There are 149 states party to the Genocide Convention. Every one of them has the right to call out the genocide in progress in Gaza and report it to the United Nations. In the event that another state party disputes the claim of genocide – and Israel, the United States and the United Kingdom are all states party – then the International Court of Justice is required to adjudicate on “the responsibility of a State for genocide”.
These are the relevant articles of the genocide convention:
Article VIII
Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III.
Article IX
Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfilment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.
Note that here “parties to the dispute” means the states disputing the facts of genocide, not the parties to the genocide/conflict. Any single state party is able to invoke the Convention.
There is no doubt that Israel’s actions amount to genocide. Numerous international law experts have said so and genocidal intent has been directly expressed by numerous Israeli ministers, generals and public officials.
This is the definition of genocide in international law, from the Genocide Convention:
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
I can see no room to doubt whatsoever that Israel’s current campaign of bombing of civilians and of the deprivation of food, water and other necessities of life to Palestinians amounts to genocide under articles II a), b) and c).
It is also worth considering Articles III and IV:
Article III
The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.
Article IV
Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.
There is, at the very least, a strong prima facie case that the actions of the United States and United Kingdom and others, in openly providing direct military support to be used in genocide, are complicity in genocide. The point of Article IV is that individuals are responsible, not just states. So Netanyahu, Biden and Sunak bear individual responsibility. So, indeed, do all those who have been calling for the destruction of the Palestinians.
It is very definitely worth activating the Genocide Convention. A judgement of the International Court of Justice that Israel is guilty of genocide would have an extraordinary diplomatic effect and would cause domestic difficulties in the UK and even in the US in continuing to subsidise and arm Israel. The International Court of Justice is the most respected of international institutions; while the United States has repudiated its compulsory jurisdiction, the United Kingdom has not and the EU positively accepts it.
If the International Court of Justice makes a determination of genocide, then the International Criminal Court does not have to determine that genocide has happened. This is important because unlike the august and independent ICJ, the ICC is very much a western government puppet institution which will wiggle out of action if it can. But a determination of the ICJ of genocide and of complicity in genocide would reduce the ICC’s task to determining which individuals bear the responsibility. That is a prospect which can indeed alter the calculations of politicians.
It is also the fact that a reference for genocide would force the western media to address the issue and use the term, rather than just pump out propaganda about Hamas fighting bases in hospitals. Furthermore a judgement from the ICJ would automatically trigger a reference to the United Nations General Assembly – crucially not to the western-vetoed Security Council.
All this begs the question of why no state has yet invoked the Genocide Convention. This is especially remarkable as Palestine is one of the 149 states party to the Genocide Convention, and for this purpose would have standing before both the UN and the ICJ.
I am afraid the question of why Palestine has not invoked the Genocide Convention takes us somewhere very dark. Anyone who, like George Galloway and myself, cut their political teeth in left-wing politics of Dundee of the 1970s has (long story) their experience and contacts with Fatah, and my sympathies have always very much lain with Fatah rather than Hamas. They still do, with the aspiration for a democratic, secular Palestine. It is Fatah who occupy the Palestinian seat at the United Nations, and the decision for Palestine to call into play the Genocide Convention lies with Mahmoud Abbas.
It is more and more difficult daily to support Abbas. He seems extraordinarily passive, and the suspicion that he is more concerned with refighting the Palestinian civil war than with resisting the genocide is impossible to shake. By invoking the Genocide Convention he could put himself and Fatah back at the centre of the narrative. But he does nothing. I do not want to believe that corruption and a Blinken promise of inheriting Gaza are Mahmoud’s motivators. But at the moment, I cannot grab on to any other explanation to believe in.
Any one of the 139 states party could invoke the Genocide Convention against Israel and its co-conspirators. Those states include Iran, Russia, Libya, Malaysia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, Afghanistan, Cuba, Ireland, Iceland, Jordan, South Africa, Turkey and Qatar. But not one of these states has called out the genocide. Why?
It is not because the Genocide Convention is a dead letter. It is not. It was invoked against Serbia by Bosnia and Herzegovina and the ICJ ruled against Serbia with regard to the massacre at Srebrenica. This fed directly through to ICC prosecutions.
Some states may simply not have thought of it. For Arab states in particular, the fact that Palestine itself has not invoked the Genocide Convention may provide an excuse. EU states can hide behind bloc unanimity.
But I am afraid that the truth is that no state cares sufficiently about the thousands of Palestinian children already killed and thousands more who will shortly be killed, to introduce another factor of hostility in their relationship with the United States. Just as at this weekend’s summit in Saudi Arabia, where Islamic countries could not agree an oil and gas boycott of Israel, the truth is that those in power really do not care about a genocide in Gaza. They care about their own interests.
It just needs one state to invoke the Genocide Convention and change the narrative and the international dynamic. That will only happen through the power of the people in pressing the idea on their governments. This is where everybody can do a little something to add to the pressure. Please do what you can.
Hat tip to the indefatigable Sam Husseini who has been pressing the Genocide Convention on the White House.
November 18, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Gaza, Zionism |
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The CDC has recently announced that exemptions to vaccinations have hit record highs in the United States. We take a look at the reasons why parents are choosing to forgo vaccinations for their young children.
Founder and Executive Director OF Texans for Medical Freedom, Jackie Shlegel, joins Del to share the monumental legal win this week in Texas and how she played an integral part in helping get SB7 passed, which protects private employees from being mandated to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Jackie details how she worked closely with Texas Governor Greg Abbott to pass this historic legislation.
November 17, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular, Video | Human rights, United States |
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The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine may increase the prevalence and distribution of some HPV virus strains not targeted by the vaccine — including some strains that are linked to cancer — resulting in unknown and potentially concerning consequences, according to a study published last week in Cell Host & Microbe.
The study was not designed to show that the HPV vaccine prevents cancer or that HPV or cervical cancer screenings need to change, though the authors did include a brief, speculative mention of the potential implications of their findings for future screening.
Yet STATNews, reporting on the study, said the findings showed that the HPV vaccine is so effective at preventing cancers — particularly when both boys and girls are vaccinated — that cancer-screening protocols may need to change.
Kim Mack Rosenberg, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) acting general counsel and co-author of “The HPV Vaccine On Trial: Seeking Justice For A Generation,” told The Defender the STATNews story was misleading:
“The STATNews headline — misguidedly suggesting even less frequent screening — is deeply troubling. Statistics in the U.S. and elsewhere suggest that cervical cancer is on the rise in younger age cohorts where we least expect to see cervical cancer, while continuing to decline in the older populations where cervical cancer historically is diagnosed.
“We know from prior studies that the HPV vaccines already have led to decreased cervical intraepithelial neoplasia/cervical cancer screening at appropriate intervals for young women around the world.
“We have also seen a number of cases in the vaccine injury compensation program in the U.S. (and the multidistrict litigation in federal court) alleging cervical cancer associated with HPV vaccination.”
‘Imminent risk of viral evolutionary responses’ may ‘introduce problems’
The study included approximately 11,000 — not 60,000 as STAT reported — young women born in 1992, 1993 and 1994 from 33 Finnish communities. The researchers divided them into three groups based on their community’s vaccination strategy: gender-neutral HPV vaccination, girls-only vaccination and no vaccination.
Four years after the groups were first offered vaccination (and eight years after for a smaller subset of around 3,600 subjects), the researchers tested for 16 types of genital HPV viruses considered oncogenic (linked to tumor formation) because they are associated with cervical or other cancers. The presence of oncogenic HPV is not the only risk factor for cervical cancer.
There are over 200 strains of the HPV virus, a subset of which are deemed high-risk. Depending on the vaccine, HPV vaccines target only two (Cervavix targets strains 16 and 18), four (Gardasil 4 targets strains 6, 11, 16 and 18) or nine (Gardasil 9, which adds strains 31, 33, 45, 52, 58) of those high-risk strains.
The researchers investigated how different community-level HPV vaccination strategies might change the prevalence of different HPV strains.
They found that in both vaccination groups, four and eight years following vaccination, there was a significant depletion of the high-risk HPV types targeted by the vaccine relative to the non-vaccinated group. The depletion was stronger in the gender-neutral group — when boys had also been vaccinated.
But they also found a higher prevalence of other, lower-risk oncogenic HPV strains than previously existed, particularly in the gender-neutral group. As the vaccine suppressed the targeted strains, the authors explained, other strains moved into the “niche” they formerly occupied.
That means that rather than reducing the incidence of the HPV virus altogether, vaccination changed the distribution of HPV strains, they wrote. Those oncogenic strains not targeted by the vaccine that grew in prevalence are also linked to cancer but at lower rates.
Other studies also have shown that HPV vaccination programs have caused the replacement of the previously most common types of HPVs with rarer types of HPV that also cause cancer.
The authors noted that “the imminent risk of viral evolutionary responses” would diminish the impact of HPV vaccination.
“It is tempting to suggest that an increase of [other oncogenic strains] or the like with increased virulence might cause a risk of HPV-related cancers in the future,” they said.
In other words, new strains that occupy the niche vacated by the vaccine-targeted strains could become more virulent and potentially cancer-causing.
The authors concluded that to control oncogenic HPVs and related cancers, more research on how long-term vaccine use could change the disease evolution is imperative. They said this may have implications for future screening protocols, but did not elaborate.
Rosenberg said the implications are that more rigorous screening protocols may be necessary. She said:
“In ‘HPV Vaccine on Trial,’ my co-authors and I discussed type replacement, a phenomenon found with HPV vaccines and other vaccines.
“The study discussed in the STATNews article actually raises again the specter of type replacement — which should support more rigorous screening protocols, not a lackadaisical, unsupported reduction in screening placing the health of untold numbers of young women at risk.”
Why would ‘type replacement’ matter?
The study authors hypothesized that this strain-type replacement occurs because vaccine-induced immunity reduces the number of people susceptible to the targeted strains and leads to a biased immune response favoring infection by other strains.
Type replacement could also lead to the selection for immune escape variants — new variants that result from the selective pressure on the virus from imperfect vaccination.
Vaccine-favored variants have developed after vaccination for a number of diseases, including hepatitis B, pertussis, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Marek’s disease, malaria and diphtheria.
In some cases, like Marek’s disease and malaria, research shows vaccination led to an increased prevalence of variants with increased virulence. In others, like pertussis, this evolution was linked to the paradoxical reemergence of the disease in highly vaccinated populations.
In other cases, such as Haemophilus influenzae type b, evidence suggested that vaccination caused a milder strain to become more virulent.
One possible biological explanation in these cases could be original antigenic sin, a phenomenon wherein the molecular immune memory to a previous antigen hampers the ability of the immune system to properly recognize a structurally similar target, J. Jay Couey, CHD staff scientist, told The Defender.
Another related but separate mechanism — antibody-dependent enhancement — occurs when antibodies aimed at previous antigens (from infection or vaccination) have the paradoxical effect of increasing the severity of disease in subsequent infections, Couey said.
“Neither of these biological possibilities are discussed in either the STAT or Cell Microbe articles in general or in relation to the questions regarding the ‘ecology’ of HPV,” Couey added.
In the study, the authors emphasized that particularly among the gender-neutral vaccine groups, the targeted strains were suppressed. However, between four and eight years post-vaccination, the levels of HPV diversity were similar to those of the non-vaccinated control group.
The researchers found that after vaccination, non-targeted cancer-linked HPV types increased in prevalence and diversity. This suggests that even with vaccination, different cancer-linked HPV types are still evolving in complex ways.
This raises questions about the long-term effects of the HPV vaccination on the antigenic variation and possible virulence shifts of the remaining oncogenic HPVs, the authors noted.
Cervical cancer ‘eradication’ by vaccinating boys?
In the authors’ press release on the study — also reported in Medical Xpress — they claimed definitively, “The most effective way to prevent cervical cancer is to give HPV vaccines to both boys and girls.”
This claim was based on their finding that in the communities where boys and girls were vaccinated, they saw a decline in four types of oncogenic HPV (16, 18, 31 and 45) and in the communities where only girls were vaccinated, they saw a decline in only three types of oncogenic HPV (16, 18 and 31).
“This shows that you get stronger herd immunity if you vaccinate both boys and girls,” said lead author Ville N. Pimenoff, Ph.D. “According to our calculations, it would take 20 years of vaccinating girls to achieve the same effect that can be achieved in eight years with a relatively moderate vaccination coverage rate of gender-neutral vaccination.”
However, they concede this herd immunity would not eliminate the risk of HPV-linked cancer, given the type replacement they identified.
Couey said these claims about the efficacy of gender-neutral vaccination are based on a questionable methodology, using a “dubiously blurred” combination of data sets.
Couey told The Defender :
“Their ‘observations’ are made without any data from HPV prevalence in these populations before vaccination and using a general linear model, or GLM, to interpret their data set. There are no quantitative differences for the authors to draw from in their data without mathematically extending it to a synthetically generated data set using a mathematical fitting technique the authors termed a graphical independence network, or GIN, model.
“The distinction between conclusions drawn from real-world observations in experiments versus conclusions drawn from mathematical modeling inference is dubiously blurred in this article and the follow-up coverage of it.
“Their conclusions are not based on disproving a null hypothesis using an experiment. Their conclusions are at best inferences drawn from the interpretation of mathematical models applied to limited real-world data.”
This analysis builds on previous analyses of these same cohorts the authors did with colleagues from Merck, GSK and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
That research also claimed that HPV vaccination with moderate coverage “eradicates” oncogenic HPV if a gender-neutral strategy is used. It also asserted in 2018 that there was no evidence of type replacement — findings this current study upends.
Those Big Pharma corporations have been dedicated over the last several years to expanding HPV vaccination throughout the world to girls, but also more recently to boys and to young and middle-aged adults.
In 2020, the WHO’s World Health Assembly ratified a plan to eradicate cervical cancer as a public health problem worldwide, largely by expanding global HPV vaccination.
Various agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services have spent at least tens of millions of dollars on behavioral research to increase vaccine uptake in the U.S.
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance —- primarily funded by the Gates Foundation —- recently announced WHO-supported plans to vaccinate 86 million girls in low- and middle-income countries against HPV by 2025 as part of the global plan to eradicate cervical cancer.
At the same time, HPV Gardasil vaccine-producer Merck, which has invested heavily in shaping the market since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug in 2006, last month announced that its 2023 third-quarter Gardasil sales grew 13% to $2.6 billion.
Merck’s Gardasil was first licensed in 2006 for use in girls and women ages 9-26 to prevent four high-risk strains of HPV.
The FDA in 2009 expanded the license for use in males ages 9-26 for the prevention of genital warts and in 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended it for routine use in boys.
In 2014, the FDA approved Gardasil 9, designed to protect against nine HPV strains, for use in the prevention of HPV-related cervical, vaginal and vulvar cancers in females and HPV-related anogenital lesions and anal cancers in males and females.
The FDA in 2018 also expanded the age range of potential HPV vaccines to males and females between the ages of 9 and 45.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
November 17, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | HPV vaccine |
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Attacks on free speech are advancing globally, not just in the United States. This declaration puts a stake in the ground for a new global free speech movement.
The Westminster Declaration
We write as journalists, artists, authors, activists, technologists, and academics to warn of increasing international censorship that threatens to erode centuries-old democratic norms.
Coming from the left, right, and centre, we are united by our commitment to universal human rights and freedom of speech, and we are all deeply concerned about attempts to label protected speech as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and other ill-defined terms.
This abuse of these terms has resulted in the censorship of ordinary people, journalists, and dissidents in countries all over the world.
Such interference with the right to free speech suppresses valid discussion about matters of urgent public interest, and undermines the foundational principles of representative democracy.
Across the globe, government actors, social media companies, universities, and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices. These large-scale coordinated efforts are sometimes referred to as the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.’
This complex often operates through direct government policies. Authorities in India[1] and Turkey[2] have seized the power to remove political content from social media. The legislature in Germany[3] and the Supreme Court in Brazil[4] are criminalising political speech. In other countries, measures such as Ireland’s ‘Hate Speech’ Bill[5], Scotland’s Hate Crime Act[6], the UK’s Online Safety Bill[7], and Australia’s ‘Misinformation’ Bill[8] threaten to severely restrict expression and create a chilling effect.
But the Censorship Industrial Complex operates through more subtle methods. These include visibility filtering, labelling, and manipulation of search engine results. Through deplatforming and flagging, social media censors have already silenced lawful opinions on topics of national and geopolitical importance. They have done so with the full support of ‘disinformation experts’ and ‘fact-checkers’ in the mainstream media, who have abandoned the journalistic values of debate and intellectual inquiry.
As the Twitter Files revealed, tech companies often perform censorial ‘content moderation’ in coordination with government agencies and civil society. Soon, the European Union’s Digital Services Act will formalise this relationship by giving platform data to ‘vetted researchers’ from NGOs and academia, relegating our speech rights to the discretion of these unelected and unaccountable entities.
Some politicians and NGOs[9] are even aiming to target end-to-end encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram.[10] If end-to-end encryption is broken, we will have no remaining avenues for authentic private conversations in the digital sphere.
Although foreign disinformation between states is a real issue, agencies designed to combat these threats, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the United States, are increasingly being turned inward against the public. Under the guise of preventing harm and protecting truth, speech is being treated as a permitted activity rather than an inalienable right.
We recognize that words can sometimes cause offence, but we reject the idea that hurt feelings and discomfort, even if acute, are grounds for censorship. Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society, and is essential for holding governments accountable, empowering vulnerable groups, and reducing the risk of tyranny.
Speech protections are not just for views we agree with; we must strenuously protect speech for the views that we most strongly oppose. Only in the public square can these views be heard and properly challenged.
What’s more, time and time again, unpopular opinions and ideas have eventually become conventional wisdom. By labelling certain political or scientific positions as ‘misinformation’ or ‘malinformation,’ our societies risk getting stuck in false paradigms that will rob humanity of hard-earned knowledge and obliterate the possibility of gaining new knowledge. Free speech is our best defence against disinformation.
The attack on speech is not just about distorted rules and regulations – it is a crisis of humanity itself. Every equality and justice campaign in history has relied on an open forum to voice dissent. In countless examples, including the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement, social progress has depended on freedom of expression.
We do not want our children to grow up in a world where they live in fear of speaking their minds. We want them to grow up in a world where their ideas can be expressed, explored and debated openly – a world that the founders of our democracies envisioned when they enshrined free speech into our laws and constitutions.
The US First Amendment is a strong example of how the right to freedom of speech, of the press, and of conscience can be firmly protected under the law. One need not agree with the U.S. on every issue to acknowledge that this is a vital ‘first liberty’ from which all other liberties follow. It is only through free speech that we can denounce violations of our rights and fight for new freedoms.
There also exists a clear and robust international protection for free speech. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)[11] was drafted in 1948 in response to atrocities committed during World War II. Article 19 of the UDHR states, ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’ While there may be a need for governments to regulate some aspects of social media, such as age limits, these regulations should never infringe on the human right to freedom of expression.
As is made clear by Article 19, the corollary of the right to free speech is the right to information. In a democracy, no one has a monopoly over what is considered to be true. Rather, truth must be discovered through dialogue and debate – and we cannot discover truth without allowing for the possibility of error.
Censorship in the name of ‘preserving democracy’ inverts what should be a bottom-up system of representation into a top-down system of ideological control. This censorship is ultimately counter-productive: it sows mistrust, encourages radicalization, and de-legitimizes the democratic process.
In the course of human history, attacks on free speech have been a precursor to attacks on all other liberties. Regimes that eroded free speech have always inevitably weakened and damaged other core democratic structures. In the same fashion, the elites that push for censorship today are also undermining democracy. What has changed though, is the broad scale and technological tools through which censorship can be enacted.
We believe that free speech is essential for ensuring our safety from state abuses of power – abuses that have historically posed a far greater threat than the words of lone individuals or even organised groups. For the sake of human welfare and flourishing, we make the following 3 calls to action.
- We call on governments and international organisations to fulfill their responsibilities to the people and to uphold Article 19 of the UDHR.
- We call on tech corporations to undertake to protect the digital public square as defined in Article 19 of the UDHR and refrain from politically motivated censorship, the censorship of dissenting voices, and censorship of political opinion.
- And finally, we call on the general public to join us in the fight to preserve the people’s democratic rights. Legislative changes are not enough. We must also build an atmosphere of free speech from the ground up by rejecting the climate of intolerance that encourages self-censorship and that creates unnecessary personal strife for many. Instead of fear and dogmatism, we must embrace inquiry and debate.
We stand for your right to ask questions. Heated arguments, even those that may cause distress, are far better than no arguments at all.
Censorship robs us of the richness of life itself. Free speech is the foundation for creating a life of meaning and a thriving humanity – through art, poetry, drama, story, philosophy, song, and more.
This declaration was the result of an initial meeting of free speech champions from around the world who met in Westminster, London, at the end of June 2023. As signatories of this statement, we have fundamental political and ideological disagreements. However, it is only by coming together that we will defeat the encroaching forces of censorship so that we can maintain our ability to openly debate and challenge one another. It is in the spirit of difference and debate that we sign the Westminster Declaration.
- Matt Taibbi, Journalist, USA
- Michael Shellenberger, Public, USA
- Jonathan Haidt, Social Psychologist, NYU, USA
- John McWhorter, Linguist, Columbia, Author, USA
- Steven Pinker, Psychologist, Harvard, USA
- Julian Assange, Editor, Founder of Wikileaks, Australia
- Tim Robbins, Actor, Filmmaker, USA
- Nadine Strossen, Professor of Law, NYLS, USA
- Glenn Loury, Economist, USA
- Richard Dawkins, Biologist, UK
- John Cleese, Comedian, Acrobat, UK
- Slavoj Žižek, Philosopher, Author, Slovenia
- Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University, US
- Oliver Stone, Filmmaker, USA
- Edward Snowden, Whistleblower, USA
- Greg Lukianoff, President and CEO Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, USA
- Stella Assange, Campaigner, UK
- Glenn Greenwald, Journalist, USA
- Claire Fox, Founder of the Academy of Ideas, UK
- Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, Psychologist, Author, Canada
- Bari Weiss, Journalist, USA
- Walter Kirn, Author, USA
- Peter Hitchens, Author, Journalist, UK
- Niall Ferguson, Historian, Stanford, UK
- Matt Ridley, Journalist, Author, UK
- Melissa Chen, Journalist, Spectator, Singapore/USA
- Yanis Varoufakis, Economist, Greece
- Peter Boghossian, Philosopher, Founding Faculty Fellow, University of Austin, USA
- Michael Shermer, Science Writer, USA
- Alan Sokal, Professor of Mathematics, UCL, UK
- Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology, Oxford, UK
- Jay Bhattacharya, Professor, Stanford, USA
- Martin Kulldorff, Professor of Medicine (on leave), Harvard, USA
- Aaron Kheiriaty, Psychiatrist, Author, USA
- Chris Hedges, Journalist, Author, USA
- Lee Fang, Independent Journalist, USA
- Alex Gutentag, Journalist, USA
- Iain McGilchrist, Psychiatrist, Philosopher, UK
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Human Rights Activist, Author, Netherlands
- Konstantin Kisin, Author, UK
- Leighton Woodhouse, Public, USA
- Andrew Lowenthal, liber-net, Australia
- Aaron Mate, Journalist, USA
- Izabella Kaminska, Journalist, The Blind Spot, UK
- Nina Power, Writer, UK
- Kmele Foster, Journalist, Media Entrepreneur, USA
- Toby Young, Journalist, Free Speech Union, UK
- Winston Marshall, Journalist, The Spectator, UK
- Jacob Siegel, Tablet, USA/Israel
- Ulrike Guerot, Founder of European Democracy Lab, Germany
- Heather E. Heying, Evolutionary Biologist, USA
- Bret Weinstein, Evolutionary Biologist, USA
- Martina Pastorelli, Independent Journalist, Italy
- Leandro Narloch, Independent Journalist, Brazil
- Ana Henkel, Independent Journalist, Brazil
- Mia Ashton, Journalist, Canada
- Micha Narberhaus, The Protopia Lab, Spain/Germany
- Alex Sheridan, Free Speech Ireland
- Ben Scallan, Gript Media, Ireland
- Thomas Fazi, Independent Journalist, Italy
- Jean F. Queralt, Technologist, Founder @ The IO Foundation, Malaysia/Spain
- Phil Shaw, Campaigner, Operation People, New Zealand
- Jeremy Hildreth, Independent, UK
- Craig Snider, Independent, USA
- Eve Kay, TV Producer, UK
- Helen Joyce, Journalist, UK
- Dietrich Brüggemann, Filmmaker, Germany
- Adam B. Coleman, Founder of Wrong Speak Publishing, USA
- Helen Pluckrose, Author, UK
- Michael Nayna, Filmmaker, Australia
- Paul Rossi, Educator, Vertex Partnership Academics, USA
- Juan Carlos Girauta, Politician, Spain
- Andrew Neish, KC, UK
- Steven Berkoff, Actor, Playright, UK
- Patrick Hughes, Artist, UK
- Adam Creighton, Journalist, Australia
- Julia Hartley-Brewer, Journalist, UK
- Robert Cibis, Filmmaker, Germany
- Piers Robinson, Organization for Propaganda Studies, UK
- Dirk Pohlmann, Journalist, Germany
- Mathias Bröckers, Author, Journalist, Germany
- Kira Phillips, Documentary Filmmaker, UK
- Diane Atkinson, Historian, Biographer, UK
- Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics, Birkbeck, University of Buckingham, Canada
- Laura Dodsworth, Journalist and Author, UK
- Nellie Bowles, Journalist, USA
- Andrew Tettenborn, Professor of Law, Swansea University, UK
- Julius Grower, Fellow, St. Hugh’s College, UK
- Nick Dixon, Comedian, UK
- Dominic Frisby, Comedian, UK
- James Orr, Associate Professor, University of Cambridge, UK
- Brendan O’Neill, Journalist, spiked, UK
- Jan Jekielek, Journalist, Canada
- Andrew Roberts, Historian, UK
- Robert Tombs, Historian, UK
- Ben Schwarz, Journalist, USA
- Xavier Azalbert, Investigative Scientific Journalist, France
- Doug Stokes, International Relations Professor, University of Exeter, UK
- James Allan, Professor of Law, University of Queensland, UK
- David McGrogan, Professor of Law, Northumbria University, UK
- Jacob Mchangama, Author, Denmark
- Nigel Biggar, Chairman, Free Speech Union, UK
- David Goodhart, Journalist, Author, UK
- Catherine Austin Fitts, The Solari Report, Netherlands
- Matt Goodwin, Politics Professor, University of Kent, UK
- Alan Miller, Together Association, UK
- Catherine Liu, Cultural Theorist, Author, USA
- Stefan Millius, Journalist, Switzerland
- Philip Hamburger, Professor of Law, Columbia, USA
- Andrew Doyle, Author and journalist, UK
- Rueben Kirkham, Co-Director, Free Speech Union of Australia, Australia
- Jeffrey Tucker, Author, USA
- Sarah Gon, Director, Free Speech Union, South Africa
- Dara Macdonald, Co-Director, Free Speech Union, Australia
- Jonathan Ayling, Chief Executive, Free Speech Union, New Zealand
- David Zweig, Journalist, Author, USA
- Juan Soto Ivars, Author, Spain
- Colin Wright, Evolutionary Biologist, USA
- Gad Saad, Professor, Evolutionary Behavioral Scientist, Author, Canada
- Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, USA
- Jill Glasspool-Malone, PhD., USA
- Jordi Pigem, Philosopher, Author, Spain
- Holly Lawford-Smith, Associate Professor in Political Philosophy, University of Melbourne, Australia
- Michele Santoro, Journalist, TV Host, Presenter, Italy
- Dr. James Smith, Podcaster, Literature Scholar, RHUL, UK
- Francis Foster, Comedian, UK
- Coleman Hughes, Writer, Podcaster, USA
- Marco Bassani, Political Theorist, Historian, Milan University, Italy
- Isabella Loiodice, Professor of Comparative Public Law, University of Bari, Italy
- Luca Ricolfi, Professor, Sociologist, Turin University, Italy
- Marcello Foa, Journalist, Former President of Rai, Italy
- Andrea Zhok, Philosopher, University of Milan, Italy
- Paolo Cesaretti, Professor of Byzantine Civilization, University of Bergamo, Italy
- Alberto Contri, Mass Media Expert, Italy
- Carlo Lottieri, Philosopher, University of Verona, Italy
- Alessandro Di Battista, Political Activist, Writer, Italy
- Paola Mastrocola, Writer, Italy
- Carlo Freccero, Television Author, Media Expert, Italy
- Giorgio Bianchi, Independent Journalist, Italy
- Nello Preterossi, Professor, University of Salerno, Scientific Director of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies, Italy
- Efrat Fenigson, Journalist, Podcaster, Israel
- Eli Vieira, Journalist, Genetic Biologist, Brazil
- Stephen Moore, Author and Analyst, Canada
Footnotes
- Pahwa, Nitish. ‘Twitter Blocked a Country.’ Slate Magazine, 1 Apr. 2023, slate.com/technology/2023/04/twitter-blocked-pakistan-india-modi-musk-khalistan-gandhi.html.
- Stein, Perry. ‘Twitter Says It Will Restrict Access to Some Tweets before Turkey’s Election.’ The Washington Post, 15 May 2023, www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/05/13/turkey-twitter-musk-erdogan/.
- Hänel, Lisa. ‘Germany criminalizes denying war crimes, genocide.’ Deutsche Welle, 25 Nov. 2022, https://www.dw.com/en/germany-criminalizes-denying-war-crimes-genocide/a-63834791
- Savarese, Mauricio, and Joshua Goodman. ‘Crusading Judge Tests Boundaries of Free Speech in Brazil.’ AP News, 26 Jan. 2023, apnews.com/article/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-government-af5987e833a681e6f056fe63789ca375.
- Nanu, Maighna. ‘Irish People Could Be Jailed for “Hate Speech”, Critics of Proposed Law Warn.’ The Telegraph, 17 June 2023, www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/06/1 7/irish-people-jailed-hate-speech-new-law/?WT.mc_id=tmgoff_psc_ppc_us_news_dsa_generalnews.
- The Economist Newspaper. (n.d.). Scotland’s new hate crime act will have a chilling effect on free speech. The Economist. https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2021/11/08/scotlands-new-hate-crime-act-will-have-a-chilling-effect-on-free-speech
- Lomas, Natasha. ‘Security Researchers Latest to Blast UK’s Online Safety Bill as Encryption Risk.’ TechCrunch, 5 July 2023, techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/uk-online-safety-bill-risks-e2ee/.
- Al-Nashar, Nabil. ‘Millions of Dollars in Fines to Punish Online Misinformation under New Draft Bill.’ ABC News, 25 June 2023, www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-25/fines-to-punish-online-misinformation-under-new-draft-bill/102521500.
- ‘Cryptochat.’ Meedan, meedan.com/project/cryptochat. Accessed 8 July 2023.
- Lomas, Natasha.’Security Researchers Latest to Blast UK’s Online Safety Bill as Encryption Risk.’ TechCrunch, 5 July 2023, techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/uk-online-safety-bill-risks-e2ee/.
- United Nations General Assembly. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). New York: United Nations General Assembly, 1948.
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November 16, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | Human rights |
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She knows not what she’s doing and she and her ilk are killing and harming too many people. Amen.
Your Local Epidemiologist at one of her Disinformation Galas. She doesn’t look too traumatized to me.
America’s local epidemiologist is a lady named Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, who publishes the most popular and lucrative “Science” newsletter on Substack. The Substack is called Your Local Epidemiologist.
Since she is my local epidemiologist and has more than 211,000 subscribers (more than 20,000 paid), I sometimes read Dr. Jetelina’s dispatches to see what I shouldn’t think.
Her latest dispatch informed me our local epidemiologist is extremely concerned about the rise in vaccine hesitancy. But what really frightens her is the continued prevalence of misinformation and disinformation and the fact fewer people seem to be trusting our trusted public institutions and experts like herself.
A few excerpts from recent newsletters should give readers a sense of why this particular influencer is terrified for her own safety and the safety of all the other scientists she argues are being “harassed” for speaking “the truth.” As I’m prone to do, I’ll offer a few of my own editorial comments on her editorial comments.
***
In her most recent article, the headline expresses Dr. Jetelina’s concern.
Drop in routine vaccinations
Driven by an increase in vaccine exemptions and misinformation.
The lede paragraph (emphasis added):
“CDC released the latest vaccine exemptions and routine vaccination rates data for last school year. This, coupled with new data on growing acceptance of vaccine misinformation, shows a slow, painful bleed.”
Re-stated: Despite 46 months of highly-coordinated, non-stop, ultra-expensive efforts to defeat vaccine hesitancy, it turns out too many members of the the public still have a “growing acceptance of vaccine misinformation.” If this was not the case, Our Local Epidemiologist (OLE) wouldn’t be so alarmed and wouldn’t have written all these stories.
OLE asks, “What is indirectly causing a decline in vaccinations?” and then answers her own question:
“Misinformation is increasing. Our information landscape has dramatically changed—false news spreads 6 times faster than the truth on social media, and 70% of Americans get health news on social media. Public health has not kept up.”
One might ask who gets to determine “the truth?” The answer, of course, would be: People like Our Local Epidemiologist.
By far, the most massive “social media” platform is Facebook … so I guess Facebook is letting vaccine “false information” spread to its one billion users.
This strikes me as a giant fib as I personally know Facebook has suspended my account at least a half dozen times and, when my account wasn’t suspended, any post I made about a Covid topic was “flagged” or seen by zero people brave enough to hit my post with a “like.”
It would be interesting information to learn how many millions of people have been temporarily or permanently banned or shadow-banned by Facebook’s algorithms, Artificial Intelligence and the company’s more than 15,000 “content moderators.”
Whatever this number, it’s not nearly large enough for America’s terrified and frustrated local epidemiologist.
Get Vaccinated or Else …
More specifically, OLE says the lack of sufficient censorship is “is directly impacting behaviors like getting vaccinated.”
I now know the answer to just about every public health issue for OLE is more vaccines and more people getting more of these vaccines.
Like the devil, OLE mixes the truth with lies. The first five words of this sentence convey an obvious truth:
“Loss of trust in institutions also drives misinformation and behaviors,” she writes, adding, “This … will surely have dire consequences to communities.”
So what really bothers OLE is that more people have “lost trust in institutions.”
In the thousands of words she’s written about the plagues of misinformation and disinformation, she doesn’t tell us why so many people might have lost faith in their now non-trusted institutions …. except, the only possible answer (for her) … the public has been getting “disinformation” from social media.
It took Our Local Epidemiologist years to get her credentials to become OLE, but one could condense the operative curriculum message to one sentence: “Everyone get your dad-blasted vaccines!”
I think I’ve got it. Not enough censorship = too much disinformation, which leads to too much “vaccine hesitancy” which = “dire consequences” – which means everyone is going to die … from Covid, the flu, RSV and the measles.
***
In a linked article from June 27, 2023, OLE agues that not only are communities going to be in dire straits due to vaccine hesitancy, the nation’s narrative-spouting scientists are also increasingly coming under attack.
The headline gives us OLE’s “truth” …
‘Harassment is out of control’
In this article, OLE reports that she feels increasingly threatened and gives us the example of another scientist, Peter Hotez, who “experienced pile-ons, stalking, and bullying after events unfolded on Twitter. So much so that law enforcement got involved. A complete nightmare.”
Some readers will remember Hotez as the pediatrician/scientist who was afraid to debate Robert Kennedy, Jr. on Joe Rogan’s podcast show.
As far as I can tell, nobody has physically attacked Hotez and his family members are still alive. This ensured that the “survival rate” (from mob violence) of narrative-spouting epidemiologists remains 100 percent.
Whatever happened to the Hotez family … “… He’s not alone. These nightmares are now a common occurrence for scientists and physicians in public health. Both online and offline. For vaccines. For gun violence. For reproductive health. And apparently for wildfires now, too.”
“It’s gotten out of control, which becomes an individual risk as well as a risk to the communities we serve.”
According to this sub headline ….
This is a huge problem
Vaccine deaths, injuries and lockdowns that caused suicides and millions of people to lose their jobs was NOT even an itty-bitty problem … but all these nightmarish non-attacks on well-paid, heroic scientists and doctors are a “huge problem.”
I didn’t know any of this, but I do now.
In her article on terrorized scientists, OLE doesn’t mention whether any “pro-vaxxers” have threatened the life of, say, Robert Kennedy, Jr.. Or if any of the hundreds of thousands of scientists, doctors and nurses who questioned the necessity of Covid vaccines have perhaps suffered some measure of unpleasantness due to their views.
Per Our Local Epidemiologist, it’s only “anti-vaxxers” who bully, smear and attack others.
A political scientist might also ask who actually possesses the power to fire large numbers of people or who has the power to discriminate against unpopular minorities who should not be allowed to use a water fountain … attend a play or travel outside of the country.
OLE informs us with another sub-headline:
‘Women scientists are particularly at risk’
OLE even published an anonymous note someone left her.
I hate to suggest I might be tougher than Our Local Epidemiologist, but if someone left me a note like this I don’t think I’d be traumatized the rest of my life … or even for two seconds.
Speaking for all the terrorized scientists, OLE writes:
“… too often scientists assume the consequences alone. This takes a significant personal toll.”
Which makes me wonder what terrible consequences people like her have been forced bear alone or what this “significant toll” really was or is.
In the case of OLE, before Covid, she was an obscure epidemiologist nobody had heard of. Today, she is a millionaire Substack author who also works for the CDC and the White House.
As she informed us in another article, Dr. Jetelina has been asked to speak at “quite a few” conferences:
“Last week I was invited to the Nobel Prize Summit on information integrity at the National Academy of Science. I’ve attended quite a few of these types of events lately—discussions on mis- and disinformation’s impact on truth, trust, and hope.”
So one toll on her is that she’s been invited to participate at the “Nobel Prize Summit on information integrity at the National Academy of Science” plus a lot of other swanky Disinformation Galas.
I’m sure she was heckled relentlessly by her colleagues and was constantly looking over her shoulder in case some bellboy slipped her a note saying he’s not impressed by her brand of epidemiology.
I include this excerpt to illustrate it’s not just OLE who’s worried about mis- and disinformation – it’s everyone who’s attending all these summits.
My main take-away from the whining of OLE is that her colleagues (millions of them) mean business about stopping this mis- and disinformation.
If you haven’t picked up on her views yet, here they are in another sub-headline:
Mis/disinformation is a major problem.
This sentence must be what really irks our local epidemiologist:
“Truth is now debatable.”
Here, I can only assume that her debating point is that the truth should NOT be “debatable.”
However, I bet she’d get a debate on this point from Socrates, a man who was put to death for asking politically-incorrect questions.
“No questioning allowed” equals no debate, which actually equals no Scientific Method – which is what Our Local Epidemiologist really espouses.
These sentences dropped my jaw:
“The major challenge in scientific communication is that the truth is now networked by peers. Because of this, disinformation and misinformation are eroding public trust in science, becoming a threat to the planet, and costing lives.”
(Aside: The same day I read several articles by OLE, I listened to this classic rift from the late great George Carlin, who told us years ago our planet was one tough sucker and was going to be just fine – even if too many people used plastic or drive in gas-powered cars.)
MORE worry-mongering from OLE …
“But it goes beyond a pandemic—climate change, routine vaccinations, gun violence, reproductive health. Everyone—the private sector, government, researchers, and communities nationally and internationally—is rightfully worried.”
FWIW, this is brazen misinformation. Everyone is NOT “worried.” For example, I’m not. In fact, for hundreds of millions of people, the things that worry Our Local Epidemiologist have never caused us to lose one wink of sleep.
This, in fact, is what really worries OLE and her colleagues at the Disinformation Junkets. Not enough people are worried about the things she says we should be worried about.
Not only do we no longer trust our institutions – which have of been spectacularly wrong on everything Covid-related – we don’t trust people like her either.
In fact, what worries us is that people like her have so much power and influence over our lives.
Not only this, she wants more control and power. And since she is our local epidemiologist and consults with the CDC and White House, she’s probably going to get what she wants.
Let me close with a headline that gives us OLE’s professional diagnosis. When it comes to the plague of disinformation and misinformation, What the world has is …
Too much talk. Too little action.
Writes OLE:
“I’m getting increasingly frustrated with inaction.”
“Institutions are needed for the long-term solution:
- Governments. Congressional courage is needed. In the U.S., other government entities have a role, too: the National Institute of Health (train scientists to communicate and translate; prioritize funding more research in this space), the FDA and CDC … Department of Defense (create a robust, well-funded surveillance system to understand where, how, and what health misinformation is circulating in real-time) …. State governments have a role with medical boards and local action, too.
- Private industry needs to get their act together: Is this truly the future we want? The lowest hanging fruit is transparency: content moderation, algorithm impacts, data processing, and integrity policies …”
OLE is not subtle; I get her point …
It’s not like Our Local Epidemiologist is camouflaging what she wants. What OLE really wants is for Big Brother to quit pussy-footing around and scare the hell out of many more people, create a lot more “surveillance systems” and use our state medical boards to repeal the licenses of more “science deniers.”
In conclusion, Our Local Epidemiologist is a menace; she’s the worst nightmare for anyone who still values free speech, scientific debate and prefers a “public health” system that’s not killing and maiming so many members of the public.
November 15, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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Recently, Elon Musk was interviewed by Joe Rogan where he shared that, early in Covid, he had access to front-line data in China and “talked to doctors from Wuhan,” implying that if we had known what he knew, our use of mechanical ventilation would have been different. That is almost certainly true but he then went on to make several inaccurate statements which I think further fuel widespread misunderstanding and overestimation of the actual negative impacts of mechanical ventilation use during Covid in the U.S.
Now, I find it shocking that I might be putting myself in a position to defend the U.S. Covid response as that would be an outrageous endeavor, however, I take issue with his subsequent statements on mechanical ventilation use as they were almost completely wrong (almost).
I hate misinformation (inaccurate /false information) about Covid and I believe Elon trafficked in the same. I do not believe he did so out of willful, malevolent intent as that would be disinformation (what the now corporate controlled U.S. government regime does to us). His comments were instead borne of a stunning amount of ignorance regarding the real risks of mechanical ventilation and exactly how mechanical ventilation was misused (and not misused) both in China and in the U.S. during that first wave. So, here is my attempt to “set the record straight.”
ELON: “We had 20,000 employees in China and during the first wave we had nobody die and nobody get ill.”
This is both interesting and unsurprising and almost certainly accurate. It brings back harsh memories of all the fear porn that was being blasted out by the world’s media with cherry-picked images of scenes from the hardest hit areas like Wuhan, Lombardy, New York, Seattle etc. They did this while the vast majority of urban areas in the country and around the world did not experience such tidal waves of people in acute respiratory failure.
Although news media trying to get as many eyeballs glued to their shows is not new (i.e. “if it bleeds it leads”) in early Covid, it soon became apparent to many (in my world at least) that they also did so to instill widespread fear to increase compliance with what were soon to be draconian violations of civil liberty, bodily autonomy, informed consent, and free speech. Those violations were deemed necessary in their plight to coerce the entire U.S. population to be vaccinated. This is probably a good time to re-read the anonymous poem I posted last year titled “Message to the Unvaccinated.” Link here:
However, on this point of instilling the greatest amount of fear possible, a recent post by A Midwestern Doctor quoted Scott Atlas, a completely sane member of the White House’s insane Coronavirus Task Force:
As often happened, Fauci spoke up to support Dr. Birx’s concerns, saying people need to be warned even more strongly about the dangers of the virus spreading, about wearing masks and distancing. He claimed Americans didn’t think the virus was serious, and that was the reason cases spread. I was honestly surprised. I thought people were already panic-stricken. Normal life had virtually ceased to exist, even eliminating serious medical care or last visits with dying family. Meanwhile the media were on-message 24/7, instructing the public about masks and social distancing; there were signs and announcements demanding masks and diagrams about distancing everywhere; healthy young people were outside riding bicycles or driving their cars alone, wearing masks. Indeed, surveys showed that most adults perceived grossly exaggerated risks, particularly but not only younger people; and yes, a high percentage were obeying the edicts, distancing and wearing masks, according to virtually every published survey.
I challenged him to clarify his point, because I couldn’t believe my ears. “So you think people aren’t frightened enough?”
He [Fauci] said, “Yes, they need to be more afraid.”
To me, this was another moment of Kafkaesque absurdity. I replied, “I totally disagree. People are paralyzed with fear. Fear is one of the main problems at this point.” Inside, I was also shocked at his thought process, as such an influential face of the pandemic. Instilling fear in the public is absolutely counter to what a leader in public health should do. To me, it is frankly immoral, although I kept that to myself.”
Note: Fauci also fear-mongered for his own benefit throughout the AIDS crisis (which amongst other things created significant stigmatization towards the gay community as Fauci asserted without evidence that HIV might be transmitted without physical contact).
ELON: I called doctors in Wuhan and asked “what are some of the biggest mistakes you made in the first wave” and they said “we put far too many people on mechanical ventilators.”
My motivation for writing this post is to try to correct (but not completely refute) the now widespread, strong belief that it was the “ventilators” that killed people and that if we did not use mechanical ventilators, many lives would have been saved. Or, similarly, “if they hadn’t put my (wife/mother/father etc) on a ventilator, they would be alive today.”
I largely and strongly disagree with the latter assessment (but not completely). The reason for my disagreement is that, based on my experiences running Covid ICU’s at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, Greenville Memorial Hospital in South Carolina, St. Lukes Medical Center in Milwaukee, and Aspirus Wausau in Central Wisconsin, it wasn’t the vents that killed people. It was the lack of effective treatments being adopted.
Initially, it was the lack of any treatment (i.e. “supportive care only” approaches, particularly at UW) that led to widespread death after what was often weeks on a ventilator and later it morphed into sub-optimal, insufficiently aggressive, sometimes harmful, monolithic treatments like Remdesivir and a modest dose of corticosteroids instead of a broad, multi-component, safe, synergistic combination of therapies such as the MATH+ protocol that FLCCC members were using and recommending for hospital patients (forgive me for I am biased). However, Elon then said the following regarding mechanical ventilation:
“This is what is exactly damaging the lungs it is not Covid. The treatment, the cure is worse than the disease.”
“People yelled at me saying I am not a doctor but I said yeah but I do make spaceships with life support systems, what do you do?”
Well, Elon, although I don’t build spaceships, I actually used and taught mechanical ventilation to keep people alive for a living and did so throughout most of Covid. Further, mechanical ventilation was a deep interest if not passion of mine for almost 20 years prior.
The act of of sedating and paralyzing someone to place an endotracheal tube through their vocal cords and into their trachea is called “intubation” and is required to transition someone to support by an invasive mechanical ventilator. What I witnessed in the first wave (but not later waves) was doctors favoring “early intubation/mechanical ventilation” out of fear that the patient would suddenly crash (intubating a “crashing” patient is a higher risk procedure). And yes, another subtle, but not overt motivation, very early on, was to “protect” staff from exhaled breath due to fear of heated high flow nasal cannulas (this is an intermediate support device often used to avoid intubation) – more on this issue/aspect in Part 3 which is already available here).
Now, although it is true that each extra day on a ventilator can worsen prognosis, the harms are much more from prolonged, poorly responsive illness requiring prolonged sedation and immobility which then cause confusion/delirium and disuse atrophy of the muscles. So for him to say it is the ventilators which damage the lungs more than Covid is completely off – know that patients with neurological injuries affecting respiration can be kept alive safely on ventilators for weeks to months to years to decades without significant “damage” accumulating to the lungs.
Admittedly, the situation of someone with a lung injury is different in that inappropriate ventilator settings can certainly further damage the lungs, but with modern ventilator techniques such as low tidal volumes, daily spontaneous breathing trials, use of appropriate positive-end expiratory pressure, highly responsive inhalation triggers etc, the harms of mechanical ventilation to the lungs are generally minimal.
To wit, I have successfully extubated thousands of patients in my career despite devastating injuries to their lungs requiring prolonged periods on the ventilator, even in situations where the ventilator was particularly difficult to set in order to achieve the holy grail of mechanical ventilation, that of “patient-ventilator synchrony.” All I am saying is that his comment on the harms of mechanical ventilation was grossly overstated to an un-credible degree. He then went further:
“The treatment is worse than the disease.”
Ugh. Mechanical ventilation is not and has never been a treatment, it is simply a means to support a patient’s breathing to keep them alive while you administer therapies (more on this below) to reverse the underlying insult or infection that landed them on the ventilator in the first place – no-one, and I mean no-one in medicine has ever viewed the ventilator as a treatment or cure for anything.
However, the initial practice of “early intubation” caused unmanageable and chaotic situations in many hospitals by increasing demand for ICU rooms and ventilators, but I will argue below that this situation was almost completely fueled by the lack of effective treatments being adopted.
This is a key distinction, i.e the harm of ineffectively or not treating the disease far, far outweighed the harms of intubating too early. Further, “early” intubations largely occurred during the first wave, and as physicians became more familiar with the disease they began to defer intubation to much more advanced degrees of respiratory failure and hypoxemia (obviously there were exceptions to this, but, as I mentioned above, I travelled and worked fairly widely, and in each center I found that the ICU docs quickly learned to defer intubation to as late as possible in Covid induced hypoxemic respiratory failure. This issue is what I will explore in further detail in Part 2.
I instead maintain that the absurdly high death rates in many hospitals in the U.S and across the world in the early waves of Covid was due to an over-reliance on “supportive care only” approaches (i.e. limiting interventions to just supplemental oxygen, fluids, nutrition, fever suppressants, mechanical ventilation). Rarely were effective treatments targeting the underlying pathophysiology being offerred at most academic medical centers based on the widespread belief that patients were dying of a viral pneumonia and that no effective anti-viral therapies existed.
What was not being sufficiently taught or disseminated at that time is that Covid-19 disease had multiple phases, i.e. an early “viral replicative phase” marked by typical viral syndrome symptoms such as cough, fever, congestion, sore throat, fatigue etc with a minority of those patients then going on to develop the later “hyper-inflammatory phase” involving the lungs. The FLCCC tried very hard to alert “the system” to the fact that early studies found no live, culturable virus in patient secretions beyond Day 6 (cue the folks who state there is no virus and/or they don’t exist. To those, all I can offer is this excellent post addressing the issue by A Midwestern Doctor).
Thus, after about Day 6, a minority of Covid-19 patients began to develop morphed a hyper-inflammatory, pulmonary phase due largely to activated macrophages (an immune cell) as well as micro-clumping or clotting of blood cells and proteins. In this latter phase, anti-inflammatory or immunosuppressive therapies combined with anti-coagulants were required (this is why the FLCCC recommended corticosteroids and blood thinners in hospital patients from the outset and were observing excellent results with early use).
To wit, my first paper on Covid (and the one I am most proud of) was initially drafted in April of 2020. I argued then that Covid-19 pulmonary disease was not a viral pneumonia but instead an “organizing pneumonia” (a form of lung injury with many causes (viruses are only one of them) but whose mainstay of therapy is corticosteroids).
From the abstract:
I arrived at that hypothesis after a couple of weeks of being mystified by the repeated presentations of Covid patients with what was called at the time, “happy hypoxia”, i.e. the state of requiring high amounts of supplemental oxygen yet without exhibiting a significant increase in the work of breathing.
I knew I had seen “happy hypoxia” on a couple of occasions in my career but could not remember what was wrong with those patients until one morning during a shower before an ICU shift in New York City it hit me – “these patients remind me of patients with organizing pneumonia!” As soon as I got to work, before my shift, I called Dr. Jeff Kanne at the University of Wisconsin, one of the top chest radiologists in the world and an expert on organizing pneumonia.
“Jeff, what would you say if I told you that I think that all of these Covid patients are suffering from organizing pneumonia?” I asked. His answer? “Of course they are. We wrote this up in March in the journal Radiology after an expert panel that I chaired completed our review of all the CT scans from Wuhan.” They had actually written in their expert report that “the most common reported CT findings in Covid-19 patients are typical of an organizing pneumonia pattern of lung injury.”
“Clinicians don’t read radiology journals,” I shouted into the phone. “We need to publish this in a clinical medical journal! Like NOW!” We quickly agreed that we would write it up together.
I went home after my ICU shift and started working furiously. The paper included radiographic, pathologic, and clinical evidence to try to prove that the pulmonary phase of Covid-19 was an organizing pneumonia and that the first line of therapy for this condition was (wait for it)… corticosteroids.
Note that my paper above was not published until September 2020 due to 5 journals rejecting it, with one journal rejecting it because a peer-reviewer said “this cannot be published until a randomized controlled trial of corticosteroids is conducted.” Welcome to my life.
The problem we in the FLCCC had with getting the world to use corticosteroids in the hospital phase were many and will be explored in Part 2 (already available).
November 15, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, United States |
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Situated in Gaza City, the Dar Al-Shifa Hospital is the largest medical complex in the Gaza Strip, and has a 700-bed capacity. The IDF has targeted the complex repeatedly over the past week-and-a-half, alleging Hamas’ use of facilities located underneath as a fortified command center. Is there any truth to this story? Sputnik did some digging.
The Israel Defense Forces provided a worrisome explanation for its targeting of hospitals and ambulances in the Gaza Strip on Monday, publishing (and then deleting) an eyebrow-raising X post saying that “for Hamas, ambulances are used to transport its operatives and weapons to disguise them as civilians,” while “hospitals are in fact terrorist infrastructure.”
“This is against international law and turns them into legitimate military targets,” the IDF said.
In the days and weeks before and since, the al-Shifa hospital complex has come under repeated attack. On November 4, an air strike hit an ambulance near the hospital’s entrance, killing 15 people and injuring 60 others. The hospital was targeted a second time on November 6. Finally, on Wednesday, the IDF launched a ground raid inside the facility.
Before mounting its “precise and targeted operation,” the IDF alleged that Hamas had established a secret headquarters burrowed deep underneath the medical complex. In a statement, the military said it had “publicly warned time and again that Hamas’ continued military use of the Shifa Hospital jeopardizes its protected status under international law,” and lamented that the “relevant authorities in Gaza” ignored an IDF ultimatum to “cease” “all military activities within the hospital.”
Several weeks earlier, the IDF released a computer-animated video of a massive alleged underground tunnel and bunker complex it said was situated underneath the hospital complex, including conference rooms, arms and fuel caches and even a makeshift weapons factory. Israeli intelligence followed up by providing interrogation footage of a captured Hamas fighter admitting there was indeed a large underground hardened facility underneath al-Shifa used by the militant group. US intelligence, Pentagon and White House officials chimed in in support of Washington’s Israeli ally, alleging that Hamas has indeed been using tunnels underneath Al-Shifa for “command and control areas as well as weapons storage,” and that “newly declassified intelligence” indicates that the hospital is being used “to support their military operations.”
Hamas has dismissed the allegations, accusing the IDF of using the claims to justify its indiscriminate bombing of the Gaza Strip.
Who Built the Facilities Underneath al-Shifa?
Starting out as an army barracks during the British Mandate for Palestine era, al-Shifa was turned into a hospital in 1946 during the closing years of Britain’s occupation, and expanded into an entire complex of medical facilities during Egypt’s administration of Gaza between 1953 and 1967. Seizing the Strip during the Six-Day War of June 1967, Israel preserved and then expanded the hospital complex, and in the 1980s, with US financial backing, gave it a major overhaul, with Israeli architects Gershon Zippor, Teddy and Ben Kaplan and others tasked with creating its modern-day design, outlining a “Master Plan for the Year 2000” of modern, six-floor buildings spread across a 12.5-acre complex and equipped with what were at the time the latest medical innovations.
Along with the medical facilities, the project reportedly saw the construction of “a secure underground operating room and tunnel network” underneath the Hospital’s Building Number 2 in 1983, with a large “underground concrete floor” constructed underneath the facility during the same period. Other reports indicated that the hardened underground facilities were used to house the hospital’s laundry and “various administrative” offices.
Zippor, notably, had previous experience with underground military facilities, and between 1972 and 1976 engaged in the conversion of bunkers and trenches used during the Six-Day War into the Ammunition Hill Memorial Site and Museum in Jerusalem.
Hamas reportedly knew about the hospital complex’s hidden underground fortified areas, with a 2014 report in Ynet revealing that Zippor’s son, Barak, had mentioned that in the late 1980s, an Israeli contractor “hired Hamas as a security company” for the hospital.
As for the potential use of the underground facilities by Hamas after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, a 2009 report in Haaretz citing Palestinian sources indicated that the militant group’s leaders never hide in one place, but spread out and constantly change locations using an elaborate network of tunnels.
None of the Israeli reporting on the hospital complex’s construction shows photos of its reported fortified basement areas, and reporters covering Israeli attacks on or near the hospital during Israel’s wars with Hamas in 2008-2009, 2012, 2014 and 2023 have yet to present any direct proof of Hamas’ use of the underground facilities built by the Israelis.
“When it comes to the issue of the bunker or the tunnels underneath the Shifa Hospital, I think one of the reasons that Israel is…asserting this is because every time it has tried to make an assertion regarding Hamas’ operations, those assertions have consistently been debunked,” Sami Hamdi, political analyst and head of International Interest, a UK-based global risk and intelligence company, told Sputnik.
The IDF will undoubtedly hope to find evidence of Hamas using underground facilities and tunnels built in the 1980s as evidence to support its narrative about the Palestinian militant group’s use of civilian infrastructure and noncombatants as human shields, but it remains to be see whether Tel Aviv can actually sway public opinion in this manner, the political analyst believes.
“The point being, I think that when it comes to the Israelis pushing this narrative, it has less to do with the idea that Israel actually believes [it] and more about a desperate attempt to try to win back public opinion that it has emphatically lost as a result of the bombardment of social media videos showing the realities of the atrocities that are being committed in Gaza,” Hamdi said.
Mehmet Rakipoglu, a researcher at Dimensions for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank, points to the irony of the IDF accusing Hamas of using bunkers and tunnels underneath Gaza’s civilian infrastructure when Israel itself appears to have built the “secret shelter” under the Shifa hospital in the first place.
“It is obvious that Hamas did not use the hospital as a shield. Even though Israel tries to manipulate public opinion with amateur videos, the truth is clear,” Rakipoglu told Sputnik.
So far, “the places that Israel claims to be used by the ‘Hamas terrorist cells’ and as tunnels are spare water tanks,” the observer said, referring to social media posts mocking the IDF’s reported ‘proof’ of alleged militant tunnel networks in civilian areas which turn out to be mere water containers, heaters and septic tanks.
November 15, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Having successfully accomplished the destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States is estimating that in Ukraine too, destruction is nearly complete. At the recent meeting of the foreign and defence ministers of the US and India in New Delhi in the 2+2 format, the two countries “concurred on the need for post-conflict reconstruction” in Ukraine. It is an assertion that is out of sync with ground realities.
The Indians and Americans are whistling in the dark. Going forward, in fact, a whole new phase of Russia’s special military operations is to be expected and it is up in the air how Ukraine might look like in the aftermath.
There is much unfinished business left with regard to the so-called “South Russian lands” comprising Novorossiya, the historical name used during the Czarist era for the administrative area immediately north of the Black Sea and Crimea.
In remarks at a recent meeting on November 3 on the eve of the National Unity Day with members of the federal and regional heads of civic chambers at the Victory Museum in Moscow, President Vladimir Putin repeated once again that Russia is “defending our moral values, our history, our culture, our language, including by helping our brothers and sisters in Donbass and Novorossiya to do the same. This is the key to today’s events.”
A noted political figure from Ukraine, Vladimir Rogov who used to be a lawmaker in Kiev reminded Putin with passionate intensity, “Believe me, we, people living in the southern part of Russia, which was cut off from its roots for 30 years, are, in fact, a storehouse of the Russian people’s historical forces, which was mothballed and could not make any efforts to regenerate our great Russia.”
Putin responded by underscoring the historical fact that Novorossiya constituted “the South Russian lands – all the Black Sea region and so on” that were founded by Catherine the Great after a series of wars with the Ottoman Empire.
Putin said that the Russian Federation chose to come to terms with the unfair, unjust move by the Soviet leadership to transfer the South Russian lands to Ukraine, but things began to change when the regime in Kiev “started to exterminate everything Russian…, declared that Russians are not an indigenous nation in these lands…, also started dragging this entire territory into NATO – brazenly, without heeding any of our protests, without paying attention to our position, as if we did not exist at all. This is what lies at the centre of the conflict that is taking place today. This is the cause of this conflict .”
Putin said the choice narrowed down to doing nothing or to “stand up in defence of the people living there… we need to do everything we can to ensure that the entry of these territories [into Russian Federation] is smooth, natural, and that people feel the result as quickly as possible.”
This was not the first time Putin expressed such views. But the context in which he spoke is important, as it has more than one salience, aside from the Russian psyche as a civilisation state — the tidings from the battlefields; Russia’s transition as a war economy; Europe’s inability to substitute for the US retrenchment due to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
First, the Ukrainian counteroffensive has ended in failure and another such misadventure is highly unlikely if only because Ukraine has no manpower left. The Russian military is gaining the upper hand.
Putin made an unexpected overnight visit last week to Rostov-on-Don, the operational centre for Russia’s war effort in Ukraine — the second such visit to the military headquarters in less than a month. Accompanied by Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and the commander of military operations in Ukraine Gen.Valéri Gerassimov, Putin was shown new military equipment and heard reports on the military’s progress in Ukraine, according to the Kremlin.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov later said Russia is pressing ahead with its goals in Ukraine. This is one thing.
Now, this is happening when the European Union nations acknowledged on Tuesday that they may be on the way to failing Ukraine on their promise of providing the ammunition Kiev’s military dearly needs to stave off an expected Russian offensive. Amidst much fanfare early this year, EU leaders had promised to ramp up production and provide 1 million rounds of ammunition to Ukraine’s front line by spring 2024 but is finding it tough to come up with the goods.
In comparison, Russia now produces more ammunitions than the US and Europe; it can manufacture 200 tanks and two million units of ammunition in a year. This asymmetry has serious consequences for the attritional war in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Alexander Mikheyev, the chief executive of Rosoboronexport, was bullish on Tuesday, saying, “I can say with certainty that the current portfolio of orders is worth more than $50 billion… Today, we see that interest is even greater than it was before because our equipment — all aircraft, armoured vehicles, air defence systems, small arms, high-precision weapons — performed well in the conditions of the special military operation [in Ukraine.] So, either the partners are already coming back, or the long pause we had is over.”
Suffice to say, not only is the Russian defence line well equipped and fortified but the mobilisation of the defence industry is also beginning to show results. Plainly put, Russia can carry on with the attritional war in Ukraine for years to come, as its war economy has put the special military operations on “self-financing”, “cost accounting” principles, while normal life moves on. (The Russian economy is expecting a 3 percent growth this year.)
To be sure, the Kremlin also would have taken note of US President Joe Biden’s audacious characterisation, during the recent address to the nation after his visit to Israel, of military aid to Ukraine and Israel as “a smart investment that’s going to pay dividends for American security for generations.”
Then, of course, there is the worsening external security environment. Thus, at a recent meeting on security, Putin compared the US to a spider:
“It is necessary to know and understand where the root of evil is, that spider who is attempting to wrap the entire planet, the entire world, into its web and wishing to achieve our strategic defeat on the battlefield…
“Fighting precisely this enemy within the framework of the special military operation, we are yet again boosting the positions of all those who are battling for their independence and sovereignty… The truth is that the more Russia is growing stronger and our society is becoming more unified, the more effectively we will be able to stand both for our own national interests and the interests of those nations that fell victim to the West’s neocolonial policy.”
Therefore, the increasingly frequent references in the Russian political discourse to the preservation of the Russian way of life, culture and values in Novorossiya can be deduced as highly meaningful markers on what lies ahead in the special military operations.
The Deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, Dmitry Medvedev was explicit recently that Novorossiya [New Russia] would include Odessa and Nikolayev as well — and possibly Kiev itself — which would probably leave Lvov in western Ukraine as the landlocked rump state on the Polish border available for NATO membership eventually.
Medvedev wrote today on Telegram channel: “America easily betrays “its sons of bitches” when they become useless. It seems that this period is definitely coming for Kiev. And it’s not just the swarms of Republicans and Democrats heading into the U.S. presidential election. Just tired already. They got it — they eat too much money, steal wildly and do not achieve military success. Plus, the Israeli-Palestinian mess happened. In short, the support of the untied “son of a bitch” is nearing an inevitable end. Of course, not at once. There will also be a lot of money, schizoid spells about democracy, bravura assurances about the coming victory on earth, and false beliefs about alliance for all time and other and other. But the situation is clear: the time to go into oblivion for another American “son of a bitch” is coming.”
Clearly, it is surreal to even contemplate a US-Indian collaboration for the reconstruction of Ukraine. The cruel fate that awaits Ukraine may turn out to be far worse than what Iraq and Afghanistan experienced.
November 15, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular | NATO, Russia, Ukraine |
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In a new verdict concerning medical freedom and free speech, another Canadian nurse could face de-certification. Delegate Leah McInnes, a Saskatchewan nurse, had a grievance filed against her by a colleague on September 26, 2021, after her social media posts spoke out against the compulsion for COVID-19 vaccines. Despite advocating their usage, she expressed strong resistance to the imposition of medical measures.
Between August and October 2021, McInnes publicly criticized the government’s pandemic strategy via social media, triggering an investigation by Saskatchewan’s College of Registered Nurses (CRNS) into her nonworking hours advocacy. She was accused by the governing body of propagating “misinformation” through expressing differing opinions, such as her promise to campaign for the removal of “unjustly excessive mandates” and the violation of individuals’ medical record privacy.
She was subsequently charged with “professional misconduct” under the Registered Nurses Act, for her social media posts and involvement in the protest. They argue she abused her authority and operated outside her professional domain.
As reported by Rebel News, the College suggested that McInnes confess to professional misconduct, albeit she stood firm with her convictions in defense of free speech rights. Subsequently, they raised a Notice of hearing against her, which encompassed an updated list of allegations against her.
The listing includes her participation in a demonstration against vaccine mandates, alongside posting “anti-vaccine messages” online, her legal representation at the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms stated.
In the judgment by the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, Strom v. Saskatchewan Registered Nurses Association, it was quoted that objections, even by service providers, do not necessarily deplete assurance in healthcare providers or the healthcare infrastructure. It argues that candid expression could “boost confidence… of this enormous and ambiguous arrangement,” and usher in progressive changes.
Andre Memauri, one of the accused’s attorneys, stated “The Discipline Committee will hear how Ms McInnes protested against vaccine mandates and vaccine passports in support of patient autonomy, dignity and privacy adhering to her ethical obligations.” He disputes that the regulatory authority “released misleading information” about his client.
Memauri added, “It’s regrettable that a certified nurse in the Province of Saskatchewan is again experiencing regulatory backlash for legitimate criticism of the healthcare system, post the Court of Appeal’s verdict in Strom.”
November 14, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Canada, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, Saskatchewan |
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When Dr. Robert Sullivan collapsed on his treadmill three weeks after his second COVID-19 vaccine in early 2021, he fell into a “nightmare” ordeal that he said exposed glaring deficiencies in the nation’s vaccine safety monitoring system.
Diagnosed with sudden onset pulmonary hypertension, the healthy and fit 49-year-old anesthesiologist from Maryland attempted to file a report through the government-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
But like others interviewed in a recent investigation by The BMJ, Sullivan hit barrier after barrier when trying to submit and update his report.
Almost three years later, still grappling with debilitating symptoms, Sullivan’s experience highlights the systemic problems with the U.S. adverse events monitoring system run jointly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
From doctors unable to file reports to disappearing data, limits on transparency and lack of resources to follow up on concerning vaccine reactions, experts warn VAERS is failing to detect critical safety signals.
According to one of those experts — VAERS researcher Albert Benavides, whose experience includes HMO claims auditing, data analytics and revenue cycle management — VAERS’ failure isn’t accidental.
“It is not broken,” Benavides wrote in his Substack coverage of The BMJ investigation. “VAERS runs cover for the big pharma cabal.”
‘They even delete legitimate reports’
Like others interviewed by The BMJ, Sullivan experienced limited follow-up after submitting his VAERS report. He received only a temporary report number months after his initial submission.
A physician named “Helen” (pseudonym) told The BMJ that fewer than 20% of concerning reports get follow-up, including many deaths she reported.
In consultation with Benavides, an audit by React19 found that 1 in 3 COVID-19 vaccine adverse events reports in VAERS were either not posted publicly or were deleted. React19 is a nonprofit that collects stories of people injured by the mRNA vaccines.
According to The BMJ, of those queried by React19, “22% had never been given a permanent VAERS ID number and 12% had disappeared from the system entirely.”
Benavides, who publishes the VAERSAware dashboards documenting many of the problems with VAERS, said there is even deeper dysfunction in the VAERS system — from inventing symptoms to deleting reports.
“VAERS does not publish all legitimate reports received,” Benavides told The Defender. “They throttle publication of reports. They even delete legitimate reports.”
For a system dependent on voluntary engagement, these restrictive policies keep critical data hidden, according to Benavides.
In 2007, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) contracted with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (HPHC) to review the VAERS system. In 2010, HPHC filed its r report, which determined that 1 in 39 people experienced vaccine injuries and that only around 1% of vaccine-related injuries or deaths are ever reported to VAERS.
The CDC, which operates under HHS, scuttled the study, refused to take calls from the researchers and declined to upgrade the VAERS system when a new, much more effective system was developed.
‘Blind spots are self-created’
VAERS “collects reports of symptoms, diagnoses, hospital admissions, and deaths after vaccination for the purpose of capturing post-market safety signals,” according to The BMJ.
But the limited transparency of VAERS data presents barriers to proper analysis, according to The BMJ’s investigation and researchers like Benavides.
The public — including doctors and other report submitters — can access only incomplete initial reports, not updates with vital details.
This means outcomes like death are often excluded if the initial report was for an injury and a subsequent death report was filed.
“I made the false assumption that my conversation [with VAERS] would result in an adjustment to the publicly reported case,” Patrick Whelan, M.D., Ph.D., told The BMJ.
Whelan, a rheumatologist and researcher at the University of California Los Angeles, in 2022 filed a report of a cardiac arrest in a 7-year-old male patient after COVID-19 vaccination.
“I assumed that, since it was a catastrophic event, the safety committee would want to hear about it right away,” Whelan said. But nobody called him or requested an update after his submission.
“There was no mechanism for [updating] it,” Whelan told The BMJ. “The only option I had was to make a new VAERS report.” Without updates, the VAERS data showed that the boy was still hospitalized.
Whelan is one the authors of a recent critique of the Cochrane Review that concluded the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were not dangerous.
The problem with VAERS is not limited to a lack of adequate follow-up but to the incomplete and often inaccurate information found there.
“VAERS in effect allows typos, truncated lot #’s, UNK [unknown] ages, UNK vax dates, UNK death dates, etc. to pass through into publication,” Benavides said.
Benavides said specific data — including ethnicity, hospital names, attending physicians, submitter’s relationship to the patient, patient and submitter addresses, telephone numbers and emails — collected by VAERS are not published,
“Any blind spots are self-created, in my opinion,” he said.
Agencies maintain two separate VAERS databases — public gets to see only one
“There’s two parts to VAERS, the front end and back end,” stated Narayan Nair, division director for the FDA’s Division of Pharmacovigilance at a December 2022 meeting with advocates, according to The BMJ. “Anything from medical records by law can’t be posted on the public-facing system,” he said.
The BMJ investigation discovered that the FDA and CDC maintain two separate VAERS databases, one available to the public that contains only initial reports, and a private back-end system containing all of the updates and corrections.
“Anything derived from medical records by law” cannot be posted on the public-facing system, Nair told the advocates, according to The BMJ.
In an apparent contradiction to this claim, The BMJ noted the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), which collects post-marketing information on drug reactions, posts its updates publicly.
Sullivan, who met Nair years before COVID-19 and considers him a friend, told The Defender that if this “very bright, kind and caring person” could not fix VAERS, “I don’t think it’s fixable.”
CDC says it reviewed 20,000 reports of deaths — none were related to COVID shots
Withholding outcome data like deaths obscures critical safety signals, experts contend.
James Gill, a medical examiner, reported the death of a 15-year-old patient after vaccination, but the case was dismissed by the CDC despite autopsy evidence, according to the BMJ investigation.
Physician “Helen” told The BMJ that after filing reports on her medical patients, including six who had died, she received only a single request for medical records on the death and two for hospital-admitted patients.
The standard operating procedure for COVID-19 vaccine reports in VAERS, according to The BMJ, is for reports to be processed quickly and for “serious reports” to receive special review by CDC staff.
However, while some other countries have acknowledged the probable connection between the mRNA vaccines and death, the CDC, while claiming to have reviewed nearly 20,000 death reports, has yet to acknowledge a single death linked to the COVID-19 vaccines, The BMJ said.
Benavides provided The Defender examples of VAERS “deleting legitimate reports,” not just duplicates or false claims.
“VAERS even deleted dead Pfizer Trial patients,” he said, claiming that this report, for example, was not a “duplicate” and did not appear to be fake.
Benavides said:
“There are currently about 50 deaths that are not counted as deaths because the correct box is not checked off.
“There are thousands of reports and about 100 deaths in ‘UNKNOWN VAX TYPE’ in VAERS. Read the narrative to see these are clearly C19 jab-related deaths.
“There are over a thousand cardiac arrests where they are not marked as dead, and I question if they actually survived because there is no mention of ROSC [return of spontaneous circulation].”
“Why couldn’t VAERS populate the ages of these dead kids before publication?” Benavides said, pointing to this report on his website.
Physicians report only FDA-recognized adverse events
Ralph Edwards, former director of the Uppsala Monitoring Centre and until recently editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine, told The BMJ the regulators may be relying too heavily on past epidemiological data, especially for new types of adverse events. “If something hasn’t been heard of before, it tends to be ignored,” he said.
Without guidance to report potential risks, doctors also face barriers. “Physicians are only willing to talk about FDA-recognized vaccine adverse events,” stated physician “Helen” in a 2021 meeting between the FDA and physicians and advocates, according to The BMJ.
Svetlana Blitshteyn, a neurologist and researcher at the University at Buffalo, New York, told The BMJ if physicians are not educated to look for a specific condition, they’re unlikely to test for it or know how to treat it.
Sullivan told The Defender he believes his experience of developing pulmonary hypertension after taking the mRNA vaccine is one such safety signal the CDC and FDA are overlooking — a condition he believes many athletes have unknowingly developed.
Sullivan co-authored a paper of his and one other similar case of post-vaccine pulmonary hypertension. According to the paper:
“Pulmonary hypertension is a serious disease characterized by damage to lung vasculature and restricted blood flow through narrowed arteries from the right to left heart. The onset of symptoms is typically insidious, progressive and incurable, leading to right heart failure and premature death.”
“Athletes are canaries in the coal mine,” Sullivan told The Defender, speaking of the unusual numbers of athlete deaths since the rollout of the vaccine. Sullivan thinks that those with superior physical conditioning, like him, stand a better chance of survival with early detection.
However, he said, “Athletes will get echocardiography, and it will be essentially normal. The only way to tell for sure is to do a right-heart catheterization” that can identify the anomaly.
Sullivan believes the lives of many athletes could still be saved if the reporting system recognized and investigated the signal — and said he would be happy to join a project dedicated to this goal.
He also told The Defender he believes many of the sudden deaths reported in the 25- to 44-year-old age group are a result of this hidden condition.
‘The buck stops with the CDC for reforms’
Critics point to choices by the CDC as compounding VAERS’ passive design and understaffing issues.
Despite over 1.7 million reports since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, staffing was not boosted accordingly, according to statements the CDC made to The BMJ.
A Freedom of Information Act request by The BMJ revealed Pfizer has nearly 1,000 more full-time employees working on vaccine surveillance than the CDC. Records showed in 2021, Pfizer on-boarded 600 additional full-time employees to handle the volume of adverse reports and planned to hire 200 more.
Physician “Helen” in The BMJ article called for an end to the “negative feedback loop” whereby the FDA fails to list adverse reactions because passive surveillance systems like the FDA’s don’t display them, while at the same time, because of that lack of disclosure, “physicians are blinded to the adverse reactions in their patients, and thus aren’t reporting them.”
“The buck stops with the CDC for reforms needed to open up data,” Benavides told The Defender, adding several suggestions that could immediately improve VAERS:
“Revert back to pre-January 2011 when VAERS did append initial reports with follow-up data, including death. Take off the arbitrary 30-minute time limit to file a report before getting kicked off. Make the process easier to submit follow-up data.”
When asked why the incompetence of VAERS had been allowed to continue for so long, Sullivan told The Defender, “Because of the lack of product liability” for the vaccines “and the surge to defend economic interests.”
Sullivan said he’d like to see the following changes to the system:
- Pharmaceutical advertising banned.
- Pharmaceutical company revenues devoted to advertising instead be spent on R&D.
- The tax money collected on pharma profits be directly sent to victim injury funds.
Yale cardiologist takes on study of COVID vaccine injuries
Benavides said he spoke with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) Monday and is also in discussion with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to address the concerns with VAERS, including the under-publishing of reports.
“That’s a long overdue prospect and it would be incredible to actually get some analysis by that committee,” he said.
Another bright spot comes from news reported in The BMJ’s investigation that Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist and researcher at Yale University, has been recruiting members of React19 to study their vaccine injuries.
“We are working hard to understand the experience, clinical course, and potential mechanisms of the ailments reported by those who have had severe symptoms arise soon after the vaccination,” Krumholz told The BMJ.
Sullivan told The Defender that medical science is “just beginning to catalog the damage to the heart” from the vaccines but that “in order to treat something, you have to diagnose it” — and that, because of the shortcomings with VAERS, “we have yet to scratch the surface of that.”
Sullivan, now almost three years into his ordeal, is outliving his initial prognosis.
“I have a grim diagnosis hanging over me, but I’m optimistic because I’m still here,” he said. “I had something bad happen to me, but I’ve met so many amazing, wonderful people along the way who are just interested in truth.”
“I’m going to live the best and most productive life I can with the time I have left,” Sullivan said, helping others who “have this cloud hanging over their future.”
John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
November 14, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA |
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Although they spend a lot of time and resources pretending that they are “democrats” and not racists, Zionists are often, especially in a crisis situation, very clear about what they believe.
We see settlers regularly on the streets of occupied Palestine chanting provocative slogans such as “may your village burn”, and “death to Arabs” and also calling for a second Nakba.
But the racist and genocidal nature of Zionism goes right to the top.
What follows is a series of inflammatory and deeply racist statements by Zionists, all uttered after 7 October 2023 and the launch of the Al Aqsa Storm (also known as Al Aqsa Flood) operation by the Hamas-led Palestinian resistance.
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals.”
Yoav Gallant, Israeli military affairs minister, 9 October 2023
“Israel needs to increase the humanitarian pressure on the Gaza Strip so that eventually hundreds of thousands of hungry and thirsty Gazans will break through the Rafah crossing.”
Tzachi Levi, Israel National News, 20 October 2023
“I am very puzzled by the constant concern which the world, … is showing for the Palestinian people and is actually showing for these horrible inhuman animals who have done the worst atrocities that this century has seen.”
Dan Gillerman, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, 25 October 2023
“We are sons of light, they are sons of darkness. And light will prevail over darkness.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister, 25 October 2023
“Do not leave a stone upon a stone in Gaza. Gaza needs to turn to Dresden, Yes! Complete incineration, No more hope…. Annihilate Gaza Now! Now!”
Moshe Feiglin, leader of the libertarian Zionist party Zehut, former Knesset member, 26 October 2023
“If we were dealing with humans, we’d send humanitarian aid, but we’re dealing with animals.”
Rabbi Meir Mazuz, October 2023
“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.”
Israeli President Isaac Herzog, 12 October 2023.
“You have to be very careful. Let me tell you we are going to finish this war, we are going to win, because we are stronger. After this Russia will pay the price. Russia will pay the price. Russia is supporting the enemies of Israel. Russia is supporting Nazi people who want to commit genocide on us. And Russia will pay the price.”
Amir Weitmann, a senior member of Likud party, on RT, 19 October 2023
“This is not Auschwitz – This is Hamas! We are not fighting against humans – we are fighting monsters! Israel will not stop until Hamas is destroyed! This is what I said at the General Assembly podium when I showed footage of Israeli civilians burnt alive by Hamas and of Hamas savages.”
Gilad Erdan, Israel ambassador to the United Nations, 26 October 2023
“Are you serious asking about Palestinian civilians? What’s wrong with you?”
Former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett on Sky News after being asked – “What about the babies in incubators in Gaza whose life support has been turned off because the Israelis have cut off the power”, 12 October 2023
“Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!”
Ariel Kallner, Likud party, member of the Knesset
“Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave any behind. Erase the memory of them Erase them, their families, their mothers and their children. These animals can no longer live.”
Ezra Yachin, 95, former Stern Gang terrorist, now back in the occupation forces. October 2023
These are only a sample of the many genocidal statements issued by Zionist leaders and cheerleaders from the past month alone.
Many more can be found online in various useful threads, compilations and videos.
The epidemic of genocidal statements in the period after October 7 has shocked the world and rightly so. But, of course, Zionism has always been an ideology and a practical movement that is intrinsically racist and inherently genocidal.
To establish a “Jewish state” in historic Palestine, Zionists deemed it necessary to find a way to eliminate the natives either by killing them or forcing them to leave.
In his 1896 book The Jewish State, a foundational text for the Zionist racist movement, Theodor Herzl explained that the Zionist movement should appeal to European imperial powers to support the creation of a “Jewish state” in Palestine.
To help bolster support for Zionism among European imperialists, Herzl presented Zionism as a civilising mission, saying, “To Europe, we would represent a part of the barrier against Asia; we would serve as the outpost of civilization against barbarism.”
During his trip to Palestine in 1898, Herzl said that “large-scale drainage operations and the elimination of swamps … could make [Palestine] habitable [for Europeans]” and that, “Such Arabs, as are immune to the fever, might be used for the work”.
He went on to say “If we move into a region where there are wild animals to which the Jews are not accustomed – big snakes, etc. – I shall use the natives, prior to giving them employment in their transit countries [i.e. before they are deported], for the extermination of these animals.”
In April 1905, at a talk in Manchester, England, leading Zionist ideologue Israel Zangwill said, “[We] must be prepared …. to drive out by the sword the [Arab] tribes in possession … or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan”.(Masalha, The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem, Pluto Press 2003: 15)
The Council of the Jewish Agency responded to the 1938 Peel Commission by constituting a Population Transfer Committee, to plan the compulsory removal of Palestinians, to take place, as they put it, not “by preaching ‘sermons on the mount’ but by machine-guns”.(Porter et al. (eds), Faith in the Millennium Sheffield Academic Press 2001: 79)
Later, in 1941, Ben-Gurion, the Labour Zionist leader and first Prime Minister of the Zionist entity said, “It is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of Palestinians from the land] without compulsion and brutal compulsion”. (Masalha: 19)
Today the ‘brutal compulsion’ continues as the Zionists try and finish the job of eliminating the natives either by killing them or by forcing them out into the Sinai or Jordan.
It’s not just the “far right”, it’s not just the revisionists, it’s not just the centrists, it’s not just the labour Zionist tradition, it’s not just the “socialist” Zionists.
Zionism at its root is a racist and genocidal ideology. It must be eradicated.
David Miller is the producer and co-host of Press TV’s weekly Palestine Declassified show. He was sacked from Bristol University in October 2021 over his Palestine advocacy.
November 14, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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