The New York Times assigned four of their top national political reporters to write a long story about Biden’s First Pandemic Year. The article is an unwitting case study in everything that is wrong with the Biden administration, the public health establishment, and the corporate media.
“Highly respected infectious disease expert(TM)” Rochelle Walensky knows almost nothing about viruses nor infectious disease
From the article:
Dr. Rochelle Walensky was stunned. Working from her home outside Boston on a Friday night in late July, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had just learned from members of her staff that vaccinated Americans were spreading the coronavirus.
Vaccines had been the core of President Biden’s pandemic strategy from the moment he took office. But as Dr. Walensky was briefed about a cluster of breakthrough cases in Provincetown, Mass., the reality sank in. The Delta variant, which had ravaged other parts of the world, was taking hold in the United States. And being vaccinated would not, it turned out, prevent people from becoming infected with the variant or transmitting it.
It was a “heart sink” moment, Dr. Walensky recalled in a recent interview.
I am not a medical doctor nor scientist. But I’ve been warning since April 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 was not a good candidate for a vaccine because it mutates too fast. This was known to everyone who paid even minimal attention to the data. There has never been a successful vaccine for the common cold nor HIV — and SARS-CoV-2 was engineered to have pieces of both of those viruses. And the flu vaccine, depending on the year, is often less than 50% effective (some years the effectiveness drops into the teens or even single digits). All of these vaccines fail for the same reason that coronavirus vaccines are failing — the virus mutates too fast.
Did Rochelle Walensky honestly not know the rate at which this virus was mutating?
It sounds like they never contemplated the possibility that the vaccines might fail.
That also likely means that Walensky has no idea what antibody dependent enhancement is, why it’s a problem, nor does she know how to spot antibody dependent enhancement if it’s happening in the population.
Bougiecrats just execute the plan. They do not think. They just tick boxes. That is not what the U.S. needs in the midst of this crisis.
Fauci is a malevolent force inside the government and he is wrong about everything
We already knew this but the article drives it home:
Fauci pushed for a national vaccine passport system.
Fauci pushed for vaccine mandates for domestic air travel.
Fauci pushed for the vaccine mandates that eventually became the OSHA, CMS, and federal worker vaccine requirements. Thankfully the OSHA vaccine mandate was recently struck down by the Supreme Court and the federal worker mandate was stayed last Friday by a federal judge in Texas.
One reason that the Biden administration was not prepared for the Delta and Omicron variants was because Fauci assured them that “the vaccine push would be able to, for the most part, nullify a Delta surge.”
Fauci is literally the Pandemic’s Wrongest Man Elf.
Six people dictate coronavirus policy for 330,000,000 Americans. Five of the six are completely rotten
Biden’s Pandemic team consists of six people:
Jeff Zients, an economist and former management consultant with no scientific nor medical background;
Xavier Becerra, a lawyer with no scientific nor medical background;
Janet Woodcock, the woman who gave us the opioid epidemic that kills more Americans every year than the Vietnam War;
David Kessler, who is a decent guy (not sure how they let him on the team);
Tony Fauci, who funded the creation of the virus that killed more Americans than all foreign wars combined; and
Rochelle Walenksy, who looks like she’s always on the verge of a nervous breakdown and is clearly unfit for purpose.
This is the point that I keep coming back to again and again:
Would you rather have six captured bureaucrats imposing their diktats on 330,000,000 people? Or would you rather have the one-million professionally-active doctors and 210,000,000 adults in this country using logic and reason to solve this problem using their best judgement?
It is profoundly unAmerican to give six corrupt unelected bureaucrats this much power. And it is absolutely the wrong way to make scientific decisions. No wonder the Biden administration gets everything wrong when it comes to coronavirus.
Ron DeSantis lives rent free inside Biden’s head and he is the reason we do not have a national vaccine passport system
The article states that the Biden administration, in March of 2021, began planning for a national vaccine passport system. We all saw the trial balloons that they floated in the press. But then they scuttled the plan when they saw that Governor DeSantis opposed it and was using it to build opposition to the administration. The Biden administration fears losing to DeSantis in the 2024 election and so they have scaled back their totalitarianism somewhat in hopes of not giving him more ammunition.
The reporters at the NY Times are dumb fascist clowns that have their thumb on the scale for Pharma
The NY Times is one of the best jobs in journalism. And the four senior reporters assigned to this article exemplify the total intellectual and moral collapse of the bourgeoisie.
The first five paragraphs of the article are all about how the vaccine does not stop the Omicron variant. The very next sentence reads,
Mr. Biden and his team have gotten much right, including getting at least one dose of a vaccine into nearly 85 percent of Americans 12 and older…
Did they not read the five paragraphs before about how the vaccine does not work? How is an 85% vaccination rate a success when the vaccine does not actually stop the virus? In fact, the best evidence shows that these vaccines have negative efficacy, something that these crack “reporters” do not seem to realize.
Throughout the article, the reporters chide Biden for not pushing harder for vaccine and mask mandates and more testing. They claim “a chorus of voices inside and outside the government” pushing for such measures — but strangely they never cite any sources by name who are part of this “chorus”. Apparently that’s the script and they are sticking to it regardless of whether they have to manufacture such claims.
Furthermore these stenographers for the cartel never once ask about vaccine effectiveness/risks, the fact that most masks make no difference, and the 90% false-positive rate from tests that their own newspaper reported on in August 2020. I guess they don’t trust the NY Times either.
They are also addicted to the “overwhelmed hospitals” narrative — they just sprinkle it in for a dash of flavor whenever their rhetoric starts to sag. They never question the firing of doctors and nurses with natural immunity and critical thinking skills. Nor do they examine the possibility that vaccine failure and vaccine injury might contribute to whatever patient surges might exist.
They live inside the Pharma-directed metaverse and they have no plans to ever leave or question any of its assumptions.
Conclusion
The reason why RFK Jr., Del Bigtree, Alex Berenson, and Joe Rogan have bigger audiences than the NY Times is because they tell the truth.
The reason why the Biden administration is a complete and total failure is because it is filled with bougiecrats who do not think, they just execute the plan and wait around for their participation trophy.
None of the bourgeois institutions that caused this problem (from the corporate media to the government to the public health establishment) are capable of correcting course based on new data. They are guided by ideology, not facts. The only solution is revolution. Let’s make it happen.
A study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has found that the risk of myocarditis (heart inflammation) after receiving an mRNA Covid vaccine (Pfizer or Moderna) was dramatically increased across many age groups and was highest after the second vaccination dose in young men.
The study found myocarditis reports were highest after the second vaccination dose in males aged 12 to 15 years at 70.7 per million Pfizer doses, compared to an expected rate of 0.53 per million, amounting to a 133-fold increase; in males aged 16 to 17 years at 105.9 per million Pfizer doses, compared to an expected rate of 1.34 per million, amounting to a 79-fold increase; and in young men aged 18 to 24 years at 52.4 per million Pfizer doses and 56.3 per million Moderna doses, compared to an expected rate of 1.76 per million, amounting to a 30-fold and 32-fold increase respectively. The full results are shown in the table below and a selection are depicted in the chart above.
The study comprised a review of reports of myocarditis to the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) that occurred after mRNA Covid vaccination between December 2020 and August 2021 in people over 12 years old. The researchers adjudicated and summarised the reports and compared the rates to expected rates of myocarditis using 2017-2019 data. For those under 30 they conducted medical record reviews and clinician interviews to investigate clinical presentation, test results, treatment, and early outcomes.
They found that out of 192,405,448 individuals receiving a total of 354,100,845 mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine doses during the study period, there were 1,991 reports of myocarditis to VAERS, of which 1,626 met their case definition of myocarditis. Among the 1,626 cases, the median age was 21 years and the median time to symptom onset was two days. Males comprised 82% of the myocarditis cases for whom sex was reported, and where timing was reported, 82% occurred after the second vaccination dose.
The charts showing myocarditis cases by age and symptom onset are shown below.
Among persons younger than 30 years of age, there were no confirmed cases of myocarditis in those who died after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination without another identifiable cause and there was one probable case of myocarditis [in those who died] but there was insufficient information available for a thorough investigation. At the time of data review, there were two reports of death in persons younger than 30 years of age with potential myocarditis that remain under investigation and are not included in the case counts.
The authors note that a difference between vaccine-related myocarditis and virus-related myocarditis was that the former comes on more quickly; they also note that it appears to be milder:
The onset of myocarditis symptoms after exposure to a potential immunological trigger was shorter for COVID-19 vaccine-associated cases of myocarditis than is typical for myocarditis cases diagnosed after a viral illness. Cases of myocarditis reported after COVID-19 vaccination were typically diagnosed within days of vaccination, whereas cases of typical viral myocarditis can often have indolent courses with symptoms sometimes present for weeks to months after a trigger if the cause is ever identified.
The major presenting symptoms appeared to resolve faster in cases of myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination than in typical viral cases of myocarditis. Even though almost all individuals with cases of myocarditis were hospitalised and clinically monitored, they typically experienced symptomatic recovery after receiving only pain management. In contrast, typical viral cases of myocarditis can have a more variable clinical course. For example, up to 6% of typical viral myocarditis cases in adolescents require a heart transplant or result in mortality.
To what extent are these differences a reporting artefact, where adverse event reports are only made when a reaction occurs within days of a vaccination, but otherwise the link is unnoticed or dismissed?
The authors note that underreporting is likely, “given the high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination”, and therefore “the actual rates of myocarditis per million doses of vaccine are likely higher than estimated”.
Another recent study found post-vaccination myocarditis adverse events were underestimated by the VAERS definition.
A third recent study, from Oxford University, found that myocarditis risk following Covid vaccination was up to 14 times higher than that following COVID-19 infection. It has been suggested that that study underestimated the risk following vaccination. It should also be noted that since vaccination provides little protection against infection the idea that the risk following vaccination is instead of and not as well as the risk following infection is not sound.
Myocarditis is not the only serious side-effect of these vaccines, and the vaccines do not protect well against infection or transmission. This means it is increasingly clear that the current Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines do not have the efficacy and safety profile that would make giving them to children and young people worthwhile or ethical.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) earlier this month recommended women who are pregnant, recently pregnant, who are trying to become pregnant now or who might become pregnant in the future get the COVID-19 vaccine.
The CDC made the recommendation after concluding, in a Jan. 7 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, that data support the safety of COVID vaccination during pregnancy.
By comparing COVID vaccination during pregnancy to those unvaccinated during pregnancy, the agency determined COVID vaccines were not associated with preterm birth or with delivering a child who was born smaller or less developed than expected, also known as small-for-gestational-age (SGA).
In this article, we examine flaws in the CDC study that led to the agency’s wrongful conclusion regarding COVID vaccines for pregnant women.
First, some background.
Including pregnant women in clinical trials
Pregnancy is a precarious time not just for the expectant mother but most importantly the developing fetus. Expectant mothers are advised not to drink alcohol or caffeinated beverages and not to eat raw foods such as sushi and deli meats.
A lot of medications are contraindicated during pregnancy including simple pain meds like non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (Ibuprofen), antidiarrheals, decongestants, antihistamines, nasal sprays and expectorants.
Women are advised not to take these medications during pregnancy because they pose potential risks to the developing fetus.
For decades, expectant mothers have been considered a vulnerable group to be shielded from potential harms of research for the sake of their fetuses’ health.
In 1977, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued guidelines excluding pregnant women and women “with childbearing potential” from phase I and phase II clinical trials, where new drugs are tested for safety and efficacy.
This view stemmed, in part, from tragedies caused by two now-infamous drugs that were widely prescribed to pregnant women in the mid-20th century: thalidomide, which caused thousands of children around the world to be born with flipper-like limbs and other birth defects, and diethylstilbestrol, which was linked to higher rates of cancer in both mothers and the daughters born to them.
Federal regulations currently require any study involving pregnant women to meet 10 criteria, including that, “where scientifically appropriate,” data first be collected on pregnant animals and non-pregnant human subjects to assess risk, and that any risk to mother or fetus be “the least possible for achieving the objectives of the research.”
Reproduction toxicity studies in animal models hinted at dangers early on
While the companies developing the COVID-19 vaccines have done preliminary studies in animals, their studies were limited to rodents. The vaccine makers did not conduct studies on non-human primates, recognized as the closest animal models to humans regarding genetics, physiology and behavior.
Nevertheless, Moderna’s own Assessment Report to the European Medicines Agency Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use on March 11, 2021, included a study for reproductive and developmental toxicology on female rats during gestation.
The report noted (page 50: Reproduction Toxicity) an increase in the number of fetuses with common skeletal variations of one or more rib nodules and one or more wavy ribs. Additionally, the number of pups born to vaccinated rats was lower than the number in the unvaccinated rats.
Most importantly, the authors explicitly stated, “In this study, no vaccine dose was administered during the early organogenesis [the period during embryonic development of an animal when the main body organs are formed], to address the direct embryotoxic effect of the components of the vaccine formulation.”
One month earlier, Pfizer reported in its Feb. 19, 2021, Assessment Report to the same committee that pregnant rats demonstrated a greater-than-2x increase in pre-implantation loss in exposed animals compared to controls.
The authors of the Pfizer report further stated (Page 50: Reproduction Toxicity) that “a very low incidence of gastroschisis, mouth/jaw malformations, right-sided aortic arch, and cervical vertebrae abnormalities” occurred in litters of exposed rats, and that these findings were within historical control data.
This finding brings up an important question: Why compare the incidence of these major congenital abnormalities with “historical” controls and not with the controls themselves?
As late as April 2021, the CDC still maintained there was limited data surrounding the safety of COVID vaccines for women who were pregnant or breastfeeding. The agency advised women who were pregnant or breastfeeding to consult with their physician before getting vaccinated.
But were obstetricians made aware of the potential safety signals appearing in animal models?
And how were physicians able to decide whether or not a COVID vaccine was appropriate for their pregnant patients if the CDC wasn’t offering any guidance at that time?
CDC’s latest study: a closer look at the details
Using data from the Vaccine Safety Datalink — a CDC vaccine safety monitoring system the public cannot access — the CDC study identified 46,079 pregnant women with live births and gestational age.
Of those, 10,064 (21.8%) received ≥1 COVID vaccine doses during pregnancy from Dec. 15, 2020, to July 22, 2021.
Nearly all (9,892, or 98.3%) of the pregnant women included in the study were vaccinated during the second or third trimester.
The authors found that among unvaccinated women, the rate of premature births was 7% compared to 4.9% in those who had received either one or both vaccine doses.
The rate of small-for-gestational-age in both vaccinated and unvaccinated mothers was equal (8.2%).
The authors thus conclude that “… receipt of COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy was not associated with increased risk for preterm birth or SGA at birth.”
5 flaws in the CDC analysis
On closer examination, we identified the following five deficits in the CDC study:
Cohorts were not well matched. There were greater than three times more African American women in the unvaccinated group than in the vaccinated group. The CDC acknowledges the African American race is a risk factor for preterm birth and may be as high as 50% greater than in white women.
There were also greater than 50% more mothers in the unvaccinated group classified as having inadequate prenatal care. Obesity, also a risk for preterm birth, was also overrepresented in the unvaccinated group (29% vs 23.9%) compared to the vaccinated.
No adjustment for mothers with a history of preterm birth of SGA. The authors did not address this potential confounder.
COVID infection, another potentially important confounder, was present in the unvaccinated group at a 25% greater incidence than in the vaccinated cohort (3.5% vs 2.8%). There was no mention of when in the pregnancy the infection was detected. Viral infections early in pregnancy are particularly deleterious to the developing fetus. This should have been an important risk factor to quantify independently, especially when establishing a risk-versus-benefit ratio of vaccination.
The CDC data indicate a 7.7% risk of preterm birth in mothers having received one of two vaccines. This represents a 10% greater risk than in unvaccinated pregnancies. This increased risk is not mentioned in the discussion. Moreover, the adjusted Hazard Ratio (aHR) in this population is given as 0.78, indicating a 22% risk reduction in preterm birth in vaccinated mothers, seemingly conflicting with the raw data. (A request for clarification from the corresponding author was not answered).
The most glaring deficit in the CDC analysis is the scarcity of vaccinated mothers who received a vaccine in the first trimester in this study. The risk of untoward outcomes (birth defects, miscarriages) in pregnancy is greatest during the first third of pregnancy, a time when crucial embryonic structures are developing. This is the period of time where maternal health is particularly important, and exposure to toxins, infections and certain medicines must be minimized or eliminated entirely if possible.
Only 172 of more than 10,000 (1.7%) vaccinated mothers in the study received a vaccine in the first trimester. The incidence of preterm birth and SGA were not mentioned in this small cohort because of limited numbers.
Nonetheless, the authors arrive at the stunning conclusion: “CDC recommends COVID-19 vaccination for women who are pregnant, recently pregnant (including those who are lactating), who are trying to become pregnant now, or who might become pregnant in the future (4) to reduce the risk for severe COVID-19–associated outcomes.”
CDC not required to provide access to its data or subject its analysis to peer review
The Vaccine Safety Datalink uses data reported from nine large healthcare organizations, serving only 3% of the U.S. population. The system collects electronic health data from each participating site.
This database is accessible only to researchers outside the CDC and only by request. Requests may be accommodated after a research proposal is submitted and approved by the Research Data Center of the National Center for Health Statistics.
CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports can, as in the case of the agency’s analysis of COVID vaccine safety in pregnant women, be based on data that is not necessarily publicly available.
The agency’s analyses are not subject to peer review. Nevertheless, the reports are often widely cited as the official scientific position.
Conclusions
The CDC’s determination that COVID vaccination is safe in pregnant women is unfounded.
Cohorts were poorly matched. There was an inexcusably low representation of women who were vaccinated early in their pregnancy in their analysis. This is a period where any exposure to medical interventions will have a greater potential for risk to the fetus.
Broadly recommending vaccination for all pregnant women including those who are trying to become pregnant is particularly unwarranted.
This report places the CDC’s purported commitment to its mission of disease control and prevention on full display. The agency’s conclusions arrive more than a full year after the CDC authorized COVID vaccinations and are based on retrospective data alone.
In other words, the CDC is willing (and apparently allowed) to make safety determinations only after the experimental vaccines have been widely and indiscriminately deployed.
This is a shocking departure from the higher standards of prudence that are demanded during pregnancy, a time where two lives are potentially at risk and poor outcomes can lead to a lifetime of potential consequences.
It should be noted that several of the authors of this study reported potential conflicts of interest.
One author reported institutional research funding from Pfizer, and another from Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. A third author has a career grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Madhava Setty, M.D. is senior science editor for The Defender.
Jennifer Smith, Ph.D. holds a doctoral degree in mIcrobiology and molecular cell sciences.
Almost all of the claimed climate records the press keeps touting were created by erasing the past – when weather was at least as extreme as it is now.
It’s the last week of the 2022 European Men’s Handball Championship, held this year in Slovakia and Hungary, and the players just can’t stop testing positive for Corona. Iceland, where handball attracts enormous interest, had eleven players sidelined after positive tests last week. Their star goalie, Björgvin Páll Gústavsson, emerged from isolation to play against Croatia yesterday, only to test positive again this morning. It’s back to quarantine for him, as he waits for a PCR confirmation. Nobody is actually too sick to play, but the alternative – spreading Omicron to a bunch of other athletes who will get it one way or another anyway – is unthinkable.
Mass containment is a set of policies that require people to act crazy all the time. Omicron is everywhere; locking up a few athletes isn’t going to slow it down. To that comes the fact that these handball players are all totally healthy; their risk of severe outcome is so low, it’s essentially unquantifiable. And on top of it all, all these precautions plainly do nothing. Everyone is testing positive anyway.
Somehow, it’s always the people at least risk who have to put up with the most Corona nonsense. Kids have spent almost two years alternating between prolonged social isolation and antiseptic prisons once known as schools. Professional athletes are probably the most heavily tested demographic in the world. The lower-risk working-age population bears the brunt of the vaccine mandates, capacity limits, and hygiene rules. Meanwhile, if you’re a sedentary retiree and you don’t care about going to the pub, your life has hardly changed since all this started.
Containment has been denuded of every conceivable goal; not even the people directing the circus can explain why we are doing this anymore. If you ask leading vaccinators like Karl Lauterbach, they’ll tell you it’s because we need to ward off hypothetical future variants – a laughable justification, which will always spring eternal. It’s time to put an end to this. It’s time to stop the testing and the masks and the vaccinating, it’s time for the hystericists to shut up and go home.
The drama currently unfolding in which the Biden Administration is doing everything it can to provoke a war with Russia over Ukraine is possibly the most frightening foreign policy misadventure since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1967 Lyndon Johnson attempt to sink the USS Liberty and blame it on Egypt, either of which could have gone nuclear. I can well recall the Robert Heinlein sci-fi book The Puppet Masters, later made into a movie, which described how alien-slugs, arriving by way of a flying saucer landing in Iowa, invaded the earth and parasitically attached themselves to the central nervous systems of humans and became able to completely control their minds. What the humans know, they know. What the slugs want, no matter what, the human will do. And the tale gets really scary in geopolitical terms when some Secret Service Agents are “occupied” by the invaders and they are thereby poised to capture the President of the United States. I would point out that the movie came out when Bill Clinton was president, which should have provoked some concerns about whether it was fact or fiction.
Well, does anyone currently wonder why I think of The Puppet Masters when an incoherent Joe Biden in particular makes a speech? And also consider the befuddled look of Secretary of State Tony Blinken or the bewildered expressions of Vice President Kamala Harris or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, all of which might also suggest that the slugs now completely control the Administration. The Biden and Blinken possibly slug-controlled automatons are now stating their conviction, based on no evidence whatsoever, that Russia is about to invade Ukraine and they are threatening sanctions like Putin “has never seen before.” There will no doubt be more slug-derived pronouncements to reinforce that warning in the next few days after the latest round of talks breaks down. Evacuation of US Embassy staff families in Kiev is already underway, deliberately escalating rather than attempting to defuse the crisis which could lead to nuclear war, destroying the human race and replacing it with the alien slugs.
Consider for a moment the inconsistencies and sheer contradictions in US foreign policy, which might support the credibility of the alien slug theory. The State Department’s management of foreign relations is supposed to serve the interests of the American people, but has not actually done so for decades. Can anyone explain why Washington’s foreign policy during the decade 2010 to 2020 constantly hammered at Russia, which, if anything, should have been the one country with which the US would seek to have a respectful relationship. Where is the logic in condemnation of Russia’s non-violent annexation of the Crimea, which was carried out based on a long-term historic relationship and a popular referendum, while also enabling “allies” like Israel’s illegal occupation and annexation of both Palestinian and Syrian land which has relied on force majeure to drive hundreds of thousands of local inhabitants from their homes. And then there are the Saudis using American made weapons to terrorize and kill the people of Yemen. Slug Biden is now considering aiding the murderous Saudi onslaught by declaring Yemen’s Houthis to be terrorists, legitimizing their slaughter.
Even if one rejects the alien slug theory, at a minimum, there has been a great deal of hypocrisy in terms of how Washington deals with the rest of the world and that has been increasingly the case under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Targeting and killing civilian populations and permanently driving them from their homes are, by the way, unambiguously war crimes and the United States is signatory to the Geneva Conventions that define the Israeli and Saudi actions as such. Israel, which claims a form of perpetual victimhood thanks to the so-called holocaust narrative, is the only nuclear power in the Middle East, though its arsenal is regarded as so secret that US government officials are not allowed to mention it, possibly another indication of alien slug control. It uses that advantage to carry out undeclared open and covert warfare against its neighbors, most notably targeting Syria and Lebanon as presumed proxies for its number one designated enemy Iran. Saudi Arabia for its part does not seem to care at all regarding the devastation it is delivering on the largely defenseless Yemenis.
Israel goes far beyond the actions of any other belligerent nation in the world, and the US is the only nation that even comes close, as recent reports regarding a particularly reckless bombing in Syria suggest. Israel, often with American complicity, engages in covert sabotage and assassination operations inside Iran, which have been sometimes reported, though hardly condemned, in the mainstream Western media. Less well covered are the more-or-less routine bombing attacks conducted against Syria, frequently also violating Lebanese airspace when the Israeli jets stand off in the Mediterranean Sea to fire their missiles at the Syrian targets. It should be noted that attacking a nation with which one is not at war and which poses no direct threat is also a war crime, in this case a war crime that the Israeli and Saudi governments repeat on a regular basis without any objection coming from Washington, which itself has attacked Syria on at least four occasions while also illegally stationing troops inside the country to “protect” its oilfields.
A recent devastating attack by Israel on Syrian targets consisted of a missile strike launched by Israeli air force planes against the Mediterranean port of Latakia on December 28th. Israel’s attack on Latakia has to a certain extent shifted the focus of the war on Syria being conducted by Israel and the United States and their Gulf allies including the UAE and Saudi Arabia. In the past, the port was protected by its proximity to the major Russian base at Tartus in Syria and the actual presence of some Russian personnel assisting in Latakia ship cargo unloading operations, which threatens to bring Moscow more directly into the conflict. And as Washington is Israel’s enabler that will no doubt lead to US involvement in the UN and other fora if any attempts are made to limit or even condemn the Israeli actions. The situation is nasty and threatens to explode if Israel stages a false flag attack intended to lead to demands for direct military action by the US, a concern that some outside the Biden Administration have expressed.
What is particularly disturbing is the fact that while Israel and the Saudis continue to do their best to engage the United States in their own quarrels in the Middle East, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Tony Blinken do nothing but look the other way so as not to annoy the Israeli leaders and their powerful domestic lobby in the US. At the same time, they unnecessarily provoke a nuclear armed and capable Russia and an emerging superpower China, both of which are regularly demonized both in the media and by leading politicians from both parties. The actions taken together are so irrational as to suggest that Robert Heinlein knew what he was writing about.
And then there is what might be described as the “hidden hand.” It should be observed that many of those US politicians and government officials most keen on baiting Russia are strong and vocal supporters of Israel. Many are neocons, who have penetrated the foreign and national security teams of both political parties and are dominant in the media while also having close ties to the Israeli government. Most of them are Jewish, to include all four of the top officials in the Department of State, while prominent politicians in both political parties, to include the president, have self-described as Zionists. For various reasons, many in the Jewish diaspora have a visceral hatred of Russia, so Israel in an odd way is part of the war party machinations to provoke an armed conflict over Ukraine.
That America is Israel’s poodle and both Russia and China are considered fair game to score political points is really the crux of the matter and it makes Americans complicit in Israeli crimes as Washington provides both arms and money as well as political cover to Jerusalem. It also reduces major US national interests involving Moscow and Beijing to sideshows and in so doing turns American national security on its head, supporting the unspeakable to make political points and ignoring what is important. One might even suggest that never before in history has a great nation so enthusiastically pursued policies that could easily lead to its own destruction. It is not in our interest, or even our survival, to continue along this path and it is past time that the politicians and bureaucrats begin to recognize that fact. Or maybe I should instead be addressing my advice to that alien-slug mothership hidden somewhere in a corn field in Iowa.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
The French Government is introducing a tougher vaccine passport regime today. Now, only vaccination (and not natural immunity or covid tests) will count to allow access to cafes, libraries, sports facilities, and long-distance trains.
The near-hysterical arguments made by the French political class justifying this new pass are strikingly unguarded and reveal the inner dynamics behind the vaccine passport drive. These debates show that vaccines are no longer a simple medical product. Instead, the vaccine has become a way in which states are establishing their authority, and creating a new QR-code citizenship based on regular compliance with medical procedures.
Vaccination has become a test for entry into the civic body. The ‘test’ of the vaccine is not your degree of medical immunity, or the degree to which you stand to suffer personally from COVID-19 infection. (The vaccine pass goes down to the age of 12 in France, while in New York it applies to those aged five and above).
Instead, the new meaning of vaccination is an act of compliance; it is a matter of doing what is asked and expected of you. The French Prime Minister Jean Castex said that the vaccinated have “played the game”, they have done what is asked of them. President Emmanuel Macron said that the vaccinated, “near-totality of people”, have “adhered” or “subscribed” to what they were asked to do. These people are “responsible”. By contrast, it is a “very small” that is “refractory” or “resistant”. They are “irresponsible”, says Macron, and “a irresponsible person is longer a citizen”.
Here, the state claims the right to set conditions for entry to civic life. The question of being part of social life is not a right, but something provisional; it is a permission that is granted by the state. The new gatekeepers of civil society are the waiter at a cafe, the head of a sports club, the door staff at the theatre, who from Monday will not only scan QR codes but check people’s ID cards too.
“To be a free citizen means to be a responsible citizen,” says Macron. “Duties come before rights.” You can only have rights (enter society) once you have done your duty (been vaccinated). The idea that duties come before rights means, at base, that the state comes before the citizen: the citizen only takes his place in society at the behest of the state.
This is not a matter of two shots and you are done. There is an ongoing demand for compliance, whereby your citizenship – and claim to ‘responsibility’ – is continually renewed. France has followed Israel in requiring a booster shot for vaccine passes to remain valid. Currently, you have seven months to get a booster, but this will shorten to four months in February. A French Government guide sets out the exact timetable expected of you: this is a jurisprudence of medically based citizenship. Every injection gives a ‘valid QR card’ that you can use to access social life; if you don’t get the booster in the required window then this QR code will expire. France has also followed Israel with a special offer (available until February 15th) allowing first-time jabbers to “benefit from a valid vaccine pass” after their first dose, so long as they get their second jab within 28 days.
The discounting of natural immunity is very telling. Natural immunity yields a wider spectrum of anti-bodies than vaccination and is likely to confer longer protection against infection and against new variants. And yet natural immunity has no political meaning. It is a strength that your body has gained through its own efforts, without involving the state or wider society. The ‘pass sanitaire’ that had been in operation in France since last summer recognised natural immunity and negative covid tests, alongside vaccination; the new ‘pass vaccinal’ recognises vaccination alone. The French Prime Minister now claims that natural immunity provides “only very little immunity”, while the source of genuine immunity is a “full course of vaccines”. This claim reflects more about the different political value placed upon these two routes to antibodies. One route is deemed “protective”, robust, and the other very weak, as something that “wanes”, only because one has a robust relationship with the state and the other relates to the state “only very little”.
(Indeed, as we saw with the Novak Djokovic saga, natural immunity – and the claim to exemption based on natural immunity – in fact now poses a threat, so dangerous that a person must be imprisoned and deported. Natural immunity poses a threat not to actual public health, but to the new social order based on vaccination that is being built by the Australian government.)
The fetishism of Covid vaccination is at base a fetishism of bureaucracy. The vaccinated person has a pass, they have a QR code; they are on these grounds judged safe. You can feel ‘reassured’ when you are in a public space and everybody has passes on their phones. The unvaccinated person has no card or QR code and therefore they are seen as risky and posing a danger to others. In declining to be vaccinated, they are not merely refusing a medical procedure – with its attendant benefits and risks – but they are refusing to relate to bureaucracy. The absolute power attributed to a vaccine card – to show that someone is safe, to show that they care for others, and are willing to protect themselves and others – owes less to the medical effects of vaccination than to vaccination as an insignia for bureaucracy.
This is why it is repeatedly asserted that only the unvaccinated are infectious. The French prime minister says that the unvaccinated cannot be allowed to go around “infecting others with impunity”. He even claims that the unvaccinated intend to infect others, that they think to themselves, “I’m going to infect others.” This belief persists in the face of sky-high vaccinated case rates; in the face, even, of the Prime Minister’s own recent Covid infection.
There is a long history of blaming dissident elements for infectious disease – as with the expulsion of beggars, Jews and prostitutes from medieval plague towns, or in the nineteenth century the association between cholera and revolutionary urban uprisings. Infectious disease has often been associated with elements outside the system or that cut against social or religious hierarchy. Michel Foucault said that the absolutist state saw the plague as “a form… of disorder”, a disease of “rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder”.
Now too, the unvaccinated are seen as the source of all ills of society. The Italian Prime Minister said that “most of the problems we are experiencing today are due to the fact that there are unvaccinated people”, as he introduced a new tougher vaccine pass for Italian citizens on January 10th. The unvaccinated are even, perversely, presented as the cause of repressive instruments designed by politicians. Emmanuel Macron said that the unvaccinated didn’t merely put other people’s lives at risk, but they also “restricted the liberty of others”, which was “unacceptable”. The French Prime Minister said the unvaccinated “put in danger the life of the whole country and restrict the daily life of the immense majority of French people”.
The eight per cent or so of people who have not been vaccinated in France appear to be the single focus of state authority. Macron recently said that his primary aim was to “piss off the unvaccinated”, and that he will continue to do this “until the end”. In his New Year’s message, he urged the unvaccinated to join the fold, telling them that “all of France is counting on you”, as if the course of the pandemic – indeed the very fate of France – depends upon them agreeing to the jab.
The project of improving national health has been replaced by a project of integrating the population into a bureaucracy by means of health status. The health of the nation has become confused with the proportion of the population that has a valid health pass.
The pursuit of the ideology of vaccination at the expense of health outcomes is shown most vividly in the imposition of vaccination mandates upon healthcare professionals. Here, we see the sheer blindness of sacking of experienced medical staff in the midst of a pandemic on the basis of a vaccine that has no bearing on the risk they pose to patients. It also shows how far the notion of the ‘irresponsible’ unvaccinated person is from the reality, given that healthcare workers have given and contributed more than anyone. In French Guadeloupe, vaccine mandates led to a 30% reduction in staff at the main hospital and the reduction of services to a skeleton operation. The scene there now is colonial: black healthcare staff picketing the hospital were removed by white mobile gendarme units, and now there is an armed police checkpoint at the hospital entrance. Vaccination mandates are a test of allegiance for healthcare professionals. Authorities show that they are prepared to run hospitals into the ground, to risk lives, to protect the ideology.
The vaccine passport is a citizenship test for a morally and politically vacuous age. It is entirely passive – it is the simple act of consenting to a medical procedure, after which you are crowned with a civic virtue. This is a citizenship test that occurs on the level of what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”; that is, it is a question of merely biological existence, rather than a question of how a life is lived. Receiving a vaccine pass is mute; there are no words, there is no oath of allegiance to party, country or leader. You offer your body and receive a QR code in return: this is the nature of the new social contract between citizen and state. “Vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate” is the mantra for reconstituting authority and society in an age where this authority cannot be grounded on a substantial social basis.
The vaccine is being treated as a mystical state or collective substance that incorporates people into the collective body. Vaccination now is like a sacrament, a transubstantiation ritual; through the vaccine we are receiving the body of the state into our body and therefore joining the community.
One casualty in this is vaccination itself. Considered scientifically, a vaccine – as with any drug – is not a protective talisman or means for membership of a community. It is a medical product with particular qualities and uses, and particular side effects and risks. It may be useful for some groups but not others, and in some contexts but not in others. The rational use of a drug is as important as the drug itself, to ensure that it is directed towards the appropriate ends.
The ideological weaponisation of vaccines distorts these cost-benefit judgements. The vaccine is forced upon people who have little or no need of it, such as children and those with natural immunity, while ignoring those who have need of it. (The older and more vulnerable someone is, the less they are affected by vaccine passports.)
This episode is violating the very basis of health and medical ethics. Through vaccination passports and mandates, it has become acceptable to force someone to take a medical treatment, even a treatment that is not really in their medical interest. When Jean Castex boasted that the vaccine passport led to a rise in people getting their first vaccination, the interviewer pointed out “but they were forced”. Castex shrugged. In normal times, medical force is unacceptable; medical force means the Nazis. When France began vaccinating a year ago, it insisted upon consent forms and pre-vaccine interviews to ensure that people were really consenting. Now, the use of force has become entirely acceptable, it has become ethical in fact. It is the duty of the state to get people to do their duty.
And in this, the state is claiming rights over our bodies, the right to say what we put in them and what we don’t. A citizen under the vaccine passport regime is not in fact a citizen at all, but rather a chattel: you sign your body over to the state, and agree to take the latest required treatments in order have your QR code renewed. You sell your rights over your body for the price of drinking a cup of coffee in a cafe.
As reported last week by The Defender, federal monies from the 2020 and 2021 COVID stimulus bills dramatically reshaped K-12 educational priorities, turning American school officials into lackeys for federal agencies more intent on masking and vaccinating every last child than on supporting meaningful education.
So, too, with the stimulus-induced reshaping of hospital priorities.
In the second half of a January interview on Del Bigtree’s “The Highwire” — “COVID-19: Following the Money” — policy analyst A.J. DePriest reported on the untoward consequences set into motion as a result of COVID funds provided to hospitals.
Managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the federal government allocated a total of $186.5 billion to the Provider Relief Fund (PRF), with two-thirds ($121.3 billion) disbursed as of January 2022.
The first tranche of $50 billion for hospitals and other Medicare providers — “for healthcare-related expenses or lost revenues … attributable to COVID-19” — began flying out the door in April 2020.
Almost immediately, alert doctors and astute journalists warned the Medicare add-on payments built into the relief package created perverse incentives unfriendly to patients’ interests.
As summarized by Dr. Scott Jensen — former Minnesota state senator and current gubernatorial candidate — “anytime healthcare intersects with dollars it gets awkward.”
Nearly two years down the road, the “awkwardness” is increasingly difficult to hide.
In the view of DePriest and many others, HHS’s stimulus slush fund has been every bit as dangerous for hospital patients as the U.S. Department of Education’s handouts have been for the nation’s schoolchildren.
Making out like bandits
Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet and Ali Shultz, J.D., who wrote a widely distributed op-ed in late 2021 for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), summed up the disturbing situation prevailing in hospitals. The AAPS’s professional calling card is its “dedication to the highest ethical standards of the Oath of Hippocrates.”
Not mincing their words, the two argued that Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) payment directives turned hospitals and medical staff into “bounty hunters,” and COVID patients into “virtual prisoners.”
Highlighting the slew of CMS add-ons and other incentives established with the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act — and also the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act (PPPHCEA) — they emphasized the payments hinge on hospitals’ willingness to slavishly follow the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) guidelines “for all things related to COVID-19.”
As itemized by Vliet and Shultz, compliant hospitals garner CMS payments for:
Each completed diagnostic test (required in the emergency room or upon admission).
Each COVID-19 diagnosis.
Each COVID admission.
Use of the intravenously administered Gilead drug remdesivir (brand name Veklury), which yields a 20% bonus payment on the entire hospital bill.
Mechanical ventilation.
COVID-19 listed as cause of death.
Citing a Becker’s Hospital Review breakdown, published in April 2020, of CARES Act payments to different states, DePriest told Bigtree payments ranged from $166,000 per COVID patient in Tennessee hospitals, for example, to far higher payments in states such as North Dakota ($339,000), Nebraska ($379,000) and West Virginia ($471,000).
In addition, for hospitals ascertained to be in COVID “hotspots,” HHS distributed special “high-impact” funds — $77,000 per admission initially, later downsized to $50,000 per admission.
HHS explained it used COVID admissions “as a proxy for the extent to which each facility experienced lost revenue and increased expenses associated with directly treating a substantial number of COVID-19 inpatient admission [sic].
The remdesivir ruse
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spent $79 million developing remdesivir for Gilead, which itself dished out $2.45 million during the first quarter of 2020, to lobby for the drug’s use with COVID patients.
On May 1, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized remdesivir for emergency use in individuals hospitalized with severe COVID illness, and members of an NIH expert panel (many with financial ties to Gilead) added the drug to the agency’s treatment guidelines.
A scant five months later, FDA granted full approval to remdesivir for hospitalized COVID patients over age 12.
The World Health Organization (WHO), in contrast, advised against remdesivir, stating the drug has “no meaningful effect on mortality or on other important outcomes for patients.”
Remdesivir sailed through regulatory hoops in the U.S. despite an abysmal track record of “adverse effects serious enough to kill” any individual hapless enough to take it.
Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. discusses remdesivir’s toxicity in his best-selling book, The Real Anthony Fauci, outlining the lethal problems — multiple organ failure, acute kidney failure, septic shock, hypotension and death — experienced by participants in NIAID’s clinical trial of remdesivir as an Ebola therapy.
When the trial, which compared remdesivir against three other drugs, killed more than half (54%) of the remdesivir recipients within 28 days — the highest mortality rate among the four groups — an oversight board forced the NIAID to end the prong of the study focused on remdesivir.
As if remdesivir alone weren’t bad enough, Vliet and Shultz estimate mechanical ventilation kills anywhere from 45% to 85% of COVID patients. Moreover, NIH’s skimpy treatment guidelines prescribe dexamethasone concurrently with ventilators.
Dexamethasone, often described as a “double-edged sword,” is a highly potent corticosteroid that suppresses the innate immune system.
Like remdesivir, dexamethasone’s potentially significant adverse impacts include kidney damage. Additional side effects include interference with the normal function of other organ systems such as the cardiovascular, digestive, endocrine, musculoskeletal and nervous systems.
Ironically, dexamethasone can also increase the need for mechanical ventilation as well as for blood pressure intervention.
Therapies like these are a large part of why, as Vliet and Shultz note, the U.S. COVID mortality rate is so “shockingly high” compared to the rest of the world.
Remdesivir’s trail of destruction could get worse — on Jan. 21, FDA expanded use of remdesivir to “high-risk” adult and pediatric outpatients (age 12 and older) “for the treatment of mid-to-moderate COVID-19 disease,” permitting administration of the intravenous drug in various outpatient facilities.
FDA’s side effects warnings include possible liver injury and allergic reactions such as “changes in blood pressure and heart rate, low blood oxygen level, fever, shortness of breath, wheezing, swelling …, rash, nausea, sweating or shivering.”
Getting involved and bringing transparency
Referring to the 20% add-on payment that hospitals receive for administering remdesivir to COVID patients, DePriest commented that a “bonus” is a “weird thing to call something when you’re murdering people.”
Journalist Jon Rappoport agreed, preferring to characterize hospitals’ behavior toward COVID patients as “a federally incentivized protocol for murder” — or “cash for death.”
All of the above parties concur that the best-case scenario is to treat COVID early at home and avoid hospitals — “because we know from experience what happens there.”
In cases where hospitalization is unavoidable, DePriest encourages communities to get more involved:
“[W]hen you know these hospitals are doing that, the people of that community need to show up at that hospital en masse and start telling them that you, as a community, are going to be advocating for every single COVID patient that walks through those doors, and you are going to hold that hospital accountable — to their patient bill of rights, to their stated visitation policies — and if your state is not in a state of emergency anymore, there shouldn’t be any reason why patients are medically kidnapped and separated from their families and isolated.
“There’s absolutely no reason for it, but the communities have to get involved and they have to confront these hospitals and tell them, ‘We’re done, you’re not killing any more of us.’”
Here is a flashback of Dr. Anthony Fauci spreading false information about AIDS transmission. Fauci claimed that people could become infected by simply being near someone with AIDS. “[I]f the close contact of a child is a household contact, perhaps there will be a certain number of cases of individuals who are just living with and in close contact with someone with AIDS, or at risk of AIDS, who does not necessarily have to have intimate sexual contact or share a needle, but just the ordinary close contact that one sees in normal interpersonal relations,” Dr. Fauci advised. Obviously, we know this is a complete lie.
This false narrative led to gay men being ostracized from society. Democratic politician Pete Buttigieg’s husband Chasten is offended that people are comparing the disinformation on AIDS to COVID disinformation. A Newsmax reporter asked, “During the AIDS crisis, can you imagine if gay men and intravenous drug users . . . had they been pariahs the way the non-vaccinated are?” Chasten replied on Twitter, “AIDS patients died because people feared simply touching them would lead to infection. Families abandoned their own children to be buried in unmarked graves.” Sadly, AIDS patients were treated in a horrific way due to people like Anthony Fauci painting them as dangerous to society. Yet, the masses continue to trust this man who has spent his entire career altering “the science.”
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.
It is now nearly three decades since the Unites States adopted the policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq. While much has been written about the containment of Iraq, there has been very little in-depth analysis of this policy when it comes to Iran. In a book that is going to be released on March 31, 2008, entitled The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment (Routledge), I attempt to address this shortcoming by investigating when and why the US policy of containment of Iran came about, how it evolved, and where it stands today.[1] To the extent that Israel has been involved in US policy making, the study will also include the role that Israel has played in the containment of Iran. Also, since the fate of Iran has been inextricably linked to that of Iraq, occasionally the investigation will overlap with the containment of Iraq.
The policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq originated during the Carter Administration, but it was not until the Clinton Administration that the expression “dual containment” became popular. … continue
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