When it comes to telling whoppers about climate change, weather extremes and any number of climate-related catastrophes, the United Nations has no equal. Their latest (2020) report proves this beyond any doubt.
Recently released is the UN’s report, dramatically titled: Human Cost of Disasters: An Overview of the Last 20 Years (2000-2019). This report stems from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) and its Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED).
The report Foreword tells us that:
“This report focuses primarily on the staggering rise in climate-related disasters over the last twenty years.”
This is followed by the not unexpected attack on developed nations:
“But the odds continue to be stacked against them in particular by industrial nations that are failing miserably on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to levels commensurate with the desired goal of keeping global warming at 1.5 ̊C as set out in the Paris Agreement.”
The hyperbole continued:
“It is baffling that we willingly and knowingly continue to sow the seeds of our own destruction, despite the science and evidence that we are turning our only home into an uninhabitable hell for millions of people.”
Any reader of this report will immediately see this is not a dispassionate, empirically-based document prepared by scientists who have carefully scrutinized the available literature on natural disasters. Rather it is the product of activists and alarmists, using hyperbole and silly phrases such as: “staggering rise in climate-related disasters”; “failing miserably on reducing greenhouse gas emissions” and “turning our only home into an uninhabitable hell.”
Apparently, the UN’s version of “the science and evidence” is not the same as the version embraced by the wider and more credible scientific community.
As always, the UN’s extreme alarmism is accompanied by the anticipated “tipping point” and “Last Chance” to avoid those “disastrous consequences” that simply never happen.
Here is a typical example:
“If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences for people and all the natural systems that sustain us.”
Anyone reading this UN report would do well to compare it with NOAA’s Dr. David Legates’s summary of the many failed predictions from climate alarmists.
In yet another tedious attempt to link carbon dioxide emissions with imaginary global warming and any natural disaster, we are told:
“This is clear evidence that in a world where the global average temperature in 2019 was 1.1oC above the pre-industrial period, the impacts are being felt in the increased frequency of extreme weather events including heatwaves, droughts, flooding, winter storms, hurricanes and wildfires.”
This should be enough for any sensible person to dismiss the report as more UN propaganda from officials who rely on the likelihood that few politicians will check their claims against actual data. The same UN officials know that the media, many politicians and Green NGO’s will continue to promote this alarmist nonsense.
The UN seriously expects everyone to believe that:
We actually know what the pre-industrial global temperature was;
We were able to measure the pre-industrial global temperature to an accuracy of 0.1oC;
We have accurate records of global natural disasters over the last several centuries;
Everyone will embrace the climate alarm nonsense that has been served up by the UN since 1988.
Incredibly, the UN produced a graph in 2020 that showed how climate-related disasters have actually declined:
Yet the UN’s latest report tells us there has been a “staggering rise in climate-related disasters.”
“The UNDRR’s own data shows that climate-related disasters have actually been declining for 20 years.”
He added:
“The United Nations must immediately withdraw this report and apologize for misleading the public.”
I doubt there is much chance of that happening.
Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. is a well-respected scientist and recognised expert on natural disasters. He has criticised the UN report, saying that its data on disasters from the last century are flawed and therefore unreliable.
Pielke, along with other reputable scientists, has acknowledged that there has been an increase in financial loss due to natural disasters but this is not attributable to any increase in extreme weather events. Common sense (and insurance companies) should tell us we are seeing an increase in population with more people having more wealth and more assets to lose.
Additionally, financial losses due to natural disasters will inevitably increase as more people with more wealth and assets choose to live in accident-prone areas such as bushland, floodplains, earthquake-prone areas, eroding and subsiding coastlines.
“When you adjust damage costs for size of economy, which even the UN Sustainable Development Goals insists you should, the relative cost of disasters is declining, not increasing.”
Additionally, the UN’s own data show the number of deaths from natural disasters has almost halved in the last 20 years, compared to the number of deaths between 1980 and 1999:
In fact the global population has increased by more than 70% since 1980 whilst the death risk has fallen by around 60%.
Returning to the UN report’s dramatic and factually incorrect statement:
“This is clear evidence that in a world where the global average temperature in 2019 was 1.1oC above the pre-industrial period, the impacts are being felt in the increased frequency of extreme weather events including heatwaves, droughts, flooding, winter storms, hurricanes and wildfires.”
This is sheer nonsense. So what do the real data show?
During recent decades, heatwaves in the US remain far less frequent and severe than was the case during the 1930s.
Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
Cold-related mortality remains a more significant and persistent problem, both in the UK and internationally. There are 20 times as many cold-related deaths as heat-related deaths worldwide, and the UK has had 35,000 cold-related deaths a year on average over the past 5 years.7
“Most of the temperature-related mortality burden was attributable to the contribution of cold.”
Many of those deaths are attributable to people who have not been able to afford the rising costs of electricity or have no access to inexpensive, reliable electricity in their countries.
The UN report, with its obsession over imaginary dramatic global warming, ignores temperature data from satellites and radio-sondes. The UN also ignores reliable surface temperature data and paleo-data that contradict the report’s alarmism.
For instance, Rydval et al. (2017) constructed an 800 year paleo-temperature record for Scotland, showing no unusual recent warming:
Studies of past global temperature estimates show there is no evidence for any change in the globally-averaged near-surface temperature over the last 100 years.
In summary, there has been no detectable long-term increase in heat waves in the US or anywhere else in the world. Record high temperatures were recorded long before the widespread use of hydrocarbon fuels.
The UN report claims that we are seeing an increased frequency of droughts. This claim is also without any empirical foundation.
The Palmer Drought Index for the US has data going back over 100 years:
Cook et al. (2015) found that Mega-droughts during the past 2,000 years were worse and lasted longer than current droughts and data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show no trend in the proportion of the globe in drought since 1950:
The UN report claims that we are seeing an increased frequency of flooding. This claim is also without foundation.
“The good news is U.S. flood damage is sharply down over 70 years. Remember, disasters can happen any time…. But it is also good to understand long-term trends based on data, not hype.”
The UN’s current report contradicts the IPCC’s earlier report in which Hartmann et al. (2013) concluded:
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that globally there is no clear and widespread evidence of changes in flood magnitude or frequency in observed flood records.”
“The results of this study, for North America and Europe, provide a firmer foundation and support the conclusion of the IPCC that compelling evidence for increased flooding at a global scale is lacking.”
Hirsch and Ryberg (2012) noted that, in none of the four regions defined in their study, was there strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with increasing carbon dioxide levels.
“We analysed the historical record of Atlantic basin and US landfalling hurricanes, as well as US continental accumulated cyclone energy to evaluate issues related to trend detection.”
They reported:
“Hurricane and major hurricane landfall counts exhibited no significant overall trend over 167 years of available data, nor did accumulated cyclone energy over the continental USA over 119 years of available data.”
This is in agreement with findings from Drs. Pielke, Maue and Weinkle who reported:
“The analysis does not indicate significant long-period global or individual basin trends in the frequency or intensity of landfalling TC’s of minor or major hurricane strength. The evidence in this study provides strong support for the conclusion that increasing damage around the world during the past several decades can be explained entirely by increasing wealth in locations prone to TC landfalls, which adds confidence to the fidelity of economic normalization analyses.”
“Ever since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, any hurricane causing catastrophic damage has been seized upon by climate alarmists as evidence of the horrors of global warming.
As if the record-holding hurricanes from the 1920’s through the 1950’s never happened.”
She added:
“I used to be concerned about ‘consensus enforcement’ on the topic of climate change. Now I am concerned about ‘alarmism enforcement.”
The UN report says we are seeing an increased frequency of wildfires. This is also without foundation.
Long-term satellite monitoring provides reliable data on global wildfires and, in contrast to UN alarmism, NASA has shown that between 2003 and 2019 global wildfires have declined by around 25%.
The National Interagency Fire Centre (NIFC) has provided data that support MODIS observations:
The UN promotes alarmist political/ideological nonsense about natural disasters and the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The UN’s obsession with “reducing greenhouse gas emissions” begs the question:
Why do we need to reduce emissions when current levels are amongst the lowest in 500 million years and all life on the planet would benefit from more atmospheric carbon dioxide?
Another question might be:
How do we know when the UN is telling lies?
Answer: Usually when they release a report about climate change.
Dr. John Happs M.Sc.1st Class; D.Phil. John has an academic background in the geosciences with special interests in climate, and paleoclimate. He has been a science educator at several universities in Australia and overseas and was President of the Western Australian Skeptics for 25 years.
Recently, a landmark study was conducted by Dr. James Lyons-Weiler and Dr. Paul Thomas. The study compared vaccinated children and unvaccinated children and was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health on November 22, 2020 after being peer reviewed.
Dr. Weiler, a research scientist and co-author of the study, was recently interviewed by Activist Post Contributor Spiro Skouras. In the interview, Weiler breaks down the data from the study which indicates children who were vaccinated showed a higher rate of medical office visits and experienced an elevated rate of medical symptoms ranging from Asthma and behavioral issues, to ADHD and Anemia.
In this report, Spiro interviews Dr. Paul Thomas, a prominent pediatrician in Portland, Oregon who also co-authored the study and used 10+ years of data from his medical practice to conduct the study.
Shortly after the vaccinated versus unvaccinated study was published, five days in fact, the Oregon State Medical Board held an emergency meeting declaring that Dr. Paul was an immediate threat to his patients and the public and suspended his medical license.
In this must-see interview, Dr. Paul addresses the accusations leveled against himself and his practice, in addition to breaking down in detail the study’s findings. Dr. Paul also weighs in on the CDC recommended vaccine schedule and the experimental Covid vaccine.
In this three-part series we will exam the transformation from COVID lockdowns to climate lockdowns. In Part I we will establish a timeline of the dark side of the environmental movement. In Part II we’ll be looking into the specifics of what a climate lockdown really means and what impact current lockdown measures have had on the environment. In Part III we will see how it fits into the bigger picture of sustainable development as described by international organizations such as the United Nations and what can be done to derail this agenda.
While much of the world remains held hostage by their governments there are impending signs of both hope and doom for the future. Across the United States the courts are overturning emergency orders enacted by governors, in Europe crowds continue to gather in huge numbers in protest of lockdown measures, while others reopen with “pre-covid” standards. Simultaneously, shocking levels of cruelty on behalf of the government continue to pour out of Melbourne and in parts of Quebec all forms of private social gatherings are now forbidden.
These terrifying trends are now being coupled with calls for what are being dubbed “climate lockdowns” to avert further destruction. In her article, professor Mariana Mazzucato calls for a total and radical overhaul of society molded by the hands of the government because of climate change. We’ll address the science she uses to justify these measures later. Nowhere does the article mention that the professor receives funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the Open Society Institutes or explain how that may have swayed her conclusions.
This comes as more and more data disrupts the narrative that COVID-19 requires pandemic status. Since March we’ve learned that PCR tests are unreliable, that the science behind masks is doubtful at best, that the virus still hasn’t been isolated, and that places that didn’t lockdown (Sweden, South Dakota, Nicaragua, etc) are faring just fine. The rise in protests and condemnations of lockdown policies makes complete sense in this context but a more alarming question still remains: why are so many governments stubbornly refusing to end lockdowns or even doubling down on these policies?
Perhaps it is because these measure were never about protecting the public’s health. The narrative of COVID-19 as a tool of control is very well-documented at this point but with climate lockdowns emerging as part of the story it’s worth focusing in on the environmental movement and seeing what tools of control have been deployed here as well. The idea that humans should be good stewards of the planet is not being questioned but the origins and evolution of environmentalism, and some of the key players involved, require close scrutiny as there is a dark side of this movement that can’t be ignored.
The Apocalyptic Origins of Environmentalism
Modern environmentalism can be traced back to the 1960s and 1970s as scientific communities, grassroots organizations, NGOs, think tanks, and eventually governments became more engrossed in man’s relationship with the planet. On the plus side there was more attention placed on cherishing the natural world, respecting animal life, and reversing environmental degradation but there also emerged an apocalyptical view of the future where mankind would destroy the planet.
In 1968 Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was released and warned of the impending death of hundred of millions in the coming decades due to resource depletion and food shortages brought on by overpopulation. This was his take on mankind’s growth:
A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people….We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.
Some of these decisions included eugenics-based solutions like forced sterilization and gene-editing. Though the theories in this book are now largely discredited it went on to become a best-seller and planted eugenics-based solutions in the public consciousness.
That same year the Club of Rome was founded. A group of industrialists, politicians, scientists, and academics met in Italy with dreams of ushering in a new global order. In 1972 they further popularized theories of a human-driven ecological collapse in The Limits of Growth which has been translated into dozens of languages and sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. The book echoed Ehrlich’s vision of a world of depleted resources, environmental destruction, and rampant food shortages in and around 2020 due to overpopulation. Their proposed solution was to have an elite group direct society through a “controlled, orderly transition” into a new vision of the world by means of population control.
Subsequent publications would expand on the organization’s dismal view of humanity’s potential and echo Ehrlich’s mankind-as-cancer metaphor. In 1975’s Mankind at the Turning Point they open their work with a lovely epigraph from a Rockefeller-funded scientist named Alan Gregg who believes, “The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.”
Almost two decades later in 1991 The Club of Rome published another report, The First Global Revolution which proposed a plan for navigating the 21st century. The authors believed that humanity was on the verge of global societal change largely brought on by anthropogenic climate change and that current forms of government were not suited to find resolutions. Instead they proposed that a global system of interlocking non-governmental institutions above the nation state level be created. In order to convince the public that surrendering much of their sovereignty was worth it they needed to create a common enemy to work in unison against. This is what they came up:
In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.
It’s easy to dismiss these passages as the reflections from a small group of people from a different time. However, this isn’t just a fringe activist group; the men and women of The Club of Rome have shaped the 20th and 21st centuries. Members have included David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Bill Gates, Maurice Strong, Kofi Annan, Anne Ehrlich, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and Mikhail Gorbachev among others. The influence these members carry extends into the United Nations, halls of government around the world, major philanthropic organizations and environmentalist NGOs, prestigious universities, and other prominent think tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.
There is truth in this line of thinking. Time and time again governments have failed to do what is right in the name of the environment but this is the result of corruption, collusion, and incompetence which does not necessitate even more centralization and unaccountability from a supranational bureaucracy. The names and institutions mentioned above are the same ones supporting the tyrannical handling the current so-called pandemic, when they begin issuing demands for climate lockdowns will we really believe it’s because they have a strong desire to save the planet?
Environmentalism As Religion
In the last 40 years environmentalism has taken on many elements of a religion. Fewer and fewer people identify as traditionally religious in the western world but there is speculation that the human brain is hardwired for faith so it follows that in the absence of conventional religious devotion the mind would grasp for something else to believe in. This is of course not true of everyone who wants the earth to be habitable for future generations but for many devotees the parallels are uncanny.
An environmental priest class has emerged whereby climate edicts from Greta Thunberg, Bill Nye, and Prince Charles mean as much to the environmentalist as religious edicts from imams do to Muslims. Religious imagery from the Book of Genesis like the Garden of Eden are evoked by climate activists when they envision a paradisiacal future where humanity acts in harmony with the planet once again. Should we fail to live up to this destiny divine retribution will come for modern man like it came for the sinners in Sodom and Gomorrah. The findings in reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are used in green sermons, much like passages in the Bible, Koran, or Torah are in houses of worship. Holy sites like Jerusalem and Mecca are for religious pilgrims what Antarctica and Glacier National Park are for the environmentalists claiming they wish to see climate change in action.
When it comes to religion we already know what happens when dogmatic thinking goes too far. The religious wars and inquisitions of history are looked back upon as blights on the story of humanity’s progress through the ages. The environmental movement is relatively new but, as has already been seen in extreme cases, it can be hijacked by orthodoxy and blinded by apocalyptic visions. It is this sort of emotional thinking that allows for proponents of climate lockdowns to propose an inhumane agenda of extreme isolation, economic destruction, and centralization of power.
We’ve Reached The Tipping Point
Climate change goes by many names. In the past it was global cooling and then global warming before it became climate change. Ad executives are working on rebranding the phenomenon and it may soon be known as The Great Collapse or Climate Collapse. It turns out almost all observable natural phenomenon can be attributed to climate change as well. Droughts, floods, hotter temperatures, cooler temperatures, the extinction of one species, the abundance of another, hurricanes, earthquakes, and fires have all been cited as the result of climate change. Weirdly the sun’s impact on the climate is often left out in favor of blaming man.
The convenience of all of this does much to remove the veneer of global warming climate change being an infallible scientific doctrine, free from the subjectivity of man’s own desires. It’s what makes it possible for Mariana Mazzucato to casually drop “Shifting Arctic ice, raging wildfires in western US states and elsewhere, and methane leaks in the North Sea” as proof we have arrived at the “tipping point” on climate change without any citation or context. Depending on who you ask we have seen many so-called tipping points come and go for decades now so they need to be taken with a grain of salt, as do the uncited claims she makes.
First let’s head north into the Arctic. When she says that the ice is shifting she presumably means that the climate itself is shifting which is resulting in less ice. Yes, ice in parts of the Arctic have been on a downward trend (noted in the link above) over the past couple of decades but this trend is only correct if you stop looking at data from before 1979. There is no context given by Mazzucato here and when we find for example that the Greenland Ice Sheet is between 5,000 and 10,000 feet thick and the melt has only been 10 feet in the past 30 years we have to be careful of jumping to conclusions that this constitutes whatever a tipping point is.
The wildfires in the western U.S. and Australia are unpleasant to watch and tragic for those who live in those parts of the world. But, it’s worth stressing wildfires in these areas are absolutely natural phenomenon that have been going on long before the advent of climate change. It’s true that man has played a role in these situations but this has more to do with mismanagement than anthropogenic climate change. In Australia government policies have done much to prevent prescribed burns and other wildfire management techniques from happening which bona fied scientific researcher Jo Nova sees as the catalyst for the disaster of 2020. In the United States, California’s mismanagement of their forests is equally at fault while in Oregon arson is suspected as the cause of several fires.
In August, Greenpeace released a report on two methane leaks found off the coast of England, the result of Exxon Mobil and Sweden’s Stena Drilling Company drilling for oil in 1990. While this isn’t good news Greenpeace’s own report explains that, “The leaking borehole has been returned by Exxon Mobil to the British state who in 2000 determined that further monitoring was not required, believing that the reservoir would soon be depleted. But 30 years later the greenhouse gas keeps escaping into the atmosphere.” Their own findings show that government incompetence, and potentially collusion with Exxon, allowed this problem to continue on unabated for three decades and yet, Mazzucato believes this justifies climate lockdowns for all of humanity as retribution.
Once again, the attempt here is not to throw the baby out with the bath water and denounce the environmentalist movement outright. Absolutely nobody denies that the climate changes and yes, the world is absolutely impacted by human presence and sometimes quite negatively. The way forward should be with open science, transparent dialogue, and accountability at all levels of society because otherwise it will be left to the elite to call the shots for the rest of mankind and we know that doesn’t usually go in mankind’s favor. Do we really trust that people like Mariana Mazzucato and her ilk at places like the Rockefeller Foundation, the same people calling mankind the enemy of the planet, have what’s best for humankind in mind when they call for climate lockdowns?
Climate Lockdowns and A Brave New World
In Part II we will take a closer look at Mazzucato’s proposals for climate lockdowns and see what impact the current lockdowns have had on the environment. Is locking down society as simple as confining people to their homes while the planet takes a break or is there something more to this call for tyranny?
Vanadium is expensive, though the price fluctuates wildly – currently $11K to $15K / tonne of Vanadium Pentoxide. But advocates claim Vanadium flow batteries have the potential to solve the intermittency of renewable energy.
StorEn Tech Provides First Of Its Kind Vanadium Flow Battery To Australia
December 19th, 2020
Australia has taken another step toward greater use of battery energy storage thanks to a new 30 kWh StorEn vanadium flow battery that was installed for use in a renewable hydrogen plant at Queensland University of Technology (QUT).
The battery, which was provided through a partnership between StorEn Technologies Inc.* and Multicom Resources Limited, will allow researchers in Australia to develop safety standards for the future use of vanadium flow batteries as well as helping to bring the technology to Australia.
The many features of vanadium flow batteries could make them ideal for grid-scale energy storage, which is something that Australia is looking to expand in the coming years. […]
Peter Talbot, a professor at QUT, said about the new battery — “vanadium flow battery technology promises safe, affordable and long-lasting energy storage for both households and industry.” […]
Vanadium has an energy density of 15-25Wh / L, so to provide backup for a 1GW renewable plant for a day, you would need:
24 x 1GW = 24GWh of storage, or 24,000,000,000 Wh / 25 Wh / L = 960 million litres of Vanadium electrolyte – say a couple of billion dollars worth.
An expensive battery, but not an unimaginable expense.
Of course a single day of backup capacity is not nearly enough. Wind droughts can last weeks or even months. So if your goal is to match the reliability of fossil fuel generators, you are going to need a lot more than a couple of billion dollars worth of electrolyte.
You might find that the electrolyte gets a lot more expensive over the course of negotiating your battery purchase agreement. The global Vanadium market is small, around 80,000 tons per year. So an attempt to purchase several hundred thousand tons of Vanadium to build a 1GW battery would have a substantial impact on global prices.
Assuming you somehow obtain enough Vanadium for your battery, your Vanadium Flow battery electrolyte cannot be allowed to overheat or freeze. So your new battery complex will need substantial air-conditioning, which will eat into its storage efficiency.
Vanadium has other important industrial uses. Vanadium is used as a steel additive to produce high strength structural steel, and is also an important component of military grade steel alloys, and critical steel components subject to high stress, such as automobile crank shafts. China is a substantial buyer in the global Vanadium market.
This year has seen what looks like the birth of a new religion. Let us call it Covidianity. It has its Prophets (eg. Neil Ferguson); its Priesthood of experts (eg. Whitty and Vallance); its own Soteriology (eg. The Vaccine of Salvation); its evangelists (eg. Piers Morgan); its own eschatology (eg. The New Normal); and of course its heretics (anyone questioning the data or the narrative).
Not everyone who has adopted the bizarre practices of Covidianity is a Covidian. Many have been cowed into it somewhat unwillingly; many have been bamboozled into it somewhat unwittingly; and many others just do not seem to have thought through what is being done to them, much less whether it is right, necessary and proportionate. But there are definitely true Covidians, and you can recognise them by their insistence that all bow down to their cult, and that those who refuse should be shamed.
In one sense, this religion has come upon us at warp speed. There we all were, going about our business at the start of the year, not particularly suspecting that there would be anything particularly out of the ordinary in 2020, and suddenly, wham! Yet in another sense, many of the ingredients were already in place long before this year, and they were simply brought together in one large melting pot to produce a toxic brew of fear, hysteria and irrationality on a truly epic scale.
Those ingredients include: A society that had abandoned belief in the Triune God and hadn’t quite managed to find a replacement to fill the void; a society obsessed with Safetyism, and the general sterilisation of life; a society glued to the Propaganda Box in the corner of the room with millions hanging on the every word that proceeds from it as if it were the very Oracle of God; and a society that had, by and large, utterly forgotten what freedom actually means.
What this has given us is a society seeking an arche (first principle) to hold everything together; one trying to stave off death by eliminating every potential risk; one that looks unquestioningly to the Government, the media and assembled experts to tell them how to do this; and one that has proved itself willing to give up freedoms won through blood, sweat and tears centuries ago to achieve it. In short, we have arrived at the planned, technocratic oligarchy that C S Lewis warned of us of over half a century ago:
“The new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend.”
And here’s Dwight Eisenhower saying much the same thing in his farewell address in 1961:
“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Sound familiar?
The irony of all that has happened this year is that in our apparent attempt to eliminate risk, we have given up our lives. That is, we have placed apparent safety so high up on the list of priorities that it has become a god, governing how we are to live, breathe and have our being, and it so dominates our everyday lives, that it makes normal life impossible, sucking out joy, meaning, and purpose. It is, as Lewis said, a tragic way to live:
“Now I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.”
One can understand how people in a plague situation would accept the suspension of normal life for a time, since you don’t mess about with an illness that wipes out something like 60% of the population. But for a coronavirus with an Infection Fatality Rate of around 0.2% – 0.26%? For a virus which has caused deaths — as a proportion of the population — to return to levels not seen since … ooh … those dark days of 2000:
And yes, I know that Covidian Logicians will claim that the deaths are not higher because we did all that weird stuff like shutting down the country and wearing bizarre face gear and making sure we didn’t sing loudly and so on. Then again, Covidian Logic claims lots of things which aren’t true, and the fact is there is no evidence whatsoever to show that these measures had any effect in terms of altering mortality rates.
For the illusion of safety — a mess of pottage — we have sold the heritage, and the liberties that were bequeathed to us by those who have gone before, which it was our duty to preserve for those who are to come. As Edmund Burke taught us:
“Society is indeed a contract … It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
We have betrayed our ancestors and our descendants, and the idea that we will just get these liberties back is a woeful misunderstanding of how the world works. Firstly, human nature being what it is, those in power who have developed a taste for authoritarianism rarely like to give it up. And secondly, liberties take centuries of long hard work to grow up, but can be hacked down in a short time — as has happened to us in 2020. Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for reinstating them speedily.
Having said that, perhaps there is still time. Perhaps there is still a window of opportunity for us to step back from the brink of this absurd Medical Tyranny, with its false promises of safety, and instead embrace life and freedom. But this would mean rejecting this misery of Covidianity without any further delay, and taking a good long draught of whatever it was they used to drink in Rohan:
“Eowyn: I fear neither death nor pain.
Aragorn: What do you fear, my lady?
Eowyn: A cage. To stay behind bars until use and old age accept them and all chance of valour has gone beyond recall or desire.”
Here’s my apology video to Facebook after they threatened to ban me for violating their community guidelines. With censorship, fact checkers, and the threat to be deplatformed, I now realize that speaking truth and empowering people is a direct violation of their community guidelines. I couldn’t be more sorry.
Gary Taubes has a new book out called ‘The Case for Keto,’ which he sent to me in the form of a real book with real pages, that he wanted me to read. Which I have.
I then suggested I should do a review and stick it up on my blog. I shall say, right up front, that I strongly recommend this book.
This may not be a surprise to those who know my thoughts on diet, heart disease and suchlike. In my case Gary is preaching to the converted. This is a book which covers the fact that fats, saturated fats, indeed any fats (other than trans-fats, and the industrially produced fats from grains) are perfectly healthy. Humans have eaten them for millennia.
You don’t see cave paintings of early humans out scything autumn wheat fields. No, you see pictures of men, because men always get the easy jobs, chasing woolly mammoths with spears. They are not just taking the mammoths out on early morning exercise, and throwing the spears to play catch. They are throwing those spears at the mammoths, and chasing them into spike filled pits, then eating them – saturated fats and all.
Anyway, as Gary makes very clear, despite the endless claims that animal fats are bad for us, when you get down to it, the evidence simply does not exist. The idea that fats make us fat and diabetic and kill us with heart disease is simply a ‘meme.’
An idea so widely held that everyone just believes it must be true. So much so that there is no need to even think about it. Fat gets into your body, floats about and gets stuck to your artery walls. Fat, cholesterol, same thing innit? ‘My mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts.’
I think I should mention that Gary first gained considerable fame in this area with his book ‘Good Calories, Bad Calories.’ In the UK and Australia, it was called. ‘The Diet Delusion.’ This is where he first looked at the idea that fats were bad for us and found it to be based almost entirely on hot air.
So, if it is not fat in the diet that is capable of causing weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, and other such nasty things, what is it? As Gary points out clearly, and inarguably, the answer is sugar. By sugar, he means carbohydrates (all sugars are just simple carbohydrates).
Slightly more complex carbohydrates are bread, and pasta, and rice and potatoes. These are just made up of lots of glucose molecules stuck together. Many people are unaware that our body takes in pasta, bread, rice etc. and simply breaks them down into sugar. So, pasta = sugar. Bread = sugar. Potatoes = sugar. Just as much as sugar = sugar. They all have the same effect.
Gary goes through the history of the brave individuals who have been those pointing out the damage that can be caused by excess carbohydrate intake for decades. Those who have been squashed flat by the mainstream. An English professor of nutrition, John Yudkin, tried to make this all clear in his book on sugar(s): ‘Pure, white and Deadly’ first published in the early 1970s. He was attacked and shouted down by Ancel Keys – the main promoter of the diet/heart hypothesis.
Gary maintains a calm and reasonable tone when discussing some of these events. Which is admirable. If I were him, I would be breaking the furniture, and chewing the curtains. He also calmly points out where the evidence is strong, and where it is weak, or where it does not exist at all. He does not overclaim, nor suggest that cutting down on carbs is a panacea that will benefit everyone. It is the calm reasonable tone that is actually most impressive. He knows his stuff, and he lays it out carefully and clearly.
What of the title of the book itself? ‘The case for Keto.’ For those who know this area ‘Keto’ is the metabolic state achieved when the body stops using sugar for energy and starts to break down the stored fats instead. These stored ‘fatty acids’ are converted to molecules known as ketone bodies in the liver. The body is perfectly happy to use them for energy. This is ‘ketosis’. Explaining the title of the book.
Many people think ketones are the preferred energy source for most organs in the body. Virtually the only exception being some processes in the brain, that require glucose, and only glucose, to function.
The downstream benefit to entering ketosis is that, when you burn up fats and ketones, you are also using up your “energy stores” aka fat. So, once you stop burning glucose, and start using ketones, you can finally lose weight. Also, your blood glucose levels fall, your insulin levels fall, and the body has a chance to reset itself.
Gary has spoken to many, many doctors and researchers who are now absolutely convinced that the best way to prevent, even reverse, the wave of obesity and diabetes sweeping the modern world is to change from eating carbohydrates and eat more fats. I agree with him. If you read this book, I believe you will agree with him too. He makes a compelling case. It is the Case for Keto.
The use of universal lockdowns in the event of the appearance of a new pathogen has no precedent. It has been a science experiment in real time, with most of the human population used as lab rats. The costs are legion.
The question is whether lockdowns worked to control the virus in a way that is scientifically verifiable. Based on the following studies, the answer is no and for a variety of reasons: bad data, no correlations, no causal demonstration, anomalous exceptions, and so on. There is no relationship between lockdowns (or whatever else people want to call them to mask their true nature) and virus control.
Perhaps this is a shocking revelation, given that universal social and economic controls are becoming the new orthodoxy. In a saner world, the burden of proof really should belong to the lockdowners, since it is they who overthrew 100 years of public-health wisdom and replaced it with an untested, top-down imposition on freedom and human rights. They never accepted that burden. They took it as axiomatic that a virus could be intimidated and frightened by credentials, edicts, speeches, and masked gendarmes.
The pro-lockdown evidence is shockingly thin, and based largely on comparing real-world outcomes against dire computer-generated forecasts derived from empirically untested models, and then merely positing that stringencies and “nonpharmaceutical interventions” account for the difference between the fictionalized vs. the real outcome. The anti-lockdown studies, on the other hand, are evidence-based, robust, and thorough, grappling with the data we have (with all its flaws) and looking at the results in light of controls on the population.
Much of the following list has been put together by data engineer Ivor Cummins, who has waged a year-long educational effort to upend intellectual support for lockdowns. AIER has added its own and the summaries. The upshot is that the virus is going to do as viruses do, same as always in the history of infectious disease. We have extremely limited control over them, and that which we do have is bound up with time and place. Fear, panic, and coercion are not ideal strategies for managing viruses. Intelligence and medical therapeutics fare much better.
(These studies are focused only on lockdown and their relationship to virus control. They do not get into the myriad associated issues that have vexed the world such as mask mandates, PCR-testing issues, death misclassification problem, or any particular issues associated with travel restrictions, restaurant closures, and hundreds of other particulars about which whole libraries will be written in the future.)
2. “Was Germany’s Corona Lockdown Necessary?” by Christof Kuhbandner, Stefan Homburg, Harald Walach, Stefan Hockertz. Advance: Sage Preprint, June 23, 2020. “Official data from Germany’s RKI agency suggest strongly that the spread of the coronavirus in Germany receded autonomously, before any interventions became effective. Several reasons for such an autonomous decline have been suggested. One is that differences in host susceptibility and behavior can result in herd immunity at a relatively low prevalence level. Accounting for individual variation in susceptibility or exposure to the coronavirus yields a maximum of 17% to 20% of the population that needs to be infected to reach herd immunity, an estimate that is empirically supported by the cohort of the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Another reason is that seasonality may also play an important role in dissipation.”
3. “Estimation of the current development of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Germany” by Matthias an der Heiden, Osamah Hamouda. Robert Koch-Institut, April 22, 2020. “In general, however, not all infected people develop symptoms, not all those who develop symptoms go to a doctor’s office, not all who go to the doctor are tested and not all who test positive are also recorded in a data collection system. In addition, there is a certain amount of time between all these individual steps, so that no survey system, no matter how good, can make a statement about the current infection process without additional assumptions and calculations.”
4. Did COVID-19 infections decline before UK lockdown? by Simon N. Wood. Cornell University pre-print, August 8, 2020. “A Bayesian inverse problem approach applied to UK data on COVID-19 deaths and the disease duration distribution suggests that infections were in decline before full UK lockdown (24 March 2020), and that infections in Sweden started to decline only a day or two later. An analysis of UK data using the model of Flaxman et al. (2020, Nature 584) gives the same result under relaxation of its prior assumptions on R.”
5. “Comment on Flaxman et al. (2020): The illusory effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe” by Stefan Homburg and Christof Kuhbandner. June 17, 2020. Advance, Sage Pre-Print. “In a recent article, Flaxman et al. allege that non-pharmaceutical interventions imposed by 11 European countries saved millions of lives. We show that their methods involve circular reasoning. The purported effects are pure artefacts, which contradict the data. Moreover, we demonstrate that the United Kingdom’s lockdown was both superfluous and ineffective.”
6. Professor Ben Israel’s Analysis of virus transmission. April 16, 2020. “Some may claim that the decline in the number of additional patients every day is a result of the tight lockdown imposed by the government and health authorities. Examining the data of different countries around the world casts a heavy question mark on the above statement. It turns out that a similar pattern – rapid increase in infections that reaches a peak in the sixth week and declines from the eighth week – is common to all countries in which the disease was discovered, regardless of their response policies: some imposed a severe and immediate lockdown that included not only ‘social distancing’ and banning crowding, but also shutout of economy (like Israel); some ‘ignored’ the infection and continued almost a normal life (such as Taiwan, Korea or Sweden), and some initially adopted a lenient policy but soon reversed to a complete lockdown (such as Italy or the State of New York). Nonetheless, the data shows similar time constants amongst all these countries in regard to the initial rapid growth and the decline of the disease.”
7. “Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19 in Europe: a quasi-experimental study” by Paul Raymond Hunter, Felipe Colon-Gonzalez, Julii Suzanne Brainard, Steve Rushton. MedRxiv Pre-print May 1, 2020. “The current epidemic of COVID-19 is unparalleled in recent history as are the social distancing interventions that have led to a significant halt on the economic and social life of so many countries. However, there is very little empirical evidence about which social distancing measures have the most impact… From both sets of modelling, we found that closure of education facilities, prohibiting mass gatherings and closure of some non-essential businesses were associated with reduced incidence whereas stay at home orders and closure of all non-businesses was not associated with any independent additional impact.”
8. “Full lockdown policies in Western Europe countries have no evident impacts on the COVID-19 epidemic” by Thomas Meunier. MedRxiv Pre-print May 1, 2020. “This phenomenological study assesses the impacts of full lockdown strategies applied in Italy, France, Spain and United Kingdom, on the slowdown of the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak. Comparing the trajectory of the epidemic before and after the lockdown, we find no evidence of any discontinuity in the growth rate, doubling time, and reproduction number trends. Extrapolating pre-lockdown growth rate trends, we provide estimates of the death toll in the absence of any lockdown policies, and show that these strategies might not have saved any life in western Europe. We also show that neighboring countries applying less restrictive social distancing measures (as opposed to police-enforced home containment) experience a very similar time evolution of the epidemic.”
9. “Trajectory of COVID-19 epidemic in Europe” by Marco Colombo, Joseph Mellor, Helen M Colhoun, M. Gabriela M. Gomes, Paul M McKeigue. MedRxiv Pre-print. Posted September 28, 2020. “The classic Susceptible-Infected-Recovered model formulated by Kermack and McKendrick assumes that all individuals in the population are equally susceptible to infection. From fitting such a model to the trajectory of mortality from COVID-19 in 11 European countries up to 4 May 2020 Flaxman et al. concluded that ‘major non-pharmaceutical interventions — and lockdowns in particular — have had a large effect on reducing transmission’. We show that relaxing the assumption of homogeneity to allow for individual variation in susceptibility or connectivity gives a model that has better fit to the data and more accurate 14-day forward prediction of mortality. Allowing for heterogeneity reduces the estimate of ‘counterfactual’ deaths that would have occurred if there had been no interventions from 3.2 million to 262,000, implying that most of the slowing and reversal of COVID-19 mortality is explained by the build-up of herd immunity. The estimate of the herd immunity threshold depends on the value specified for the infection fatality ratio (IFR): a value of 0.3% for the IFR gives 15% for the average herd immunity threshold.”
10. “Effect of school closures on mortality from coronavirus disease 2019: old and new predictions” by Ken Rice, Ben Wynne, Victoria Martin, Graeme J Ackland. British Medical Journal, September 15, 2020. “The findings of this study suggest that prompt interventions were shown to be highly effective at reducing peak demand for intensive care unit (ICU) beds but also prolong the epidemic, in some cases resulting in more deaths long term. This happens because covid-19 related mortality is highly skewed towards older age groups. In the absence of an effective vaccination programme, none of the proposed mitigation strategies in the UK would reduce the predicted total number of deaths below 200 000.”
11. “Modeling social distancing strategies to prevent SARS-CoV2 spread in Israel- A Cost-effectiveness analysis” by Amir Shlomai, Ari Leshno, Ella H Sklan, Moshe Leshno. MedRxiv Pre-Print. September 20, 2020. “A nationwide lockdown is expected to save on average 274 (median 124, interquartile range (IQR): 71-221) lives compared to the ‘testing, tracing, and isolation’ approach. However, the ICER will be on average $45,104,156 (median $ 49.6 million, IQR: 22.7-220.1) to prevent one case of death. Conclusions: A national lockdown has a moderate advantage in saving lives with tremendous costs and possible overwhelming economic effects. These findings should assist decision-makers in dealing with additional waves of this pandemic.”
12. Too Little of a Good Thing A Paradox of Moderate Infection Control, by Ted Cohen and Marc Lipsitch. Epidemiology. 2008 Jul; 19(4): 588–589. “The link between limiting pathogen exposure and improving public health is not always so straightforward. Reducing the risk that each member of a community will be exposed to a pathogen has the attendant effect of increasing the average age at which infections occur. For pathogens that inflict greater morbidity at older ages, interventions that reduce but do not eliminate exposure can paradoxically increase the number of cases of severe disease by shifting the burden of infection toward older individuals.”
13. “Smart Thinking, Lockdown and COVID-19: Implications for Public Policy” by Morris Altman. Journal of Behavioral Economics for Policy, 2020. “The response to COVID-19 has been overwhelmingly to lockdown much of the world’s economies in order to minimize death rates as well as the immediate negative effects of COVID-19. I argue that such policy is too often de-contextualized as it ignores policy externalities, assumes death rate calculations are appropriately accurate and, and as well, assumes focusing on direct Covid-19 effects to maximize human welfare is appropriate. As a result of this approach current policy can be misdirected and with highly negative effects on human welfare. Moreover, such policies can inadvertently result in not minimizing death rates (incorporating externalities) at all, especially in the long run. Such misdirected and sub-optimal policy is a product of policy makers using inappropriate mental models which are lacking in a number of key areas; the failure to take a more comprehensive macro perspective to address the virus, using bad heuristics or decision-making tools, relatedly not recognizing the differential effects of the virus, and adopting herding strategy (follow-the-leader) when developing policy. Improving the decision-making environment, inclusive of providing more comprehensive governance and improving mental models could have lockdowns throughout the world thus yielding much higher levels of human welfare.”
14. “SARS-CoV-2 waves in Europe: A 2-stratum SEIRS model solution” by Levan Djaparidze and Federico Lois. MedRxiv pre-print, October 23, 2020. “We found that 180-day of mandatory isolations to healthy <60 (i.e. schools and workplaces closed) produces more final deaths if the vaccination date is later than (Madrid: Feb 23 2021; Catalonia: Dec 28 2020; Paris: Jan 14 2021; London: Jan 22 2021). We also modeled how average isolation levels change the probability of getting infected for a single individual that isolates differently than average. That led us to realize disease damages to third parties due to virus spreading can be calculated and to postulate that an individual has the right to avoid isolation during epidemics (SARS-CoV-2 or any other).”
15. “Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison” by Christian Bjørnskov. SSRN working paper, August 2, 2020. “The lockdowns in most Western countries have thrown the world into the most severe recession since World War II and the most rapidly developing recession ever seen in mature market economies. They have also caused an erosion of fundamental rights and the separation of powers in a large part of the world as both democratic and autocratic regimes have misused their emergency powers and ignored constitutional limits to policy-making (Bjørnskov and Voigt, 2020). It is therefore important to evaluate whether and to which extent the lockdowns have worked as officially intended: to suppress the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and prevent deaths associated with it. Comparing weekly mortality in 24 European countries, the findings in this paper suggest that more severe lockdown policies have not been associated with lower mortality. In other words, the lockdowns have not worked as intended.”
16.”Four Stylized Facts about COVID-19” (alt-link) by Andrew Atkeson, Karen Kopecky, and Tao Zha. NBER working paper 27719, August 2020. “One of the central policy questions regarding the COVID-19 pandemic is the question of which non-pharmeceutical interventions governments might use to influence the transmission of the disease. Our ability to identify empirically which NPI’s have what impact on disease transmission depends on there being enough independent variation in both NPI’s and disease transmission across locations as well as our having robust procedures for controlling for other observed and unobserved factors that might be influencing disease transmission. The facts that we document in this paper cast doubt on this premise…. The existing literature has concluded that NPI policy and social distancing have been essential to reducing the spread of COVID-19 and the number of deaths due to this deadly pandemic. The stylized facts established in this paper challenge this conclusion.”
17. “How does Belarus have one of the lowest death rates in Europe?” by Kata Karáth. British Medical Journal, September 15, 2020. “Belarus’s beleaguered government remains unfazed by covid-19. President Aleksander Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, has flatly denied the seriousness of the pandemic, refusing to impose a lockdown, close schools, or cancel mass events like the Belarusian football league or the Victory Day parade. Yet the country’s death rate is among the lowest in Europe—just over 700 in a population of 9.5 million with over 73 000 confirmed cases.”
18. “Association between living with children and outcomes from COVID-19: an OpenSAFELY cohort study of 12 million adults in England” by Harriet Forbes, Caroline E Morton, Seb Bacon et al., by MedRxiv, November 2, 2020. “Among 9,157,814 adults ≤65 years, living with children 0-11 years was not associated with increased risks of recorded SARS-CoV-2 infection, COVID-19 related hospital or ICU admission but was associated with reduced risk of COVID-19 death (HR 0.75, 95%CI 0.62-0.92). Living with children aged 12-18 years was associated with a small increased risk of recorded SARS-CoV-2 infection (HR 1.08, 95%CI 1.03-1.13), but not associated with other COVID-19 outcomes. Living with children of any age was also associated with lower risk of dying from non-COVID-19 causes. Among 2,567,671 adults >65 years there was no association between living with children and outcomes related to SARS-CoV-2. We observed no consistent changes in risk following school closure.”
19. “Exploring inter-country coronavirus mortality“ By Trevor Nell, Ian McGorian, Nick Hudson. Pandata, July 7, 2020. “For each country put forward as an example, usually in some pairwise comparison and with an attendant single cause explanation, there are a host of countries that fail the expectation. We set out to model the disease with every expectation of failure. In choosing variables it was obvious from the outset that there would be contradictory outcomes in the real world. But there were certain variables that appeared to be reliable markers as they had surfaced in much of the media and pre-print papers. These included age, co-morbidity prevalence and the seemingly light population mortality rates in poorer countries than that in richer countries. Even the worst among developing nations—a clutch of countries in equatorial Latin America—have seen lighter overall population mortality than the developed world. Our aim therefore was not to develop the final answer, rather to seek common cause variables that would go some way to providing an explanation and stimulating discussion. There are some very obvious outliers in this theory, not the least of these being Japan. We test and find wanting the popular notions that lockdowns with their attendant social distancing and various other NPIs confer protection.”
20. “Covid-19 Mortality: A Matter of Vulnerability Among Nations Facing Limited Margins of Adaptation” by Quentin De Larochelambert, Andy Marc, Juliana Antero, Eric Le Bourg, and Jean-François Toussaint. Frontiers in Public Health, 19 November 2020. “Higher Covid death rates are observed in the [25/65°] latitude and in the [−35/−125°] longitude ranges. The national criteria most associated with death rate are life expectancy and its slowdown, public health context (metabolic and non-communicable diseases (NCD) burden vs. infectious diseases prevalence), economy (growth national product, financial support), and environment (temperature, ultra-violet index). Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate. Countries that already experienced a stagnation or regression of life expectancy, with high income and NCD rates, had the highest price to pay. This burden was not alleviated by more stringent public decisions. Inherent factors have predetermined the Covid-19 mortality: understanding them may improve prevention strategies by increasing population resilience through better physical fitness and immunity.”
21. “States with the Fewest Coronavirus Restrictions” by Adam McCann. WalletHub, Oct 6, 2020. This study assesses and ranks stringencies in the United States by states. The results are plotted against deaths per capita and unemployment. The graphics reveal no relationship in stringency level as it relates to the death rates, but finds a clear relationship between stringency and unemployment.
22. The Mystery of Taiwan: Commentary on the Lancet Study of Taiwan and New Zealand, by Amelia Janaskie. American Institute for Economic Research, November 2, 2020. “The Taiwanese case reveals something extraordinary about pandemic response. As much as public-health authorities imagine that the trajectory of a new virus can be influenced or even controlled by policies and responses, the current and past experiences of coronavirus illustrate a different point. The severity of a new virus might have far more to do with endogenous factors within a population rather than the political response. According to the lockdown narrative, Taiwan did almost everything ‘wrong’ but generated what might in fact be the best results in terms of public health of any country in the world.”
23. “Predicting the Trajectory of Any COVID19 Epidemic From the Best Straight Line” by Michael Levitt, Andrea Scaiewicz, Francesco Zonta. MedRxiv, Pre-print, June 30, 2020. “Comparison of locations with over 50 deaths shows all outbreaks have a common feature: H(t) defined as loge(X(t)/X(t-1)) decreases linearly on a log scale, where X(t) is the total number of Cases or Deaths on day, t (we use ln for loge). The downward slopes vary by about a factor of three with time constants (1/slope) of between 1 and 3 weeks; this suggests it may be possible to predict when an outbreak will end. Is it possible to go beyond this and perform early prediction of the outcome in terms of the eventual plateau number of total confirmed cases or deaths? We test this hypothesis by showing that the trajectory of cases or deaths in any outbreak can be converted into a straight line. Specifically Y(t)≡−ln(ln(N/X(t)),is a straight line for the correct plateau value N, which is determined by a new method, Best-Line Fitting (BLF). BLF involves a straight-line facilitation extrapolation needed for prediction; it is blindingly fast and amenable to optimization. We find that in some locations that entire trajectory can be predicted early, whereas others take longer to follow this simple functional form.”
The Pfizer pharmaceutical company beat everyone to the punch by being the first Covid-19 vaccine to be granted Emergency Use Authorization by the FDA. There is an aggressive media and government campaign to “[push] blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans to the front of the [vaccine] line, ahead of whites.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs has apparently determined that these groups will be given priority for receiving the vaccine once it is available, despite the fact that 60 percent of the Covid-19 cases and 61 percent of the deaths among veterans are White (16 percent and 22 percent are Black, respectively).
But Black people have every reason to be profoundly suspicious of Pfizer as Pfizer has a history of doing horrendous medical experiments on Black people for profit. American drug companies routinely hop across borders in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America conducting risky drug experiments with little oversight. This is a legacy of the colonial view of “The Colony as Laboratory” for the Western powers.
Foreign drug trials in the Third World are cheaper, faster, and provide huge pools of human guinea pigs for experimentation with minimal red tape or regulation. In 2006 Rep. Tom Lantos of California, the senior Democrat on the International Relations committee, cited an unconscionable Pfizer case as an example of “large pharmaceutical companies, both here and in Europe … using these poor, illiterate and uniformed people as guinea pigs.”
At the beginning of 1996 Pfizer was sitting on a new, potentially billion-dollar blockbuster drug, according to Wall Street analysts. The antibiotic Trovan was not yet approved by the FDA. Pfizer had enrolled thousands of adults in Trovan clinical trials and they wanted to debut the drug as a therapy for bacterial meningitis, but there were a number of problems. There was already an effective treatment for meningitis available, the antibiotic ceftriaxone. But Pfizer’s biggest problem was children.
In order to gain maximum market share and achieve the predicted $1 billion per year from this drug, Pfizer needed to develop an oral form that proved safe for pediatric use. But Trovan had never been tested on children, and in animal models it caused liver toxicity and joint damage. In addition, bacterial meningitis was rare in the U.S. There were thus not enough children suffering from it for a convincing clinical trial. However, as luck would have it, a ready pool of children suffering from the disease had suddenly, coincidentally, and inexplicably become available—in Africa!
In 1996 an unprecedented epidemic of cerebrospinal meningitis (CSM) erupted oddly in the Muslim half (the north) of Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa. This was Africa’s worst ever CSM outbreak. Hardest hit was Nigeria’s largest northern state, Kano. “For Pfizer, the timing was oddly fortuitous.” Together with the World Health Organization (WHO), Pfizer “volunteered” to help. Vaccines and effective antibiotics were already long in use and could have tamed this epidemic, but curiously these were not made adequately available. It is believed that local health officials were paid off in order to obstruct efforts to halt the epidemic.
Pfizer officials saw in the Nigerian outbreak “a unique opportunity to test their drug without the restrictions of FDA clinical study protocols.” The Pfizer team roared into Nigeria on a chartered DC-9 and roared out five weeks later. But between April 3 and May 15, 1996, Pfizer engaged in an indefensible, illegal medical experiment in Kano using 200 gravely ill Nigerian children as young as 3 years old, who were either given the unapproved experimental drug Trovan or inappropriate doses of the alternative, ceftriaxone. Pfizer never obtained authorization from the federal government of Nigeria to conduct the experiment within its borders and was unable to produce any records documenting that the children or their parents were informed that they were part of an experiment.
“For weeks, Pfizer dispensed Trovan to Nigerian children and babies with complete disregard for all scientific research protocols.” A report on the Kano Experiment from a Nigerian federal panel concluded that the experiment violated Nigerian law as well as international law. Pfizer did no long-term follow up on the children and left Nigeria without any significant information about the final health impact of Trovan on this group. We now know that, due to this illegal and unethical experimentation, the children suffered various degrees of adverse effects and long-term disabilities ranging from deafness to muteness, paralysis, brain damage, loss of sight, and slurred speech; 11 died.
The successful operation of Pfizer’s Kano Experiment relied on the corruption of the local health care system. Nigerian healthcare professionals were paid almost double their normal salary to participate in the study. Pfizer hired Nigerian doctor Abdulhamid Isa Dutse to run the Kano Experiment. However, Dutse was chief “only in name.” Actually, the experiment was directed totally from Pfizer’s U.S. office. Publications on Trovan inaccurately listed Dutse as the lead author, when in fact he was kept in the dark about experiment results; data that appeared in papers with his name on them was actually withheld from him. Later Dutse lamented:
“I have trusted people and am disappointed. I regret the whole exercise, I wonder why on earth I did this.” However, after the Kano Experiment, Dutse ascended to the position of dean of the Kano medical school. Dutse’s role in the Kano Experiment seems analogous to the roles of Nurse Eunice Rivers, scapegoat for the U.S Public Service’s infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and possibly of Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, made the face of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Covid-19 Vaccine today. On October 5, 2020 Dr. Dutse walked into Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, suffered a cardiac arrest and died.
During a 1997 FDA audit of the Nigerian Trovan trial or “Kano Experiment,” Pfizer produced as proof of authorization a fraudulent letterhead document granting clearance for the trial by a Nigerian ethics committee that did not exist at the time. Dutse revealed later that Pfizer instructed him to concoct and backdate the fraudulent ethics committee letter.
In 2007 the state of Kano sued Pfizer for U.S. $2.75 billion, while the Nigerian federal government sued for U.S. $8.5 billion in damages, alleging that the pharmaceutical giant “pretended it came (to Nigeria) to render humanitarian service” but in actuality “Pfizer devised a scheme under which it misrepresented and failed to disclose its primary motive in seeking to participate in giving care to the victims of the epidemic.” Nigeria even sought criminal charges against Pfizer officials, including the CEO at the time of the experiment, William Steer. To squash the case Pfizer continued to engage in unethical behavior.
In 2010 a U.S. diplomatic cable uncovered by WikiLeaks revealed that Pfizer hired investigators to look for evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general Michael Aondoakaa in an effort to persuade him to drop the legal action. The cable reported a meeting between Pfizer’s country manager, Enrico Liggeri, and U.S. officials at the Abuja embassy on April 9, 2009, discussing using leaks to the local media to pressure the Nigerian attorney general to drop the cases against Pfizer. This effort failed. In 2011 Pfizer began making payments to the victims involved in the suit as part of a $75 million settlement. In the end, an incredible and unprecedented 12,000 Nigerians died from meningitis in the curious 1996 epidemic, despite the “help” pledged by the WHO and by Pfizer.
Now, that same Pfizer is trialing a brand new, never-before seen experimental vaccine platform—the mRNA Covid-19 vaccine—and Black people are to be “prioritized” in this grand experiment! The innovative and terrifying mRNA vaccine is the brainchild of a secretive Pentagon agency, a military technology R&D operation named the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA, as it is commonly known, “specializes in turning science fantasies into realities” but for military purposes. DARPA doesn’t actually invent things itself.
Instead, it outsources its scientific tasks to universities, military labs and defense contractors, such as Pfizer and Moderna. Pfizer has been an important military contractor for decades, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars to do research and development for the Pentagon, including biodefense contracts as far back as 2013. In that year DARPA awarded Pfizer a $7.7 million contract to innovate the type of mRNA vaccine platform that is now being rolled out in “warp speed.” DARPA awarded Moderna a similar contract of up to $25 million in 2013 as well. Thus, behind both Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine BNT162b2 and Moderna’s mRNA vaccine mRNA-1273, is DARPA. This Covid-19 vaccine is thus a piece of military technology. And Black people are being invited to cut to the front of the line.
Yeah, we should be deeply suspicious.
This would not be the first time the government would have operationalized mass vaccinations for covert military purposes. In 2012 Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta confirmed the CIA’s unethical use of the cloak of public health and medicine to advance a military-intelligence objective by making operational use of vaccination programs. For example, the Taliban of Afghanistan and Pakistan have vigorously opposed polio vaccination campaigns in their lands, charging that the U.S runs a spy network under the guise of these vaccine programs and also sterilizes Muslim children. Neither of these charges are mere “conspiracy theory” as they have been proven true.
In 2010 the CIA initiated a clandestine mission to locate (and then kill) Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan through the use of a fake “free vaccination” program targeting Pakistani women and children in areas surrounding Bin Laden’s presumed hideout. CIA agents recruited senior Pakistani doctor Shakil Afridi to organize a sham hepatitis B vaccination operation and paid generous sums to health workers used in the plot. Nurses would travel from house to house looking for women ages 15 to 45 to cajole into taking their needle. Mothers were paid to vaccinate their children.
But none were given an actual Hep B vaccine. Rather, blood was drawn and then some concoction was injected into them. The aim of this vaccine ruse was allegedly the extraction of DNA from children of Bin Laden to confirm that he was in the area. Spies posing as polio vaccinators got close to Bin Laden’s home. The clandestine mission was apparently successful and on May 2, 2011 U.S. Navy Seals raided the three-story compound in the suburb of Abbottabad and killed Osama Bin Laden. The Taliban was proved correct to reject the free vaccinations of Western-affiliated campaigns as these campaigns were indeed cover for military/intelligence operations.
Thus, for reasons well beyond Tuskegee, Black people are rightly suspicious of the Covid-19 vaccines being rolled out in “warp speed.”
Wesley Muhammad holds a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies and is a student minister in the Nation of Islam. He is also a sought after speaker, author, member of the NOI Research Team and the Nation of Islam Executive Council. Follow him on Instagram @wesleymuhammad. This is part one in a series of articles.
COVID-19 has reignited the vaccine debate worldwide as significant portions of the population express their unwillingness or hesitancy to take the experimental vaccine. A vaccine that was developed in record time with rolled back regulations, limited oversight, as well as a limited scope in the safety trials.
The vaccine manufacturers conducting the trials carefully screened potential volunteers, and carefully selected candidates to help them ensure a passing grade for government regulators and then mass distribution.
In this interview, Spiro is joined by Dr. James Lyons-Weiler who recently co-authored a study comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated children. A study the CDC has refused to perform despite four different congressional bills which would have obligated them to conduct. All four bills failed.
The fact that all four bills failed may not come as a surprise, considering Big Pharma is the largest lobby in DC. But the key findings of the study, may indeed surprise you.
The study was independently conducted, peer reviewed and publicly funded.
Trump claims Iran’s military is routed just as IRGC launched missiles strike American bases
RT | June 10, 2026
The Iranian military has been “completely defeated,” US President Donald Trump has claimed, warning Tehran it will “pay the price” for delaying a deal with Washington.
The warnings came after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced missile and drone strikes on American military facilities in several Arab countries in retaliation for recent US attacks. US Central Command said the operations inside Iran were carried out after an AH-64 Apache helicopter was lost near the Strait of Hormuz, an incident it blamed on Tehran.
Trump posted on Truth Social on Wednesday that Iran “is all talk and no action,” adding that “The Bully of the Middle East is DEAD!!!” … Full article
HEAT exposure could drive a dramatic rise in cardiovascular disease (CVD) burden across the USA over the next 25 years, with researchers warning that climate change and population ageing may combine to reverse decades of progress in heart health.
Heat Exposure Threatens Future Heart Health A new modelling study estimated that heat-attributable CVD burden could more than triple by 2050 under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario, disproportionately affecting older adults and economically disadvantaged communities. … Full article
… Climate change and land use conversion have the potential to increase the frequency of encounters between snakes and humans. This situation arises due to changes in temperature and rainfall, the loss of natural habitats, and shifts in food sources, which drive snakes to move into areas closer to human activity.
Prof Mirza Dikari Kusrini, a lecturer in the Department of Forest Resource Conservation and Ecotourism, Faculty of Forestry and Environment (Fahutan) at IPB University, explained that climate change affects snakes’ behavior, distribution, and movement patterns. … Full article
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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The UN promotes alarmist political/ideological nonsense about natural disasters and the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The UN’s obsession with “reducing greenhouse gas emissions” begs the question:
Aletho News 