March of 2020, in violation of the principles embedded in our constitutions, governments around the world convinced citizens to give their leaders and public institutions the authority to overrule individual rights in order to “flatten the curve.” That impulse went unchallenged under the false assumption that human rights violations could be justified as long as the benefits to the majority outweighed the costs to the minority. By accepting this excuse for overriding unconditional rights, we transformed ourselves into an authoritarian police state where “might makes right”. That is the moment when all the checks and balances in our scientific and democratic institutions stopped functioning.
Liberal democracy was built around the principle that individual rights must be unconditional. In other words, they are meant to supersede the authority of government. Consequently, individual rights (such as bodily autonomy) were meant to serve as checks and balances on government power. They were meant to provide a hard limit to what our government can do to us without our individual consent.
If the government cannot override your rights to bend you to its will, then it will be forced to try to convince you by talking with you. That forces government to be transparent and to engage in meaningful debate with critics. Your ability to say NO, and to have your choice respected, is the difference between a functioning liberal democracy and an authoritarian regime.
The natural instinct of fearful people is to control those around them. Unconditional rights force people to negotiate voluntary participation in collective solutions. Thus, unconditional rights prevent the formation of echo chambers and provide an important counter-weight to rein in uncontrolled panic. When no-one has the option to use the brute force of State power to force others to submit to what they think is “the right thing to do”, then the only path forward is to keep talking to everyone, including to “fringe minorities” with “unacceptable views”. When we allow rights to become conditional, it is virtually a certainty that during a crisis, panicked citizens and opportunistic politicians will give in to their worst impulses and trample those who disagree with them.
Unconditional individual rights prevent governments from taking unwilling citizens on crusades. They prevent scientific institutions from transforming themselves into unchallengeable “Ministries of Truth” that can double down on their mistakes to avoid accountability. They ensure that the checks and balances that make science and democracy work do not break down in the chaos of a crisis. In the heat of an emergency when policy decisions are often made on the fly, unconditional rights are often the only safeguards to protect minorities from panicked mobs and self-anointed kings.
If we allow our leaders to normalize the idea that rights can be switched off during emergencies or when political leaders decide that “the science is settled”, then we are giving the government terrifying and unlimited power over us. It gives those who control the levers of power the authority to turn off access to your life. That turns the competition for power into a zero-sum game: the winners become masters, the losers become serfs. It means you can no longer afford to allow the other side to win an election, at any cost, nor agree to a peaceful transfer of power, because if you lose the winning team becomes the master of your destiny. And so, a zero-sum game of brutal power politics is set in motion. Unconditional individual rights are the antidote to civil war. Liberal democracy collapses without them.
Withdrawing mandates because “the Omicron variant is mild” or because “the costs of continuing the measures outweigh the benefits” does not undo what has been normalized and legitimized. If the legitimacy of mandates is not overturned, you will not be going back to your normal life. It may superficially look similar to your life before Covid, but in reality you will be living in a Brave New World where governments temporarily grant privileges to those who conform with the government’s vision of how we should live. You will no longer be celebrating your differences, cultivating your individuality, or making your own free choices. Only conformity will enable you to exist. You will be living under a regime in which any new “crisis” can serve as justification to impose restrictions on those who don’t “get with the program” as long as mobs and technocrats think the restrictions are “reasonable”. You will no longer be the master of your own life. A golden cage is still a cage if someone else controls the lock on the door.
Politicians and public health authorities MUST be forced to acknowledge that mandates are a violation of civil liberties. The public MUST be confronted by the fact that liberal democracy ceases to exist without the unconditional (inalienable) safeguards of individual rights and freedoms. The public MUST recognize that science ceases to function when mandates can be used to cut off scientific debates. Our governments and our fellow citizens MUST be made to understand that unconditional rights are especially important during a crisis.
If the legal and ethical fallacies that were used to justify mandates are not called out as inexcusable violations of our constitutional rights, we will have inadvertently normalized the illiberal idea that, as long as someone in a lab coat says it’s okay, this can be done to us again, at any time, whether to fight the next wave of Covid, to take away freedoms to fight “climate change”, to seize assets to solve a government debt crisis, or simply to socially engineer outcomes according to whatever our leaders define as a “fairer and more equitable world”.
How we navigate the end of mandates determines whether we win our freedom or whether we allow our leaders to normalize a Brave New World with conditional rights that can be turned off again during the next “emergency”.
~
February 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | Canada, Covid-19, Human rights |
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A legal motion makes bombshell allegations about IT firm’s clandestine spying activities on Trump White House
Lawyers working for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign paid an IT firm to “infiltrate” servers at Trump Tower and the White House in order to establish a “narrative” that would link Donald Trump to Russia, an explosive new legal filing alleges.
The legal motion, filed in a District of Columbia court on Friday by a Justice Department (DOJ) prosecutor investigating the origins of the FBI’s ‘Russiagate’ probe, relates to potential conflicts of interest by former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann. Sussmann has previously pleaded not guilty to a one-count charge of lying to federal agents.
Two months before the 2016 election, Sussmann, a partner at Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented the Democrats and Clinton’s campaign, allegedly told the FBI he was not working on behalf of Clinton when he presented the agency with supposedly incriminating documents.
In the filing, Special Counsel John Durham alleges that Sussmann was working on behalf of the Clinton campaign and an unnamed “technology executive” at a US tech firm when he submitted “purported data” and “white papers” to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in September 2016. They apparently pointed to a “covert communications channel” between the Trump Organization and Russia-based Alfa Bank (identified as “Russian Bank-1”).
Highlighting Sussmann’s “billing records,” Durham alleges that he had “repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations.” This involved an unnamed lawyer working with the campaign, the tech executive (identified as “Tech Executive-1”), an investigative firm, several cyber-researchers, and employees at “multiple internet companies,” the motion states.
It alleges that the executive “exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data” and tasked researchers at an unnamed US university to “mine Internet data” so as to create “an inference” and “narrative” linking Trump to Russia. The executive claimed to be working “to please certain VIPs.”
While many US media outlets pointed to the Alfa Bank claims as proof of Trump’s “collusion” with the Kremlin, the FBI found that the email server in question was run by an advertising agency that sent out promotional emails for Trump’s hotels, among other things.
Among the internet data exploited was “domain name system (DNS) Internet traffic” from Trump Tower, Trump’s apartment building in New York City, and the White House, the filing states. It alleged that Tech Executive-1’s employer (identified as “Internet Company-1”) provided DNS resolution services to the White House – and accused the executive and his associates of exploiting this arrangement to mine data for “derogatory information” about Trump.
Then, in 2017, Sussmann apparently used this information to compile “an updated set of allegations” about Trump’s supposed Russian ties – noting “suspicious DNS lookups” and “Russian-made wireless phones” – to another US government agency, the motion states. Durham said he found “no support for these allegations” and added that some of the lookups occurred as early as 2014 during the Obama administration.
Demanding “reparations” be paid, Trump said in a statement on Saturday that the filing provided “indisputable evidence” that his campaign and presidency were “spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign” to “develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia.”
“This is a scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate and those who were involved in and knew about this spying operation should be subject to criminal prosecution,” he added, noting that there was a time when the alleged crime “would have been punishable by death.”
There has been no official response from Clinton as yet.
Last year, Sussmann’s attorneys said their client had “committed no crime,” calling charges against him “baseless [and] unprecedented.” Meanwhile, a lawyer for the person who fed Sussmann the Alfa Bank claims said that his client did not know his law firm had a relationship with the Clinton campaign “and was simply doing the right thing.”
Sussmann represented the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during proceedings related to the alleged 2016 hack of its computers. Both Clinton and the DNC had blamed Russia, but could not back up their accusations.
The original Russia probe ballooned into a two-year investigation led by then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who failed to produce evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
February 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Hillary Clinton, United States |
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in the age of government sponsored science driven by grants, sinecure, and sponsorship, scientists face a difficult set of choices.
they must, if they wish to continue receiving the largess of the gold-givers toe the party line of state or commercially sponsored science. he who has paid the piper demands to call the tune and producing work that does not suit “the narrative” is career suicide. your funding will dry up. so may your position, your prospects for advancement, and even your tenure. you will not be asked to join committees, interviewed for articles, citied, or supported. you may be outright attacked. i discuss this in more depth HERE.
but scientists also face another constraint: they need to be accurate. they need to run good experiments, collect good data, and relay it faithfully. if they do not, they will get called out and revealed as incompetents or frauds. this too will end one’s career as it means that not only are you doing no useful work (apart from to propogandists) but will reveal that you have sold out integrity for lucre and that is the end of peers taking you seriously. you play for team lysenko now.
the need to thread this needle and appease and please both demands has led to an odd practice:
many times, the claims made in the abstract or in the conclusions are not supported by the actual data.
i know this sounds a little bizarre, but as someone who reads perhaps 1000 such papers a year, allow me to assure you, it is stunningly common in any politically loaded sphere. (and you would be amazed how many are politically loaded. it need not be government pushing it. watching geneticists tie their conclusions in knots to claim that you can breed horses for speed and endurance or dogs for intelligence but that of course there is no such thing as eugenics in humans because that would be unspeakable despite your having just proved that there is in fact, eugenics in humans is really quite something. they go to astounding lengths in the introductions of their books to disavow what they are about to prove.)
this odd compromise sort of works, but mostly, it doesn’t.
it gives those who fund studies and the journals who curate them for ideological purity their bone. the abstract says “X means Y.” this is what they want for the press releases and for waving around.
it also puts the actual data out into the world. this is what researchers, both those who did the work and those who will read it in detail, actually need. they can see the facts and will not be gulled in by the claims in the conclusion as they are adept at drawing their own conclusions.
this leads to the weird outcome of the public and the politicians frequently having one idea about what a study says and the experts in the field having more or less the opposite take.
the “experts” all know what the data means and why they are not allowed to say it. it works a bit like the foils used by renaissance dialogue writers to ape at being fools while presenting the actual case being made while the “authorities” presented the “narrative” and were made fools of by those able to read between the lines.
in the age of the internet, this sets up a bizarre and deeply frustrating conflict: those who can and do really read studies are constantly having to pick them apart and explain to the “google and spam” crowd who just selectively confirm their biases and skim the lead paragraph of a study why the study they just cited does not, in fact, say what they are claiming it does.
and, of course, trying to convince someone that the authors deliberately misstated the facts in the summary is like trying to teach a new trick to the very oldest of dogs. they are just not having it.
this has created a rancorous and dangerously stupid level of debate and an impossible burden for any one individual to carry. it takes 10 seconds to search, skim, and spam with a study you never read and start yelling “peer review!” over and over as if that means something.
it can take hours to pick the study apart and see if it really does support the conclusions stated in the summary and then hours more to convince someone who has not even read it (and probably does not know how). that’s unwinnable. it’s like sisyphus getting and additional rock to push back up the hill every time he reaches the top. pretty soon it’s 20 boulders and nothing is going anywhere.
fortunately, the internet age has produced a large group of folks interested in picking these studies apart and publishing their takes. and we form communities and help one another. so no one has to do ALL the work when the CDC publishes yet more self refuting “wave around” data.
this is, in fact, what real peer review is. it’s supposed to be hostile and to pick holes.
the upshot here is that you should be very careful taking studies you have not actually read at face value.
you need to read them. thoroughly. waving them around as if you did when you have not is a recipe for being wrong.
let’s take a simple and straightforward recent example:
this article is being used to push boosters. this is because the authors said this:
i have not spoken to them. perhaps they believe this, perhaps they do not but felt they had to say it or be pariahs. i have no special insight there. but i can read data.
so let’s see what the data says.
this was a big study, but also a retrospective study with post facto matching. the matching was by age, sex, and municipality. it is tainted by the ever present “we counted no one as vaccinated until 14 days post dose 2” issue which will inevitably deeply favor vaccine efficacy through a mathematical rig job (especially in the short run) and can even produce it from zero VE and looks to have had large effects in canadian data.
so we have some ingrained bayesian issues with our cohorts that may inject serious bias toward making vaccines look effective.
the data itself was rendered quite challenging to read. (heavy text, few graphics)
it was also truncated in a somewhat misleading fashion.
if you read it closely, you’ll see that even the longest follow ups on infection data were lumped after 210 days, several were 180 (before it really gets bad) others were 120.
this is just typical bayesian datacrime and presentation bias as we’ve seen so many times before. and it does not really speak to the interesting issue of “are the vaccines preventing severity?”
this is, in fact, omitted from the study. but they did collect the data, they just made it REALLY difficult to find. you need to go HERE to the supplemental materials page. you then need to download the actual PDF as the data is not on the webpage. then you need to go to the very last page of that supplement.
those who do so (and i’m guessing we’re down to a very few folks by then) will be rewarded with this graph:
and this one has profound and powerful implications.
- it shows that efficacy against severe outcomes like hospitalization and death also wanes very rapidly
- it shows that this efficacy keeps waning over time
- it shows that it could easily be strongly negative based on the huge downside bias to the error range (gray shaded area)
- and it shows that this data is of very low quality in terms of error magnitude.
at 9 months, midline expectation is ~15% reduction. (i’m eyeballing) but look at the confidence interval: it runs from (ballpark) +63% to -90%. that is not a useful range upon which to base anything. it implies that there is a very strong chance that vaccination is associated with greatly increased risk of severe outcomes for a great many people.
this pattern implies that boosters are likely, at best, a treadmill that will need constant refreshing, likely 3X a year or so, if you want to sustain efficacy. vaccine fade after 4 months degrades rapidly. (and frankly, the first 4 could well be an illusory halo generated by the dose 2 +14 vaccinated definition as linked above)
given the adverse events profile and the lack of severity of omicron this seems a truly odious proposition that looks likely to fail for most people on any sort or risk/benefit analysis. it is telling that the researchers here did not even attempt to take risk reward into account before claiming:
“The results strengthen the evidence-based rationale for administration of a third vaccine dose as a booster.”
what is also telling is the other part of the data required to make this claim:
do boosters work? do they refresh clinical immunity and mitigate severity? could they ever have done so and is this data even relevant with the emergence of omicron that seems to be at least an escape variant and far more likely a full blown hoskins effect/OAS variant that is enhanced, not mitigated by the vaccines.
because the evidence there looks quite persuasive that they do not.
note that all this data is from before oct 4th 2021, so it has no omicron impact whatsoever in it. claiming it bolsters the case for boosters without presenting evidence of booster efficacy on this new variant makes their claim feel like a rote bolt on, placed there to mollify and placate patrons and authorities.
there is absolutely no data here to validate that point.
the study does not even speak to the data that would be needed to make such a claim.
“efficacy wanes, so boost” is not a valid argument unless we know that boosters work, yet any evidence that boosters actually do anything to help is absent and all past data shows such rapid fade on efficacy vs severity as to make boosters a poor appearing proposition.
there is no data whatsoever on the new variant.
and boosters are sure not seeming to help in the UK. omi is driving rates of infection in the boosted at roughly double the rate of the unvaxxed.
the swedish study uses possibly irrelevant data and not only fails to prove out the ostensible interpretation, but winds up far more consistent with the conclusion that boosters are a waste of time and will provide ephemeral, at best, protection.
having seen this, go back and read the “interpretation” again.
now do you see my point about “the abstract says one thing while the data says another?”
i mean, they literally buried the lede at the very end of a hard to find supplement. it’s like putting the actual object of a video game inside of an easter egg.
most vexing, this easter egg also shows that vaccines may be making immunity to severe covid outcomes significantly worse.
call me mister suspicious, but i have a hunch that’s WHY they put it there.
let’s explore that a bit further:
what would be REALLY interesting is to see how this population distribution looks.
if it barbells then we likely have a serious confound going on. we really have no idea what the prior incidence of covid was in those who got vaccinated. one could expect it to be quite meaningful.
if vaccines look like they are working well in some and are strongly negative in others with not much in the middle (this is suggested but not proven by the skew in the confidence interval) then i would posit that the most likely explanation is that what looks like VE is actually naturally acquired immunity.
if you had covid then got vaxxed, vaccines look like they work, especially as the high risk groups got vaxxed more and these same groups likely had higher risk of prior infection. this gets magnified by the 2 week worry window of TLR suppression post vaccination that results in well documented decreases in immune function and a doubling of the rate of covid contraction in that period vs unvaxxed.
but if you got vaxxed without having had covid, it could be acting as an immunosuppressant or driving hoskins effect/OAS antigenic fixation that makes you more vulnerable.
this, along with all cause deaths in vaxxed vs unvaxxed measured from the moment you got your first jab is some data i’d really like to see.
it’s continuing non-availability certainly frustrating and likely telling. this data absolutely exists.
why we are not getting to see it is fast becoming a question too big to ignore.
February 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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In lockstep in multiple countries
As with so many things that are happening at the moment, the attack on free speech is happening in multiple countries at the same time.
Firstly in the UK.
A draft Online Safety Bill was first presented to Parliament in May 2021 but has been strengthened in the last few weeks. Originally the draft Bill focussed on large web companies but the government has recently announced that more changes would be made and new criminal offences added.
One of these new offences would be spreading Covid-19 disinformation under a crime of sending a false communication. This offence would be committed if a person sends a communication they know to be false with the intention to cause non-trivial emotional, psychological or physical harm. The maximum sentence is 51 weeks.
The average person might think it is reasonable to imprison somebody for communicating something they know to be false with the intention to cause harm. However, what is “false” and what is “harm”? The last few years have shown us that these are now very subjective topics. Information that was true in 2019 became false in 2020 and is starting to be true again in 2022. A truth that is communicated to somebody who believes it to be false may cause them emotional or psychological harm. Intention is necessary for the crime to take place but if something is deemed to be false and deemed to cause harm then it could be argued that if the person who communicated the information, knew the information was on the “harmful list” then intention was there.
And who is deciding what information is false? The government? That almost sounds like a punchline to a joke. We’ll just end up with news articles such as the one below – Sponsored by the UK Government (see the text in blue).
The Bill was already censorial enough, making online companies remove content which was deemed to be harmful but not illegal. As we have seen in recent times, corporations’ misinformation policies have been arbitrary enough, which will only worsen with governments deciding what is true and what is false. Now, in a step one-removed from pre-crime, these companies will be made to proactively “prevent people being exposed in the first place”.
The government press release on the strengthening of this bill says that “to proactively tackle the priority offences, firms will need to make sure the features, functionalities and algorithms of their services are designed to prevent their users encountering them and minimise the length of time this content is available. This could be achieved by automated or human content moderation, banning illegal search terms, spotting suspicious users and having effective systems in place to prevent banned users opening new accounts”.
In almost Orwellian double-speak the press release says the Bill “will better protect people’s right to free expression online”. What this means is, it will better protect people’s free expression of government approved material. It continues by saying “it will have to be proven in court that a defendant sent a communication without any reasonable excuse and did so intending to cause serious distress or worse, with exemptions for communication which contributes to a matter of public interest”. So the government says something is a matter of public interest (e.g. vaccines) and suddenly intention doesn’t have to be proven.
Please sign this online petition to remove requirements that specifically target lawful speech from the Bill.
Next to the US.
At almost the same time, the US sent out a bulletin “Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland”.
This states that “the United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence”.
According to the bulletin, “the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions” has “increased the volatility, unpredictability, and complexity of the threat environment”.
Key factors contributing to the current heightened threat environment include “widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19”.
Furthermore, “as COVID-19 restrictions continue to decrease nationwide, increased access to commercial and government facilities and the rising number of mass gatherings could provide increased opportunities for individuals looking to commit acts of violence to do so, often with little or no warning. Meanwhile, COVID-19 mitigation measures—particularly COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates—have been used by domestic violent extremists to justify violence since 2020 and could continue to inspire these extremists to target government, healthcare, and academic institutions that they associate with those measures”.
So in a step up from the UK’s response, the US is labelling individuals who produce any MDM as terrorists. Obviously, any language that incites violence is unacceptable but to confuse people encouraging unrest with those discussing whether Ivermectin could help save lives is completely unacceptable.
And finally in Canada.
Again, as if in lockstep, Justin Trudeau is trying to revive his controversial Internet legislation bill. Once known as Bill C-10, to fool those unintelligent Covid deniers, it has been changed to Bill C-11.
There are concerns that the legislation could be used to censor social media. The government have denied this but experts hold the opposite view. Who to believe, hmmm? The Toronto Sun reports that Trudeau is using the current national tensions as a smokescreen to let them slip in unpopular pieces of legislation. Never let a good crisis go to waste!
When we remove freedom of speech and censorship of controversial topics becomes common place, we turn into a dangerous society. Not only can authors be imprisoned for airing their views but, just as importantly, debate becomes restricted resulting in truths being hidden and novel and radical ideas supressed.
But if they can’t censor you, maybe they’ll just give you a morality pill so you don’t produce the stuff in the first place!
February 12, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Canada, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK, United States |
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A Professor of Surgery at John Hopkins, Dr. Marty Makary, said that a research letter he helped author was censored by LinkedIn for violating the platform’s “Professional Community Policies.” The post was reinstated later “after a friend complained to the CEO.”
The censored post contained a link to a research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The letter is a study Makary conducted about the “prevalence and Durability of SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies Among Unvaccinated US Adults.”
According to the screenshots Makary shared on Twitter, LinkedIn removed the letter “because it goes against Professional Community Policies.”
The policies prohibit users from sharing “false or misleading content.”
They also forbid users, including researchers and scientists, from posting “content that directly contradicts guidance from leading global health organizations and public health authorities.”
It is not clear how the study Makary posted violated any of LinkedIn policies.
February 12, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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This is what happens when you demand speedy production in an era of politicized regulation
All these tragedies have been due to failures of testing or failures in manufacturing processes. Most occurred before vaccine manufacturers were given virtually complete protection from liability in 1987. With the duration of patent exclusivity determining how much new products earn, products are rushed to market as quickly as possible, most using a shortened path for FDA review. Recalls and market removals of approved products are much more common than they used to be. We can only expect more of these disasters in the future, especially if the products are mandated for everyone.
- 1955: (Improperly inactivated) live polio vaccine caused polio in 40,000 children
The Cutter (now part of Bayer) Incident of 1955: This early US Salk polio vaccine contained live polio virus, which had not been inactivated. It caused 40,000 cases of polio; 200 of these recipients became paralyzed; and ten died. Other companies also had problems with viral inactivation. The NIH director lost his job in the aftermath, since NIH scientist Bernice Eddy had earlier warned this lot of vaccine paralyzed monkeys, but her findings were suppressed in the rush to vaccinate.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0199726590
- 1950s-1960s: SV-40 (Simian Virus 40, a potentially cancer-causing virus) contaminated polio vaccines given to millions of Americans.
SV-40 can cause cancer in animals and has been found in human cancers, though its relationship to human cancers remains uncertain.
http://www.sv40foundation.org/cpv-link.html
- 1970s-1985: Factor 8 Concentrate a pooled blood product used to prevent bleeding in hemophiliacs, was contaminated with HIV and Hepatitis C, but was sold worldwide even after manufacturers became aware of the contamination
Its manufacturers knew it was contaminated with HIV (and Hepatitis C), which spread through the injectable blood products used by hemophiliacs. About 8,000 US hemophiliacs at the time developed HIV infections this way, and an estimated 150,000 developed Hepatitis C, which frequently results in chronic liver disease, cirrhosis or death. The practice of distributing contaminated blood was widespread internationally, with many companies involved, and continued even after the problem was identified. It led to suits against pharmaceutical companies in a number of countries. It led to thousands of deaths. Doctors went to jail.
Cutter/ Bayer knowingly sold HIV-contaminated products in the US and overseas, seemingly having learned nothing from its polio-contaminated vaccine disaster 25 years earlier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood_products
http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lanhiv/PIIS2352-3018%2815%2900007-7.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/22/business/2-paths-of-bayer-drug-in-80-s-riskier-one-steered-overseas.html?pagewanted=print
- 1976-1977: Swine flu vaccine given to 45 million Americans for a non-existent disease, causing hundreds of cases of paralysis
A new flu virus was discovered in a soldier who died at Fort Dix, NJ. Concern that the virus might cause a 1918-like influenza pandemic led to a huge federally-instigated program to develop a vaccine and vaccinate every American against the virus. But the epidemic never occurred. And the affected soldier, despite having an acute infection, had been on a rigorous march before he died. No one knew if the flu had killed him. US vaccine manufacturers agreed to produce vaccine on a short timeline, but only if they received a waiver of liability for possible vaccine injuries. The decision to use the vaccine was strongly influenced by political considerations, according to a National Academy of Sciences investigation of the program, commissioned by HEW Secretary Joe Califano. The report gives a bird’s eye view of how personal and political agendas came together to supercede considerations of the public health.
45 million Americans received the new vaccine, of whom 400 people developed autoimmune paralysis (Guillain-Barre syndrome) at a rate 6-8 times expected during the six weeks post-inoculation, and about 30 died.
http://iom.edu/~/media/Files/About%20the%20IOM/SwineFluAffair.pdf
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=394635 (unfortunately now behind a paywall)
- 1999: Rhesus rotavirus vaccine (Rotashield) caused intestinal damage
This oral Rotashield vaccine was designed to prevent a mild form of gastroenteritis. However, it caused 1-2 cases per 10,000 recipients of intussusception of the bowel, and many affected babies required surgery to repair “telescoping” of the gut. Several died. Months after being licensed, the vaccine was taken off the market.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4843a5.htm
- 1998-2001: Lymerix vaccine likely caused autoimmune symptoms, taken off market
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/pdf/S0950268806007096a.pdf
- 2009-10 Pandemrixswine flu vaccine caused over 1300 cases of narcolepsy in Europe
Children aged 5-19 were about 15 times more likely to develop narcolepsy if they received the GSK Pandemrix brand of swine flu vaccine, which was not sold in the US. Other age groups were also at an increased risk of narcolepsy, but to a lesser degree. Narcolepsy is caused by autoimmune destruction of cells in the brain’s Locus Ceruleus, and is newly recognized as a vaccine adverse reaction. The narcolepsy cases were severe, often preventing children from attending school.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/07/why-pandemic-flu-shot-caused-narcolepsy
http://ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications/publications/vaesco%20report%20final%20with%20cover.pdf
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/Concerns/h1n1_narcolepsy_pandemrix.html
** The adverse effect profile of drugs and vaccines is generally not well known until millions of people have received the drug or vaccine. New federal legislation (21st Century Cures Act of 2016 etc.) that speeds up licensing of vaccines, and removes liability from the manufacturers for all vaccines placed on the childhood schedule, all vaccines recommended by CDC for pregnant women, and new, potentially unlicensed products used during declared emergency situations — increases the potential risk of vaccines. http://www.fda.gov/RegulatoryInformation/Guidances/ucm125127.htm#categories
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Readiness_and_Emergency_Preparedness_Act
February 12, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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A FRIEND of my ex-wife is so angry about lockdown lunacy and its associated abuses that she lets rip on busloads of cowed, mask-wearing passengers, letting them know they have been horribly duped.
I thought of her yesterday when I saw a large caravan parked in the centre of Worthing, the seaside town where I currently live, encouraging passers-by to drop in for a Covid jab.
Despite waiting lists now said to be likely to hit nine million, the NHS still finds the money to try to terrorise people into submitting to this experimental procedure. I am happy to say there were no customers as I passed.
Just how experimental the rollout remains is brought home by a new international study looking at what happens in our bodies when injected with the mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna, and comparing that with natural infection. A 73-page report, with 43 authors, has been posted online as a preprint by the scientific journal Cell.
A key finding is that for up to two months following the jab, our bodies continue to produce a protein that has been associated with risks to the heart and blood vessels. It may be longer – 60 days was as far as the researchers went.
Most readers are by now familiar with the infamous spike protein, the ‘gain-of-function’ feature through which American and Chinese scientists made a bat virus a danger to humans, causing the Covid-19 pandemic.
The vaccines inject copies of a genetic code that causes production of this protein, alerting the immune system to the danger it presents so as to limit damage from actual virus infection. The Cell study confirms that in the short-term, the immune system response to the vaccine is broader than that seen in severely ill, naturally-infected patients.
But the researchers found mRNA from the vaccine still present on days seven, 16 and 37 post-jab, ‘with lower but still appreciable specific signal at day 60.’ Production of actual spike protein was ‘abundant’ 16 days after the second dose, and still present as late as 60 days.
Ninety-six per cent of vaccinees had the protein circulating in their blood in the first day or two after the jab, and 63 per cent at day seven, although the level fell dramatically during that first week.
What does this mean? According to Dr Robert Malone, an American virologist and immunologist whose work paved the way for mRNA vaccines, it means we are in the midst of a ‘health public policy nightmare’.
That is because the protein is now recognised as a danger in itself, regardless of the virus. The fact that it continues to be produced for weeks or months after the jab helps to explain the record numbers of reports of post-vaccination deaths and injuries.
Once in the bloodstream, the genetic instructions are carried throughout the body, and cells that line our blood vessels are particularly prone to taking it in. When they produce the ‘spike’, lymphocytes of the immune system recognise it as foreign and start attacking the cells, provoking the formation of blood clots of varying sizes.
Studies in patients who have died post-injection have shown how the lymphocytes infiltrate heart muscle in particular, causing inflammation. Lungs, liver, kidney, uterus, thyroid and skin appear vulnerable to a similar reaction.
Cardiac surgeon Dr Steven Gundry has reported that in the wake of the jab, most patients show changes in biochemical markers signalling damage to the heart and circulatory system.
‘These changes persist for at least two and a half months post second dose of vaccine,’ he said in a November 2021 alert to the American Heart Association.
‘We conclude that the mRNA vaccines dramatically increase inflammation of the endothelium and T-cell infiltration of cardiac muscle and may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination.’
His alert prompted a big reaction from some fellow professionals and a watered-down version appeared soon afterwards.
But a similar warning was issued as far back as last June by Canadian vaccine expert Dr Byram Bridle, who used freedom of information laws to obtain a previously confidential ‘biodistribution’ study in animals, conducted for Pfizer by Japanese researchers. It showed that the spike protein does not just act at the site of the jab, but is carried through the circulation to many sites in the body.
‘I’m very much pro-vaccine, but always making sure that the science is done properly and that we follow the science carefully before going into public rollout of the vaccines,’ Bridle said. With Covid, the rollout was a big mistake, he added. ‘We didn’t realise that by vaccinating people we are inadvertently inoculating them with a toxin.’
He said it was now known that ‘the spike protein, on its own, is almost entirely responsible for the damage to the cardiovascular system, if it gets into circulation. Indeed, if you inject the purified spike protein into the blood of research animals, they get all kinds of damage to the cardiovascular system, and it can cross the blood-brain barrier and cause damage to the brain.’
At first glance that might not seem too disconcerting, he said, because the jab was injected into the shoulder muscle. ‘The assumption, up until now, has been that these vaccines behave like all our traditional vaccines: They don’t go anywhere other than the injection site, so they stay in our shoulder. Some of the protein will go to the local draining lymph node in order to activate the immune system.’
But for the first time, the biodistribution study had allowed scientists to see where the mRNA goes after the jab. ‘In other words, is it a safe assumption that it stays in the shoulder muscle? The short answer is, absolutely not.’
Malone says the Cell findings may mean that a genetic device inserted in the Moderna and Pfizer products, aimed at avoiding immediate destruction of the mRNA by the immune system, ‘is working so well that the mRNA is completely evading the normal clearance/degradation pathways.’ Consequently, spike protein levels are even higher after the jab than seen in a person with severe Covid-19 disease.
‘That this has not been published or investigated more demonstrates the gross regulatory dereliction of duty by Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, NIAID VRC (the Vaccine Research Centre of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) and that whole crew … I do not know how to write this more strongly.’
February 12, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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ADDING vaccines to countries’ immunisation schedules is meant to be the function of expert advisory groups. It can also be influenced by lobbying, sponsored by industry, to create the perception of a public demand for increased access to certain vaccines.
Indeed, many of governments’ senior medical and scientific advisers have close links with, or interests in, pharmaceutical companies and the crossovers are multiple.
Take a closer look for instance at the Supporting Active Aging Through Immunisation (SAATI) partnership. It was founded in 2011, as the so-called Decade of the Vaccine began, at the instigation of the Confederation of Meningitis Organisations (CoMo).
In 2013, SAATI entered into a collaboration agreement via a memorandum of understanding with Vaccines Europe. This organisation was previously known as European Vaccine Manufacturers, the vaccines specialist group within the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Association.
A 2014 SAATI report calling for more adult immunisation was prepared by Hill and Knowlton, the international PR agency and funded by Pfizer.
Professor Dr Javier Garau, chair of SAATI, said: ‘As we get older, the immune system weakens, increasing our risk of contracting infectious diseases. Furthermore, acquired immunity to certain infections (tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria) declines with age; due to this, vaccination and revaccination are a particularly relevant prevention strategy for adults.
‘We are determined to engage with all relevant stakeholders to make life-course immunisation the norm as part of healthy ageing, public health or prevention strategies.’
The acquired immunity Garau speaks of comes from vaccines and the decline in protection over time is called secondary vaccine failure. Vaccines do not confer lifelong immunity. As the protection conferred fades, more vaccination is required.
CoMo was created in 1994 and receives funding by Pfizer, Sanofi and GSK. One American charity affiliated to it, the Emily’s Dash Foundation, successfully lobbied the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to lower the age at which children could be given a meningitis vaccine.
CoMo receives additional financial support from the Coalition for Life-Course Immunisation (CLCI)whose individual sponsors include MSD, Sanofi-Pasteur and Vaccines-Europe and whose members are Moderna, Sanofi-Pasteur, MSD, Novavax, Pfizer, Seqirus, Takeda and VBI Vaccines.
Seqirus is under contract with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, a US government agency, to develop next-generation self-amplifying mRNA vaccines for influenza. It is also developing new Covid-19 vaccines using technology that purports to have fewer side-effects than first generation mRNA gene therapy vaccines.
The World Bank has now ‘financialised’ epidemics and pandemics through bond issues, making them a vehicle for profit that entrenches their permanency. Vaccine bonds were introduced in 2011 to finance GAVI. In 2017, before we’d even heard of Covid-19, a pandemic bond and a finance facility had been introduced. In May 2021, 750million dollars in Covid-19 vaccine bonds underwritten by the Rockefeller-linked JP Morgan Bank were released.
‘No one in the world is safe from the threat of Covid-19 until everyone is safe,’ said Seth Berkley, chief executive of the GAVI Alliance. ‘And this transaction will help us supply lower-income countries with the vaccine doses they need to roll back the pandemic in its most acute phase.
‘Proceeds from the bonds will also strengthen GAVI’s continuing support for its core vaccine programmes to ensure that routine immunisation does not fall behind and hard-earned gains against vaccine-preventable disease are not lost.’
All but the very poorest countries are expected to take on additional debt burden to purchase and distribute the vaccines. By June 2021, reluctant to do so, developing countries had only availed themselves of 3.9billion dollars of the 100billion dollars the World Bank had set aside to finance Covid vaccines.
It is hard to see Covid-19 vaccines as anything other than a cash cow for the industry. In February 2021, two months after the UK’s watchdog Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) issued a temporary use authorisation for Pfizer’s vaccine, the firm’s chief financial officer, Frank D’Amelio, told investors the profit margin for the vaccine was in the upper 20 per cents.
That was based on what he called ‘pandemic pricing’ – charging 19.50 dollars per dose compared with a normal price of up to 175 dollars. He added that the percentage could go higher depending on economies of scale.
Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla said ‘a durable Covid-19 vaccine revenue stream like is happening in flu’ was likely for the firm, because booster shots would be needed and emerging variant strains would have to be countered.
The Covid vaccines, smashing conventional wisdom, were cleared for use in what were meant to be exceptional circumstances. Bourla said: ‘I believe the Covid thing has created a new normal.’
Even at discounted ‘pandemic pricing’ levels, the financial bonanza for the firm was astronomical. In November 2021, Pfizer executives told institutional investors the 39billion dollars in revenues from its Covid-19 vaccine accounted for 44 per cent of its record 88billion dollars total revenue for the year.
In the euphoria following the granting of emergency use authorisations for the Covid vaccines and the huge profits, many new vaccines are being planned and industry expectations have been raised.
As I mentioned in Part 1 of this investigation, the international health policy expert William Muraskin warned in 2017 that ‘an all-out war on microbes is being planned right now by eradication proponents who intend to prevail regardless of developing-country governments’ or their peoples’ choices.’
Like the ‘war or terror’, it was an open-ended concept, ambiguous and useful to justify a range of actions.
Muraskin argues that vaccination has been prioritised at the expense of, and to the detriment of, the already limited resources of the health systems of developing countries.
Covid-19 has now hijacked the resources of the industrialised world’s health systems and undermined their economies in an unprecedented way. Israel has just authorised its fourth booster in a year, even as the toll of adverse events and deaths mounts in their wake. It is now evident that the revenue stream is for the time being more ‘durable’ than any protection derived from the vaccines.
The public health agenda was long ago seized by private interests. The campaign to eradicate Covid-19 and other diseases through vaccination reflects the biases of GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance partners, and more especially those of its founders.
The rationale may be questionable, but the approach is certainly lucrative. Eradication appears a fools’ game, but one in which we will all be forced to participate if vaccination passports become a permanent mechanism for accessing our everyday lives.
As of 2013, a pipeline of 120 new vaccines was in development and only half were directed at tropical diseases afflicting developing countries. There are more now.
How many of these are destined to be added to national immunisation schedules and indiscriminately used? How many might become mandatory? Society needs a wider debate on the merits of the war on microbes before it sweeps us all away.
February 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, GAVI |
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[Note: This essay is abstracted from my eBook Myths: Widely Held But False Beliefs In The Climate Change Crisis, available on Amazon]
In their Fifth Assessment Report the IPCC, the ‘internationally accepted scientific authority on climate change’, gave their opinion of how much of the recent global warming was caused by human activity: ‘It is extremely likely [95-100 percent confidence] more than half of the observed increase in global mean surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic [i.e. man-made] increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together’. Reflecting that opinion Wikipedia states that the ‘Scientific consensus on climate change’ is that ‘the Earth is warming and… this warming is mainly caused by human activities’. It claims that 97-100% of actively publishing climate scientists endorse this opinion. Similarly, NASA claim that, ‘A consensus on climate change and its human cause exists… human activities are the primary cause of the observed climate-warming trend over the past century.’ And in an October 2020 interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes climatologist Dr Michael Mann said, ‘There’s about as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity.’ So is it actually true that 97-100% of climate scientists explicitly or implicitly endorse this key IPCC opinion?
Although science is not remotely democratic (it only needs one scientist to prove that the ‘consensus view’ is wrong and it is wrong) the fact remains that if this 97-100% consensus assertion is true then it is indeed very powerful. If the ‘internationally accepted scientific authority on climate change’ says something is almost certainly true and almost all climate scientists in the world agree then it almost certainly must be true – mustn’t it? Whilst there is undoubtedly almost total scientific consensus amongst the scientific authorities (literally dozens of scientific academies from around the world explicitly or implicitly endorse the IPCC’s opinions) that does not necessarily reflect the consensus view amongst climate scientists themselves. So what exactly is it that climate scientists agree on?
The consensus argument is epitomized by Barack Obama’s 2013 tweet that, ‘Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: climate change is real, man-made and dangerous’. He tweeted this immediately after the publication of the most famous climate change consensus survey, Quantifying the consensus on man-made global warming in the scientific literature (John Cook et al, 2013) conducted by Skeptical Science, a small group of climate change activists, who, despite their name, are precisely the opposite of climate change skeptics (their strapline is ‘Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism’). This study examined the Abstracts from 11,944 climate science papers published over the twenty-year period from 1991 to 2011. It concluded that 97.1% of the Abstracts (that actually expressed an opinion on the causes of global warming) endorsed the view that man-made greenhouse gas emissions (or, at least, greenhouse gases) cause global warming. Although this was 97% of Abstracts, not 97% of climate scientists, it is not unreasonable to suppose that, based on this survey, about 97% of climate scientists endorse the view that man-made greenhouse gas emissions (or, at least, greenhouse gases) cause global warming. It said nothing whatsoever about how much warming those emissions were causing and whether or not such warming was ‘dangerous’. It is probably the case that at least 99.9% of people who might describe themselves as climate scientists (including those most skeptical about the climate change crisis idea) endorse the view that man-made greenhouse gas emissions (or, at least, greenhouse gases) cause global warming, i.e. some global warming. That is not in any serious dispute. The dispute is about how much global warming human activity is causing and whether or not it is ‘dangerous’. So the study revealed nothing that was not already well known and uncontroversial.
Skeptical Science summarized their findings with the statement, ‘97% of climate papers expressing a position on human-caused global warming agree: global warming is happening and we are the cause’ – where ‘we are the cause’ clearly implied ‘we are the sole cause’ instead of what it actually found, viz. that we are the cause of some of the global warming. If the study had been able to show convincingly that 97% of climate scientists endorsed the IPCC’s opinion that human activity was the predominant cause of global warming between 1951 and 2010 then that would certainly have strongly supported the view that there was almost total scientific consensus that the IPCC was right. But of all the Abstracts reviewed in this study only 0.3% explicitly endorsed that central IPCC opinion1. Even (ex-IPCC) Mike Hulme has noted that, ‘The Cook et al study is hopelessly confused… in one place the paper claims to be exploring “the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW [Global Warming]” and yet the headline conclusion is based on rating abstracts according to whether “humans are causing global warming”. These are two entirely different judgements.’ The recently published paper Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature (Lynas et al, 2021) claims that the consensus is actually 2% higher – but once again only actually finds a 99% consensus that human activity contributes to climate change to some extent2; in fact about 99% of the papers reviewed in this study failed to explicitly quantify the extent. A survey3 of more than 1,800 climate scientists conducted in 2015 concluded that just 43% of them would endorse the IPCC opinion about our recent predominant role in global warming (and how many of them were agreeing based primarily on their faith in the IPCC and/or their self-interest in staying ‘on message’ to the climate change crisis narrative?)
Mike Hulme has stated that, ‘Claims such as “2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate” are disingenuous. That particular consensus judgement, as are many others in the IPCC reports, is reached by only a few dozen experts.’ Supporting that view, an independent study4 found that the views expressed by the IPCC were the consensus of a leadership cadre of just 53 (about 2%) of them, 44 of whom were very closely linked professionally, having co-authored papers with one another and so very likely to share the same opinions. The author of the study, John McLean (climate data analyst at the Australian Climate Science Coalition and an Expert Reviewer for the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report), concluded that ‘Governments have naively and unwisely accepted the claims of a human influence on global temperatures made by a close-knit clique of a few dozen scientists, many of them climate modellers, as if they were representative of the opinion of the wider scientific community.’
One of the most comprehensive reviews5 ever performed of surveys of the scientific consensus on climate change concluded:
- The articles and surveys most commonly cited as showing support for a ‘scientific consensus’ in favor of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis are without exception methodologically flawed and often deliberately misleading.
- There is no survey or study showing ‘consensus’ on the most important scientific issues in the climate change debate.
- Extensive survey data show deep disagreement among scientists on scientific issues that must be resolved before the man-made global warming hypothesis can be validated. Many prominent experts and probably most working scientists disagree with the claims made by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
So what is the real scientific consensus on climate change? There is almost total scientific consensus that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing, that that increase is predominantly due to human activity, that the climate system is warming, that climate change is happening and that human activity has contributed to some extent to the warming, changing climate. Note again that skeptical scientists, like Dr Roy Spencer and Dr Judith Curry and Dr Richard Lindzen, are part of this ‘scientific consensus on climate change’; the idea that they constitute the 3% of scientists who do not support the scientific consensus on climate change is a false idea, misrepresenting what the ‘scientific consensus on climate change’ actually is6. This misrepresentation is designed to bolster the ‘climate change crisis’ narrative and to marginalize and neutralize the skeptical scientists by making their views appear to fall far outside the overwhelming consensus view, even though they actually share that consensus view. Basically, the ‘consensus’ breaks down over the issue of whether or not human activity has been predominantly responsible for recent warming – and whether or not that warming is ‘dangerous’. The power of the false ‘97% scientific consensus that human activity has been predominantly responsible for climate change’ meme, perpetuated by Wikipedia, NASA, Facebook (and many others) is that it can be used very effectively to strangle at birth any debate about the science. As Dr Richard Lindzen has put it, ‘The claim is meant to satisfy the non-expert that he or she has no need to understand the science. Mere agreement with the 97 percent will indicate that one is a supporter of science and superior to anyone denying disaster. This actually satisfies a psychological need for many people.’
So if we return to Dr Michael Mann’s statement that, ‘There’s about as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity’ this is very disingenuous. Whilst there is almost total scientific consensus that climate change is ‘real’ and happening and that there has been some human-caused influence, there is no such scientific consensus over the extent of the human-caused influence and whether or not it could reasonably be described as ‘dangerous’, let alone a ‘crisis’.
References
1 Legates et al. (2015), Science & Education and ‘Consensus? What Consensus?’, GWPF Note 5, thegwpf.org, September 2013 and ‘Richard Tol’s Excellent Summary of the Flaws in Cook et al. (2013) and ‘The Infamous 97% Consensus Paper’, wattsupwiththat.com, 26 March 2015 and ‘The Cook ‘97% consensus’ paper, exposed by new book for the fraud that it really is’, wattsupwiththat.com, 12 March 2016
2 ‘Cooked Up Consensus: Lynas et al “Should Rather Be Classified As Propaganda, Bad Science”’, wattsupwiththat.com, 26 October 2021
3 Bart Strengers, Bart Verheggen and Kees Vringer (2015), Climate Science Survey, Questions and Responses, PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, pp 1 – 39
4 ‘Prejudiced authors, prejudiced findings’, John McLean, (Science and Public Policy Institute), July 2008
5 Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming (2015) – Craig D. Idso, Robert M. Carter, S. Fred Singer
6 ‘Study: 3% Contrarians Derailing the 97% Climate Consensus’, wattsupwiththat.com, 18 December 2021
February 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Facebook, IPCC, NASA, Obama, Wikipedia |
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