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Why Lockdown Doesn’t Work: The Surprising Fact that Halving Your Frequency of Exposure Barely Cuts Your Infection Risk

By Will Jones | Lockdown Sceptics | July 1, 2021

A common criticism of lockdown sceptics who draw attention to the copious data that restrictions and social distancing make little or no difference to infection rates is that we are denying “germ theory”. By which is meant that we are denying the fact that viruses are transmitted from sick people to those they come into contact with and hence that reducing those contacts will significantly reduce the infection rate.

However, this criticism fails to recognise that risk of infection is not proportional to frequency of exposure. It doesn’t take into account the counterintuitive fact that halving your exposure, say, doesn’t halve your risk of infection, not even close.

Consider the case of John, who is one of the unfortunate few who is highly susceptible to infection, so that whenever he is exposed for a non-trivial length of time he has a 0.8 (i.e., 80%) chance of being infected. Suppose that under normal circumstances he attends four places in a week where he might be exposed outside his home, maybe the supermarket, his workplace, the pub and the barber or doctor.

What is his probability of being infected during the week? It’s one minus the probability of him not being infected. The probability of him not being infected at the supermarket is 1-0.8=0.2 (to keep things simple we assume that in all four contexts he visits he is exposed to the virus). Then the probability of him also not being infected at the pub is 0.2×0.2=0.04. Then add in two more contexts where he has to avoid infection, so multiply by 0.2 twice more, and you get the answer: 1-(0.2 x 0.2 x 0.2 x 0.2)=0.998, or 99.8% risk of infection. In other words, John’s chances of getting through the week when attending four places of exposure without being infected is almost nil.

Now suppose that due to restrictions, John halves the number of places he goes where he is exposed, dropping the pub and workplace maybe but still going to the supermarket and the doctor or barber. So he halves his risk of infection, right? Wrong. That’s not how risk works when the event is a binary one (getting infected or not) that you are trying to avoid. That’s because you only have to get infected once to ‘lose’, but you have to avoid it every time to ‘win’. John’s probability of being infected during the week now is 1-(0.2 x 0.2)=0.96. So halving his amount of exposure during the week reduced his risk of infection from 99.8% to 96%, i.e., it just made it slightly less certain.

Indeed, even if John reduced his weekly exposure to just one context (say, the supermarket or the doctor) he would still have an 80% chance of being infected during the week. The only way to reduce it significantly would be to have zero exposure, but that is rarely possible for anyone. And the risk repeats week in, week out for as long as the virus remains prevalent.

Now, someone having an 80% risk of infection on exposure may be unrealistic (though presumably some people really are that susceptible). But you can reduce the risk of infection in the calculation, and also take into account the chance that you won’t always be exposed when you visit somewhere, and the basic point remains: reducing your frequency of exposure does not significantly lower your risk of infection.

This is one of the reasons that lockdowns and social distancing do not make the impact on the infection rate that many assume they will. They assume reducing exposure reduces risk proportionally, but in reality the virus is quickly able to infect almost everyone who is susceptible, largely regardless of restrictions and distancing, as they continue to be exposed in their day-to-day lives.

July 1, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Raising the Alarm on Myocarditis After Covid Vaccination

By Dr Clare Craig and Dr Andrew G. Bostom | Lockdown Sceptics | June 29, 2021

There are now 1160 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis after Covid vaccination in the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). The total could be significantly higher due to latency in reports being processed. Myocarditis is a serious condition associated acutely with fatal arrhythmias, and chronically, because myocytes are irreplaceable, with heart failure and significant associated mortality. The rate of myocarditis/pericarditis reports post-vaccination has historically been low. For the 28 years from 1990 to 2018, during which there were close to three billion vaccinations for influenza alone, there were 708 such events reported in VAERS.1 Using methodology described by Su et al,1 to search the VAERS database,2 the 1160 myocarditis/pericarditis cases occurred in only six months, during which a total of around 150 million people had Covid vaccines, mostly mRNA and excluding lagged reporting.

There are understandable caveats about attributing ‘causality’ to VAERS adverse events associated with vaccination,3 however the numbers of adverse events are likely to be underreported.4 As the aetiology of Covid vaccine-induced myocarditis is new it may be unwise to extrapolate the prognosis from what is known about myocarditis due to other aetiologies. However, it is worth noting that 3-4% of those with acute myocarditis require heart transplantation.5 The overall mortality rate after one year was 20%6 and after five years 44%7 to 56%.6 Of the 1160 reported incidences after Covid vaccination, there have been seven deaths so far with three in under 60 year olds.

Of the myopericarditis cases in under 30 year olds, 496 have an ejection fraction recorded in VAERS. Of these 52 were graded as “decreased” and 36 graded as “normal”. At a minimum, therefore, more than 10% have at least transiently decreased ejection fractions indicating measurable damage to the myocardium. A low ejection fraction has been associated with major adverse cardiac events.8 The transplantation rate is as high as 11% within the first year in those with complications.9 A case report of post-vaccination ‘mild’ myopericarditis in a 16 year-old initially admitted to the intensive care unit, and hospitalised for six days, revealed that he had myocardial fibrosis.10 His troponin levels were high enough to predict a tenfold increased risk of mortality.11

The FDA has expressed concerns around the rate of reported myocarditis within the VAERS reporting system, especially in the young. A presentation by the FDA on June 10th 2021 compared the reported rates of myocarditis with background expected rates, with data up to May 31st 2021.12 However, the expected rates to which observed rates were compared were those expected over a 31-day period. For under-18s, 90% of cases had an onset by day five after vaccination, making comparison with expected rates over 31 days unreasonable. A further meeting on June 23rd 2021 examined the reports in a seven day window with data up to 11 June 2021. A four fold increase above baseline was evident in the seven days after the first dose for under-24 year-olds, rising to over 27-fold for the seven days after the second dose. The rate per million doses given in males 12-17 years old was 17 times higher than in men aged over 50 years seven days after the first dose, rising to 74 times seven days after the second dose. (For females the risk was 50% higher and 13 times higher respectively.)13

For over-65 year-olds, half of the reported incidences were within eight days of vaccination and 79% occurred in a 31-day window after vaccination. The expected rate for the over-65 year-old age group was 36 to 358 per million over 31 days, whereas the reported rate was 26.12 This gives an indication of the under-reporting of events in the VAERS system which is not capturing even the background expected rates. For both young and old it is not a clinically obvious diagnosis and it is likely that milder cases will have gone undiagnosed. Even for these mild cases, the long term outcome is unknown and the risks to these patients with re-exposure to SARS-CoV-2 is also unknown. Currently, more than half of the reports in VAERS are from patients under the age of 30. It is unclear whether the high excess of reported cases in the younger age groups compared with the old is a reporting issue, as myocarditis may be mistaken for other cardiac pathology in older age groups and not reported, or a genuine finding of increased incidence in the young. Others have found that younger patients have a higher incidence of adverse effects following Covid vaccination which may be a function of more efficient translation of RNA into protein resulting in a higher dosage or a more vigorous immune reaction.14

For an individual the risk of vaccination must be balanced against the benefits. Under the age of 20, the risk of mortality for someone who catches Covid is less than four in a million.15 The risk of catching Covid is far from 100%, with many having naturally acquired immunity and high levels of population immunity. The risk to the individual must be measured as the sum of risks of every adverse effect. With estimates of the incidence of myocarditis alone after Covid vaccination in men 16-24 as high as one in 3-6000, the benefit for young people does not justify this risk.16 Immediately, this summer, controlled one-month longitudinal studies (see “A prospective study of the incidence of myocarditis/pericarditis and new onset cardiac symptoms following smallpox and influenza vaccination”,17for example) of the incidence of myopericarditis should be conducted comparing Covid vaccinated and unvaccinated groups under 30 years of age, undergoing serial echocardiography, electrocardiography, and blood cardiac injury markers (notably, troponin). Pending completion of these studies, and rapid analyses of the data, there should be a moratorium on mass Covid vaccination of healthy, extraordinarily low-Covid-risk persons18 under 30 years old. The FDA’s intention to only continue monitoring is a dereliction of duty.

Dr Clare Craig is a Diagnostic Pathologist in London @clarecraigpath and Dr Andrew G. Bostom, MD, is MS Research Physician at Brown University’s Center For Primary Care and Prevention at Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island @andrewbostom

1  Su JR, McNeil MM, Welsh KJ, et al. “Myopericarditis after vaccination, Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)”, 1990-2018. Vaccine 2021;39:839–45.

2 The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) Request (accessed June 21st 2021).

3 Shimabukuro TT, Nguyen M, Martin D, et al. “Safety monitoring in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)”. Vaccine 2015;33:4398–405.

4 Baker MA, Kaelber DC, Bar-Shain DS, et al. “Advanced Clinical Decision Support for Vaccine Adverse Event Detection and Reporting”. Clin. Infect. Dis. 2015;61:864–70.

5 “UNOS Registry Myocarditis Heart Transplantation Outcome” – ATC Meetings Abstracts. 2020 (accessed June 23rd 2021).

6 Mason JW, O’Connell JB, Herskowitz A, et al. “A Clinical Trial of Immunosuppressive Therapy for Myocarditis”. The Myocarditis Treatment Trial Investigators. N. Engl. J. Med. 1995;333:269–75.

7 Grogan M, Redfield MM, Bailey KR, et al. “Long-term outcome of patients with biopsy-proved myocarditis: comparison with idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy”. J. Am. Coll. Cardiol. 1995;26:80–4.

8 Wong BTW, Christiansen JP. “Clinical Characteristics and Prognostic Factors of Myocarditis in New Zealand Patients”. Heart Lung Circ. 2020;29:1139–45.

9 Ammirati E, Cipriani M, Moro C, et al. “Clinical Presentation and Outcome in a Contemporary Cohort of Patients With Acute Myocarditis”: Multicenter Lombardy Registry. Circulation 2018;138:1088–99.

10 Talman V, Ruskoaho H. “Cardiac fibrosis in myocardial infarction-from repair and remodeling to regeneration”. Cell Tissue Res. 2016;365:563–81.

11 Roos A, Bandstein N, Lundbäck M, et al. “Stable High-Sensitivity Cardiac Troponin T Levels and Outcomes in Patients With Chest Pain”. J. Am. Coll. Cardiol. 2017;70:2226–36.

12 FDA. Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee June 10th, 2021 Meeting Presentation.

13 COVID-19 Vaccine safety updates Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) June 23, 2021.

14 Menni C, Klaser K, May A, et al. “Vaccine after Effects and Post-Vaccine Infection in a Real World Setting: Results from the COVID Symptom Study App”. 2021. doi:10.2139/SSRN.3795344

15 Ghisolfi S, Almås I, Sandefur JC, et al. “Predicted COVID-19 fatality rates based on age, sex, comorbidities and health system capacity”. BMJ Glob Health 2020;5. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2020-003094

16 Israel reports link between rare cases of heart inflammation and COVID-19 vaccination in young men. 2021 (accessed June 21st 2021).

17 Engler RJM, Nelson MR, Collins LC Jr, et al. “A prospective study of the incidence of myocarditis/pericarditis and new onset cardiac symptoms following smallpox and influenza vaccination”. PLoS One 2015;10:e0118283.

18 Ioannidis JPA. “Reconciling estimates of global spread and infection fatality rates of COVID-19: An overview of systematic evaluations”. Eur. J. Clin. Invest. 2021;51:e13554.

July 1, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Scandal of the suppressed case for ivermectin

By Edmund Fordham | The Conservative Woman | June 29, 2021

‘We don’t doubt this is an important paper,’ wrote the senior editor of Lancet Respiratory Medicine on March 9 in response to our paper ‘Ivermectin for prevention and treatment of COVID-19 infection: a systematic review and meta-analysis’, the brainchild of Dr Tess Lawrie and the world’s first Cochrane-standards ‘meta-analysis’ of clinical trials of the long-established anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, for treating, and preventing, Covid-19.

Four expert reviewers were satisfied by revisions already made. ‘The effort of the authors is praiseworthy in this pandemic situation,’ one said. Their critiques had been technical: some of the statistical methods break down when there are no ‘events’ (in this case, deaths) in both ‘arms’ of a clinical trial. Our lead statistician ran more checks; we fixed the criticisms. This is what ‘peer review’ is supposed to do. It’s normal.

One might take such a comment from the senior editor as the preamble to acceptance for publication. But no, this was the editors’ reason for not publishing the paper. This isn’t normal. What was the problem?

‘We don’t doubt this is an important paper, and would likely be widely taken up.’ Hang on, Lancet Respiratory Medicine wants to avoid printing something it recognises as an important paper, that four of their own experts have passed, because it might be ‘widely taken up’? This is what they usually want.

Of course, the Lancet has a lot to live down, having moved into the business of publishing fake news, as with the notorious hydroxychloroquine fraud which I reported on for TCW last year. Not only did the Lancet publish an obvious fake, it did so with hostile editorial commentary and briefing to BBC Radio 4 Today for maximum impact. So media briefing for planted fake news, but a Lancet specialist title won’t touch an ‘important paper’.

I was told in January, by a senior clinical researcher who knows him personally, that Richard Horton, editor in chief of the Lancet, was ‘very ashamed’ at having let through the fake news. Horton, whose Twitter bio reads ‘welcome to a permanent attack on the present’, wrote in 2015:

‘Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness . . . Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours . . . Our love of “significance” pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale. We reject important confirmations . . . And individual scientists, including their most senior leaders, do little to alter a research culture that occasionally veers close to misconduct.’

Horton was right. The only aspect that the fake news had going for it was the huge sample size: 96,000 patients. Except that the true number was actually zero, since the paper was fake. The Lancet was certainly seduced by a ‘fashionable trend of dubious importance’, namely ‘Big Data’, a flavour-of-the-month set fair to corrupt many other sciences as well as medicine. The Lancet ‘aided and abetted the worst behaviours’, not just those ‘veering close to misconduct’, but those clearly crossing the line.

Has anything changed? In 2015 Horton bemoaned journals that ‘reject important confirmations’, but in March 2021, ‘after lengthy discussions with the editorial team’, Lancet Respiratory Medicine did it again, rejecting our ‘important confirmation’ (passed by four of their own experts, remember) that yes, ivermectin works for Covid-19.

So there we have it. Horton’s 2015 editorial remains true, but he doesn’t seem to have done anything about it. He’s only the man in charge, after all.

I had feared as much, but we were all keen to give our findings maximum visibility. But Lancet Respiratory Medicine did what its friends wanted, which was ‘kill the story’ for as long as possible, which in the event has been over three months, whilst we searched for a journal with enough integrity to publish an article which had already passed four-fold peer-review at the Lancet, and would get yet further examination elsewhere. As of last Friday the paper is now published in the American Journal of Therapeutics, and you can read it here. More importantly your doctor, or your family’s doctors, can read it too. Take it to them, as many as possible.

So what does this dry-as-dust research paper actually show?

The starting point was another review article on ivermectin for Covid-19, also in the American Journal of Therapeutics, published on May 1. Take that paper to your doctor too. Dr Pierre Kory and his Front-Line Covid Critical Care alliance (FLCCC) of US-based intensive care doctors had their four-times peer-reviewed paper accepted for a special issue on repurposed drugs for Covid-19, but then revoked, by the journal Frontiers in Pharmacology. This unprecedented volte face was charted recently in TCW by Dr Michael Yeadon. The same ‘kill the story’ orders delayed publication by over five months.

The FLCCC know what they are doing with Covid-19. Their ‘MATH+’ treatment delivers the world’s best survivals from serious, late-stage, hospitalised  Covid-19. It remains almost unknown in the UK and unused in the NHS. (All Brits should be very angry about this). FLCCC luminary Dr Joseph Varon, mentioned en passant in my coverage of the Oxford RECOVERY trial, has the best track record of them all. The FLCCC have used several anti-virals in their continuing evolution of the best treatments, but by late autumn realised that one drug, ivermectin, stood out because it worked at all stages of the Covid-19 disease, from prophylaxis through to the intensive care that the FLCCC specialise in. They wrote up the evidence, posting a preprint in mid-November.

They explain the back-story to ivermectin, little-known in Western countries but worldwide one of the most widely-used drugs at 3.8 billion doses and counting. Earning the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for its discoverers, it has crushed the hideously disabling infestation of onchocerciasis or ‘river-blindness’ across the tropics. A potent anti-parasitic, it is used for threadworms, scabies and head-lice. It costs pence per pill. It is a known anti-viral, working across a range of RNA viruses, (and some DNA ones). It may even be an anti-cancer drug, and has prolonged lives in leukaemia. Specifically against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a team at Monash University in Australia showed that ivermectin killed off the virus in vitro in April 2020. The usual suspects declared that this meant nothing (which on its own is true), that that you couldn’t get it strong enough in vivo; nevertheless the Monash paper set off a series of clinical trials of ivermectin for Covid-19, usually in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs), or in plain English poor countries. There is a good reason for this: if you are dirt poor, you need your medicines to be dirt cheap. Nothing else will be any use. What did they find? Ivermectin works for Covid-19, at entirely tolerable doses.

Kory’s paper showed how cases and deaths in Peru came crashing down where ivermectin was freely distributed, and not where it wasn’t. The same phenomenon has been repeated in India more recently; states such as Goa that adopt mass distribution of ivermectin crush their cases; those that refuse it such as Tamil Nadu (Chief Minister M K Stalin) don’t.

Dr Kory’s paper identifies and charts the evidence, but doesn’t do a formal meta-analysis, which is where Dr Tess Lawrie came in. Her Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy does nothing but rigorous systematic reviews, and only for public clients such as the NHS and the WHO. Their objectives are clinical practice guidelines, providing the evidence for decisions on licensing and implementation.

A ‘meta-analysis’ is a synthesis of data from multiple sources – typically clinical trials of a new drug – using recognised statistical methods. A meta-analysis of clinical trials that are themselves ‘randomised’ clinical trials (where patients are allocated at random to receive, or not, the treatment) lies at the summit of the ‘evidence quality’ pyramid, in the doctrines of Evidence-Based Medicine, ruthlessly insisted upon by regulatory authorities. To rehearse a cliché, the Randomised Controlled Trial or RCT is the ‘gold standard’ of medical evidence. If so, a meta-analysis of RCTs is platinum.

What makes the paper a first is being carried out according to the standards of the Cochrane organisation, requiring a protocol to be observed (i.e. no favouritism), data extraction from primary sources by two researchers independently, and the ‘grading’ of those sources for the quality of the evidence. Indeed the paper began life as a Cochrane Review, and was finished by the end of January. But to cut short a long story (parts of which are covered elsewhere by the ever-vigilant France Soir ) the Cochrane organisation did not want a systematic review on a topic already approved by a specialised researcher and colleagues whose consultancy does nothing else, and who have contributed nearly 80 such reviews between them. Sounds familiar? It should do by now: the ‘capture’ of learned journals by powerful interests who will suppress, by fair means or increasingly by foul ones, any knowledge that threatens those interests.

The reason for doing a systematic review is that that is what is required by regulatory authorities such as the FDA (in the US) the European Medicines Agency (for the EU), our own Medical and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the World Health Organisation (WHO). It’s what they require to decide on licensing new drugs (though ivermectin isn’t new at all).

Dr Lawrie didn’t stop at the meta-analysis, but pressed on to a ‘Evidence to Decision’ process, the formal procedure which those regulators are supposed to use in coming to decisions. On February 20, the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD) panel voted  that ‘ivermectin should be adopted to reduce morbidity and mortality associated with Covid-19 infection and to prevent Covid-19 infection among those at higher risk.’

That was February. The essentials were already clear from Dr Kory’s paper in preprint in November, his testimony to the US Senate in December, Dr Lawrie’s first meta-analysis issued on January 3, and our submission to the Lancet on 5 February (preprint posted March 11). BMC Systematic Reviews were kind enough to post a preprint on March 18 but though they still say it’s ‘under review’ we haven’t heard from them in three months, so it looks like ‘kill the story’ orders apply there too. Our published paper has since been revised and updated.

The paper makes clear that there’s no real doubt that ivermectin is an effective medicine for Covid-19. Multiple clinical trials show it. The Randomised Controlled Trials that our paper analyses are just the tip of the iceberg. Plenty of other trials show it too, but if they were not randomised, according to regulators they don’t count, so our meta-analysis did not include them. Although Risks of Bias are carefully evaluated, disregarding the mountain of evidence from elsewhere, not least the experience and testimony of doctors actually using it, is itself a potent source of bias. You are throwing away all the data that might force you to think. A critic of our paper wrote: ‘a technical tour-de-force based on ritualised ideas’. He’s right, but let’s not argue: our meta-analysis was upon the Regulators’ terms. We played by their rules. That was the point. You want a strict meta-analysis of RCTs only? Take two dozen.

How many do they need? When governments, or regulatory agencies, want to approve medicines, one will do. Dexamethasone, to huge fanfare, was approved last summer on the evidence of just one RCT, though it helps only ventilated patients in the inflammatory stages of the illness, and on its own, by not very much. The FLCCC doctors had been using a different corticosteroid, methylprednisolone, and at higher equivalent doses, long before. In our analysis, ivermectin reduces deaths overall by around 62 per cent, and works at all disease stages. As a prophylactic, it prevents 6 out of every 7 infections that would otherwise occur, and stops household transmission in its tracks. Corticosteroids are vital in the inflammatory phase of the illness, but are useless in the purely viral stage or for prophylaxis.

So where does all this leave ivermectin, for those affected by Covid-19, those worried about it, and vulnerable people at risk?

Ivermectin isn’t new. Its safety record, from those billions of doses, is second to none. Its cost is negligible. The WHO, in its BC (Before Covid) era, listed it as an ‘Essential Medicine’ in their catalogue of the ‘minimum medicine needs for a basic health-care system’ (though our ‘envy of the world’ NHS doesn’t have it).

In the USA, ivermectin is licensed by the FDA, albeit not for Covid, so is available to any American doctor to prescribe ‘off-label’ (i.e. not according to the originally licensed ‘advertising label’). However the fact that it isn’t ‘labelled’ for Covid makes it easy to refuse. Patients’ families have had to go to court for injunctions ordering hospitals to give ivermectin. The FLCCC still swims against the tide, though legal barriers are lower than elsewhere, for open-minded doctors.

In the UK, ivermectin has never been licensed by the MHRA. This makes it easy for doctors to refuse, and for those who want to help to be obstructed. My GP refused me ivermectin for prophylaxis, even after I showed him the evidence. Hospital doctors can’t get it except to special order at pharmacies. The bureaucracy won’t allow them to prescribe it. Listen to Dr Nyjon Eccles  having to bring his own ivermectin for his 84-year-old mother in hospital with Covid-19, dependent on oxygen, and failing every time she came off. She was discharged five days after her first dose.

As for the WHO itself, on March 31, 2021, its ‘Living Guideline’ for Covid treatments was updated, declaring: ‘We recommend not to use ivermectin in patients with Covid-19 except in the context of a clinical trial.’ The cherry-picking of studies that helped give the Right Answer, and rejection of those that didn’t, the cavalier appraisal of risks of bias and evidence certainty, make their analysis a complete travesty, but nevertheless potently influential.

In India, seeing the damage that the WHO had done to their Covid-19 policy, and finding the pile of evidence compiled by the FLCCC and BIRD, the Indian Bar Association served two legal notices upon the chief scientist of the WHO, Dr Soumya Swaminathan (an Indian national). The first (May 25) accuses her of a ‘disinformation campaign against ivermectin’ and the second June 13) ups the ante by joining Dr Tedros (director general of the WHO), and accusing them of ‘contempt of court and aggravated offences against humanity by spreading disinformation’. If these move to actual litigation, watch this space.

Meanwhile, patients and their families, and even Bar Associations, should not have to go through the courts or to smuggle medicines into hospital to get treatment for sick patients. At some point, officials who obstruct access to safe medicines are going to have to explain the moral difference between their actions and corporate manslaughter.

Will our own MHRA see sense and ‘license’ this WHO Essential Medicine of unparalleled safety record and negligible cost for use in the UK for treatment and prophylaxis of Covid-19? There’s none so deaf as those that will not listen. We have a Government that has lied to us throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and continues to do so. The oxymoronic Sage, fronted by the Gruesome Twosome, receive no challenges from equally or better qualified scientists, except through volunteer groups like HART or BIRD. The Prime Minister, having ‘landed from another planet and having absolutely no clue of what he is talking about’ appoints a Task Force to have ‘antiviral treatments ready for deployment by autumn 2021’.

This article has been about an anti-viral treatment that is already known, already exists, with an unparalleled safety record, is on the Essential Medicines list of the WHO, costs virtually nothing, and has anti-inflammatory properties to boot. It requires only formal endorsement. Johnson’s Task Force is redundant.

Preparing a formal application to the MHRA, we take comfort from the editors of Lancet Respiratory Medicine: ‘We don’t doubt this is an important paper’.

July 1, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

JCVI Scientist: “Let Kids Catch Covid Instead Of Jabbing Them!”

By Richie Allen | July 1, 2021

Robert Dingwall, a member of the JCVI (Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation) has suggested that allowing children to catch Covid and build up natural immunity to the infection, may be safer than vaccinating them.

Dingwall (pictured) sits on the JCVI. The committee advises the government on who should get vaccinated and when. It is currently considering whether 12-18 year-olds should receive the jab. Dingwall took to Twitter yesterday and stated:

“Teenagers are at intrinsically low risk from Covid. Vaccines must be exceptionally safe to beat this. Given the low risk of Covid for most teenagers, it is not immoral to think that they may be better protected by natural immunity generated through infection than by asking them to take the possible risk of a vaccine.”

He went on to say that the pandemic, “would end through population immunity, whether from vaccination or prior infection”.

However, SAGE member John Edmunds told BBC Newsnight last night, that the country should not fully reopen until all secondary school children are vaccinated. He said:

“At some point we do have to dismantle all of these measures that we’ve put in place. I think, for me, the safest time to do that is when children have been vaccinated, certainly secondary-school-aged children at least. That’s the safest way.”

John Edmunds is a lunatic. As Robert Dingwall pointed out, Covid presents no real risk to children. Children should not be coerced into taking a medicine on behalf of someone else.

In fact, Dingwall should go further. The great majority of the population are at no serious risk from Covid. The evidence is overwhelming that the jabs present a far greater risk than the virus.

 

July 1, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Spreading ‘human rights’ at the tip of a bayonet: the LGBT agenda has now become a tool in Western foreign policy

By Glenn Diesen | RT | July 1, 2021

When it comes to issues of ‘human rights’ and individual liberties, every country in the world takes a different stance. Culture, religion, and nationality all play their roles, but now it’s clear the West wants to change this.

On Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted a picture of the rainbow pride flag raised outside the State Department in Washington, writing that the commemoration of two major LGBT events “reminds us how far we’ve come – and how much more we need to achieve, at home and worldwide.” The key word here is “worldwide.”

As the West elevates LGBT issues to be the highest measure of morality, reorganizing its culture accordingly, it begs the question – how will this manifest itself in foreign policy? Values are deployed as an effective instrument in Western power politics, with liberal democracy held up as a hegemonic norm that allows countries like the US to lead the world and exempt themselves from international law.

Even the CIA is rebranding itself now as an organization guided by the advocacy of LGBT rights, which is a clear indication that the celebration of ‘our’ righteous values will soon be expressed as derision and attack on the ‘other’.

What is the difference between a ‘values-based’ foreign policy and a civilizing mission designed to undermine the sovereignty and cultures of other states? In the post-Cold War era, the West explicitly legitimizes hegemony, hierarchies, and sovereign inequality in the defense of universal liberal democratic values. Is the world heading towards a woke form of imperialism?

Woke values as a hegemonic norm?

Ideologies tend to appeal to grand ideals such as freedom and reason, yet at the same time they can divide the world into good versus bad – leaving little room for freedom or reason.

An open and democratic debate is missing regarding the extent to which modern liberal values are universal. It is, for example, reasonable to ask whether gender reassignment surgery or hormone treatment for children is a universally held value spanning all cultures, and how different states balance parental consent and involvement.

It also seems reasonable to discuss whether people born male should be allowed to compete in sports as women, and the impact this would have on women’s sports. Ideology has reduced these discussions to love versus hate, which suggests that dissent is impermissible. Herein lies the power of ideology that is too seductive to keep out of foreign policy.

Hungary recently passed a law that banned the promotion of LGBT lifestyles to children. Its prime minister, Viktor Orban, argues that he has previously been a strong promoter of gay rights, and this law is intended to protect children and parents from sexual material. As the EU deems this to be an issue of universal values, any nuanced discussion was skipped and it instead moved straight on to talking about punishment.

Mark Rutte, the prime minister of the Netherlands, stated: “My goal is to bring Hungary to its knees on this issue” and called for expelling Hungary from the EU. The French president argued that Brussels should show “no weakness” in facing down Hungary. No sense of irony was apparent as the EU condemned Hungary for “authoritarianism.” The ideological mantra of ‘diversity and inclusion’ ironically accepts no diversity of values for thousand-year-old cultures, and fails to include states with compatible values.

Russia versus the West

Throughout history, the West aimed to prove its civilizational superiority by comparing itself to supposed Russian barbarism. For centuries, ethnicity was at the center as civilized ‘Europe’ was contrasted with ‘Asiatic’ Russia. The purported opposite of Western freedom and civilization was this Eastern slavery and barbarism, which gradually became a fundamental part of the liberal ideology.

Through this prism, Russia has been allowed to play two roles: either a lowly apprentice of Western civilization, or a counter-civilizational force that must be contained or defeated.

In the early 18th century, Peter the Great established Russia as a great power and initiated a cultural revolution to Europeanize his country. The Western Europeans applauded Peter for adopting the role as the ‘student’ who would civilize Russia, according to European standards.

In the early 1990s, Russia aimed yet again to ‘return’ to Europe by adopting capitalism and a form of democracy. The West again applauded Moscow’s acceptance of the teacher-student relationship, although it rejected the inclusion of Russia in the European security architecture to any extent that would entail sovereign equality.

The rejection of the role as a civilizational second fiddle to the West, and the implicit sovereign inequality that would go with it, has once more entailed a return to containment and confrontation. Moscow therefore remains skeptical of any foreign policy framed as a civilizing mission.

Liberal authoritarianism

The West’s commitment to a ‘values-based’ international system has since meant artificially reorganizing and propagandizing all politics as a competition between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. International law, with equal respect for states, is dismantled and replaced with the so-called ‘rules-based international system’. This is portrayed as an extension of international law, but is actually the antithesis of it. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently commented: “the beauty of these Western ‘rules’ lies precisely in the fact that they lack any specific content.”

Strategically ambiguous standards are designed to enable NATO countries to decide when the rules have been broken and then unilaterally punish those who run contrary to their values.

The rules-based international system is intended for the West to police the rest, which is why it does not apply to the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange or the treason charges leveled against Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk. It also exempts Guantanamo Bay, the Stuxnet saga, NSA mass surveillance, digital censorship, the dismemberment of Serbia, or the hundreds of thousands who have perished in the illegal ‘humanitarian wars’ of Western states. The responsibility of NATO countries to uphold the rules-based system is instead used as the reason for exempting themselves from these rules.

Under the veil of the responsibility to selflessly uphold values, members of the bloc can ever-so casually discuss ways to topple foreign governments with economic sanctions or military power.

Towards woke imperialism?

Will humanitarian imperialism evolve into woke imperialism? It hardly seems far-fetched that woke values will be absorbed into the existing liberal-democratic civilizing mission to remake the world in the West’s image. Can the objective “to bring Hungary to its knees” develop into subversion, regime-change operations, or LGBT wars?

In the current age of liberal authoritarianism, the US is partnering with Saudi Arabia to fight for Syrian human rights by occupying the country’s territory, cooperating with jihadi groups, stealing oil Damascus needs to fund rebuilding, and stealing the wheat required for civilians there to survive.

Rights for sexual minorities is an important topic for any society, but cynical forces are obviously at play when the pride flag is raised over US military bases.

Glenn Diesen is a Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway and an editor at the Russia in Global Affairs journal.

July 1, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Serbia Leads in Cancer Deaths in Europe After NATO Strikes, Oncology Institute Director Says

Sputnik – 29.06.2021

BELGRADE – The use of depleted uranium bombs by NATO in 1999 and the destruction of environmentally hazardous facilities during air strikes led to Serbia currently leading in cancer deaths across Europe, Danica Grujicic, director of the Institute for Oncology and Radiology of Serbia (IORS), told Sputnik.

“There are more and more children with oncological disorders, cancer appears in previously uncharacteristic age groups. In patients, including children, the growths react weaker to therapy. Despite all necessary tests, it is increasingly difficult to predict the behavior of tumors. Serbia is now first place in Europe in mortality from cancer,” Grujicic said.

She stressed that the consequences of the use of uranium and chemicals during the bombings of Yugoslavia by NATO will be felt for a long time, especially taking into account what the UN Environment Program described as an “ecocide” and a “regional environmental disaster in April 1999.”

The oncologist noted that the first results of the bombings, which may be called the “acute phase” in the medial field, are death, destruction of infrastructure, and pollution of the air, rivers and soil. The next stage, according to Grujicic, is the “chronic phase,” which was first noticed by veterinarians in the south of central Serbia after domestic animals began bearing abnormal offspring.

Medics then started observing more cases, as benign growths develop unpredictably and aggressively in humans, Grujicic noted.In 2018, there were almost 30,000 new cancer patients registered in central Serbia, without including the autonomous regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina, compared to 19,000 in 1999. The death toll in 2018 reached 15,500, as opposed 12,000 in 1999, despite better treatment available, the oncologist stated. Within the country there have been some 58,000 new cancer cases reported in one year, out of a population of seven million.

A group of some one hundred scientists and medical experts previously suggested that the Serbian government conduct a detailed study on the consequences of the 1999 NATO strikes. The half-life of uranium is about 4.5 billion years.

NATO airstrikes in Yugoslavia continued from March 24 to June 10, 1999. The exact number of victims of the airstrikes is unknown. Serbian authorities suggest that as many as 2,500 people, including 89 children, were killed and about 12,500 people were injured in the bombings. According to various sources, the material damage is assessed at between $30 billion and $100 billion.

The military operation was conducted without the approval of the UN Security Council and on the basis of Western countries’ allegations that Yugoslavian authorities had carried out ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and provoked a humanitarian catastrophe.

June 30, 2021 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Over 180 unmarked graves found at former Catholic school in Canada, indigenous group says, in third such find

RT | June 30, 2021

A Canadian indigenous group has said 182 unmarked graves have been discovered in the South Interior of the province of British Columbia, the third such discovery in the past two months near former Catholic schools.

The burial site is located at the former Catholic-run St. Eugene’s Mission School, the Lower Kootenay Band announced on Wednesday.

The community of ʔaq’am – or St. Mary’s Indian Band – based near the city of Cranbrook made the gruesome find after using radar detection equipment, which apparently pointed to there being graves around a meter below the surface.

Last week, 751 unmarked graves were uncovered at a Catholic school in Saskatchewan province, another indigenous community announced.

That discovery came after the remains of 215 children, some as young as three years old, were found at another Catholic school in British Columbia in May.

St. Eugene’s, now a casino and resort, was run by the Catholic Church from 1890 until the 1970s, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a body set up to document the history of indigenous students in Canadian schools.

The Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre said the school was hit by frequent outbreaks of influenza, mumps, measles, chickenpox, and tuberculosis.

As many as 100 people from the Lower Kootenay Band had been forced to attend the institution, the group said.

“It is believed that the remains of these 182 souls are from the member Bands of the Ktunaxa Nation, neighbouring First Nations communities and the community of ʔaq’am,” the community said in a statement.

More than 150,000 indigenous children were required to attend Catholic-run state schools in Canada from the 1870s until 1997.

In 2015, a report by the commission said the government’s forced assimilation of indigenous students and the system itself could “best be described as ‘cultural genocide.’”

June 30, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Trust me – I’m from Big Pharma

By Kate Dunlop | The Conservative Woman | June 29, 2021

THE behaviour of political and public-health leaders across the world over the past fifteen months has been deplorable: for reasons yet to be confirmed, they have turned themselves into procurers for Big Pharma.

Governments not only funded fast-paced vaccine development but also psychologically prepared their populations to receive them by means of sustained media manipulation. Billions of pounds in public money has been transferred to drug corporations which have been insulated from civil legal challenge in respect of harm or loss arising from their products.

Medical staff have lost a great deal of public trust by colluding with vaccine stakeholders and withdrawing general support. They have delivered experimental gene therapies to people who did not need them but who were cowed into having them, and they have exposed young people, healthy adults and pregnant women to unnecessary risks without their full knowledge or consent in breach of their own ethical and professional standards.

When the UK government granted Pfizer civil legal immunity in December 2020 it enabled a private commercial entity to avoid the already restricted product liabilities that might have given it cause to consider. Regulation 345 of the Human Medicines Regulations (HMR) 2012, gave it blanket protection from civil lawsuits arising from any ‘unforeseen complications’ with Covid jabs.

Such legal immunity is unusual but came from an emergency government consultation in September 2020, after the Department of Health and Social Care under Matt Hancock had determined that changes to civil liability were necessary to ‘better facilitate the widespread use of a Covid-19 vaccine in Britain’.

Emergency approval had already been granted for Pfizer/BioNTech’s two-shot ‘vaccines’ through Regulation 174 of the HMR, which allowed them to avoid statutory licensing procedures, so with civil legal protections, they were unfettered. Crony capitalism and avarice beat prudence and public protection.

The government, likely for political expediency,  included Covid jabs on the Vaccine Damage Payments Scheme (VDPS) (Vaccine Damage Payments (Specified Disease) Order 2020, SI 2020/1411). This scheme is taxpayer funded and provides for ‘the very rare possibility where someone is severely disabled as a result of taking a vaccine’.

To qualify for assistance, a claimant must provide medical evidence that proves to the Department of Work and Pensions that on ‘the balance of probability’ there is a ‘causal link between the vaccine and the claimed disability [and] that the resulting disability is severe – up to 60 per cent’.

Those who can prove their cause receive a one-off tax-free payment of £120,000. The test poses two key challenges for claimants, the high threshold of disablement and the relatively low level of compensation.

Consumer Protection Rights and common law rights still apply for people damaged by Covid-19 vaccines but due to the legal definition of product defects and a rule known as the ‘state-of-the-art defence’, it may be very difficult to get compensation: only time and case law will tell.

The very fact that Covid vaccine research was funded by government is curious and may, arguably, make them also liable; that manufacturers’ experimental products were given emergency authorisation is questionable; that immunity against civil action for damages was granted is an egregious betrayal; and the continuing promotion of the jabs, despite growing evidence of harm, is evil.

In both the UK and the US, a condition for the release of any new drug is that there be no other effective treatments available. We all know now that proven therapeutics were available to treat the early symptoms of Covid-19 but that they were, and still are, suppressed. Viable alternatives include ivermectin,  hydroxychloroquine and zinc, dexamethasone and other corticosteroids (prednisone, methylprednisolone), and remdesivir.

What distinguishes these remedies from novel ‘vaccines’ is that they are already fully licensed and off-patent. They are relatively cheap to manufacture and administer, and therefore unlikely to bring new long-term income streams to Big Pharma.

All of which brings us unhappily to our question: Why on earth was our government so eager to fund the activity of international drug giants and why did it provide them with tax-funded legal immunities for products that only they will profit from?

It’s not as if Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock or their Sage advisers can claim ignorance of the business practices or track records of these outfits: they all have strong public links to them, either as employees, researchers, directors, business partners, shareholders, or recipients of funding.

In December 2020, Global Justice Now, a UK-based ‘social justice organisation’ published a report which concluded:

‘The current pharmaceutical model is . . . deeply flawed, delivering outcomes which are poor value for money for the public sector, which exacerbate global inequality and which are driven by the objective to make sky-high returns to shareholders, not a healthier population.’

It described the market as dysfunctional with incentives for ‘the most appalling behaviour including aggressive marketing of inappropriate drugs, kickbacks to doctors, claims of testing drugs on children without proper consent, massive price hikes on essential medicines, profiteering, blocking competition, and secrecy’.

In the US, Public Citizen, a non-profit, consumer rights advocacy group, published Twenty Seven Years of Pharmaceutical Industry Criminal and Civil Penalties 1991 through 2017, which detailed the 412 settlements against drug companies that resulted in them paying out $38.6 billion in criminal and civil penalties. A small loss relative to the $711 billion in net profits made by the 11 largest global drug companies during ten of those 27 years (2003-2012).

Pfizer, now the leading Covid mRNA vaccine manufacturer, was found guilty of more transgressions than any other company and forced to pay 34 settlements amounting to $4.7billion: AstraZeneca had to settle just over $1billion on 13 matters, including concealing data.

Johnson & Johnson was ordered to pay $2.8billion in 20 settlements that included unlawful promotion of prescription drugs and unfair practices.

Such penalties are clearly accepted by the companies as a ‘cost of doing business’. They are certainly no incentive to changing behaviour.

Criminal prosecutions of executives of drug companies are extremely rare, as are prosecutions of politicians. Nonetheless, a forensic assessment of who is liable for the risks, damages, and losses brought by Covid -19 ‘vaccines’ is long overdue.

June 30, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Are regular health checks good for you?

By Sebastian Rushworth, M.D. | June 30, 2021

Regular health checks (a.k.a routine visits) are probably the bane of many a primary care physician’s existence. I can’t imagine many things more boring than running through a standardized list of questions with a patient who feels absolutely fine, then going through a list of lab values that are almost invariably within the normal reference range, and finally topping it off with a perfunctory physical examination. Nothing converts a highly trained professional into an unthinking automaton more than the regular health check.

Of course, the physician’s feelings about regular health checks aren’t really what matters (except in so far as they cause physicians to choose not to work in primary care, and thereby cause a shortage of primary care physicians). What matters is whether the regular health check results in objective benefits for the patient. Well, do they?

A review was recently published in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) that sought to answer that question. Regular health checks are a big part of what primary care physicians do in many countries. In the US for example, 8% of doctor’s appointments are for a regular health check. This means that a lot of money is poured into them, and it therefore makes sense to try to figure out whether or not they actually do any good. Otherwise that money could be better used elsewhere, like for example launching Jeff Bezos into space.

The review included both randomized trials and observational studies, with the only requirements for inclusion being that a study have at least 200 participants, that there be a control group, that the health check be conducted in a primary care clinic, and that it be a “general” health check, i.e. not designed to screen specifically for any one disease. 19 randomized trials and 13 observational studies were identified. The smallest study had 240 participants, while the largest had almost 500,000 participants, and the length of follow-up varied from six months to thirty years. The oldest included study was published in 1973, and the most recent was published in 2017. Virtually all were carried out in western Europe or north America, with a disproportionately large proportion of the studies being carried out in Denmark, because apparently the Danes are disproportionately interested in health screening.

The frequency of the health check varied quite a lot. Some of the studies had a single visit, some had a visit annually or bi-annually, and some had irregular intervals.

So, what were the results?

13 randomized trials studied the effect of health checks on mortality, and eleven of these failed to show any benefit. This includes the study that ran the longest, a Danish trial with almost 18,000 people that provided health checks at baseline and then after five years and again after ten years. It failed to show any difference in mortality after thirty years. It also includes the largest study, another Danish trial with almost 60,000 people that provided health checks at baseline and again five years out (and also at the one year and three year marks for those deemed to be at high risk). It failed to show any mortality benefit after ten years of follow-up.

As mentioned, two of the thirteen studies did show a mortality benefit. The larger, another Danish study with 50,000 participants, which provided a single health check and then followed participants for five years to see what happened, showed an extremely marginal benefit (10% vs 11 % dead five years out), but the result only just crossed the threshold for statistical significance and could thus easily be a fluke. The other of the two was a smaller study with 4,195 people conducted in the US, which provided a health check at baseline and at one year out. It showed an improvement in mortality at two years (8% vs 11%) and four years (19% vs 22%).

Overall, though, I think it’s safe to conclude that the totality of studies that have so far been done of regular health checks fail to show that they result in any reduction in mortality. Of course, whether you’re dead or alive isn’t the only thing that matters. So let’s look at other outcomes too.

Five randomized trials looked at whether regular health checks helped prevent cardiovascular disease and cardiovascular events (a.k.a. heart attacks and strokes). All five failed to find any benefit. This is a bit odd, since one rationale for regular health checks is that they catch problems like high blood pressure and high cholesterol early, one major goal of which is to prevent cardiovascular events.

Four randomized trials and six observational studies did seek to understand whether the health checks increased detection of disease. A randomized trial conducted in Denmark (of course), in which 1,104 participants aged 45-64 were randomized to either a health check or “usual care” (i.e. don’t bother the doctor unless you feel sick) and then followed for one year, the health check had resulted in more than twice as many people being treated with anti-depressants (5% vs 2%). As I’ve written about previously, anti-depressants don’t work (better than placebo), but do result in significant side effects, so it’s questionable whether this is a good thing.

The health check did not however result in an increase in the diagnosis of high blood pressure, hypercholesterolemia (high cholesterol), or diabetes. Which is a bit surprising, quite frankly. Other trials did find a difference, however. An American trial in which 906 adults were randomized to a single health check or usual care and then followed for a year found that the health check resulted in a significant increase in the number of people diagnosed with high blood pressure (14% vs 10%). A British observational study including over 85,000 people found that attending regular health checks was associated with an increased likelihood of being diagnosed with high blood pressure, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease. Participants were also more likely to be diagnosed with hypercholesterolemia and treated with statins.

So the totality of evidence suggests that regular health checks do result in an increase in the number of people being given diagnoses and thus the number of people being put on medical treatment. But they don’t improve mortality or the frequency of cardiovascular events. That is strange, isn’t it? How do we explain that?

Here’s what I think.

Firstly, some of these diagnoses don’t actually result in any treatment. Take chronic kidney disease, for example. As people age, their kidneys gradually wear out. Once your kidneys’ capacity is at around 70% of the normal value in a healthy young person, you will be diagnosed as suffering from “chronic kidney disease”. Luckily, the kidneys have an enormous amount of spare capacity, and you don’t actually develop any symptoms until the kidneys are down to 10 to 15% of their original capacity. Most people who have been diagnosed with chronic kidney disease die of other causes long before their kidney function gets to that point. So regular health checks might increase the number of people diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, but the diagnosis doesn’t actually change anything in reality (except for the psychological harms of now thinking that you have a chronic disease, of course).

Secondly, there are many diagnoses that are treated, but where the benefits of treatment are so marginal that it isn’t clear whether treatment actually improves overall outcomes. This applies to mildly elevated blood pressure and blood sugar. Treating very high blood pressure and very high blood sugar is undoubtedly a good thing. But when they are only marginally raised, then treatment is much more questionable, and it’s not clear that the benefits outweigh the harms. The reason this is relevant is that most of the people identified with these conditions through health checks are at the milder end of the spectrum, and thus statistically unlikely to benefit from medical interventions.

Another condition that falls in to this category is the aforementioned hypercholesterolemia. Reducing cholesterol levels in the blood results in a reduction in deaths from heart disease (at least, that’s what the trials produced by the corporations that own the cholesterol lowering drugs say), but it doesn’t result in a reduction in overall mortality. Which does rather beg the question why we even bother to treat high cholesterol.

Thirdly, if regular health checks increase diagnoses and thus increase drug prescriptions, then they also increase the problem of polypharmacy, which is now a leading cause of death. Polypharmacy (taking many drugs simultaneously) frequently cancels out the benefits seen in clinical trials, where unusually healthy and young patients are being treated with a single drug or just a few drugs (i.e. a situation very far from the clinical reality).

It is thus easy to see how regular health checks could result in an increase in diagnoses and an increase in prescriptions without there being any noticeable improvement in survival.

Let’s move on and look at some more results.

Overall, health checks were associated with small improvements in blood pressure and cholesterol, as would be expected given the increase in prescriptions. However, it is hard to see what the value of an improvement in a surrogate marker is if there is no actual improvement in survival.

There was also a consistent increase in the uptake of disease specific screening services in people who took part in health checks. Which intuitively sounds like a good thing, except that again the reality is far more complicated. As I’ve written about before, both breast cancer screening and prostate cancer screening harm far more people than they help, and don’t result in any reduction in overall mortality. So increasing uptake of screening interventions can actually be a bad thing overall. It all depends on which particular screening interventions are being recommended.

Ok, let’s sum up. Regular health checks result in an increased probability of receiving a diagnosis and an increased probability of being put on drugs. They do not however improve longevity. With that being the case, the increase in diagnoses and drug prescriptions is of questionable value, and might even be a net negative, when side effects of the drugs and the negative psychological consequences of thinking of yourself as someone with a “chronic disease” are considered.

June 30, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Covid’s dark winter: How bio war-gaming robbed us of our liberty

By Neville Hodgkinson | The Conservative Woman | June 30, 2021

MANY have asked themselves how policies so ineffective and yet damaging to so many people’s lives and liberties could have been put in place so quickly, and seemingly almost on a global basis, in response to the Covid crisis.

Part of the answer has been provided by an investigation by German journalist and author Paul Schreyer. In an hour-long video, he tracks a series of pandemic simulation exercises conducted at the highest level over many years among the most influential industrial nations of the West.

Top officials were ‘primed’ to respond as they did, once the World Health Organisation declared the pandemic spread of a new coronavirus, SARS-COV-2, almost regardless of the nature of the virus or the degree of harm it was likely to cause.

This weakness can be seen as a huge obstacle to rational decision-making. It helps to explain how the views of thousands of doctors, scientists and others who have challenged the official, fear-based approach to the pandemic came to be ignored.

Schreyer maintains that political decisions during the crisis did not come out of the blue, but stemmed from a ‘war on viruses’ begun back in the 1990s, alongside the ‘war on terror’.

It was as though a fresh enemy had to be brought into being, following the end of the Cold War era in which the superpowers Russia and America confronted each other with immense and potentially suicidal armaments and military budgets.

‘I am running out of villains.  I am running out of demons,’ said General Colin Powell in a 1991 newspaper interview. ‘I’m down to Castro and Kim Il-Sung.’ At the time he was the highest-ranking military official in the USA.

That was the context in which the fight against terror, including preparations to fight biological weaponry, began. A 1993 bomb attack on the World Trade Centre in New York City, attributed to Islamist terrorists, boosted demands for continued use of American military abroad, and a similar attack, though with mysterious origins, on a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 reinforced fears of a ‘shadow enemy’ within.

At the same time, dangerous biological research was being conducted at US facilities, said to be aimed at better understanding the threat that could be posed by a state or terrorist with a biological arsenal.

Colonel Dr Robert Kadlec, Biodefence Programmes Director at the Department of Homeland Security, wrote in a 1998 Pentagon strategy paper: ‘Using biological weapons under the cover of an endemic or natural disease occurrence provides an attacker the potential for plausible denial.  Biological warfare’s potential to create significant economic loss and subsequent political instability, coupled with plausible denial, exceeds the possibilities of any other human weapon.’

That same year saw the founding of the Johns Hopkins Centre for Civilian Biodefence Strategies, later renamed the Centre for Health Security. This institution has played a major role in the Covid pandemic, compiling, displaying and analysing data on a global dashboard used by media – for the most part, unquestioningly – all over the world.

And it was this centre that organised several important simulation exercises in the field of disaster response strategies.

The first, the National Symposium on Medical and Public Health Response to Bioterrorism, was held at Arlington, home to the Pentagon, in February 1999. Hundreds of delegates from ten countries took part.  Smallpox was the supposed bioweapon, and delegates were taken through a series of sessions simulating how an attack might be handled and problems that might arise.

How far could the police go to detain patients? How to proceed with vaccination?  Should martial law be implemented? How to control the message going to the public? Public health issues were for the first time being treated as military problems, with the Department of Health becoming part of the US national security apparatus.

A similar exercise took place in November 2000 in Washington DC, this time using plague as the simulated pandemic. Scenarios enacted in front of the high-level officials attending included: ‘The sight of an armed military presence in US cities has provoked protests about the curtailment of civil liberties … the question is, how do we enforce it, and to what degree? How much force do we use to keep people in their homes?’

A third exercise, called Dark Winter, held at a military base a few miles outside Washington in June 2001, simulated a full-scale smallpox emergency. It brought in journalists from well-known media, including the BBC, to question the politicians and top-level officials so that they could learn the kind of issues that would arise.

Among the conclusions:

  • We are ill-equipped to prevent the dire consequences of a bioweapon attack.
  • America lacks the resource stockpiles required for appropriate responses, including vaccines, antibiotics, and means of effective distribution.
  • Forcible constraints on citizens may likely be the only tools available when vaccine stocks are depleted.
  • Americans can no longer take basic civil liberties such as freedom of assembly or travel for granted.

On a fictional news channel created as part of the exercise, Kadlec announced: ‘The problem is, we do not have enough vaccine … it means this could be a very dark winter in America.’

When the real Covid-19 struck, Kadlec became the top emergency preparedness official co-ordinating the response from both the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the federal government.

Days after Joe Biden was declared winner of the presidential election, he warned of a ‘dark winter’ ahead, urging continued mask-wearing. ‘You might call it a coincidence, although you could also suspect that his choice of words was related to the exercise,’ Schreyer says.

The September 11, 2001 attacks brought home the terrorist threat to everybody in the global community. Proposed legal changes to extend state powers of surveillance met resistance in the US, but that disappeared following the so-called anthrax attacks in October the same year. Letters containing anthrax spores were sent to several news media offices, and to two senators who had opposed the changes.

‘To this day it is not clear who was responsible for those attacks,’ says Schreyer, who interprets them as ‘a signal that a certain red line should not be crossed’.

A month later, in November 2001, on the initiative of the US Government, a new international organisation was founded called Global Health Security Initiative (GHSI).

It was emphasised that every government was in danger of receiving a deadly pathogen, and there was a need to unite and jointly take action. The participating countries were Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Britain, and the USA. The European Union also signed up to the initiative and the WHO was involved as technical adviser.  Health ministers and senior officials came together regularly to discuss bioterrorism and how best to co-ordinate a response.

In 2002 a further crucial step was taken: The group declared that the threat need not only be man-made, but might also come from nature, such as with a flu pandemic.  Emergency preparation was needed for both scenarios, on a global scale.

From then on, exercises were co-ordinated internationally. The first, called Global Mercury, convened in 2003, depicted an attack by fictitious self-inoculated terrorists to spread smallpox internationally to target countries.   A planning group for the exercise was led by Canada and comprised ‘trusted agents’ from all participating nations or organisations. Hundreds of people participated.

Another important exercise, convened in 2005, was called Atlantic Storm. Many of the country representatives were either current or former individuals with governmental responsibility.  The real-life Madeleine Albright, for example, former US Secretary of State, played the US President.

Key questions highlighted in the post-exercise report included:

  • How should national leaders determine measures such as border closures or quarantine?
  • If actions are taken that restrict the movement of people, for how long should they be maintained? How would they be coordinated internationally, and how would the decision be made to lift them?

The basic premise of all the scenarios, Schreyer says, was to highlight decision-making processes and competencies in a public health emergency. ‘But they also involved declaring a state of emergency, implementing authoritarian leadership, bypassing parliament and investing certain federal officials with augmented decision-making power while also suspending fundamental civil rights and effecting plans to vaccinate the population.

‘What strikes me as particularly noteworthy is the ready suspension of basic human rights when responding to a pandemic or bioterror attack; because that is not necessarily a logical consequence.

‘Observing all this, the question arises: Maybe such exercises might have served as a cover and testing ground for a state of emergency and checking out how such a political situation could be handled.’

One lesson we might draw from the handling of the Covid crisis is that while politicians understandably feel a need to prepare for global disasters, they risk causing far more harm than good by following tramlines of action rigidly predetermined to be ‘the science’ of the situation, but which actually obstruct rational responses.

June 30, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Boris Johnson wanted to reduce the global population

Meryl Nass, MD | June 30, 2021

Global over-population is the real issue

… It is time we had a grown-up discussion about the optimum quantity of human beings in this country and on this planet. Do we want the south-east of Britain, already the most densely populated major country in Europe, to resemble a giant suburbia?

This is not, repeat not, an argument about immigration per se, since in a sense it does not matter where people come from, and with their skill and their industry, immigrants add hugely to the economy.

This is a straightforward question of population, and the eventual size of the human race.

All the evidence shows that we can help reduce population growth, and world poverty, by promoting literacy and female emancipation and access to birth control. Isn’t it time politicians stopped being so timid, and started talking about the real number one issue?

https://www.boris-johnson.com/2007/10/25/global-population-control/

June 30, 2021 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

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