The EU is once again attempting to impose a carbon tax on all imports, to stop “carbon leakage”, the loss of manufacturing or other businesses relocating to lower cost countries. But a few simple economic calculations demonstrate why the EU’s plan will not stop the ongoing haemorrhage of business activity.
Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism: Questions and Answers
Why is the Commission proposing a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism?
The EU is at the forefront of international efforts to fight climate change. The European Green Deal sets out a clear path towards realising the EU’s ambitious target of a 55% reduction in carbon emissions compared to 1990 levels by 2030, and to become a climate-neutral continent by 2050.
The July 2021 package in support of the EU’s climate targets is an integral part of our strategy to achieve this, and will further seal the EU’s reputation as a global climate leader. As part of these efforts, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is a climate measure that should prevent the risk of carbon leakage and support the EU’s increased ambition on climate mitigation, while ensuring WTO compatibility.
Climate change is a global problem that needs global solutions. As we raise our own climate ambition and less stringent environmental and climate policies prevail in non-EU countries, there is a strong risk of so-called ‘carbon leakage’ – i.e. companies based in the EU could move carbon-intensive production abroad to take advantage of lax standards, or EU products could be replaced by more carbon-intensive imports. Such carbon leakage can shift emissions outside of Europe and therefore seriously undermine EU and global climate efforts. The CBAM will equalise the price of carbon between domestic products and imports and ensure that the EU’s climate objectives are not undermined by production relocating to countries with less ambitious policies.
Why does this tax put an EU producer at a disadvantage?
EU Border Tax – No Sale
Simple – selling to another EU entity is price competitive, so far, but selling outside the EU is impossibly expensive, because you are competing with other sellers who don’t pay EU carbon taxes. An exporter outside the EU has an advantage over a manufacturer inside the EU, even if they have to pay a carbon border adjustment.
What about if the EU tries to level the playing field for EU based exporters, and applies a tax credit to exports? This opens the door to massive global carbon carousel fraud.
EU Carbon Tax Carousel Fraud
Either the EU destroys their own exporters, in an attempt to protect their domestic industry, or they have a big firefight on their hands, trying to contain carbon carousel fraud, which will only get worse any time they try to ratchet up their carbon price.
What about the effect of carbon pricing on businesses inside the EU carbon tax zone?
Classic supply and demand graph, showing the impact on quantity of a tax driven rise in price per unit.
In this case quantity is assumed to be a proxy for economic activity.
Ever visited a shopping centre, and wondered why all the interesting shops are slowly replaced by clothes shops or other high turnover businesses? The reason is all those interesting shops are not profitable enough to pay the rent, and over time they are replaced by simpler, less interesting businesses – safe, boring, profitable, but still a contraction in the diversity of life choices available to consumers.
Pretty much the same thing would happen to domestic high carbon businesses afflicted by EU carbon pricing.
The EU at least in principle likely hopes that revenue from the carbon tax will drop to zero, as people discover low carbon or zero carbon alternatives to the high carbon goods they currently use such as alumina, or simply learn to live without.
But this is a huge gamble. The only reason for carbon leakage in the first place is because the carbon intensive goods targeted by the EU are difficult to replace with low carbon alternatives, and difficult to live without.
If a carbon intensive good is irreplaceable, continued dependency on that high carbon good will be an ongoing anchor dragging on the European economy.
Of course you could make an argument that the benefits the people of the EU receive from reduced CO2 emissions outweigh the costs, that one day our descendants will thank us for giving them the opportunity to experience cold weather. But this does not help consumers and businesses today.
In conclusion, the EU carbon border adjustment will do nothing to prevent carbon leakage. The EU does not control enough of the global economy to make it more than an inconvenience for multinationals. The only people the EU border carbon adjustment will hurt are people living in the EU, who will see their choices and opportunities contract.
Professor Ole Humlum is a former Professor of Physical Geography at the University Centre in Svalbard, Norway, and Emeritus Professor of Physical Geography, University of Oslo, Norway. He specializes in reporting and analyzing annual changes in the climate. I wrote aboutthe professor’s work just over a year ago on this site. His report, published annually by the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London, was moderately optimistic on climate changes in 2019, pointing out that some of them were for the better, some worse, but that overall there was no justification for the alarmist rhetoric of climate emergency. For instance, as I then wrote,
He points out that new data on rising ocean temperatures raise interesting questions about the source of the heat. We can detect a great deal of heat rising from the bottom of the oceans. This obviously cannot be anything to do with human activity.
Since annual reports come out every year, his latest report on the world’s climate in 2020 has just been published. It covers the waterfront from Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation to Zonal Air Temperatures, and though most of it is addressed to technical specialists, it reaches some broad general conclusions that can be grasped by the layman. By and large these are a mix of moderate changes, long-term stability in main trends, and some trends getting worse but falling short of a climate emergency. Here, for instance, is his summing-up of changes in snow cover:
Variations in global snow-cover extent are driven by changes in the Northern Hemisphere, where most of the major land masses are located. Southern Hemisphere snow-cover extent is essentially controlled by the Antarctic ice sheet, and is therefore relatively stable. Northern Hemisphere average snow cover has also been stable since the advent of satellite observations, although local and regional inter-annual variations may be large. Considering seasonal changes in the Northern Hemisphere since 1979, autumn extent has been slightly increasing, mid-winter extent has been largely stable, and spring extent has been slightly decreasing. In 2020, Northern Hemisphere seasonal snow cover was somewhat below that of the preceding years.
And here is his account of storms and hurricanes in 2020:
The most recent data on numbers of global tropical storms and hurricane accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) are well within the range seen since 1970. In fact, the ACE data series displays a variable pattern over time, with a significant 3.6-year variation, but without any clear trend towards higher or lower values. A longer ACE series for the Atlantic Basin (since 1850), however, suggests a natural cycle of about 60 years’ duration for tropical-storm and hurricane ACE. The number of hurricane landfalls in the continental United States remains within the normal range for the entire record since 1851. (My italics.)
Not easy reading, as you can see, but worthwhile because it records what actually happened to the climate in the last year. And that picture contrasts strongly with two things: the general impression of what happened to the climate given by the mainstream media, and the forecasts drawn from computer modelling in previous years of what would happen to the climate. Those two things generally reinforce each other almost as if the media reports those real climate events that reflect the media “narrative” and ignore or gloss over those that don’t. The truth rarely, if ever, catches up with the predictions in mainstream news reporting.
Time and again the dates for which catastrophe was confidently predicted have passed without grave occurrences, as I wrote a year ago. No apologies are offered, and no signs given that the forecasters will be reconsidering the theories on which their forecasts either were based or by which they will in future be supported.
To be sure, that’s a problem not confined to climate science. There’s a general crisis of “replication” or “reproducibility” in science as scientists themselves have been debating in the last decade. As Wikipedia sums it up:
A 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists conducted by Nature reported that 70 percent of them had failed to reproduce at least one other scientist’s experiment (including 87 percent of chemists, 77 percent of biologists, 69 percent of physicists and engineers, 67 percent of medical researchers, 64 percent of earth and environmental scientists, and 62 percent of all others), while 50 percent had failed to reproduce one of their own experiments, and less than 20 percent had ever been contacted by another researcher unable to reproduce their work. Only a minority had ever attempted to publish a replication, and while 24 percent had been able to publish a successful replication, only 13 percent had published a failed replication, and several respondents that had published failed replications noted that editors and reviewers demanded that they play down comparisons with the original studies.
That’s bad enough. Worse, common sense suggests that the rate of failed replications will be higher in forecasting than in already performed physical experiments. To replication failure and prediction failure, however, we should probably add a third crisis—namely, impartiality failure on the part of the mainstream media—if we are to understand how bad things are.
The latest example of this is the media treatment of a new book, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, by Steven Koonin, a physicist specializing in energy policy who served as an Under-Secretary for Energy for Science in the Obama administration. He doubts some of the claims allegedly accepted as valid by a “consensus” of scientists. Koonin has since come under fierce attack from those scientific reviewers who in turn doubt his own claims. That’s well and good—it’s how science is supposed to operate until experiments settle the argument conclusively–for the moment. In the meantime Koonin must fight his corner as best he can—as apparently he intends to do.
What is objectionable is that social media should tilt an already tilted playing field so that its “fact-checkers” preface information about “Unsettled” with a kind of health warning that its statistics are unreliable and that the book itself “denialist” when in fact Koonin denies not climate warming but some arguments about its speed, extent, and whether we’re pursuing the right mix of mitigation and adaptation in dealing with it. That’s a debate we need—and which we’re bound to have anyway because of the looming costs of Net-Zero.
Suppressing debate simply won’t work. And that’s likely to be demonstrated soon. Koonin has agreed to give the GWPF’s annual lecture in November in London. My guess is that the Foundation will have to hire a larger-than-usual hall to accommodate an audience drawn there by today’s equivalent of “Banned in Boston”—namely, “Not Available on Social Media.”
A newly released raft of government papers has revealed the British Broadcasting Corporation’s extensive involvement in spreading pro-London, pro-EU, and pro-NATO messaging across the Balkans.
In February, classified documents revealed that BBC Media Action (BBCMA), the ‘charitable arm’ of the British state broadcaster, was embroiled in a number of clandestine operations to “weaken the Russian state’s influence,” funded by the UK Foreign Office.
The exposure raised serious questions about the BBC’s international reputation as a ‘neutral’, ‘objective’ purveyor of news, and what implications its murky relationship with Whitehall has for its output more widely. A further tranche of leaked files, related to covert UK actions in the Balkans, amply reinforces that the organization serves as a cloak-and-dagger device for achieving London’s foreign policy goals.
The papers indicate that BBCMA has been operating across the region since 1996, conducting a wide variety of “media capacity-building, reform and change management” projects. Cited examples of its initiatives include “reforming [the] institutional structures” of Montenegro’s state broadcaster RTCG, working with Macedonian media to “effectively cover elections” and act as a “watchdog,” and supporting the development of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Public Broadcasting System.
The organization also targeted youth audiences in five separate Balkan countries with “an innovative multi-platform media project,” which aimed to “build young people’s capacity for civic participation.” The centrepiece was “social media-based educational web drama” #SamoKazem (Just Saying). Strikingly, viewers were directed to “offline activities to translate awareness into action for change,” strongly suggesting stirring teenagers to activism was the program’s ultimate objective.
Details of BBCMA’s extensive meddling in Serbia greatly reinforces the overtly political nature of its Balkan ventures. From 2007 to 2017 alone, it delivered “four large-scale projects” in the country, such as “a challenging undertaking” with Radio Television Serbia (RTS) over the course of two years “to assist in its transition from state to public service broadcaster,” and working to “professionalise” five local radio stations “to develop their capacity to hold local government to account.”
The organization also delivered a huge three-year project for the European Union, which “strengthened media capacities for improving objective public information about all aspects of EU integration” – in other words, it assisted in the production of pro-Brussels propaganda.Vital work indeed, considering Serbian citizens remain by far the most skeptical about bloc membership.
Under the program’s auspices, BBCMA distributed a two-million-euro grant to 25 Serbian media platforms, and helped produce a staggering 174 separate TV programs, including the 15-part RTS series ‘What’s in It for Me?’ – which averaged 500,000 viewers per episode and won a national award for best EU-related documentary – and human trafficking docudrama ‘Sisters’, which was shown at the United Nations and won “numerous” awards.
Other files explicitly confirm that there is little meaningful distinction between the BBC and its charitable arm. In service of a Foreign Office effort to counteract allegedly falling levels of independence in Macedonian and Serbian media, which ran from November 2016 to March 2019, BBCMA created “a pool of local media professionals with the skills, knowledge and willingness to ensure digital media plays an effective role in fostering debate and accountability.”
Beneficiaries were said to have benefited from the British state broadcaster’s “wealth of experience and talent in creating quality journalism and compelling programmes,” with BBC journalists embedded in the organizations for which they worked in order to provide “mentoring/on-the job training, production support and co-production.” They were also granted access to the BBC Digital Lab, BBC studios, and BBC Blue Room.
The organization asserted in its Whitehall submissions that it considered the production of content to be a fantastic opportunity to “have [an] impact with Serbian and Macedonian audiences.” The consequences of its machinations aren’t certain, although it could be significant that one veteran BBC journalist assigned to the project was in charge of “masterminding” coverage of UK elections during their many years at the Beeb.
After all, the endeavor concluded not long before North Macedonia’s 2019 presidential vote, which pitted pro-EU, pro-NATO candidate Stevo Pendarovski against Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova, a more skeptical, pro-Russian figure. While the first round of the election produced a virtual tie, precipitating a runoff, Pendaraovski was comfortably elected in the second. What’s more, previously leaked files make abundantly clear that the Foreign Office sought to interfere directly in the process in other ways.
That the UK government is engaged in multiple cloak-and-dagger initiatives to influence politics and perceptions in the Balkans is sinister enough, without even considering the covert and overt role played by London in the blood-spattered breakup of Yugoslavia, the non-aligned, independent republic that once comprised most of the region. Given this history, BBCMA’s restructuring of RTS is rendered particularly disquieting.
On April 23, 1999, in the midst of the West’s protracted bombing campaign against Serbia, RTS’ headquarters in Belgrade, along with several radio and electrical installations throughout the country, were targeted for destruction by NATO missiles. In all, 16 journalists were killed in the strike and 16 more wounded, with many trapped in the rubble for days afterward.
In the face of significant international condemnation, high-ranking US and UK officials rushed to declare the bombing entirely justified. Then-Prime Minister Tony Blair defended it on the basis the station was part of “the apparatus of dictatorship and power” of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
“The responsibility for every single part of this action lies with the man who has engaged in this policy of ethnic cleansing and must be stopped,” he added.
Of course, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a UN body established to prosecute crimes committed during the Yugoslav wars and their perpetrators, would eventually conclude Yugoslav troops had not in fact pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing, and Milosevic, who died in a UN prison in 2006, was posthumously exonerated of all charges.
The ICTY also considered whether the RTS bombing constituted a war crime, ultimately ruling that while its pro-government transmissions didn’t make the station a military target, as the action aimed to disrupt the state’s communications network, it was still legitimate.
Amnesty International branded the tribunal’s findings a miscarriage of justice, and contradictorily too, the judgment quoted NATO General Wesley Clark, who oversaw the overall campaign, as saying it was well-understood that the attack would only interrupt RTS broadcasts for a brief period, but “we thought it was a good move to strike it and the political leadership agreed with us.” In the event, it was off the air for a mere three hours.
Another motive for the hideous incident unexplored by the ICTY could well be that the station’s reporting on NATO’s almost-daily attacks on civilian and industrial infrastructure in Serbia was overly problematic for the military alliance, given its intervention was sold on humanitarian grounds. Nine days prior to the RTS bombing, as many as 85 innocent civilians were killed when NATO jets bombed a Kosovan refugee convoy.
While spokespeople initially claimed the tragedy was an “accident”, RTS subsequently broadcast a chilling recording of the pilot who delivered the deadly payload being repeatedly ordered to strike the convoy on the basis it was a “completely legitimate” target, despite them protesting that they couldn’t see any tanks or military hardware on the ground, just cars and tractors. If truth is the first casualty of war, purveyors of truth are surely the second.
n a perverse irony, though, the ICTY did record that NATO had warned Yugoslav authorities weeks prior that RTS may be caught in the crossfire, unless it acquiesced to broadcasting six hours of uncensored Western media reports per day to balance its coverage, thus making it an “acceptable instrument of public information.”
With the troublesome socialist federation of Yugoslavia now irrevocably smashed into pieces, Whitehall needn’t threaten the use of military force to compel Balkan media outlets to transmit pro-Western propaganda. It simply dispatches BBC staffers to their offices, under the bogus aegis of promoting media diversity, free expression, democracy, civic participation, and fostering debate, to ensure they remain “acceptable” instruments of public information.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
One commonly used trick in drug trials is to exclude any group that might make the drug look worse, such as those that are more likely to experience side effects. A good recent example of this is the covid vaccine trials, which largely excluded people with auto-immune diseases (more likely to develop an auto-immune disease after vaccination), people with allergies (more likely to have an allergic reaction to the vaccine), and, of course, the elderly (less likely to develop immunity after getting the vaccine, and more likely to become seriously sick from it).
These three groups are all frequently excluded from trials, and the exclusion is particularly galling when it comes to the elderly, because they are a big segment of the population, and they are also usually the most likely to end up actually using the drugs being tested.
When drug companies have gotten a drug approved, and move on to market the drug, they will studiously avoid mentioning the fact that large segments of the population were excluded from the trials. When drug reps show their flashy powerpoints to gatherings of doctors, say for a new drug to lower blood pressure, they will always present impressive looking graphs of benefit, and they will of course point out how safe their drug was shown to be in the trials. Not once will they mention that the groups of patients the doctors will primarily be prescribing the drug to weren’t even included in the trials.
The manipulation of who is included in trials is probably one of the main reasons why findings of side effects always end up being much higher in reality than in clinical trials. It might explain, for example, why muscle pain is a massively common side effect of statins in the real world, while being vanishingly rare in the statin trials (as Dr. Malcolm Kendrick has written about in detail).
A study recently published in the Lancet Healthy Longevity sought to estimate the extent to which drug trials underestimate side effects. It was funded by the UK Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust. The study chose as its particular focus people being treated for high blood pressure with a certain class of blood pressure lowering drugs known as RAAS blockers (which includes all drugs with names ending in -pril and all drugs with names ending in -sartan). The advantage with looking at this particular class of drugs is that there are a ton of trials. Every major pharmaceutical company has its own RAAS-blocker. It should therefore be possible to draw relatively broad conclusions about the results – whatever they show, they apply to the entire pharmaceutical industry, not just to a few specific companies. It’s also reasonable to think that the results apply to other classes of drugs too – there’s no reason to think trials of RAAS-blockers have been done differently than trials of other drug classes.
What the study sought to do more specifically was compare the rate of serious adverse events in clinical trials of RAAS-blockers with the rate observed in the real world. A serious adverse event is any event that is potentially life threatening or that results in death, hospitalization or lasting disability. If a trial has been designed in such a way that it is representative of reality, then the rate of serious adverse events in the trial should largely mirror that seen in the real world.
110 trials of RAAS-blockers were identified by the researchers. Of these, 11 were specifically designed to look at older people (i.e. didn’t recruit anyone under the age of 60). The data on serious adverse events from these 110 trials was extracted and compared to real world data on deaths and hospitalizations taken from a UK government funded database of 55,000 people living in Wales, who were being treated with RAAS-blockers. Deaths and hospitalizations are not exactly the same thing as serious adverse events (which as mentioned above also include “life threatening events”, and could for example include someone who is treated in an emergency department after a fall but not admitted to the hospital), but they’re close enough to allow a reasonable comparison.
So, what were the results?
Let’s begin with comparing the trials of older people with the “standard” trials. The relative rate of serious adverse events in the trials of older people was 76% higher than the rate in the standard trials. This shows the importance of including elderly people in drug trials – they are much more likely to experience adverse events of all kinds (including those actually caused by the drug being tested), and excluding them will therefore likely underestimate side effects.
Considering that many of the drugs in common use show marginal benefits at best (statins have, for example, only been shown to prolong life by a few days on average), this is important information. Why? Because a drug that is beneficial, on balance, to a fifty year old, who has a fully functioning kidney and liver, and is therefore unlikely to suffer side effects, could easily be harmful, on balance, to an 80 year old.
That’s why drug studies done on younger people should not be used to guide treatment of older people. No shock there. Everyone already knows that we shouldn’t be extrapolating results from one group to another (even though it happens all the time, as we’ve seen most recently with the covid vaccine trials).
Next we come to the more important, and perhaps more shocking finding.
The real world patients were between 300% and 400% more likely to experience a serious event than the participants in the trials! That is in spite of the fact that the trials, as mentioned above, were using a broader definition of what constituted a serious event. If the trials were representative of reality, then they should have a higher rate of events than is seen in the real world data. Instead they have a rate that is several times lower!
Interestingly, the trials of older people were just as far from the real world results as the trials of younger people. Clearly, doing trials on the elderly is not enough on its own to produce trials that are representative of reality. What’s happening here exactly?
There are three possible explanations, as far as I can see. The first explanation is that the trials are representative of reality, but that the Welsh die and are hospitalized at a rate that is several times higher than people in the countries where the studies were conducted. Many of the trials were conducted in the US, not in Wales. But Wales has a higher life expectancy than the United States, so that seems unlikely. I think we can discount that explanation.
The second explanation is that the trials are unrepresentative in so many different ways that just correcting the age issue doesn’t make a noticeable difference. That’s probably part of the explanation. The average age even in the trials of “older people” was 73, which isn’t very old from my perspective. And those 73 year olds included in the trials were probably at the healthier end of the spectrum.
The third, more sinister explanation, is that the pharmaceutical companies are hiding serious adverse events… But wait a minute, the trials are randomized and blinded, so the people running the drug trials have no way of knowing if someone experiencing a possible side effect is in the treatment group or the placebo group, right?
Yes, that’s right, so the easiest solution, if you want to avoid finding nasty side effects, is to not report them, regardless of which treatment group the participant is in. That will cut down on total adverse events in both groups, which will make any difference between the groups that does exist smaller in absolute terms, and also less likely to reach the level of statistical significance. Voila – the treatment group and the placebo group end up having similar rates of side effects, and the drug company can conclude that the drug is completely safe.
Is that what’s happened here? Are the pharmaceutical companies hiding adverse events? Well, it’s very strange that the real world data shows a rate of serious adverse events that is several times higher than is found in the trials. It’s hard to see how that massive difference could be explained in any other way.
So, how big a problem is this?
Big. Very big. It should shake the very foundations of evidence based medicine. If the drug trials and the real world data show such wildly different rates of adverse events, then it really begs the question how much we can trust the trials at all. It would be perfectly reasonable in this situation to say that all “evidence” produced by pharmaceutical companies is so suspect that it should be dismissed out of hand, and that only independently funded trials should be used as a basis for medical treatment decisions.
The problem with that is that it would mean saying goodbye to most of the trials that form the basis of modern medical treatment, and there is not much to replace them with. This issue could be solved over the longer term through large tax payer funded investments in new independent trials. But there’s no quick fix.
The problem is most acute when it comes to the many drugs in common use that only show marginal benefits, such as statins. If the rate of side effects is actually 300% to 400% higher than seen in the trials, then the harms of these drugs could easily outweigh the benefits. In other words, the cost-benefit calculation could shift entirely for many of the most commonly used drugs.
Ok, let’s wrap this up. What can we conclude?
Drug trials do no accurately represent rates of adverse events. It is likely that the true rate of side effects is often many times higher than that seen in drug trials.
We’ve known since the early weeks of the pandemic that age is the single best predictor of COVID-19 mortality, and that the risk of death for young people is vanishingly small.
A letter in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that zero Swedish children aged 1–16 died of COVID-19 up to the end of June 2020. And only 15 were admitted to the ICU, of whom four had a serious underlying health condition.
Of course, England is a much larger country than Sweden, and it’s been a whole other year since those Swedish data were collected. So how many English children have died of COVID-19?
In an unpublished study, Clare Smith and colleagues sought to identify the number of COVID-19 deaths among people aged under 18 between March 2020 and February 2021. They examined data from the National Child Mortality Database, which was linked to testing data from Public Health England and comorbidity data from national hospital admissions.
The structure of their dataset allowed the authors to distinguish deaths that were plausibly from COVID-19 and deaths that were merely with COVID-19.
3,105 under 18s died from all causes in England during the relevant time period. 61 of these involved people who had tested positive for the virus. However, the authors determined that only 25 were actually caused by COVID-19. And of the 25, 76% had a serious underlying health condition.
Given that an estimated 469,982 under 18s were infected with the virus up to February of 2021, the survival rate in this age-group (the inverse of the IFR) was 99.995%. What’s more, 99.2% of total deaths were caused by things other than COVID-19.
Smith and colleagues’ findings underline just how small a risk COVID-19 poses to young people, and hence – I would argue – why a focussed protection strategy was preferable to blanket lockdowns.
As early as 10th April 2020, Martin Kulldorff – co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration – published an article on LinkedIn titled ‘COVID-19 Counter Measures Should be Age Specific’.
Based on the data that were then available, he estimated one would need to stop 3.5 million children being exposed in order to prevent the same number of deaths as one could prevent by shielding 1,000 people in their 70s. He argued, therefore, that COVID counter-measures must vary by age.
A similar argument was made by George Davey Smith and David Spiegelhalter in a piece for The BMJ last May. These authors called for “stratified shielding”, while noting that this would “require a shift away from the notion that we are all seriously threatened by the disease”.
According to the medical researcher Russell Viner, who spoke to Nature, “There’s a general feeling among paediatricians that probably too many children were shielded during the first wave”. And the epidemiologist Elizabeth Whittaker said that efforts to shield children “have probably caused more stress and anxiety for families than benefit.”
In addition to “stress and anxiety”, there’s also the learning losses associated with months of online teaching. All this compared to the marginal impact closing schools had on the spread of COVID-19.
When we look back at the response to COVID, serious questions will have to be asked about the costs of lockdown, not only to society in general, but to young people in particular.
Pure gold is all I can say for Episode 110 – that’s what this conversation is!
The New York Times, WSJ and all of the media have mused about the origins of this virus – well here we explain the actual science and data, and what IT actually tells us 🙂
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It was 40 years ago that Israel conducted the first skyjacking of a civilian airliner. On Dec. 12, 1954, Israeli warplanes forced a Syrian Airways Dakota passenger craft carrying four passengers and five crewmen to land at Lydda airport inside Israel.1 The passengers were interrogated for two days before international protests, including strong complaints from Washington, finally convinced Israel to release the plane and its passengers.2
Moshe Sharett, who as Israel’s foreign minister had to explain the incident to the international community, was privately appalled by it. He recorded in his diary: “I have no reason to doubt the truth of the factual affirmation of the U.S. State Department that our action was without precedent in the history of international practice. What shocks and worries me is the narrow-mindedness and the short-sightedness of our military leaders. They seem to presume that the state of Israel may—or even must—behave in the realm of international relations according to the laws of the jungle.”3
The purpose of the unprecedented skyjacking, according to Sharett, was Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan’s ambition “to get hostages in order to obtain the release of our prisoners in Damascus.”4 The reference was to an incident that had occurred four days earlier. Five Israeli soldiers were captured retrieving tapping devices on Syrian telephone lines on the Golan Heights inside Syria. Israel expressed outrage at the imprisonment of the soldiers but Syria refused to release them. 5
Israeli passions were riled even further the next month when one of the Israeli soldiers, Uri Ilan, son of a former Mapam member of parliament, committed suicide in jail on Jan. 13, 1955. Although the Israeli press loudly charged Syria with torture, an examination by the United Nations showed “no signs of physical ill-treatment.”6
But still Syria refused to release the prisoners, pointing out that Israel was holding Syrian civilians prisoner. The impasse contributed to an even graver incident toward the end of the year. On Dec. 11, 1955, Israel sent two paratroop battalions backed by artillery and mortar batteries under the command of Ariel Sharon, later Israel’s defense minister, against Syrian military posts at Buteiha Farm and Koursi near the northeast shore of Lake Tiberias.
It was Israel’s largest military raid inside Syria up to that time and resulted in 56 Syrian deaths, including three women, and nine wounded. Significantly Israel also took 30 prisoners, whom it later used as hostages to exchange for the four Israelis held by Syria.7 The United States expressed its “shock” at the raid and supported a resolution by the United Nations Security Council that unanimously condemned Israel for its “flagrant violation” of the armistice agreement.8
French Ambassador to the U.N. Herv Alphand observed that the condemnation resolution of Israel was “the strongest ever passed by the council.”9 It was the fifth time the council had condemned, censured, called on and otherwise passed resolutions critical of Israel.
Israel insisted the raid was simply in retaliation for Syrian troops firing at an Israeli patrol boat on Lake Tiberias the previous day, in which there had been no casualties. But the explanation was widely disbelieved. Canadian General E.L.M. Burns, the chief of staff of the United Nations Truce Supervisory Organization, bluntly wrote:
“No one with any knowledge of military affairs would believe that such an elaborate, coordinated attack had not been planned well before, and probably rehearsed. Certainly it was not improvised in a few hours…. The reasons given by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ statement were only an excuse, and not a very good one.”10
In fact, like most major actions in the Middle East, there was far more than just retaliation behind the raid. At the time, it was widely suspected that Israel’s main motive in launching the heavy attack was primarily to punish Syria for keeping the four Israeli soldiers prisoners. But it turned out that was just one of the reasons. Israeli historian Benny Morris reports that primarily the attack was meant as a provocation to goad Egypt into attacking Israel and thus start a war. “This,” wrote Morris, “was the thinking behind the strike.”11
The timing was dictated by two events during the previous three months: Egypt and Syria had signed a mutual defense pact on Oct. 20, 1955, and on Sept. 27 Egypt had announced its historic “Czech” arms deal, shocking Israel by the fact that Egypt was about to start receiving massive quantities of Soviet weapons. In the event, Egypt did not respond to the attack on the Golan and Israel had to wait nearly another year before taking on itself the burden of attacking Egypt to start a war.
ANOTHER MOTIVE
There was also another motive behind the attack. It had to do with Israel’s long- term policy to establish exclusive control over Lake Tiberias, the biblical Sea of Galilee, which lay within Israeli territory, and the three demilitarized zones (DMZs) that lay along the Israeli-Syrian frontier in the Jordan Valley.
Palestinians and Syrians insisted on fishing in the lake and were a constant source of friction, especially during mid-November to mid-April, which marked the official fishing season. Israel denied Arabs had any rights to fish there, citing the fact that the Mandate governments over Palestine and Syria had agreed in the 1920s that the frontier followed the east shore of the lake at a distance set back 10 meters parallel to the water.
However, the Arabs countered that under Anglo-French agreements of Feb. 3, 1922, June 23, 1923 and Feb. 2, 1926, Syrians were given “the same fishing and navigation rights on Lakes Huleh and Tiberias… as the inhabitants of Palestine” and also the right to “enjoy grazing, watering and cultivations rights” and to “cross the frontier freely.”12
Nonetheless, Israel insisted on keeping Arab fishermen away from the lake, by force if necessary. It further lacerated relations with Syria by chasing Palestinian farmers out of the DMZs near the lake in violation of the truce of 1949, which held the farmers should be allowed to remain. Israel’s forceful takeover of the DMZs left the Palestinian farmers and fishermen denied access to their fields or fishing grounds embittered and angry. A later UNTSO chief of staff, Norwegian General Odd Bull, who served during the 1960s, wrote:
“I imagine that a number of those evicted settled somewhere in the Golan Heights and that their children have watched the land that had been in their families for hundreds of years being cultivated by Israeli farmers. From time to time they opened fire on these farmers. That, of course, was a violation of the armistice agreement, though I could not help thinking that in similar circumstances Norwegian peasants would almost certainly have acted in the same way. In the course of time all the Arab villages [in the DMZs] disappeared.”13
So too did the Arab fishermen. In 1967 Israel conquered the whole area, including the Golan Heights, and chased out all of the Arabs. It is Israel’s continuing occupation of this land that today remains the major impediment to peace between Israel and Syria.
Recommended Reading:
Bull, Odd, War and Peace in the Middle East: The Experiences and Views of a U.N. Observer, London, Leo Cooper, 1976.
Burns, Lt. Gen. E. L. M., Between Arab and Israeli, New York, Ivan Obolensky, 1962.
Chomsky, Noam, The Fateful Triangle, Boston, South End Press, 1983.
*Chomsky, Noam, Pirates & Emperors: International Terrorism in the Real World, Brattleboro, VT, Amana Books, 1986.
Khouri, Fred J., The Arab-Israeli Dilemma, Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1985.
Morris, Benny, The Birth of the Palestine Refugee Problem, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1987.
*Neff, Donald, Warriors at Suez: Eisenhower Takes America Into the Middle East, Brattleboro, VT, Amana Books, 1988.
Rokach, Livia, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism: A Study Based on Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary and Other Documents, Belmont, MA, Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Inc., 1980.
Von Horn, Carl, Soldiering for Peace, New York, David McKay Company, Inc., 1967.
Notes:
1 New York Times, 12/13/54.
2 Associated Press, New York Times, 12/15/54.
3 Rokach, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, pp. 20-21. For an analysis of Sharett’s lengthy diaries, see “Secrets of State: An Analysis of the Diaries of Moshe Sharett,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Autumn 1980, pp. 35-57.
4 Chomsky, Pirates and Emperors, p. 84.
5 Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, p. 366.
6 Burns, Between Arab and Israeli, p. 109.
7 Ibid., p. 108; Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, p. 366n.
8 Resolution 111. The text is in Tomeh, George J., United Nations Resolutions on Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1947-1974, Washington, DC, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1975, p. 137; the text of the U.S. statement is in Boudreault, Jody and Eric Fortin, U.S. Official Statements: The Golan Heights, Washington, DC, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1993, pp. 27-28.
9 Neff, Warriors for Jerusalem, 118.
10 Burns, Between Arab and Israeli , p. 108.
11 Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, p. 364.
12 Khouri, The Arab-Israeli Dilemma, p. 194.
13 Bull, War and Peace in the Middle East, pp. 50-51.
Donald Neff is author of the Warriors trilogy on U.S.-Middle East relations and of the unpublished Middle East Handbook, a chronological data bank of significant events affecting U.S. policy and the Middle East on which this article is based. His books are available through the AET Book Club.
FACT checkers at the BBC, Reuters and Snopes have been busy debunking the Covid vaccine ‘magnet challenge’. Social media including TikTok, Facebook and Instagram have been awash with videos showing people with magnets sticking to the exact spot on their arms where they had received a Covid jab. See some independently verified examples here.
All three companies went to great lengths to explain why a magnet cannot possibly cling to your skin, without experimenting on a single vaccinated person to see what would happen.
BBC fact checker Jack Goodman spoke to many who said the magnet challenge worked for them and ‘were genuinely curious as to why’. He didn’t provide them with answers; instead he focused on one TikTok prankster called Emily who admitted she’d licked a magnet as a joke and stuck it to her arm.
It has been left to independent associations, doctors and journalists to test the phenomenon. Not On The Beeb founder and award-winning director Mark Playne tracked down a woman called Lorraine whose Instagram post of a magnet sticking to the Pfizer vaccine site on her left arm went viral. The fact checkers said the video was a fake but none of them bothered to visit her and test for themselves.
Playne told me: ‘Lorraine’s son Carl demonstrated the spot of magnetism on his mother. Even though I was inches away, I asked Carl to take the camera so I could try for myself. Feeling a magnet being tugged out of your hand, by a subtle yet defined magnetic force from under the skin of a living human being, is quite a shock.
‘Sensing the magnet being repelled and trying to flip so that the correct polarity was in contact with the skin was mind-blowing.’
A group called the European Forum for Vaccine Vigilance (EFVV) representing 25 European countries, took the magnet challenge to the Belle-Étoile shopping centre in Strassen, Luxembourg. The organisation represents over 100,000 medical professionals and scientists, from pro-vaccine choice groups, who are fighting for the 258 million people in Europe who have no freedom of choice when it comes to vaccination.
EFVV randomly interviewed 30 vaccinated and 30 unvaccinated people between June 1 and June 5. There were 15 men and 15 women in each group.
Their published report says: ‘In the non-vaccinated group, the number of people showing attraction to the magnet was zero. In the vaccinated group, 29 of the 30 individuals showed attraction to the magnet. The magnet adhered to their skin without difficulty.
‘Two individuals, a nurse who was one of the first to be vaccinated, and a financial analyst, showed abnormal electric field emission. It seems that people who were vaccinated earlier are more electromagnetic than people who were vaccinated more recently. The magnet adheres faster and holds better than in freshly vaccinated people.’
Some participants were shocked and upset at the results. EFVV said: ‘It was an extremely disorienting experiment for some. One lady cried and said that she had not wanted to be vaccinated but was forced to by her employer because she was in contact with customers.’
The obvious questions are: what is in the vaccine to cause magnetic pull and what are the consequences for the magnetised?
A former GP who prefers to remain anonymous hypothesises, and she stresses that it is a hypothesis, that graphene oxide, a synthetic form of carbon which is being studied as a vaccine delivery method, is the culprit. Graphene oxide is magnetic.
Dr T said: ‘They want to say it is crazy for us to consider that such a thing could be in the vaccinations and yet the literature points to research being exactly in this area for years. And we have magnetic people after vaccination.’
None of the Covid vaccines used in the UK (Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna) lists graphene oxide as an ingredient and all three companies deny its inclusion. So far, independent researchers have not managed to obtain empty vaccine vials for analysis, although international lawyer Reiner Fuellmich, whose Coronavirus Investigative Committee Corona Committee Foundation (corona-ausschuss.de) is gathering evidence surrounding the pandemic response, says some vials they have tested contain graphene oxide while others do not.
Chemical engineering researchers from Monash University, Melbourne, have studied whether superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) could improve the efficiency of vaccine gene delivery, and Chinese scientists have studied graphene oxide for the same purpose.
The Graphene Flagship Project, a collaboration of 150 academic and research groups in 20 countries, is studying the safety of graphene oxide for many uses, including vaccines. The tests began in 2013 in the lab, and in animals, and are ongoing. The researchers warn that ‘there needs to be sound, science-based assessment of the potential impact on human health’ after they found it settled in the lungs, causing asbestosis-like illness. It also settled in the liver, caused cell death, mitochondrial dysfunction, changed the diversity in the gut and caused blood clots in mice after 15 minutes. We know that one of the few adverse reactions that has been accepted by the establishment are blood clots that can form in the brain and body, known as vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT). Last week AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson both announced they are studying their vaccines to see whether they can be modified to reduce blood clots.
Dr T, who has tested the magnet challenge on vaccine recipients herself, believes that graphene oxide is in the vaccine, and that it crosses the blood/brain barrier (BBB). The BBB is there to protect the brain from toxins, but scientists have been trying to breach it to treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. They discovered that polyethylene glycol (PEG), which is in the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA covid vaccines, can cross it and so can polysorbate 80, which is in the AstraZeneca vaccine. Both substances could allow graphene oxide through too.
Dr T thinks graphene oxide could be the ingredient affecting the 12 cranial nerves emerging from the mid-line structure in the brain and the brain stem. These nerves govern our mood, heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, digestion, sight, taste, pain, touch, hearing, balance, muscles inside the major organs, neck muscles and speech.
She said that damaged cranial nerves could account for the many serious neurological and physical adverse reactions reported to the Medicines Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the government body responsible for regulating all medicines in the UK.
The Yellow Card Scheme to July 9 shows 100,564 reports of headache and 9,649 of migraine. Eye disorders are 16,980 with blindness at 327. Psychiatric disorders stand at 20,856 and hallucinations at 1,183. Facial paralysis, including Bell’s Palsy, are 1,310, nervous system disorders 212,708, strokes and haemorrhages 2,207, Guillain-Barré syndrome 377, tremors 10,565 and dizziness 30,715. Pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis, seizures, paralysis, nosebleeds, all types of haemorrhage, vertigo, and tinnitus account for another 23,907 reactions. That’s on top of the 1,440 reported deaths.
Maddie de Garay, 12, from Cincinnati, Ohio, who took part in Pfizer’s vaccine trial for 12-15-year-olds, suffered a serious adverse reaction with neurological and physical symptoms that include seizures, loss of bladder control, loss of memory and heavy menstrual cycles. She is now in a wheelchair and she is fed through a tube.
Dr T said: ‘Maddie’s mum Stephanie said her symptoms worsened after she received an MRI scan. MRI stands for magnetic resonance imaging. If there are magnetic nanoparticles in the vaccine, and someone has an MRI those microscopic particles will be attracted to the scanner – it’s the biggest magnet you can get. They will act like shrapnel, ripping through the brain, damaging everything in their path.’
If patients who believe they are vaccine-damaged experience worsening symptoms post MRI, that should surely be a red flag for doctors?
WHILE some well-intentioned (but ill-informed) MPs are doing their utmost to counter Covid ‘vaccine hesitancy’ in their constituencies, the remarkable Dr Tess Lawrie is continuing to try to persuade medical colleagues to pause the rollout.
She sets out her case simply and powerfully in this interview with Mark Dolan of talkRADIO, aired on Wednesday. Well worth watching, and it could be sent to friends and relatives who are wondering who to believe on the issue.
Dolan, who has had both doses of the vaccine himself, puts questions reflecting the perspective held by most people, that the vaccine is safe and effective, as repeatedly advertised by the NHS.
Lawrie, who founded the Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy Ltd, a specialist firmcommitted to improving the quality of healthcare through rigorous research, shows a cool authority in her replies.
‘I’ve looked at the data and I think there is reason to pause,’ she says. By the end of June, 300,000 people had reported adverse events through the UK regulator’s Yellow Card system after taking the vaccine, and this is not normal.
‘If you take a vaccine like tetanus, around since 1968, there are 36 deaths attributed to it on the World Health Organisation (WHO) database, whereas six to seven thousand deaths have been reported from Covid vaccine in just a few months.
‘In the UK, there are 1,440 deaths. So this is unprecedented in the history of any medicine, to have so many deaths reported in such a short time, and indeed so many reports in such a short time.’
Pressed by Nolan on whether this meant the need for a pause, even though the reports do not prove cause and effect, she says: ‘I tend to adopt the precautionary principle. I think if there’s any cause for concern, especially in view of these alarming numbers of reports, we need to get more information, and follow up each and every report to find out a bit more about its association – indeed, is it a cause for concern.
‘I feel there is a lack of transparency from the regulatory bodies. In their report, they highlight a very rare brain clot, cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, and that there have been 30 deaths associated with this and a couple of hundred cases.
‘But when you look at the Yellow Card data, you find there have been 2,208 strokes reported – a brain bleed – and of those, 154 people died. These data are far more worrying to me than just the cerebral venous sinus thrombosis data.
‘And when you look at all sorts of bleed, and the causes of death overall, you see that many are associated with bleeding and clotting. We’re seeing brain clots and heart clots and lung clots. The commonest causes of death are brain clots – strokes – and then pulmonary embolism, which is a lung clot, and also heart clots – heart attacks.
‘I would like to know more. I personally think these should be investigated.’
Dolan: Wouldn’t pausing the vaccine rollout put us back into the mess of the pandemic?
‘Not really, because we now know there are many safe, effective treatments for Covid. It is not an untreatable condition. There’s a very safe medicine called ivermectin, very low-cost, and around for 40 years, registered on the WHO’s database since 1992. And they’ve only registered 20 deaths since 1992. It’s been given billions of times, used against tropical parasites and available over-the-counter in many countries.’
Dolan: Should the vaccine be given to children over 12?
‘It’s unnecessary and dangerous. A child has more chance of dying from a vaccination – looking at these figures – than they do from Covid.’
Dolan: Is the relatively small risk from the vaccine better than getting Covid? It’s certainly a nasty virus.
‘I think we all have a robust immune system, if you’re not vulnerable and not very elderly. Our immune systems are geared up to deal with viruses, bacteria and others. A lot of the side-effects we see from Covid – the long Covid and so on – can be prevented by early treatment.
‘The doctors using ivermectin say you don’t get long Covid if you treat with it in the early stages. If you’ve got a treatment for Covid, you don’t have to be afraid of Covid.’
Dolan: What’s your professional verdict on 16 months of rolling out lockdowns in the UK and across the world?
‘I haven’t seen any good evidence that lockdowns or masks work. More concerning, we’ve known that ivermectin works for some time, and doctors have been trying to communicate this message to the authorities, who have been very single-minded in their strategy and approach. If ivermectin had been employed last year, when the UK authorities were notified, there would have been no lockdown in my opinion.’
Dolan: Why do you think your message about applications such as ivermectin were ignored?
‘I think there are a lot of forces at play that we don’t fully understand, particularly with regard to the huge . . . Covid is probably a £100billion-a-year industry, and ivermectin and other generic medicines are very cheap.’
Lawrie adds: ‘I think it’s time everybody took more responsibility for their health. Get themselves in better shape, be careful of what they eat – not just the quantity and the calories, but the nutritional value; exercise, and sunlight, and including taking responsibility for getting the information. Anybody can go to the Yellow Card system and have a look at the data. It’s not that easy on the government system, but there is a group called UK Column with a website that’s really easy to navigate. They update the data every week. You can type in a problem, and see what other people are reporting too.
‘I would encourage everybody, if you have the vaccine today and tomorrow you have some kind of problem, to report it – it may be associated with the vaccine, and there might be many other people who are suffering a similar thing. It’s only by highlighting these things that we will be able to ask the government to investigate.’
During a Covid surge, what proportion of the population is exposed to an infective dose of the virus, which they either fight off with no or minimal symptoms or are infected by? This is one of the most important questions scientists need to answer.
It’s closely related to the question of whether lockdowns work. If lockdowns work then, as per SAGE and Imperial orthodoxy, the restrictions successfully prevent the virus from reaching most people, who remain unexposed and susceptible – and hence in need of vaccination to protect them when the protective restrictions are lifted. If lockdowns don’t work, however, then they don’t prevent the virus spreading, and thus the majority of people will be exposed to it as it spreads around unimpeded by ineffectual restrictions.
Another related question is: What proportion of exposed people are infected? Using ONS data we can estimate that around 10-15% of the country tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 over the autumn and winter. How many were exposed to the virus to produce this number of infections? Was it, say, 10-20%, with half to all of them catching the virus? Or was it more like 80-90%, with around 10% being infected? It’s a question that makes all the difference in our understanding of the virus and how to respond to it.
If almost all are exposed during a surge, and relatively few of them are infected, then a number of things follow. First, most people have enough immunity to fight off the virus when exposed to it, and only a small minority become infected. Second, the surge ends when enough of that small minority who are particularly susceptible to this virus or variant acquire immunity through infection, i.e., when herd immunity is reached. Third, there won’t be another surge or wave until there is a new virus or variant which evades enough of the existing population immunity to require herd immunity to be topped up via a further spread of infections.
If, on the other hand, very few are exposed during a surge, and most of them are infected, none of these things is true. It means: Most people have little immunity and are highly susceptible. A surge which infects 10-20% of the population has exposed not much more than that. The surge does not end because of herd immunity but because of restrictions. And there will be another surge as soon as restrictions are eased or behaviour changes and the unexposed begin to be exposed again. SAGE orthodoxy, in other words.
The evidence, however, is strongly supportive of the first position – ubiquitous exposure – not the second, limited exposure.
Consider the secondary attack rate (SAR, the proportion of contacts an infected person infects). Data from Public Health England consistently shows this figure sits around 10-15%, meaning around 85-90% of the contacts of infected people do not become infected. It rises during a surge, which is typically due to the higher SAR of a novel variant, and then falls after the surge, as the new variant’s SAR also falls.
Such data is much more consistent with ubiquitous exposure than with limited exposure, as it shows that only a minority of those exposed to an infected person are themselves infected (10-15%), meaning ubiquitous exposure with a minority infected is the much more plausible scenario. This meshes with the data on high levels of prior immunity via T cells and other mechanisms.
Another key data point is the fact that surges consistently peak abruptly and begin to fall, independently of the imposition of restrictions. For instance, as Professor Simon Wood has shown, all three lockdowns in England were imposed after infections had peaked and begun to decline. Similarly, multiple peer-reviewed studies have shown no relationship between the imposition of restrictions and Covid infections or deaths across different countries and U.S. states.
The pattern of abrupt peaks and falls in incidence, independent of restrictions, is strongly indicative of hitting a herd immunity threshold (or overshooting it), as the virus or variant runs out of susceptible people to infect and exhausts itself.
Similarly, when restrictions are lifted there is typically no immediate surge, as there wasn’t in Europe last summer and in numerous U.S. states such as Texas and Mississippi in spring 2021. Surges only tend to occur when a new variant arrives, which again suggests it is not restrictions that are preventing spread to a still highly susceptible population but herd immunity that is preventing it, at least until a new virus or variant arrives to temporarily disturb it.
How, though, does the virus circumvent restrictions to achieve ubiquitous exposure of the population, and apparently without being noticeably even slowed down by the restrictions or voluntary distancing behaviour?
The answer, as I have suggested previously, likely lies in the airborne transmission of the virus. It is likely that the virus primarily spreads through building up to infective levels in the air, and that people are infected by breathing it in (a form of transmission which face masks do little or nothing to prevent). During a surge the virus becomes increasingly ubiquitous in the air at higher concentrations, accelerating exposure and infections until the herd immunity threshold is hit, at which point it abruptly enters decline. This explains why even though it is at its highest point of prevalence and was spreading at its fastest rate just a few days before, it suddenly stops and enters sustained decline. It is hard to see how any explanation other than herd immunity can explain this consistently abrupt change in the rate of virus transmission, particularly as there is no evidence of a similarly abrupt change in public behaviour in the mobility data.
Is there any concrete evidence that SARS-CoV-2 or other airborne viruses like influenza are ubiquitous in the air? Yes, there is. As HART notes in its bulletin this week:
For novel influenza viruses, between 7% and 8% are susceptible and develop antibodies in the first winter, much as we saw with SARS-CoV-2… If a certain proportion of the population are susceptible to infection in any one season, those individuals will end up infected sooner or later, regardless of which day they are exposed.
Studies have demonstrated that influenza is transmitted by aerosol particles and that such particles are prolific, indeed ubiquitous, in all indoor settings during the winter season. What stops people contracting the virus is their level of susceptibility, not their level of exposure.
HART refers to a study on influenza from 2014, which argues:
There are some amounts of the virus in the air constantly. These amounts are generally not enough to cause disease in people, due to infection prevention by healthy immune systems. However, at a higher concentration of the airborne virus, the risk of human infection increases dramatically. Early detection of the threshold virus concentration is essential for prevention of the spread of influenza infection.
The idea of a “threshold virus concentration” at which an outbreak is triggered (rather than just low level transmission) may be important for understanding how airborne viruses spread, and how they can become ubiquitous during a surge. Seasonal factors such as temperature, humidity, UV radiation, human behaviour (e.g. gathering indoors with little ventilation), and cycles in the human immune system may play a role in how easily this threshold concentration is reached.
A study in JAMAtested the air in hospitals for SARS-CoV-2 and found plenty, particularly in the public areas:
Overall, 14 of 42 samples (33.3%) in public areas were positive, with 9 of 16 (56.3%) in hallways, 2 of 18 (11.1%) in other indoor areas, and 3 of 8 (37.5%) in outdoor public areas (P = .01).
There isn’t yet much evidence from other settings, though a study, COVAIR by Imperial College, is underway and the results will be of great interest when they eventually appear.
To my mind, this is the explanation that (at least for now) explains all the known facts better than others – the low secondary attack rate, the ineffectiveness of lockdowns, the outbreaks that explode then suddenly end, the absence of resurgence when restrictions are lifted, the repeated hitting of herd immunity, and so on. At the heart of it is the idea of ubiquitous exposure – that almost everyone, not just a small percentage, are exposed each time the virus passes through, and the vast majority are already immune.
Once upon a time there was a little chick called Chicken Licken. One day as she was scratching about in the farmyard, she heard a message coming from the television in the farmhouse saying that everyone must stay home or else we would all die.
‘Oh no,’ cried Chicken Licken. ‘I must go into my coop and stay there.’
So off she went to stay in her coop for three weeks, which was how long the nice man on the telly reckoned it would take. On the way, she met Henny Penny.
‘Oh Henny Penny,’ cried Chicken Licken, ‘There’s a deadly virus about and if we don’t stay cooped up we’re all going to die.’
‘But why would those who are perfectly healthy need to do that?’ asked Henny Penny confused. ‘If we’re healthy, that means we haven’t got it. And if we haven’t got it, we can’t spread it.’
‘Henny Penny!’ replied Chicken Licken aghast. ‘The man on the telly said that healthy people can spread it to one another even if they haven’t got it. Stay Safe.’
‘Sounds like nonsense to me,’ said Henny Penny, ‘but I suppose they must know what they’re talking about.’
So Chicken Licken and Henny Penny hurried off to their coops. On the way they met Cocky Locky.
‘Oh Cocky Locky,’ cried Chicken Licken. ‘There’s a deadly virus about, and we need to go into Lockdown to protect vets from being overwhelmed.’
‘But we’ve never quarantined millions of the healthy before Xi Jinping did it in China,’ said Cocky Locky, ‘and there’s not a jot of scientific evidence that it will do anything to prevent deaths, although it will undoubtedly wreck our society, economy, and lead to a never-ending medical tyranny.’
‘Cocky Locky, I’m ashamed of you,’ sneered Chicken Licken. ‘You sound more like Tucker Carlson by the day. I think you need to stop watching right-wing talk shows and alternative media and instead get your news from established sources like the BBC and CNN. Follow the Science.’
So Chicken Licken, Henny Penny and Cocky Locky hurried off to their coops. On the way they met Ducky Lucky.
‘Oh Ducky Lucky,’ cried Chicken Licken, ‘There’s a deadly virus about and we all need to put pieces of cloth across our faces.’
‘Ducky Lucky,’ said Chicken Licken disapprovingly. ‘I’m shocked to hear you question the science. Wear Your Mask!’
‘Okay then,’ said Ducky Lucky in resignation as she strapped to her face a piece of old rag she found on the floor. ‘I suppose if the man on the telly says it will do us good, we’d better do it then.’
So Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky and Ducky Lucky hurried off to their coops. On the way they met Drakey Lakey.
‘Oh Drakey Lakey,’ cried Chicken Licken. ‘There’s a deadly virus about and you need to take a PCR test.’
‘But I’m feeling fine,’ replied Drakey Lakey. ‘Why would I need to take a test for an illness I don’t have? And besides, the PCR test is not a clinical diagnostic tool and cannot tell whether you are infected or infectious.’
‘Drakey Lakey!’ said Chicken Licken frowning contemptuously. ‘I never dreamt you were a conspiracy fowl. Everything you say has been debunked by various factchecking websites and the mainstream media. Are you saying they’re all wrong? Get Your Test!’
‘Well okay, I don’t want to be seen as a crank,’ replied Drakey Lakey anxiously, shoving the test up his beak.
‘Aagghh!’ cried Drakey Lakey. ‘Even though I feel perfectly fine and healthy, the test tells me I have the deadly virus.’
‘You see,’ said Chicken Licken smugly. ‘I told you it was a conspiracy theory to doubt those who are trying to keep us safe. Now stop listening to Mike Yeadon, Sucharit Bhakdi and Peter McCullough and go and self-isolate.’
So Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky and Drakey Lakey hurried off to their coops. On the way they met Goosey Loosey.
‘Oh Goosey Loosey,’ cried Chicken Licken. ‘There’s a deadly virus about which is like the plague and it could kill us all.’
‘Hmm?’ replied Goosey Loosey quizzically. ‘Actually, according to John Ioannidis, the world’s most cited epidemiologist, the Infection Fatality Rate of this virus is between 0.15% – 0.23% — about the same as a bad flu season. What is more, it’s only really dangerous to the elderly and sick.’
‘Goosey Loosey! Are you saying the lives of the elderly are worth nothing?’ said Chicken Licken, sounding like Cathy Newman.
‘Well no, that wasn’t what I meant,’ replied Goosey Loosey looking somewhat shamed. ‘But if we know which people it effects, surely targeted protection towards them would make more sense than this scattergun approach.’
‘If you’re referring to the so-called Great Barrington Declaration,’ said Chicken Licken dismissively, ‘not only did Matt Hancock dismiss it out of hand, but you won’t find it coming up in the Google rankings – that’s how thoroughly discredited it is.’
‘Oh,’ replied Goosey Loosey taken aback. ‘Well, I suppose if Google, Facebook and other Big Tech companies have decided it’s not something we should see, it can’t have any credibility, can it?’
‘Indeed,’ said Chicken Licken. ‘Now come along and Don’t Kill Granny.’
So Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky, Drakey Lakey and Goosey Loosey hurried off to their coops. On the way they met Turkey Lurkey.
‘Oh Turkey Lurkey,’ cried Chicken Licken. ‘There’s a deadly virus about for which there’s no known treatments.’
‘I don’t think that’s the case,’ replied Turkey Lurkey. ‘A number of highly qualified physicians and scientists have put in place treatment protocols, some of which prevent up to 85% of deaths.’
‘Turkey Lurkey,’ sneered Chicken Licken. ‘You sound like a card-carrying Covidiot. Do you really think if such treatments existed, the Government and the scientists on the telly would ignore them?’
‘But they’ve been suppressed and censor…’
‘Stop it!’ screeched Chicken Licken. ‘Stop spreading disinformation. Now come along with us and Help Save Lives.’
So Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky, Drakey Lakey, Goosey Loosey and Turkey Lurkey hurried off to their coops, keeping two wings apart as they went. On the way they met Foxy Loxy.
‘Oh Foxy Loxy,’ cried Chicken Licken. ‘There’s a deadly virus about, it’s mutating into new variants, and we’re all going to die.’
‘If you come with me,’ said Foxy Loxy with a glint in his eye. ‘I’ll keep you safe and give you your freedom back.’
With sighs of relief, Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky, Drakey Lakey, Goosey Loosey and Turkey Lurkey followed Foxy Loxy who took them to a yard surrounded by black and yellow walls covered in slogans, such as ‘Watch Out for Invisible Dangers,’ whilst over the gates were the words, ‘Safety and Freedom for All’.
‘This, my friends, is where you can lay aside all your fears,’ explained Foxy Loxy calmly. ‘Once you enter here, I not only give you my personal guarantee for your safety, since it is guarded day and night by my own family, but we will give you all the freedom you like, within these four walls. As if that weren’t enough, we’re actually giving away two shots of our brand new Virus Vanquisher as part of the entry package. We’ve been working on it flat out for days, so you really are very lucky birds indeed. What are you waiting for?’
As they received their shots and filed into the yard, the gates clanged shut behind them. Looking up at the top of the walls, they were reassured to see the kindly eyes of the smiling Loxy family keeping watch over them, and glad to hear the ping of the app they’d been given telling them what to do and when to do it. But most of all they were comforted by the words on the inside of the gates:
‘All who attempt to leave do so at their own risk.
Stay Safe. Be Free. Never Leave.’
Someone wrote this in 2017. Some people thus knew ivermectin had antiviral properties. In fact, the drug has all kinds of possibly miraculous effects. It is just missing the important one: patentability. (It was patented but the patent expired in 1997.)
Recent research has confounded the belief, held for most of the past 40 years, that ivermectin was devoid of any antiviral characteristics. Ivermectin has been found to potently inhibit replication of the yellow fever virus, with EC50 values in the sub-nanomolar range. It also inhibits replication in several other flaviviruses, including dengue, Japanese encephalitis and tick-borne encephalitis, probably by targeting non-structural 3 helicase activity.97 Ivermectin inhibits dengue viruses and interrupts virus replication, bestowing protection against infection with all distinct virus serotypes, and has unexplored potential as a dengue antiviral.98 Ivermectin has also been demonstrated to be a potent broadspectrum specific inhibitor of importin α/β-mediated nuclear transport and demonstrates antiviral activity against several RNA viruses by blocking the nuclear trafficking of viral proteins. It has been shown to have potent antiviral action against HIV-1 and dengue viruses, both of which are dependent on the importin protein superfamily for several key cellular processes. Ivermectin may be of import in disrupting HIV-1 integrase in HIV-1 as well as NS-5 (non-structural protein 5) polymerase in dengue viruses.99,100…
Anti-cancer
There is a continuously accumulating body of evidence that ivermectin may have substantial value in the treatment of a variety of cancers. The avermectins are known to possess pronounced antitumor activity,107 as well as the ability to potentiate the antitumor action of vincristine on Ehrlich carcinoma, melanoma B16 and P388 lymphoid leukemia, including the vincristine-resistant strain P388.108 Over the past few years, there have been steadily increasing reports that ivermectin may have varying uses as an anti-cancer agent, as it has been shown to exhibit both anti-cancer and anti-cancer stem cell properties. An in silico chemical genomics approach designed to predict whether any existing drugs might be useful in tackling glioblastoma, lung and breast cancer, indicated that ivermectin may be a useful compound in this respect.109 In human ovarian cancer and NF2 tumor cell lines, high-dose ivermectin inactivates protein kinase PAK1 and blocks PAK1- dependent growth. PAK proteins are essential for cytoskeletal reorganization and nuclear signaling, PAK1 being implicated in tumor genesis while inhibiting PAK1 signals induces tumor cell apoptosis (cell death). PAK1 is essential for the growth of more than 70% of all human cancers, including breast, prostate, pancreatic, colon, gastric, lung, cervical and thyroid cancers, as well as hepatoma, glioma, melanoma, multiple myeloma and for neurofibromatosis tumors.110 Globally, breast cancer is the most common cancer among women but treatment options are few. Ivermectin suppresses breast cancer by activating cytostatic autophagy, disrupting cellular signaling in the process, probably by reducing PAK1 expression… https://www.nature.com/articles/ja201711.pdf
By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | July 8, 2021
Gene research companies tend to come and go. They start out banging and popping like fireworks in the sky, and then they fade out—selling themselves to larger outfits who’ve hired better liars…
Once upon a time, it sounded easy. Start with a disease, find the gene responsible for the disease, and correct the problem.
Then, researchers wondered, was disease the result of one gene or a group of genes acting together?
Either way, the proof would be in devising cures for diseases using gene therapy. “Not yet, but soon…”
And regardless, the major need was: money. Lots and lots of money.
This need required good PR people. “We have to pump up the idea that we’re on the edge of tremendous breakthroughs. We’re always on that edge…”
This hype also needed to obscure the fact that there wasn’t (and isn’t) ANY gene cure for ANY disease. … continue
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