Statins are HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors; that is, they block the enzyme in your liver responsible for making cholesterol (HMG-CoA reductase). According to Drugs.com, more than 35 million Americans are on a statin drug, making it one of the most commonly prescribed medicines in the U.S.1
National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data suggest 47.6% of seniors over the age of 75 are on a statin drug.2 Lipitor — which is just one of several brand name statin drugs — is one of the most profitable drugs in the history of medicine.3,4
Collectively, statins have earned over $1 trillion since they were introduced.5 This, despite their being off patent. There is simply no doubt that selling them is big business with major financial incentives to distort the truth to continue their sales.
Statin recommendations have become fairly complex, as they’re recommended for various age groups under different circumstances, and whether they’re used as primary prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD), or secondary prevention. Guidelines also vary slightly depending on the organization providing the recommendation and the country you’re in.6
In the U.S., the two guidelines available are from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF),7 and the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association.8,9 The USPSTF guidelines recommend using a statin for the primary prevention of CVD when a patient:10
Is between the age of 40 to 75
Has one or more CVD risk factors (dyslipidemia, diabetes, hypertension or smoking)
Has a calculated 10-year risk of a cardiovascular event of 10% or greater
In secondary prevention of CVD, statins are “a mainstay,” according to the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.11 Secondary prevention means the drug is used to prevent a recurrence of a heart attack or stroke in patients who have already had one.
Regulators’ Role Questioned
A February 2020 analysis12 in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine (paywall) brings up the fact that while the use of statins in primary prevention of CVD “has been controversial” and there’s ongoing debate as to “whether the benefits outweigh the harms,” drug regulators around the world — which have approved statins for the prevention of CVD — have stayed out of the debate. Should they? The analysis goes on to note:
“Our aim was to navigate the decision-making processes of European drug regulators and ultimately request the data upon which statins were approved. Our findings revealed a system of fragmented regulation in which many countries licensed statins but did not analyze the data themselves.
There is no easily accessible archive containing information about the licensing approval of statins or a central location for holding the trial data. This is an unsustainable model and serves neither the general public, nor researchers.”
Have We Been Misled by the Evidence?
In her 2018 peer-reviewed narrative review,13 “Statin Wars: Have We Been Misled About the Evidence?” published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., a former medical science major turned investigative health reporter, delves into some of these ongoing controversies.
“A bitter dispute has erupted among doctors over suggestions that statins should be prescribed to millions of healthy people at low risk of heart disease. There are concerns that the benefits have been exaggerated and the risks have been underplayed.
Also, the raw data on the efficacy and safety of statins are being kept secret and have not been subjected to scrutiny by other scientists. This lack of transparency has led to an erosion of public confidence.
Doctors and patients are being misled about the true benefits and harms of statins, and it is now a matter of urgency that the raw data from the clinical trials are released,” Demasi writes.14
While Demasi’s paper is behind a paywall, she reviews her arguments in the featured video above. Among them is the fact that the “statin empire” is built on prescribing these drugs to people who really don’t need them and are likely to suffer side effects without getting any benefits.
For example, some have recommended statins should be given to everyone over the age of 50, regardless of their cholesterol level. Others have suggested screening and dosing young children.
Even more outrageous suggestions over the past few years include statin “‘condiments’ in burger outlets to counter the negative effects of a fast food meal,'” and adding statins to the municipal water supply.
Simple Tricks, Big Payoffs
Medical professionals are now largely divided into two camps, one saying statins are lifesaving and safe enough for everyone, and the other saying they’re largely unnecessary and harmful to boot. How did such a divide arise, when all have access to the same research and data?
Demasi suggests that in order to understand how health professionals can be so divided on this issue, you have to follow the money. The cost of developing and getting market approval for a new drug exceeds $2.5 billion. “A more effective way to fast-track company profits is to broaden the use of an existing drug,” Demasi says, and this is precisely what happened with statins.
By simply revising the definition of “high cholesterol,” which was done in 2000 and again in 2004, millions of people became eligible for statin treatment, without any evidence whatsoever that it would actually benefit them.
As it turns out, eight of the nine members on the U.S. National Cholesterol Education Program panel responsible for these revisions had “direct ties to statin manufacturers,” Demasi says, and that public revelation sowed the first seed of suspicion in many people’s minds.
Skepticism ratcheted up even more when, in 2013, the American College of Cardiology and AHA revised their statin guideline to include a CVD risk calculation rather than a single cholesterol number. U.S. patients with a 7.5% risk of developing CVD in the next 10 years were now put on a statin. (In the U.K., the percentage used was a more reasonable 20%.)
This resulted in another 12.8 million Americans being put on statin treatment even though they didn’t have any real risk factors for CVD. Worse, a majority of these were older people without heart disease — the very population that stand to gain the least from these medications.
What’s worse, 4 of 5 calculators were eventually found to overestimate the risk of CVD, some by as much as 115%, which means the rate of overprescription was even greater than previously suspected.
Industry Bias
While simple revisions of the definitions of high cholesterol and CVD risk massively augmented the statin market, industry-funded studies have further fueled the overprescription trend. As noted by Demasi, when U.S. President Ronald Reagan cut funding to the National Institutes of Health, private industry moved in to sponsor their own clinical trials.
The vast majority of statin trials are funded by the manufacturers, and research has repeatedly found that funding plays a major role in research outcomes. It’s not surprising then that most statin studies overestimate drug benefits and underestimate risks.
Demasi quotes Dr. Peter Gøtzsche, a Danish physician-researcher who in 1993 co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration and later launched the Nordic Cochrane Centre:
“When drug industry sponsored trials cannot be examined and questioned by independent researchers, science ceases to exist and it becomes nothing more than marketing.”
“The very nature of science is its contestability,” Demasi notes. “We need to be able to challenge and rechallenge scientific results to ensure they’re reproducible and legitimate.” However, there’s been a “cloud of secrecy” around clinical statin trials, Demasi says, as the raw data on side effects have never been released to the public, nor other scientists.
The data are being held by the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists (CTT) Collaboration at CTSU Oxford, headed by Rory Collins, which periodically publishes meta-analyses of the otherwise inaccessible data. While the CTT claims to be an independent organization, it has received more than £260 million from statin makers.
Inevitably, its conclusions end up promoting wider use of statins, and no independent review is possible to contest or confirm the CTT Collaboration’s conclusions.
Tricks Used to Minimize Harms in Clinical Trials
As explained by Demasi, there are many ways in which researchers can influence the outcome of a drug trial. One is by designing the study in such a way that it minimizes the chances of finding harm. The example she gives in her lecture is the Heart Protection Study.
Before the trial got started, all participants were given a statin drug for six weeks. By the end of that run-in period, 36% of the participants had dropped out due to side effects or lack of compliance. Once they had this “freshly culled” population, where those suffering side effects had already been eliminated, that’s when the trial actually started.
Now, patients were divided into statin and placebo groups. But since everyone had already taken a statin before the trial began, the side effects found in the statin and placebo groups by the end of the trial were relatively similar.
In short, this strategy grossly underestimates the percentage of the population that will experience side effects, and this “may explain why the rate of side effects in statin trials is wildly different from the rate of side effects seen in real-world observations,” Demasi says.
Deception Through Statistics
Public opinion can also be influenced by exaggerating statistics. A common statistic used to promote statins is that they lower your risk of heart attack by about 36%.15 This statistic is derived from a 2008 study16 in the European Heart Journal. One of the authors on this study is Rory Collins, who heads up the CTT Collaboration.
Table 4 in this study shows the rate of heart attack in the placebo group was 3.1% while the statin group’s rate was 2% — a 36% reduction in relative risk. However, the absolute risk reduction — the actual difference between the two groups, i.e., 3.1% minus 2% — is only 1.1%, which really isn’t very impressive.
In other words, in the real world, if you take a statin, your chance of a heart attack is only 1.1% lower than if you’re not taking it. At the end of the day, what really matters is what your risk of death is the absolute risk. The study, however, only stresses the relative risk (36%), not the absolute risk (1.1%).
As noted in the review,17 “How Statistical Deception Created the Appearance That Statins Are Safe and Effective in Primary and Secondary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease,” it’s very easy to confuse and mislead people with relative risks. You can learn more about absolute and relative risk in my 2015 interview with David Diamond, Ph.D., who co-wrote that paper.
Silencing Dissenters and Fear-Based PR
Yet another strategy used to mislead people is to create the illusion of “consensus” by silencing dissenters, discrediting critics and/or censoring differing views.
In her lecture, Demasi quotes Collins of the CTT Collaboration saying that “those who questioned statin side effects were ‘far worse’ and had probably ‘killed more people’ than ‘the paper on the MMR vaccine'” … “Accusing you of murdering people is an effective way [to] discredit you,” she says.
Demasi also highlights the case of a French cardiologist who questioned the value of statins in his book. It received widespread attention in the French press, until critics started saying the book and resulting press coverage posed a danger to public health.
One report blamed the book for causing a 50% increase in statin discontinuation, which was predicted would lead to the death of 10,000 people. On this particular occasion, however, researchers analyzed the number of actual deaths based on national statistics, and found the actual death toll decreased in the year following the release of the book.
The authors, Demasi says, noted that it was “‘not evidence-based to claim that statin discontinuation increases mortality,’ and that in the future, scientists should assess ‘real effects of statin discontinuation rather than making dubious extrapolations and calculations.'”
Trillion-Dollar Business Based on Flimsy Evidence
Statins, originally introduced three decades ago as secondary prevention for those with established CVD and patients with congenital and familial hyperlipidemias, have now vastly expanded thanks to the strategies summarized above.
Tens if not hundreds of millions of people are now on these drugs, without any scientific evidence to show they will actually benefit from them. As noted in the EBM analysis, “Statins for Primary Prevention: What Is the Regulator’s Role?”:18
“The central clinical controversy has been a fierce debate over whether their benefits in primary prevention outweigh their harms … The largest known statin usage survey conducted in the USA found that 75% of new statin users discontinued their therapy by the end of the first year, with 62% of them saying it was because of the side effects.
Regardless of what level of prevention statin prescription is aimed at, the proposed widening of the population to over 75s de facto includes people with multiple pathologies, whether symptomatic or not, and bypasses the distinction between primary and secondary prevention …
The CTT Collaboration estimates the frequency of myopathy is quite rare, at five cases per 10,000 statin users over five years. But others have contended that the CTT Collaboration’s work ‘simply does not match clinical experience’ … [Muscle-related adverse events] reportedly occur with a frequency of … as many as 20% of patients in clinical practice.”
Regulators Have a Duty to Create Transparency
Considering the discrepancy in reported side effects between statin trials, clinical practice and statin usage surveys, what responsibility do regulators have?
According to “Statins for Primary Prevention: What Is the Regulator’s Role?”19 regulators have a responsibility to “engage and publicly articulate their position on the controversy and make the evidence base underlying those judgments available to third parties for independent scrutiny,” none of which has been done to date. The paper adds:
“Regulators holding clinical trial data, particularly for public health drugs, should make these data available in searchable format with curated and dedicated web-based resource. If national regulators are not resourced for this, pooling or centralizing resources may be necessary.
The isolation of regulators from the realities of prescribing medications based on incomplete or distorted information is not enshrined in law but is a product of a subculture in which commercial confidentiality is more important than people. This also needs to change.”
Do Your Homework Before Taking a Statin
There’s a lot of evidence to suggest drug company-sponsored statin research and its PR cannot be trusted, and that few of the millions of people currently taking these drugs actually benefit from them.
Some of the research questioning the veracity of oft-cited statin trials is reviewed in “Statins’ Flawed Studies and Flawed Advertising” and “Statins Shown to Extend Life by Mere Days.”
To learn more about the potential harms of statins, see “Statins Double Diabetes Rates,” “Statins Trigger Brain Changes With Devastating Effects,” and “5 Great Reasons You Should Not Take Statins.”
Climate alarmists have said it’s necessary to ratchet up the fear about global warming to get the public’s attention. It’s the same story with the coronavirus outbreak. Authorities wanted to strike fear in the people, so they exaggerated the lethality of a virus deadly to only a narrow demographic segment.
Compare and contrast:
Global warming, 1988. “We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have,” about global warming, said Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider. (In the interest of full disclosure, the entire quotation ends with Schneider saying “each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” We’re leaving it up to readers to decide if he was advocating dishonesty to further the narrative or telling researchers and activists to cool it with the deceptive rhetoric. Either way, someone was pushing the agitprop.)
Pandemic, 2020. Britain’s Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior warned “that ministers needed to increase ‘the perceived level of personal threat’ from Covid-19 because ‘a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened,’” the London Telegraph reported last year in its coverage of “A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponized fear during the Covid-19 pandemic,” by Laura Dodsworth.
Global warming, 2014. The academics who wrote a paper published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics said their article “provides a rationale for” the tendency of “news media and some pro-environmental organizations” to accentuate or even exaggerate “the damage caused by climate change.”
“We find,” they wrote, “that the information manipulation has an instrumental value.”
Pandemic, 2020. The Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior recommends the perception of fear regarding the coronavirus needed to “be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.”
Global warming, circa 2001. University of Alabama in Huntsville climatologist John Christy, lead author on the 2001 United Nations’ climate report, had lunch with three European colleagues who talked about “how they were trying to make the report so dramatic that the United States would just have to sign that Kyoto Protocol.”
Pandemic, 2021. The New York Times’ “overblown” warnings “must be viewed in context of the Gray Lady’s wider lock-down-the-world agenda,” says the New York Post’s Steve Cuozzo. “The paper rarely reports unqualified hopeful news about taming the virus.”
Global Warming, 2004. NASA scientist James Hansen, who is the godfather of climate alarmists, wrote in Scientific American, that an “emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue.” In the next sentence, he added that, “now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate-forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic under current conditions.” So objective science was not good enough to advance the narrative, then it was?
Pandemic, 2021. “I did a simple Google search of ‘recent coronavirus news reports,’” says psychologist Ilisa Kaufman in Psychology Today. “The first random five headlines had the words, ‘death toll rising,’ ‘new infections,’ and ‘thousands of COVID cases, hundreds of deaths.’ Those were the first five. Also, it is May of 2021, a full 14 months since the beginning of the pandemic. Absolutely nothing reassuring, hopeful, or non-alarming.” She goes on to suggest “some ways to help correct or prevent mental health consequences from the ‘fear porn’ industry.”
We’re not fully convinced the lockdowns were conspiratorial dry runs to accustom the world to future restrictions handed down under the guise of “fighting” global warming. But as we said when the lockdowns were still relatively new, “observant and cunning politicians have gone to school” and were thinking over the possibility they could “use the pretext of a climate emergency to control Americans and break the back of capitalism.”
The ingredients are all present. A teen activist whose name isn’t Greta Thunberg has put down on paper what many are thinking when she wrote “if we can shut the world down to stop a virus, that also means it is possible to do the same for climate change.” It’s the sort of superficial statement that earns her points from a puerile media, ever-mugging politicians, and the adults among us who haven’t outgrown their insecure high school aspirations to be popular. And an idea many will run with.
The chilling fact there is much to be afraid of – not of a falling sky or a virus that we hope is on the wane, but of those eager to stir up dread and anxiety so they exercise the raw power they covet.
Every community has those who are designated wise — sometimes able to anticipate imminent catastrophe. For example, back in the 1500s, some in rural England and France would suspend dead birds — specifically kingfishers — from silken threads that purportedly acted as natural weathercocks. It was thought that the dead kingfisher was able to anticipate approaching storms and turn its breast into the wind. This is an unfortunate example, though, because Thomas Browne showed it to be nonsense. He suspended two dead kingfishers, side by side, and they pointed in different directions, thus demolishing the myth. I can’t imagine that all the wise ones took their dead birds down immediately, but Browne’s book Pseudodoxia Epidemica of 1646 championed a new kind of evidence-based science that relied on simple experiment.
For a period of some few hundred years, science came to replace superstition and key zoological texts including, for example, Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, were penned by the curious who tried hard to sort fact from fiction through observation. Browne and Darwin’s works followed Nicolaus Copernicus’ book On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, published in 1543, that explained humankind was not at the centre of the universe.
Before evidence-based science, natural historians and even astronomers, relied on the work of Aristotle who thought mankind was at the centre of the universe. In the twelfth century, Aristotle was a major source of information for the medieval encyclopaedias of animals, known as Bestiaries, with moral biblical lessons added.
We have somehow returned to this practice where natural history is once again interwoven with moralising. Worse, many of those designated as wise are full of hubris and carry on as though humankind can affect the weather and climate. This extends to projects at universities, where, even in zoology departments the ‘research’ must lament the trace gas carbon dioxide and its perceived impact on the distribution and abundance of species.
Even in The Spectator Australia, James Allan in ‘Decline and Fall of New Zealand’ (11 December) remonstrates about how woke our universities have become but then lauds the superiority of Western science relative to Maori mythology. But is woke science superior to Maori myths? Arguably the most significant climate event since satellites began measuring global temperatures in 1979, was the very strong El Niño of 2015/16. It caused global temperatures to spike in February 2016, corals to bleach, and so on. This hottest period – according to the UAH satellite record – was forecast some years earlier by long range weather forecaster Ken Ring relying on Maori mythology. It was not forecast by Western meteorological bureaus that run simulation models on super computers.
In 1974, Ring, then a high school mathematics teacher ‘dropped out’ to home school his children. He moved his family to the remote East Coast of the North Island of New Zealand and over a period of six years befriended local Maori fishermen. He returned to ‘civilization’ six years later with what he has described as ‘the rudiments of a weather prediction system’ based on traditional Maori knowledge. Sometime later he began publishing weather almanacs for Australia, New Zealand and Ireland with rain, frost and snow maps including fishing calendars and gardening guides.
I’ve no doubt that the forecasts in those almanacs could be vastly improved, including through the mining of historical weather data using artificial neural networks, a form of machine learning that uses artificial intelligence. John Abbot and I showed its application to monthly rainfall forecasting in a series of research papers published from 2012 to 2017, including in the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Advances in Atmospheric Sciences (Abbot J. & Marohasy J., 2012. Vol. 29, No. 4, Pgs. 717-730).
What has made Ken Ring’s long-range forecasts often more accurate than those from our bureaus of meteorology is their reliance on lunar cycles, uncorrupted by simulation modelling that misguidedly insists atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are relevant to weather and climate forecasting.
It is possible to forecast El Niño and other key weather events years in advance because the passage of the Moon overhead is regular and cyclical. A 2019 technical paper by Jialin Lin and Taotao Qian entitled ‘Switch Between El Niño and La Niña is Caused by Subsurface Ocean Waves Likely Driven by Lunar Tidal Forcing’ explains the underlying physical mechanisms in terms of Newtonian physics.
In fact, observations of the Moon’s changing trajectory were a main test of the theories detailed in Isaac Newton’s The Principia, published in 1687 and recognised as a highlight of the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century.
If we open our eyes to the evidence – as Thomas Browne implored a few hundred years ago – we would notice that the very hot year globally of 2016 immediately followed a year of minimum lunar declination, as did the super El Niño exactly 18 years earlier, in 1998, that also caused mass coral bleaching. It is now well understood, beyond Maori mythology, that there is an 18.6-year lunar declination cycle. But this is wilfully ignored by mainstream meteorologists lest such extra-terrestrial influences on weather and climate detract from the moralising about humankind’s influence.
More than ever, Westerners who claim to respect science —could benefit from a return to simple observation as practiced by Maori fishermen who see the weather patterns created by the passage of the Moon and its changing declination. Browne’s contemporary, John Ray wrote, ‘Let us not suffice to be book-learned, to read what others have written and to take on trust more falsehood than truth, but let us ourselves examine things as we have the opportunity, and converse with Nature as well as with books …’
In meteorological bureaus, simulation modelling has replaced observation and Heads of state are urged to sign international treaties absurdly pledging to stop climate change. The true nature of this woke western climate forecasting would be better appreciated if it was evaluated against other methods. Forecasts from different systems could be placed next to each other, in much the same way that Thomas Browne strung up dead kingfishers – side by side.
Since the article was published, I’ve received a note from Ken Ring with the following comment:
I’ve since learned that the Tuhoe fishermen of the East Coast were descended from Celtic peoples. They weren’t Maori at all, but originally pale skinned and red hair. There’s a whole political argument going on re-Treaty funds. Money seems to guide and hide our true prehistory …
Truth is, the Maori Fishing Calendar (which I published each year in the 2000s) was exactly the same as the Canadian Rockies Hunting Calendar, and Hindu writings, and harkened back to a time when the lunar laws were universal knowledge …
There are remnants of stone circles in New Zealand, but they are almost certainly pre- Maori.
I agree with the school of thought that says Aborigines were in New Zealand 40,000 years ago, based on rock drawings, and were only one of 100 or so cultures living peacefully side by side. At our closest point, we are only 900 nautical miles from Australia, and it is daft to think that for 60,000 years we were unknown to them. The ancient Chinese, too, settled on the east coast of Australia, and established a greenstone industry in New Zealand, but all this is completely shunned by historians. It means that indeed there may have been towns of 1000 people in Australia, but they were probably Asian, not Aboriginal.
I would like to thank Barry Goldman for the link to the article by Ben Finney et al. entitled ‘Wait for the West Wind’ that explains something of the complexity of navigating the South Pacific and the importance of understanding wind direction and its seasonality. It concludes with comment that:
Without the ability to sail over long distances, to find islands strewn over many thousands of miles of open sea, and to carry enough people, tools, plants and animals to found viable colonies on the islands discovered, there would have been no Polynesian culture, no vast triangular section of ocean occupied by closely related neolithic peoples. That the large, stable, and seaworthy double-canoe was the critical artefact of this cultural development and expansion is generally accepted, just as the ability to make one’s way across the ocean and find distant islands by reading the stars, the winds, the swells, the flight of birds, and other clues provided by nature is often cited as the skill most crucial to this process. To the double-canoes, and ways of navigating them without instruments, we would add a third main element of this oceanic adaptation that made the colonisation of so many far-flung islands possible: knowledge of the winds of the sea and the skill to exploit spells of westerly winds to sail far to the east.
While the more intermittent character of the westerlies in the tropical south-eastern Pacific may have slowed the momentum of eastward expansion across the Pacific, the ethnographic and experimental evidence suggests that early Polynesian voyagers were able to adapt to this wind regime and to use periodic episodes of westerly winds to find and settle all the oceanic islands to the east of their mid-Pacific homeland. The evidence further suggests that they would have been able to make the multiple landfalls throughout central East Polynesia, and that, once settled on the various islands and archipelagos, they and their descendants would have been capable of exploiting the alternating rhythm of monsoonal and subtropical westerlies with easterly trade winds to maintain some communication ties within the central East Polynesia region, and also to some extent between East and West Polynesia. The actual history of East Polynesia colonisation may, therefore, turn out to be much more complex than suggested by broad arrows commonly drawn on maps to indicate migration paths.
Instead of searching for a single island or archipelago as the sole site of first settlement in East Polynesia, and of assuming one-way population dispersal from there to all the other eastern archipelagos, perhaps we should think of early East Polynesian colonisation in terms of a large multi-archipelago, intercommunicating region with some two-way links back and forth between there and West Polynesia. Although the camp-sites and settlements made by the first people to reach the islands of East Polynesia may be sparse and difficult to find, and evidence of interisland communication even harder to discern, the archaeologists should keep looking for evidence of early colonies and their interrelations throughout the islands and archipelagos lying to the east of the Polynesian homeland.
The feature image was taken at dawn at Lake Wanaka under the Milky Way and a rising Full Moon.
Autism is an epidemic and a pandemic by any reasonable definition of those words. J.B. Handley in, How to End the Autism Epidemic, produced the best chart showing the growth in autism prevalence in the U.S. over the last 50 years:
Increase in Autism Prevalence in the U.S. 1970 to 2017
Darold Treffert at Winnebago State Hospital in Wisconsin was one of the first people to attempt to measure autism in the general population. His study, published in Archives of General Psychiatry in 1970, showed an autism rate of less than 1 in 10,000 children.
Then, sometime around 1987, the autism rate in the United States began to skyrocket. By 2017, the autism rate in the U.S. was 1 in 36 kids (Zablotsky et al., 2017). So the U.S. has experienced a 277-fold increase in autism prevalence in the last 50 years.
In some places and populations the rates are even higher: in Tom’s River, NJ, the state’s largest suburban school district, 1 in 14 eight-year-olds is on the autism spectrum; in Newark, NJ, 1 in 10 Black boys is on the spectrum (forthcoming).
The United States is in the midst of a genocide.
Genetic theories of autism never made much sense because “there is no such thing as a genetic epidemic” — the human genome just does not change that fast. An early twin study by Susan Folstein and Michael Rutter at the Institute of Psychiatry in London in 1977 suggested a strong genetic component to autism. More recent scholarship shows that this was likely overstated; the study only had 21 twin pairs and did not effectively control for environmental factors (twins usually grow up in the same family and are thus likely exposed to the same toxicants).
As the autism rate exploded throughout the U.S., the state of California hired eleven of the best geneticists in the country to examine the role of genes in autism. They concluded that genetics explains at most 38% of autism cases and in two places they explained that this was likely an overestimate (Hallmayer et al., 2011). Whatever is driving the surge in autism prevalence, it is not primarily genetics.
Well perhaps the increase in autism prevalence is just the result of better awareness (and what’s called “diagnostic expansion and substitution”)? That theory of the case does not check out either. The state of California funded two multimillion dollar studies to examine sharply rising prevalence in the state and whether it was the result of social factors. The first study was led by pediatric epidemiologist Robert S. Byrd at UC Davis who directed a team of investigators at UC Davis and UCLA. The investigators concluded that, “The observed increase in autism cases cannot be explained by a loosening in the criteria used to make the diagnosis” and “children served by the State’s Regional Centers are largely native born and there has been no major migration of children into California that would explain the increase in autism” (Byrd et al., 2002).
The state of California revisited this question in 2009 with a study led by the top environmental epidemiologist in the state — Irva Hertz-Picciotto at the UC Davis Mind Institute. This study concluded that changes in diagnostic criteria, the inclusion of milder cases, and earlier age at diagnosis explain about a quarter to a third of the total increase in autism (Hertz-Picciotto & Delwiche, 2009). In a subsequent interview with Scientific American, Hertz-Picciotto explained that these three factors “don’t get us close” to explaining the sharp rise in autism over that time period and she urged the scientific community to take a closer look at environmental factors (Cone, 2009).
There are now seven good ‘societal cost of autism’ studies (Jarbrink and Knapp, 2001; Ganz, 2007; Knapp et al., 2009; Buescher et al., 2014; Leigh & Du, 2015; Cakir et al., 2020; Blaxill, Rogers, & Nevison, 2021). They all show that the U.S. and much of the developed world is heading for economic and social collapse as a result of surging autism costs.
Autism increases poverty and inequality. Lifetime care costs for autism range from $1.4 to $2.4 million. Mothers of kids with autism earn 35% less than mothers of kids with other health limitations and 56% less than mothers of kids with no health limitations (Buescher et al., 2014).
In 2015, autism cost the U.S. an estimated $268 billion a year in direct costs & lost productivity; given current rates of increase, autism costs will reach $1 trillion a year (3.6% of GDP) by 2025 (Leigh & Du, 2015). As a point of comparison, the U.S. Defense Department budget is “just” 3.1% of GDP.
All of the more recent studies show autism costs surpassing $1 trillion a year in the near future. There is no plan by any level of government to raise revenue to meet these costs or prevent autism to mitigate these costs. Elected officials are frozen like a deer in the headlights.
In the last decade, three groups of top epidemiologists have published consensus statements declaring that neurodevelopmental disabilities including autism are caused by toxicants in the environment (The Collaborative on Health and the Environment, 2008; Mount Sinai Hospital, 2010; Project TENDR, 2016).
This is good news because it means that autism is likely preventable. The bad news is that the leading mainstream toxicologists do not want to lose their jobs so they generally avoid mentioning pharmaceutical products (even though these products appear to have an outsized impact). Parents groups have made up for the cowardice of mainstream toxicology by funding their own research.
We have fairly good data that five classes of toxicants increase autism risk:
Mercury from coal fired power plants and diesel trucks;
Plastics;
Pesticides & herbicides;
EMF/RFR; and
Pharmaceuticals (Tylenol, SSRIs, & vaccines).
Taking each toxicant in turn…
For every 1,000 pounds of environmentally released mercury, there was a 61% increase in the rate of autism (Palmer, 2006). For every 10 miles closer a family lives to a coal fired power plant the autism risk increases by 1.4% (Palmer, 2009).
Plastics: Children with autism had significantly increased levels of 3 endocrine disruptors (two phthalates — MEHP & DEHP, & BPA) in blood samples as compared with healthy controls (Kardas, 2016).
Pesticides & herbicides: Increased use of RoundUp is strongly correlated (r = 0.989) with the rising prevalence of autism (Swanson, 2014). Organophosphates increase autism risk 60 – 100%; chlorpyrifos increase risk 78% – 163%; pyrethroids increase risk 78% (Shelton et al., 2014).
9 studies show an association between acetaminophen (Tylenol) use & adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes (Bauer et al., 2018). Avella-Garcia (2016) & Liew et al. (2016) found that males exposed to Tylenol in utero have significantly elevated risk of autism.
8 studies show a statistically significant association between selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) use in pregnant women and subsequent autism in their children (see meta-analysis in Kaplan et al., 2016). Doctors who prescribe SSRIs to pregnant women are committing malpractice.
Unfortunately, in the debate over toxicants that increase autism risk, all roads lead back to vaccines. At least 5 studies show a statistically significant association between vaccines & autism (Gallagher & Goodman, 2008 & 2010; Thomas & Margulis, 2016; Mawson et al., 2017a & 2017b).
Dr. Paul Thomas is the most successful doctor in the world at preventing autism. Data from his practice show:
If zero vaccines, autism rate = 1 in 715;
If alternative vaccine schedule, autism rate = 1 in 440;
If CDC vaccine schedule, autism rate = 1 in 36.
That study had large sample size (3,344 children), access to medical files, and good researchers working on it. But look closely. His alternative vaccine schedule reduces autism risk by more than 1200%. However even an alternative vaccine schedule increases autism risk by 160% versus no vaccines at all.
And all of those other toxicants that I described above that have been shown to increase autism risk? Those are the 1 in the 715 cases when the parent does not vaccinate at all. Autism appears mostly be a story of iatrogenic injury from vaccines.
This is not a surprise. Thousands of parents have been telling us for years that their children regressed into autism following vaccinations. Ethylmercury is a known neurotoxin and is still in 7 different vaccines (Thomas & Margulis, 2016, p. 14).
Aluminum is a known neurotoxin (Grandjean & Landrigan, 2014) and is used in a majority of vaccines. “The dose makes the poison” paradigm has collapsed in recent years and now we know that many toxicants have no safe dose.
In a sane world, all of this would be seen as good news. In a sane world the CDC, EPA, NIH and every major newspaper would rush out to Portland, Oregon to examine whether the data from Dr. Paul’s practice (and other studies) are correct. But we live in an insane world…
To date, the CDC, EPA, NIH, the federal government, and all state governments have ignored Dr. Paul’s work. None of the top 10 major newspapers in the U.S. have reviewed his book, The Vaccine Friendly, plan even though it is a bestseller on Amazon. In fact the Oregon Medical Board was so incensed by Dr. Paul’s success in preventing autism that they pulled his medical license briefly in 2021 (he has since been reinstated).
All of this information is public and available to anyone with an internet connection and a library card. By 1999 it was clear that vaccines that contained mercury were a problem (see Kirby, 2005). By the early 2000s it was clear that the problems with vaccines went well beyond mercury. Government had a choice to make: come clean or double down. And starting with senior scientist Thomas Verstraeten and then William Thompson the CDC decided to just flat out lie, manipulate findings, and destroy data.
The pharmaceutical industry also had a choice to make: improve their products or utilize their extensive capture of media and government to protect their existing toxic products. As everyone now knows, they chose to protect their existing toxic products. But the pharmaceutical industry has an enormous problem on their hands. We know some vaccines (hepatitis B, HPV, flu, DTaP…) cause catastrophic harms. And pockets of unvaccinated people across the country — who are healthier than vaccinated children — are the control group that provides evidence of Pharma’s crimes.
So starting in 2015, with the introduction of SB277 in California, the pharmaceutical industry began a systematic effort to eliminate the unvaccinated control group in all 50 states. They start by removing religious or personal belief exemptions to vaccination. In subsequent years they introduce bills to eliminate all medical exemptions to vaccination (SB 277 in CA in 2019) to get to 100% vaccination rates (even though all scientists will tell you that there are some children who should not be vaccinated because of underlying health conditions). In the Pharma legislative blitzkrieg no one is spared so that there will be no evidence left of the harms from these products. If 100% of children are treated, then there is no background rate of illness and all vaccine injuries just appear “normal”.
These mandatory vaccine bills are racketeering and crimes against humanity. With the introduction of coronavirus vaccines in late 2020, the situation has gotten much worse. Pharma now aims to vaccinate 100% of adults as well as 100% of kids and the results thus far have been catastrophic.
So here’s where things stand. The vaccine paradigm has collapsed (and no, mRNA, DNA, and adenovirus vector vaccines are not going to save it). Pharma has piles of cash and extensive capture of the media, academia, and government. So they have the ability to do just about whatever they want. Fearing prosecution and seeking immense profits, Pharma has abandoned any pretense of science, consent, or health and pushed all in to set up a totalitarian state that will serve their interests.
But Pharma has harmed so many people — first with the childhood schedule and now with coronavirus vaccines — that there are now millions of people who have seen vaccine injury first-hand and are now fighting back with everything they’ve got. Variously referred to as the medical freedom movement, the health choice movement, and/or the personal sovereignty movement, these brave citizens are taking on the most powerful industry in the world and fighting to save our country from Pharma fascism. The fighting is so fierce because the stakes are enormous. We are fighting to preserve human life as we know it from the most predatory and corrupt industry in the world.
To learn more about the toxicants associated with autism, read The Political Economy of Autism. To learn more about the battle to save our country and the world from Pharma totalitarianism, please subscribe to my Substack.
Just moments after the Supreme Court ruled against Biden’s vaccine mandate for large employers, ICAN Attorney, Aaron Siri, Esq., joins Del to critique important moments from this monumental hearing.
During World War II, Japan’s Emperor Hirohito directed the looting of the national treasures in 13 nations his army had conquered. This included the wealth of Britain, Netherlands, and France, which had moved some of their gold to Asian colonies for safety. What happened to these treasures, estimated at around 100 billion in 1945 dollars? This loot was combined with treasure seized from the Germans to create a vast slush fund called the Black Eagle Trust, which was used to finance clandestine activities of the CIA. These funds allowed the creation of a huge organized crime syndicate in Asia that supplement their funds via drug and arms trafficking, and government contract and bank fraud.
As the U.S. moves nuclear forces closer and closer to the border of Russia, and as our corporate media bang their war drums louder and louder, does anyone remember the Cuban missile crisis?
In June of 1961, just three months after the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was defeated, the United States began the deployment of fifteen Jupiter nuclear missiles to Turkey, which shared a border with the Soviet Union. Each missile, armed with a W49 1.4 megaton thermonuclear warhead, was equivalent to 175 Hiroshima bombs. With their fifteen-hundred-mile range, the missiles were capable of annihilating Moscow, Leningrad, and every major city and base in the Russian heartland. Each missile could incinerate Moscow in just sixteen minutes from launch, thus wildly raising the possibility of thermonuclear war caused by technological accident, human error, miscommunication, or preemptive attack.
We didn’t hear about the Jupiter missiles and of course we didn’t hear anything about Operation Mongoose, the top-secret plan launched on November 1, 1961, to overthrow the government of Cuba through a systematic campaign of sabotage, coastal raids, assassinations, subversion leading to CIA-sponsored guerrilla warfare, and an eventual invasion by the U.S. military. The armed raids and sabotage succeeded in killing many Cubans and damaging the economy, which was hit much harder by the economic embargo announced in February. However, the assassination plots were foiled, and all attempts to develop an internal opposition failed. Many of the CIA agents and Cuban exiles who infiltrated the island by sea and air were captured, and quite a few of them talked, even on Cuban radio, about the plans for a new U.S. invasion, which was planned for October. Cuba requested military help from the Soviet Union, which by July was sending troops, air defense missiles, battlefield nuclear weapons, and medium-range ballistic missiles equivalent to the U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey.
At 7 p.m. eastern time on Monday, October 22, 1962, John F. Kennedy delivered the most terrifying presidential message of my lifetime. Declaring that the Soviet Union had created a “clear and present danger” by placing in Cuba “large, long-range, and clearly offensive weapons of sudden mass destruction” “capable of striking Washington, D.C.,” he announced that U.S. ships would immediatly impose a “strict quarantine,” a transparent euphemism for a blockade, on the island. Knowing that the American people knew nothing about the recent and ongoing U.S. deployment of the Jupiter ballistic missiles capable of striking all the cities of the Russian heartland, he stated, “Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift that any . . . change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace.” And knowing the American people knew nothing about Operation Mongoose and its previously planned invasion of Cuba in October, the president stated over and over again that these Soviet missiles were “offensive threats” with no defensive purpose. Here was his most frightening sentence: “We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth—but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.”
On Friday Jane wrote a long letter to her family:
Oct. 26, 1962
Dear Family,
Marie, your letter from the east helped rouse me from a state of paralysis in which I have been suspended since Kennedy’s speech on Monday… Bo, I am glad your orders so far are not changed… I had figured Bill must be in the blockade…
Thursday night Bruce was one of three faculty who spoke on this crisis. Dr. Leppert, a nuclear physicist (he watched the effects of nuclear blasts in Nevada) and Dr. Holman of the medical school were the two other speakers. There was a large audience. The discussion afterwards was intelligent and constructive. But part of the time there I felt like crying because all their hope and desire for reason is, in effect upon those in power, like the vaguest ripple of a breeze. When we once sent a telegram urging no resumption of nuclear testing, we received in return a very brisk, official pamphlet on how to prepare for a nuclear attack…
Tuesday in the middle of the night Karen appeared at our bed and said through tears, “I’ve been having a nightmare about an atomic bomb.” We had been being careful about our words around them, but the radio had been on constantly… Tuesday I had periods of wishing I weren’t pregnant, but I keep telling myself that instead of bringing one more person into the shadow of nuclear war, I’ll be bringing one more person up to hate hate, respect respect, and love love.
Until I recently read her letter, I had forgotten my talk. According to the Stanford Daily, I had explained how Kennedy’s blockade of Cuba violated international law and asked the audience to judge it on “pragmatic, ideological, and ethical” grounds. That all sounds embarrassingly tame and bookish. Jane obviously would have done better.
The recipients of Jane’s letter included her sister Marie and her husband Bo Sims, a Marine lieutenant colonel stationed at the Pentagon, and her sister Bobbie and her husband Bill Morgan, the captain of a destroyer. Back in 1956, Bill has cut our wedding cake with his ceremonial Navy sword. Although he and I rarely agreed about anything—except the Gulf of Tonkin incidents of 1964—I always figured that he was probably a good, albeit gung-ho, naval officer, fair to his crew and responsible about his duty. Only in 2017 did I discover that the destroyer under Bill’s command was the USS Cony, one of the U.S. warships searching the Cuban coast for surviving invaders the Bay of Pigs the year before. The day after Jane was writing her letter, Bill was indeed carrying out his orders professionally and efficiently. On October 27, the Cony discovered and then tracked for four hours the Soviet diesel-electric submarine B-59 out in the North Atlantic Ocean several hundred miles from Cuba.
The Cony was one of eight destroyers and an aircraft carrier hunting for Soviet submarines that might be heading for Cuba. They were under orders to force any such sub to surface by bombarding it with “signaling depth charges,” designed to cause explosions powerful enough to rock the sub, while also pounding it with ultra-high-amplitude sound waves from the destroyer’s sonar dome.
Meanwhile, the B-59’s last orders from Moscow were not to cross Kennedy’s “quarantine line” — 500 miles from Cuba–but to hold its position in the Sargasso Sea. After that, it received no communication from the Soviet Union for several days. It had been monitoring Miami radio stations that were broadcasting the increasingly ominous news. When the sub-hunting fleet of U.S. ships and planes arrived, the submarine was forced to run deep, making it lose all communication with the outside world, and to run silent, relying on battery power. The batteries were close to depleted, the air conditioning had broken down, and water, food, and oxygen were running low when the Cony began its hours of bombardment with the depth charges and high-amplitude sonar blasts. Other destroyers joined in an ongoing barrage of hand grenades and depth charges.
The Soviet officers were unaware of the existence of “signaling depth charges,” and international law has no provision allowing one warship to bombard another with small explosives unless they are in a state of war. Since the B-59 was hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic, not within the blockade area and not heading toward Cuba, its crew and officers logically deduced that war had started. If so, it was their duty to attack. The officers knew that with one weapon on board, they could destroy the entire sub-hunting fleet of destroyers and the aircraft carrier that had been pursuing them—along with themselves.
Neither Bill Morgan nor anyone else in the U.S. Navy or government was aware that the B-59 was armed with a T-5 nuclear torpedo, approximately equivalent in explosive force to the Hiroshima bomb. If the sub fired its T-5, it would plunge the world into nuclear holocaust.
One nuclear weapon fired from any of the American or Russian subs still prowling the oceans would do the same today, decades after the end of the Cold War. Hardly anyone in America then or now is aware of the command-and-control protocol on nuclear-armed submarines. In order to deter an opponent’s “decapitating” first strike, which would wipe out all the nation’s leaders with the authority to launch a nuclear retaliation, the three top officers of a nuclear-armed sub have the authority and ability to launch a nuclear attack under certain circumstances. On October 27, 1962, the Soviet command-and-control protocol for launching nuclear torpedoes was even riskier: only the sub’s captain and its political officer had to agree.
On the B-59, Captain Valentin Savitsky and his political officer realized that it was now or never. Their choice was either to surface—which was equivalent to surrender while they, perhaps alone, had the ability to launch a significant counterattack—or to fire their nuclear torpedo. They decided to attack and readied to aim for the aircraft carrier at the core of the submarine-hunting fleet.
Only one man stood in the way of a nuclear Armageddon, and he was on board the B-59 by chance. He was Vasili Arkhipov, the commander of the four-submarine Soviet flotilla, who vetoed the attack, leaving Captain Savitsky with no alternative but to surface.
“This week’s events have brought home,” Jane had written in her letter a day earlier, how few people have any say “about nuclear war before it may be brought down upon their heads by the handful of people who decide man’s fate.” Even that handful of people in the White House and Pentagon didn’t know about those nuclear torpedoes. And that handful of people in the Kremlin didn’t know that the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff had been itching for an excuse to launch a full-scale thermonuclear attack on the Soviet Union and that now, led by the “mad”—President Kennedy’s word—ravings of my ex-boss Curtis LeMay, these dogs of war were demanding to be let off their leashes.
The Missile Crisis ended with the USSR removing all “offensive” weapons from Cuba in return for a public U.S. commitment not to invade Cuba and a secret agreement to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey within several months. Years after the Jupiter missiles were withdrawn, we were told that they were “obsolete,” a term still used in almost all accounts of the crisis. But if the Jupiter missiles in Turkey were obsolete, then so were the equivalent Soviet missiles in Cuba. In reality, the problem with both deployments was not obsolescence but reckless brinkmanship, initiated by the United States. Fortunately, Moscow and Washington ended up mutually recognizing that neither was willing to live with a gun that close to its head.
What may have looked to the public like a Soviet capitulation turned out to be a successful, desperate, and potentially fatal gamble by the Soviet Union. They won a tit-for-tat removal of the land-based missiles within sixteen minutes of incinerating either Moscow or Washington, with a bonus of stopping the imminent invasion of Cuba and possibly future invasions as well, all without having to commit to the future defense of Cuba.
Behind the scenes, Kennedy now had to deal with the shrieking hawks, furious at the president both for missing the golden opportunity to annihilate the Soviet Union and for an ignominious surrender of America’s exceptional right to invade Cuba and to station nuclear weapons wherever it pleased.
Alarmed by how close we had come to nuclear apocalypse, Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev set up a telephone hot line to enable direct communication, developed a personal relationship to ease tensions, and succeeded in August 1963 in banning nuclear testing in the atmosphere, under water, or in space. The president inspired many of us with an eloquent June 1963 American University commencement address about the world’s crucial need for an enduring peace. He even urged “every thoughtful citizen” who desired peace to “begin by looking inward—by examining his own attitude toward peace, toward the Soviet Union,” which he extolled for its heroic World War II sacrifices. But then of course he went on to claim: “The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today.” Since today Russia is as capitalist as Saudi Arabia, Australia, and United States, what is “the primary cause of world tension today?”
President Kennedy’s final remarks began with this statement: “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.” So it must have been Vietnam that started a war with the United States.
Defending Australian Open Champion Novak Djokovic was deported from Australia, the day before commencement of 2022 tournament play. He entered the country on a visa including a medical exemption based on recent Covid infection. Due to public outry over “special treatment,” his visa was revoked upon arrival in the country, only to be reinstated by a court. It was later revoked by an immigration minister, whose decision was upheld by another court, sending Djokovic packing — potentially for three years.
This draconian act puts Djokovic at a serious disadvantage in his Grand Slam rivalry with Rafael Nadal, who is competing in Australia this year after vocally supporting vaccines. Both champions, along with Roger Federer, currently hold 20 Grand Slam titles. Djokovic was favored to be the first to reach 21, but his decision to remain unvaccinated leaves Nadal alone with that opportunity for now. (Federer is out recovering from surgery.)
Djokovic was technically deported for not being vaccinated, but the decision lacks even a superficial “health and safety” justification. Djokovic already had Covid twice, once in early 2020 and again in December 2021. At the time of his deportation, he had been in Australia for ten days, and tested negative. He’s as healthy as a human being can be — you don’t earn “GOAT’ status in the difficult sport of tennis any other way.
Further proof that Djokovic poses no disease threat to anyone is the fact that this tournament was safely played in January 2021, before vaccines were available for any player or guest. Even if Djokovic had taken the vaccine, he’d be no “safer” in terms of his ability to transmit the virus, as the 100,000 daily cases in highly-vaccinated Australia attest.
Even the government that deported Djokovic didn’t try very hard to frame its decision as the elimination of a health threat. Rather, it stated that Novak could become an “icon of free choice” if allowed to stay. Ironically, he will undoubtedly become that now that he’s made the supreme sacrifice of forfeiting his chance to play in order to openly oppose mandatory vaccination.
It’s not a good look for the Covid Regime if an avowed “anti-vaxxer” dominates the sport. The world audience might start thinking about the relative health status of “unvaccinated” people, particularly since athletes have been experiencing heart trouble all over the world — several already at the Australian Open practice courts.
As it stands, Millions of Australians and others who have already taken the vaccine applaud the government’s decision. They can’t get the vaccine out of their bodies, so the next best thing is to make sure that everyone else has to put themselves into the same spot.
Nevermind the precedent it sets to allow a government to force people to choose between their health and their career. Such Sophie’s choices are normal these days.
The Regime would not have minded Djokovic playing in an unvaccinated state so long as he publicly expressed support for mandatory universal vaccination. He could have easily done this — a hero in Serbia, the wealthy star could have tapped any number of doctors to provide fake certification of vaccination. But that would have violated his principles.
In 2010, an “unwell” Djokovic was collapsing at tournaments, unable to complete strenuous matches. A doctor witnessing his condition on TV got in touch with the athlete, recommending that he eliminate gluten, dairy and processed sugar from his diet. Novak thought it sounded strange but agreed to try, and it’s hard to argue with his results. His 2011 season was one of the best in men’s tennis history. On his new fuel, he was unstoppable. He ended the season with an unbelievable 10–1 record against Nadal and Federer, and compiled a 41-match winning streak.
This experience changed not only the tennis player. It fundamentally changed the man, as Djokovic explains in his book “Serve to Win”:
When it’s not being cared for, your body will send you signals: fatigue, insomnia, cramps, flus, colds, allergies. When that happens, will you ask yourself the questions that matter? Will you answer honestly and with an open mind?
Open-minded people radiate positive energy. Closed-minded people radiate negativity. Eastern medicine teaches you to align mind, body, and soul. If you have positive feelings in your mind — love, joy, happiness — they affect your body… But a lot of people, especially closed-minded people, are led by fear. That and anger are the most negative energies we have. What are closed-minded people afraid of? It could be many things: Fear that they are wrong, fear that someone might have a better way, fear that something has to change. Fear limits your ability to live your life.
Some people at the top feed off of negativity. The way I see it, pharmaceutical and food companies want people to feel fear. They want people to be sick. How many TV ads are for fast foods and medicines? And what’s at the root of those messages? We’ll make you feel better with our products. But even deeper down: We’ll make you fear that you don’t have enough of the things we say you need. It’s crazy — even when you’re completely healthy, they say you need [products] to stay that way.
Here’s a pattern I’d rather embrace: good food, exercise, openness, positive energy, great results. I’ve been living that pattern for several years now. It works better than the alternative.
Djokovic rejects Big food, Big Ag, Big Chemical, and Big Pharma. He doesn’t need them. His practices allow him to be healthy without any of their products — in fact, he’s achieved an elite level of health by actively avoiding their products.
There is no greater threat to the bottom line of these companies than people like Novak Djokovic. He is not scared, he is not anxious, so he can’t be manipulated or sold an easy fix. He can see the path to health takes hard work, and he’s willing to put it in. When they tell him that he can’t be healthy without a vaccine, he laughs in their faces. They can send him packing, but they can never take away his integrity and self-worth.
Novak Djokovic doesn’t want to lie to the public, making it appear as if he agrees with The System’s “path to health.” If he did that, he would get to play his tournament, but he would have millions of lives on his conscience. He’d rather give up his career’s crowning achievement in order to stand in truth. To send people the message: you CAN reject this tyranny. You do NOT have to comply. You can SAY NO, and you will be okay.
It’s easier for him, yes, with his millions of dollars. Healthcare workers on a middle-class salary will have a harder go of it. Military members faced with dishonorable discharge absent vaccination have it worse. But Djokovic has made it easier, at least, for everyone to publicly reject vaccination. If Novak openly rejects this vaccine, they can too, without shame. His very public deportation will hopefully get many people thinking about his approach to health, which if widely understood and adopted, will finally burn the Covid Regime to the ground — once and for all.
Stacey Rudin is an attorney and writer in New Jersey, USA.
Two important papers have recently been published that question the extent to which humans are causing global warming by burning fossil fuel and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The works will of course be ignored by mainstream media outlets, but they represent further evidence that a more nuanced view of human-caused or anthropogenic warming is gaining traction among scientists, tired of working within the political constraints of ‘settled’ science.
In a paper to be published next month in the journal Health Physics, three physics professors led by Kenneth Skrable from the University of Massachusetts examine the atmospheric trail left by CO2 isotopes and conclude that the amount of CO2 released by fossil fuel burning between 1750 and 2018 was “much too low to be the cause of global warming”.
Three carbon isotopes are found in the atmosphere, 12C, 13C and 14C. The latter is produced by cosmic rays and is in a constant state of activity but the other two are contained in the gas entering the atmosphere. The carbon in living matter has a slightly higher proportion of 12C. Although only about 4% of CO2 entering the atmosphere every year is produced by human activity, it is said very slightly to alter the balance of the other atmospheric isotopes. As a result it is often used as ‘proof’ that rising CO2 levels are primarily the result of fossil fuel burning.
But the Massachusetts team found that claims of the dominance of anthropogenic fossil fuel in the isotope record have involved the ‘misuse’ of 12C and 13C statistics to validate such suggestions. They conclude that the assumption that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is dominated by or equal to the anthropogenic component is “not settled science”.
Furthermore, they go on to state: “Unsupported conclusions of the dominance of the anthropogenic fossil component of CO2 and concerns of its effect on climate change and global warming have severe potential societal implications that press the need for very costly remedial actions that may be misdirected, presently unnecessary, and ineffective in curbing global warming.”
The “remedial” net zero political agenda is driven by the unproven hypothesis that humans are causing catastrophic heating and climate breakdown by using once-living plant and animal matter and releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. But there is little or no correlation between temperature and CO2 levels on a current, historical or geological timescale. Recent global warming, which replaced the global cooling scare of the 1970s, ran out of steam almost two decades ago. Green activists keep the doomsday tales going by highlighting natural bad weather, quoting massaged surface temperatures (don’t mention the far more accurate and cooler satellite data) and citing increasingly fanciful forecasts from the hottest ticket in town – the Always Goes Wrong Climate Model Show.
The unproven science hypothesis that humans cause most or all climate change is now under increasing attack on a number of fronts in scientific circles. Professor Happer of Princeton University has suggested that CO2 becomes “saturated” once it reaches a certain level, since it reflects heat back to Earth only within certain bands of the infrared spectrum. Under this hypothesis, which was given some credence by former Obama Administration Energy Under-secretary Steve Koonin in his book Unsettled, CO2 becomes “saturated” once it reaches a certain level, with most of the Sun’s heat that is going to be trapped having already been radiated back to Earth.
Ascribing all climate change to just one cause – the burning of fossil fuel – is given short shrift by recent work published by the German physicist Dr. Frank Stefani. In a paper published last year, the researcher at the Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf dismisses the “illusionary claims of an overwhelming scientific consensus”. He cautions it is essential to support such settled conclusions, “before embarking on drastic, perilous and perhaps misguided plans for global action”.
Much of Dr. Stefani’s research looks at the effect of solar influences and geomagnetic forces on the planet. He suggests that the Sun accounts for between 30-70% of recent planetary warming. He further suggests that it is likely that solar activity will continue its two decade decline – at the end of the 20th century it was likely at its highest level for 8,000 years – and geomagnetic activity as measured by the aa-index will fall. In Dr. Stefani’s work, he uses the aa-index as a proxy for solar activity. So far as CO2 is concerned, he argues that even if there is an annual rise of 2.5 parts per million into the atmosphere, this will lead to only “a mild additional temperature rise” of less than 1°C by 2100. Other scenarios could result in flatter temperature curves “in which the heating effect of increasing CO2 is widely compensated by the cooling effect of a decreasing aa-index”.
There are countless factors that influence the climate in the short, medium and long term. Dr. Stefani concludes his work by noting that the huge “Milankovitch drivers” [changes in the Earth’s axis and orbit] will eventually “cool down mankind’s hubris of being able to significantly influence the terrestrial climate (in whatever direction)”.
Shortly after World World Two, The Rockefeller Foundation set forth on a quest to bring about a transformation of world agriculture. They did this, in part, by “socially engineering” the scientific culture to not only accept but promote the use of GMO foods and dangerous biotechnologies. And now, they are at it again.
This new attempted policy change is outlined in a document titled “The True Cost of Food: Measuring What Matters to Transform the U.S. Food System”. In the report, mention is made of both the Covid-19 crisis and the climate crisis, claiming that now is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for to effect “transformative change” in food production.
The report is the result of a collaboration between the Rockefeller Foundation, various academics from leading universities, the World Wildlife Fund and the True Price Foundation. Leading the analysis were members of “True Price”, a Dutch company that describes itself as a “social enterprise with the mission to realize sustainable products that are affordable to all by enabling consumers to see and voluntarily pay the true price of products they buy”.
Leading the True Price team is Michel Scholte, an alumnus of the World Economic Forum Global Shapers Network, Adrian de Groot Ruiz, also a former WEF “Global Shaper” and Herman Mulder, former Director-General at ABN AMRO, one of the world’s leading agribusiness banks!
The intended goal of the report is to uncover the “true cost” of food in the US, which is claimed to be at least $3.2 trillion per year, three times more than than $1.1 trillion that Americans spend annually on food.
Included in this “cost analysis” are things like diet-related diseases, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and reduced biodiversity – all reasonable concerns. However, to understand the true agenda at play, one must read past the flowery language and popular buzzwords. As noted by author and researcher, William Engdahl:
“The message is that the current American food production is to blame and that radical and costly changes are urgently needed. The difficulty in reading the report is that the language is deliberately vague and deceptive. For example one of the most damaging components of American agriculture since the 1990s has been the wholesale introduction of GMO crops—especially soybeans, corn and cotton and the highly carcinogenic Monsanto-Bayer Roundup with glyphosate. The Rockefeller report omits their direct role in fostering that devastation by their creating and promoting Monsanto and GMO for decades, knowing it was destructive.”
As Engdahl makes clear, such a report detracts attention away from the fact that most of the “costs” associated with the food industry can be traced directly to the Rockefellers themselves and their role in creating the current industrialized food chain that has not only wrought destruction on global agriculture but contributed to the explosion of chronic disease. The adverse health effects caused by the introduction of GMO crops into modern farming and the subsequent lack of safety testing cannot be overstated. This will be detailed in part 2.
Following the classic problem-reaction-solution model, the report makes mention of the impact of Covid-19 on the current food supply chain, stating that the food system needs to become more resilient.
“Food insecurity has skyrocketed during the pandemic, with more than 54 million Americans (one in six Americans), of which over 18 million are children, facing uncertainty around their next meal.”
This is ironic considering that these issues are a direct result of political decisions to institute draconian lockdowns and other nonscientific policies, NOT a virus or a disease called “Covid-19”. And lest we forget the 2012 Rockefeller publication, “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development” (p.18, “Lockstep”) describes many aspects of the Covid-19 drama in haunting detail.
According to the Rockefeller report, the way to construct a more resilient food supply chain is by increasing corporate involvement through a focus on industrialization and technological innovation. However, these are the very same measures that caused many of the issues being outlined.
For example, the report makes mention of “soil health” as a primary concern. However, it is precisely the widespread implementation of modern farming techniques (which involve the use of artificial fertilizers and the spraying of pesticides) – advocated for by the Rockefellers – that has depleted the soil of its nutrients in the first place.
Unsurprisingly the report makes no mention of agroecology or other regenerative methods of natural farming that seek to harness, maintain and enhance biological and ecological processes in agricultural production.
The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) describes agroecology as an approach to farming that:
“Favours the use of natural processes, limits the use of external inputs, promotes closed cycles with minimal negative externalities and stresses the importance of local knowledge and participatory processes that develop knowledge and practice through experience, as well as scientific methods, and the need to address social inequalities”.
“Agroecology, which encompasses common ecological principles – organic farming, permaculture, biodynamic farming, natural farming regenerative agriculture, among many others – has been recognized as the most effective sustainable and equitable method of farming which also addresses the challenges of feeding the world in an era of climate crises.”
Back to the Rockefeller report… Which claims that one of the fundamental shifts required across the current food system is an acceleration in the development of new tools to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As stated in the report, “this includes new financial markets related to natural capital including carbon, water, soil nitrogen and biodiversity”.
It is not stated how these new financial markets will be constructed, but this seems like a reference to the recent Rockefeller/Wallstreet-backed creation of a new asset class called a Natural Asset Company. NACs are specialized corporations “that hold the rights to the ecosystem services produced on a given chunk of land, services like carbon sequestration or clean water”.
Journalist and researcher Whitney Webb explains the true motives behind the creation of NACs in no uncertain terms:
“The ultimate goal of NACs is not sustainability or conservation – it is the financialization of nature, i.e. turning nature into a commodity that can be used to keep the current, corrupt Wall Street economy booming under the guise of protecting the environment and preventing its further degradation.”
Another method of reducing GHG emissions, according to the Rockefeller/Gates/WEF initiative, is by introducing plant-based, meat-free alternatives. Once again, the threat of “Covid-19” is subtly exploited to highlight the importance of this transition.
“[meat] processing plants that continued to operate became transmission sites for the disease. Reports show approximately 300,000 excess cases of Covid-19 due to proximity to a livestock plant and approximately 5,000 deaths happened among workers in meat processing facilities.”
Here it’s worth noting that the President of the Rockefeller Foundation, Rajiv Shah, is the former Director of Agricultural Development at the Gates Foundation and that Bill Gates is personally invested in Impossible Foods, Memphis Meats and Beyond Meats – companies that produce synthetic meat and dairy products from plants, using laboratory techniques including gene editing.
In Gates’ 2021 book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster” he advocates for the replacement of beef with fake meat. In a recent interview with MIT technology review, he said that people’s behaviors should change for them to learn to like fake meat, and if that doesn’t work, appropriate regulations should be put in place.
This agricultural transformation advocated for by Gates, the Rockefellers and the WEF, one that seeks to increase industrialization, patentable crops and the consumption of lab-grown “meat”, stems in part, from the mechanical mind and its reductionist theory of food.
The “reductionist” view of food tells us that food is digested in the body where it’s broken down into its constituent parts, sent to different areas of the body and, ultimately, used as “fuel” for the body to burn. Much emphasis is put on the caloric content of food, rather than its nutritional value or its other medicinal properties/benefits. This view stems from our scientific establishment which views the body as nothing more than a complex “machine”.
Furthermore, as is evident, the transhumanists seek to alter our perception of food from something that is grown naturally in the earth beneath our feet to something that is synthetically engineered in laboratories. Companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger have raised millions of dollars, promoting their concoctions on the basis of claims that “Lab-grown meat will replicate the taste and consistency of traditional meat”.
If taste alone doesn’t hook people in, they play the “climate change” card, touting the consumption of fake meat as “necessary” for us to avoid an environmental disaster. Ironically, research indicates that the production of lab-cultured meat could require more energy than the preparation of regular meat. Adding to this irony is the fact that Gates, who lives in a 66,000-square-foot mansion and travels in a private jet, is himself a carbon super-emitter.
In 2019, the USDA and FDA announced a regulatory framework for lab-grown meat, a move that elated the fake-meat industry. Why would synthetic meat producers be happy about this? Kelsey Piper, in an article for Vox, gives us the answer:
“… consumer confidence is absolutely critical. If people don’t believe that cell-based meat products are safe, regulated, and healthy, then they’ll stick with slaughtered meat”.
In other words, no matter how fraudulent, an “FDA Approved” badge constitutes an irreplaceable marketing tool. For example, data indicate that Covid-19 vaccination rates increased after the vaccines were given full FDA approval.
With a regulatory framework in place, startups are working to build out the technological infrastructure that will allow for the production of lab-grown meat at scale. The next step in this “transhumanist tiptoe” will be “food” created using nanotechnology. As stated by author and researcher Aaron Franz,
“Nanotech could take the atoms from an otherwise useless source and turn it into something useful. You could turn dirt directly into food with nanotech.”[1]
Related to this is the developing science of “molecular manufacturing”, which may be defined as “the hypothetical future use of reprogrammable nanoscale ‘assemblers’ to build products atom by atom”.
Franz explains the transhumanist mindset behind the development of such a technology:
“Molecular manufacturing is hailed by transhumanists as a way to conquer scarcity. In a scarcity-free world people would be able to concentrate on things other than survival.”[1]
However, a quick search through the scientific literature indicates that the use of molecular manufacturing in food production goes far beyond alleviating “scarcity” and may have more to do with altering the structure and function of the body itself. For example, a 2015 review paper states that (emphasis added):
“The potential benefits of utilizing nanomaterials in food are improved bioavailability, antimicrobial effects, enhanced sensory acceptance and targeted delivery of bioactive compounds.”
Another review published in the American Journal of Food Technology makes mention of “nanotechnology-based biosensors” for the detection of food-borne pathogens. Shades of the DARPA/NIH brainchild, Profusa, and their research into developing an injectable biosensor that can “detect future pandemics”.
Once again, “public acceptance” is cited as a major hurdle to the introduction of food created using nanotechnology, and therefore one can reasonably predict to see further regulatory frameworks created specifically for such products.
FOOD AS INFORMATION
Despite the reductionist, body-as-a-machine doctrine expounded by the transhumanists, new research argues that food is a form of information and that this information interacts directly with our genetic infrastructure, effecting epigenetic changes by turning on and off various genes – “You are what you eat”, as the old adage goes.
“Epigenetics” refers to the science of how cells control gene activity without changing the DNA sequence. Our food and our environment are two important factors that drive epigenetic changes. One of the primary epigenetic mechanisms is DNA methylation – a process that regulates gene expression by altering protein activity and/or inhibiting the binding of transcription factors.
Abnormal DNA methylation is observed in cancer patients and as researchers note, “Dietary nutrient intake and bioactive food components are essential environmental factors that may influence DNA methylation”. The discovery of epigenetics revealed the profound importance of food intake on disease risk and phenotypic expression.
But DNA methylation is not the only mechanism by which food interacts with our DNA. All food, whether of plant or animal origin, contains non-coding RNA that can survive digestion to affect profound changes in the expression of our genes. These RNAs are shuttled in virus-sized (!) “microvesicles” (also called “exosomes”). A groundbreaking study published in 2011 found that exogenous plant micro RNAs could regulate gene expression changes in humans.
These findings may extend the role of exosomes to that of interspecies communication, thereby highlighting the significance of food as a source of information transfer, affecting the body on a nutritional, energetic and genetic level.
Another source of information comes from the microbes that accompany most plant foods. The “microbiome” as it’s termed refers to the collective microbial (fungal, bacterial, etc) content of our body, much of which is found in the gut. Recent discoveries have illuminated the importance of the microbiome and its role in nearly every chronic disease from depression to cardiovascular disease.
Beneficial microbes help to regulate bowel pH, produce vitamins, maintain mucosal integrity, regulate immune function, reduce inflammation, and ferment complex carbohydrates that are normally inaccessible to human digestion.
Microbes represent a profound “store” of information, relayed to us through the food we eat. Fermented foods (such as kimchi) are thus irreplaceable sources of beneficial bacteria that help to promote optimal bowel conditions, reduce disease risk and restore balance to a microbiome decimated by overly processed foods, glyphosates and other toxins common to modern-day life.
Understanding food as more than merely a source of energy allows us to comprehend the magnitude of the agenda that seeks to promote the consumption of genetically modified, synthetically produced, test-tube mulch cooked-up in corporate laboratories. With this firmly in mind, we are now prepared to dive into the history of GMOs and modern “agribusiness”, with an emphasis on highlighting the role of the Rockefellers and other wealthy elite actors.
To be continued…
REFERENCES
[1] Franz, A. Revolve: Man’s Scientific Rise to Godhood. Franz Productions. 2011.
Ryan Matters is a writer and free thinker from South Africa. After a life-changing period of illness, he began to question mainstream medicine, science and the true meaning of what it is to be alive. Some of his writings can be found at newbraveworld.org, you can also follow him on Gab.
I’ve been getting frequent requests for at least the last six months to write about the Novavax covid vaccine. I’ve been resisting, mainly because it’s seemed uncertain whether it would ever actually be approved in the western world. Now that it’s been approved for use in the EU, however, that has changed, and I figure that I can put it off no longer.
I guess the reason so many people are excited about the Novavax vaccine is that it uses a traditional technology that’s been used many times previously, rather than the new-fangled technologies used in the mRNA and adenovector vaccines that have up to now been all that’s available in the US and EU. To many people, that apparently makes it feel inherently safer.
The Novavax vaccine consists of two parts: the Sars-Cov-2 spike protein and an adjuvant (a substance that causes the immune system to realize that a dangerous foreign entity is present, and which thus activates an immune response to the spike protein). So, rather than injecting genetic blueprints in to the body that get cells to make the viral spike protein themselves (as is the case with the four previously approved vaccines), the spike protein is injected directly.
The first country to approve the Novavax vaccine was Indonesia, which approved it for use in November. That means that there is no even slightly long term real world follow-up data available yet. All we have is the preliminary results from the randomized trials. That means we still have no idea about rare side-effects, and won’t for months. Several million people had already received the AstraZeneca vaccine before authorities realized it could cause serious blood clotting disorders, and millions had also received the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines before it became clear that they can cause myocarditis. With that cautionary point having been made, let’s take a look at what the preliminary results from the randomized trials show.
The first trial results concerning the Novavax vaccine appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in May. 4,387 people in South Africa were randomized to receive either the vaccine or a saline placebo. The trial was conducted during the final months of 2020, when the beta variant was dominant in South Africa. Like the earlier covid vaccine trials, the objective of the study was to understand the ability of the vaccine to prevent symptomatic disease, which was defined as symptoms suggestive of covid-19 plus a positive covid test.
The average age of the participants was 32 years and chronic conditions were rare, so this was a group at low risk of severe disease. When this fact is combined with the relatively small total number of participants (for a vaccine trial), there was no possibility that the study was going to say anything useful about the ability of the vaccine to prevent severe disease. So this was really a trial looking at the ability of the Novavax vaccine to prevent the common cold in healthy young people.
Let’s look at the results.
As with the earlier published vaccine trials, data on efficacy was only provided two months out from receipt of the vaccine. At the two month mark, 15 people in the vaccine group had developed symptomatic covid-19, as compared with 29 people in the placebo group. This gives a relative risk reduction of 49% against the beta variant at two months post vaccination, which is disappointing. It’s below the 50% risk reduction that regulators have set as the minimum level required for them to approve a vaccine.
Let’s move on and look at safety. Safety data was only provided for a sub-set of patients, and for the first 35 days out from receipt of the first vaccine dose. What little there was though, was somewhat discouraging, with twice as many adverse events requiring medical attention in the group receiving the vaccine as in the group receiving the placebo (13 vs 6), and twice as many serious adverse events in the group receiving the vaccine (2 vs 1). To be fair though, the small absolute numbers make it impossible to draw any conclusions about safety based on this limited data. So we’ll wait to pass judgement.
Let’s move on to the second trial, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in September. This was a much larger trial than the first, with 15,187 people in the UK who were randomized to either the Novavax vaccine or a saline placebo. Like the earlier study, it was looking at the ability of the vaccine to prevent symptomatic disease. The study ran from late 2020 to early 2021, during a time when the alpha variant was dominant, so the results of the study apply primarily to that variant. 45% of the participants had at least one risk factor that would predispose them to severe disease, and the average age was 56 years.
Ok, so what were the results?
Among participants who received two doses of the vaccine, there were 96 covid infections in the placebo group, but only 10 in the vaccine group during the three month period after receipt of the second dose. This gives an efficacy during the first few months of 90%, similar to what was found in the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine trials. One person ended up being hospitalized for covid-19 in the placebo group, while no-one was hospitalized in the vaccine group – so unfortunately there again weren’t enough hospitalizations to be able to say anything about the ability of the vaccine to prevent severe disease (although it’s pretty clear from this study that even for a relatively high risk group, the overall risk of hospitalization due to covid is low – of 96 people in the placebo group who got covid, only one required hospitalization).
Let’s turn to safety. Safety data is only provided for the period from receipt of the first dose to 28 days out from receipt of the second dose, so we don’t learn anything about the longer term, but at least for that shorter period, there was no signal of serious harm. There were 44 serious adverse events in the vaccine group, and 44 serious adverse events in the placebo group. One person in the vaccine group developed myocarditis three days after receipt of the second dose, which suggests that the Novavax vaccine might cause myocarditis, just like the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines do.
Let’s turn to the final trial, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in December. It was carried out in the United States and Mexico during the first half of 2021. Just as with the previous trial, the results apply primarily to the alpha variant. 29,949 participants were randomized to either the Novavax vaccine or a saline placebo. Like the other two trials, the purpose was to see if the vaccine prevented symptomatic disease, again defined as symptoms suggestive of covid-19 plus a positive PCR test. The median age of the participants was 47 years, and 52% had an underlying condition that would predispose them to more severe disease if infected with covid-19.
So, what were the results?
At 70 days out from receipt of the second dose, 0.8% of participants in the placebo group had developed covid-19, compared with only 0.1% in the vaccine group. This gives a relative risk reduction of 90%, a result that is identical to that seen in the previous trial. Unfortunately, no information is provided on hospitalizations, which I assume means that not one of the 29,949 people included in the study was hospitalized for covid-19, so, just as with the earlier trials, it’s impossible to tell if the vaccine results in any meaningful reduction in hospitalizations.
At 28 days post receipt of the seond dose, 0.9% of participants in the vaccine group had suffered a serious adverse event, compared with 1.0% of participants in the placebo group. That is encouraging.
Ok, let’s wrap up. what can we conclude about the Novavax vaccine after looking at the results of these three trials?
First, we can conclude that it effectively protected people from symptomatic covid due to the alpha variant at two-three months post vaccination (which of course tells us nothing about how effective the vaccine is after six months or a year). That information is now mostly of historical interest, since alpha is long gone and we’re living in the era of omicron. If the Novavax vaccine is similar to the four previously approved vaccines, then it’s likely useless at preventing infection due to omicron.
Second, it’s impossible to conclude from these trials whether the Novavax vaccine results in any reduction in risk of hospitalization due to covid, for the simple reason that not enough people ended up being hospitalized. Having said that, my guess would be that it probably does protect against hospitalization and need for ICU treatment, just as the other approved vaccines do. At its heart, it’s doing the same thing as they are – generating an immune response to the spike protein found on the original Wuhan covid variant, and the overall trial results are very similar to the trial results for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.
The overall safety data suggests that the vaccine is pretty safe, with serious adverse events being balanced between the vaccine group and the placebo group. Rare side-effects are however not detectable in randomized trials with a few tens of thousands of participants. For that longer term follow-up with much larger numbers of people is necessary. So it’s currently impossible to know whether the Novavax vaccine can cause myocarditis, like the mRNA vaccines, or blood clotting disorders, like the adenovector virus vaccines, or some other type of rare adverse event entirely. It’s therefore impossible to say at the present point in time whether it will turn out to be more safe, or less safe, or equivalent to the already approved vaccines.
Chair of the Public Administration & Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC)
Dear Mr Wragg,
Re: Ethical concerns arising from the Government’s use of covert psychological ‘nudges’ in their COVID-19 communications strategy
We are writing to you as a group of psychological specialists and health professionals to highlight our major ethical concerns about the deployment of covert behavioural-science techniques (commonly referred to as ‘nudges’) in the Government’s COVID-19 communications strategy. Our view is that the use of these behavioural strategies – which often operate below people’s conscious awareness and frequently rely on inflating emotional distress to change behaviour – raises profound moral questions. In light of these pressing concerns we respectfully request that, in your role as chair of the Public Administration & Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC), you instigate a comprehensive inquiry into the acceptability of using these strategies on the British people as a means of promoting compliance with public health directives.
Background
The appetite for using covert psychological strategies as a means of changing people’s behaviour was boosted by the emergence of the ‘Behavioural Insights Team’ (BIT) in 2010 as ‘the world’s first government institution dedicated to the application of behavioural science to policy’ (1). The membership of BIT rapidly expanded (2) from a seven-person unit embedded in the UK Government to a ‘social purpose company’ operating in many countries across the world. A comprehensive account of the psychological techniques recommended by the BIT is provided in the Institute of Government document, MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy (3), where the authors claim that their strategies can achieve ‘low cost, low pain ways of nudging citizens … into new ways of acting by going with the grain of how we think and act’.
Since its inception in 2010, the BIT has been led by Professor David Halpern who is currently the team’s chief executive. Professor Halpern and two other members of the BIT also currently sit on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) (4), a subgroup of SAGE that advises the Government on its COVID-19 communications strategy. Most of the other members of the SPI-B are prominent British psychologists who have expertise in the deployment of behavioural-science ‘nudge’ techniques.
It is important to emphasise that the use of behavioural science in this way represents a radical departure from the traditional methods – legislation, information provision, rational argument – used by governments to influence the behaviour of their citizens. By contrast, many of the ‘nudges’ delivered by the BIT are – to various degrees – acting upon us automatically, below the level of conscious thought and reason.
The ‘nudges’ of concern
The BIT and the SPI-B have encouraged the deployment of many techniques from behavioural science within the Government’s COVID-19 communications. However, there are three ‘nudges’ which have evoked most of our alarm: the exploitation of fear (inflating perceived threat levels), shame (conflating compliance with virtue) and peer pressure (portraying non-compliers as a deviant minority) – or “affect”, “ego” and “norms”, to use the language of the MINDSPACE document.
AFFECT/FEAR
Aware that a frightened population is a compliant one, a strategic decision was made to inflate the fear levels of all the British people. The minutes of the SPI-B meeting (5) dated the 22nd March 2020 stated, ‘The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent’ by ‘using hard-hitting emotional messaging’. Subsequently, in tandem with a subservient mainstream media, the collective efforts of the BIT and the SPI-B have inflicted a prolonged and concerted scare campaign upon the British public. The methods used have included:
Daily statistics displayed without context: the macabre mono focus on showing the number of COVID-19 deaths without mention of mortality from other causes or the fact that, under normal circumstances, around 1600 people die each day in the UK.
Recurrent footage of dying patients: images of the acutely unwell in Intensive Care Units.
Scary slogans: for example, ‘IF YOU GO OUT YOU CAN SPREAD IT, PEOPLE WILL DIE’, typically accompanied by frightening images of emergency personnel in masks and visors.
EGO/SHAME
We all strive to maintain a positive view of ourselves. Utilising this human tendency, behavioural scientists have recommended messaging that equates virtue with adherence to the Covid-19 restrictions and subsequent vaccination campaign. Consequently, following the rules preserves the integrity of our egos while any deviation evokes shame. Examples of these nudges in action include:
Slogans that shame the non-compliant: for example, ‘STAY HOME, PROTECT THE NHS, SAVE LIVES’.
TV advertisements: actors tell us, ‘I wear a face covering to protect my mates’ and ‘I make space to protect you’.
Clap for Carers: the pre-orchestrated weekly ritual, purportedly to show appreciation for NHS staff.
Ministers telling students not to ‘kill your gran’.
Shame–evoking adverts: close-up images of acutely unwell hospital patients with the voice-over, ‘Can you look them in the eyes and tell them you’re doing all you can to stop the spread of coronavirus?’
NORMS/PEER PRESSURE
Awareness of the prevalent views and behaviour of our fellow citizens can pressurise us to conform and knowledge of being in a deviant minority is a source of discomfort. The Government has repeatedly encouraged peer pressure throughout the COVID-19 crisis to gain the public’s compliance with their escalating restrictions, an approach that – at higher levels of intensity – can morph into scapegoating. The most straightforward example is how, during interviews with the media, ministers have often resorted to telling us that the vast majority of people are ‘obeying the rules’ or that almost all of us are conforming. However, in order to enhance and sustain normative pressure, people need to be able to instantly distinguish the rule breakers from the rule followers; the visibility of face coverings provides this immediate differentiation. The switch to the mandating of masks in community settings in summer 2020, without the emergence of new and robust evidence that they reduce viral transmission, strongly suggests that the mask requirement was introduced primarily as a compliance device to harness normative pressure.
Ethical questions
Compared to a government’s typical tools of persuasion, the covert psychological strategies (outlined above) differ in both their nature and subconscious mode of action. Consequently, we believe there are three main areas of ethical concern associated with their use: problems with the methods per se; problems with the lack of consent; and problems with the goals to which they are applied.
First, it is highly questionable whether a civilised society should knowingly increase the emotional discomfort of its citizens as a means of gaining their compliance. Government scientists deploying fear, shame and scapegoating to change minds is an ethically dubious practice that in some respects resembles the tactics used by totalitarian regimes such as China, where the state inflicts pain on a subset of its population in an attempt to eliminate beliefs and behaviour they perceive to be deviant.
Another ethical issue associated with these covert psychological techniques relates to their unintended consequences. Shaming and scapegoating have emboldened some people to harass those unable or unwilling to wear a face covering. More disturbingly, the inflated fear levels will have significantly contributed to the many thousands of excess non-COVID deaths (6) that have occurred in people’s homes, the strategically-increased anxieties discouraging many from seeking help for other illnesses. Furthermore, a lot of older people, rendered housebound by fear, may have died prematurely from loneliness (7). Those already suffering with obsessive-compulsive problems about contamination, and patients with severe health anxieties, will have had their anguish exacerbated by the campaign of fear. Even now, when all the vulnerable groups have been offered vaccination, many of our citizens remain tormented by ‘COVID-19 Anxiety Syndrome’ (8), characterised by a disabling combination of fear and maladaptive coping strategies.
Second, a recipient’s consent prior to the delivery of a medical or psychological intervention is a fundamental requirement of a civilised society. Professor David Halpern (the BIT Chief Executive and prominent member of SPI-B) explicitly recognised the significant ethical dilemmas arising from the use of influencing strategies that impact subconsciously on the country’s citizens. The MINDSPACE document (9) – of which Professor Halpern is a co-author – states that, ‘Policymakers wishing to use these tools … need the approval of the public to do so’ (p74). More recently, in Professor Halpern’s book, Inside the Nudge Unit, he is even more emphatic about the importance of consent: ‘If Governments … wish to use behavioural insights, they must seek and maintain the permission of the public. Ultimately, you – the public, the citizen – need to decide what the objectives, and limits, of nudging and empirical testing should be’ (p375).
As far as we are aware, no attempt has yet been made to obtain the public’s permission to use covert psychological strategies.
Third, the perceived legitimacy of using subconscious ‘nudges’ to influence people may also depend upon the behavioural goals that are being pursued. It may be that a higher proportion of the general public would be comfortable with the government resorting to subconscious nudges to reduce violent crime as compared to the purpose of imposing unprecedented and non-evidenced public-health restrictions. Would British citizens have agreed to the furtive deployment of fear, shame and peer pressure as a way of levering compliance with lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccination? Maybe they should be asked before the Government considers any future imposition of these techniques.
The position of the British Psychological Society
The British Psychological Society (BPS) is the leading professional body for psychologists in the UK. According to their website (10), a central role of the BPS is, ‘To promote excellence and ethical practice in the science, education and application of the discipline’. [Our emphasis]. Mindful of their important position as the guardian of ethical psychological practice, on the 6th January 2021 46 psychologists and therapists (including many of the signatories of the present letter) wrote to the BPS (11) raising the ethical questions outlined above.
A month later, on the 5th February 2021, a reply (12) was received from Dr Debra Malpass (Director of Knowledge and Insight at the BPS) which failed to directly address our ethical concerns and was, in our view, evasive and disingenuous. Dr Malpass’s response included questioning whether the strategies deployed by Government psychologists were actually covert, stating that the role of specific psychologists had not been evidenced, and expressing how ‘incredibly proud’ the BPS was about the ‘fantastic work done by psychologists throughout the pandemic’.
Dissatisfied with this initial reaction, we contacted the BPS again to question whether our expressed concerns had actually been considered by their ethics committee. We received a brief reply from Dr Malpass on the 16th February 2021 informing us that our initial letter would be considered at their next BPS Ethics Committee on the 1st March; we understood this to be an admission that the covert psychological strategies recommended by psychologists had yet to be scrutinised in regards to their ethical acceptability.
By 12th March, and not having received any further communication from the BPS, we prompted them again. On the 23rd March a message was received from Dr Roger Paxton (Chair of the BPS Ethics Committee) apologising that ‘owing to a very full agenda and an oversight’ no discussion about our concerns had taken place but that they would be included on the agenda of their June meeting.
On the 30th June, and not having received any further communication from the BPS, we prompted them again. On the 1st July we received a response (13) from Dr Paxton, comprising three paragraphs, informing us that the issues we raised had been considered and that their ethics committee had endorsed all previous BPS responses. In this communication, Dr Paxton acknowledged that he had received a large number of recent emails raising the same issues, but rejected our ethical concerns arguing that the strategies referred to were ‘indirect’ rather than covert, the application of psychology in this instance fell outside the realm of individual health decisions (so informed consent was not an issue), levels of fear within the general population were proportionate to the objective risk posed by the virus, and the psychologists’ role in the pandemic response demonstrated ‘social responsibility and the competent and responsible employment of psychological expertise’.
We believe the BPS responses to our ethical concerns about the deployment of covert psychological strategies throughout the COVID-19 pandemic have been defensive and disingenuous. Also we believe the BPS is impeded by a major conflict of interest on this issue in that several members of the SPI-B are also influential figures within the BPS. As such, the impartiality of the BPS in addressing the ethical issues we raised is highly questionable.
Finally, it is worth noting that serious concerns about the Government’s use of behavioural science have previously been raised in relation to other spheres of government activity. An All Parliamentary Group Report (APGR) (14) analysing the recommendations of the Morse Report (15) (a Treasury-commissioned review into the Loan Charge, published in December 2019) found that the distress evoked in those people targeted by behavioural insights may, in some instances, have led to victims taking their own lives. In the words of the APGR:
‘HMRC continue to apply pressure to taxpayers by using 30 behavioural insights in communications, something that has been cited in one of the seven known suicides of people facing the Loan Charge’.
In further recognition of the suffering and anguish associated with these ‘nudge’ techniques, the APGR recommends:
‘An independent assessment and suspension of HMRC’s use of behavioural psychology/behavioural insights in light of the ongoing suicide risk to those impacted by the Loan Charge’.
Clearly, a truly independent and comprehensive evaluation of the ethics of deploying psychological ‘nudges’ on the British people – during public health campaigns and in other areas of government – is now urgently required. We respectfully ask the PACAC to consider performing this important role.
Co-Signatories
Psychology/therapy/mental health
Dr Gary Sidley (M.Sc., ClinPsy, PhD) Retired Consultant Clinical Psychologist
Ms Jen Ayling (UKCP registered counsellor) Psychotherapeutic Counsellor
If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
If you scoff at the notion that the US, a republic founded on principles of freedom and democracy, has morphed into a world empire, perpetrating assassinations, coups d’état, acts of terror and illegal warfare . . .
If you want to promote peace but haven’t yet explored deceptive events that precipitate US warmongering . . .
. . . here is a volume that will clear the air and paint an honest picture of the significant, not-so-rosy impact US foreign policy and actions have had in the world around us.
USA: The Ruthless Empire, by Swiss historian and peace researcher Daniele Ganser, is the newly published English language translation of his book Imperium USA, originally written in German and published in 2020. Here is a summary of key points — including some lesser-known ones — along with remedies for a more peaceful future, that are covered in the book. … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
Aletho News
Aletho News 