Australia has passed a new law that will force Google and other search engines to remove content or risk huge fines.
The Online Safety Act will come into effect on January 23. Sites will have only 24 hours to remove harmful content. The penalty for non-compliance is $110,000 for individuals and $550,000 for companies.
The act also applies for apps on both Android and iOS devices.
The eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant also has the authority to name and shame platforms that do not comply with content takedown requests.
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph newspaper, Inman Grant Said: “There aren’t powers like these anywhere in the world. We will use them judiciously. But we feel emboldened to tackle the worst of the worst content.”
Enforcement will apply to both local and international sites.
The Commissioner said that the focus of the act is content with the potential to cause “serious psychological or physical harm.”
Insulting someone might not meet the threshold, unless it is something that will “do more than hurt a person’s feelings.”
Before eSafety can get involved, someone has to make a complaint to the platform hosting the content.
In 2020, eSafety received about 21,000 complaints, a 90% increase from 2019.
“With these new powers, we will now be able to take real action to disrupt the trade in this distressing material and if online service providers fail to comply with our removal notices, they will face very real and significant consequences,” Inman Grant said.
December 22, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Australia |
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I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. – Michael Crichton
The 97% consensus on catastrophic human-induced climate warming is one of the great PR coups of all time, demonstrating the effectiveness of The Big Lie for propaganda purposes. Cook’s 2013 paper became a springboard, coming strategically before the Paris COP, for Barack Obama and John Kerry to achieve a face-saving but meaningless result at the event. It was the rejoinder to the leaked emails from East Anglia that sank the Copenhagan COP.
It became the “go to” rejoinder and the killer argument in every private discussion and public debate – “I am just following the science.” Commentators and public service advisors use it to intimidate politicians and the public although practically no one has read the all-important paper by John Cook and associates, or even knows someone who has.
Three tasks
We have to explain how the offending paper fooled uncritical readers. My colleague Jeff Grimshaw has explained this with reference to the advertising tricks used to sell cat food. We also have to explain that the merits of rival scientific theories are determined by critical discussion and rigorous testing, not by a show of hands in the scientific community. Yet another task is to understand how a scientific culture emerged where Cook and associates would be allowed to pursue their work and there are many journals are pleased to publish the results.
The paper has no useful scientific content because it is not about science, it is about the opinions of a sample of scientists, interpreted by green activists and then sliced and diced to eliminate or misrepresent opinions that were not acceptable to the researchers.
The decisive step was to count everyone who thought there was warming and any amount of human influence in the category of people who are worried about warming. Close reading and repeated re-reading is necessary to understand how the information was collected and manipulated to get that result. Then a trick from the advertising industry came into play to sell their product – “97.1% of cats liked it!”
No scientists dispute warming because the arguments are about how much, over what period and with what cause, so you can bet on 100% agreement there, and likewise no scientists dispute human influence (even if it is just the heat island effect) and you can expect 100% there as well. The result should be 100% consensus on CAGW (the revised version) but 97.4% has a strangely reassuring “scientific “ ring to it, not quite 100% but very precise!
The two parts of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) meme: (1) warming is going to be catastrophic and (2 ) human activities are driving it.
Both of these need to be established to justify trillions of dollars of spending on projects that inflict massive environmental damage – like chemotherapy for the planet.
Both of them! Not just one or the other.
If the warming is dangerous and we make little or no contribution to it, then we can do little or nothing to avert the danger.
Alternatively if the warming is not dangerous then the extent of our influence is a matter of scientific interest but we don’t need to worry about it.
Starting with the first leg of the double. The case for the danger of warming is laughable because nobody can credibly deny the benefit of warming over the last 200 years, and the advance of warming has been glacial in recent times.
As for the human emissions of CO2 that are supposed to drive warming, we can reply, starting at the shallow end of the scientific pool. The geological record shows that high levels of CO2 never caused runaway warming. The level of CO2 at present (including a small fraction from human emissions) is nowhere near the pre-historical high points. Doubling atmospheric CO2 from 420ppm at present, with the current increase of 2ppm per annum, will take 200 years. There is a diminishing return from additional CO2 and most of the effect of rising CO2 since the Industrial Revolution has been used up with the one degree of warming since then. And so on and so forth as you go towards the deep end of the pool to learn from Happer and Lindzen on atmospheric physics.
How did Cook and associates manage to fool people into thinking that scientists are terrified of CAGW?
Regrettably a lot of people wanted to believe the consensus and serious public discussion is almost impossible because most people are scientifically illiterate. To be fair, that is not a sin, they just didn’t study science – you don’t beat a dog for chasing cats and you don’t blame cats for chasing mice. The sin for journalists, politicians and their advisors is to ignore the views of the significant number of very highly qualified scientists who are not alarmed. That may be harder since Steven Koonin emerged on the scene, untainted by incorrect political affiliations.
In case President Obama’s strident advocacy of the consensus was not enough, it would have gone viral through the Climate Action Network, a global coalition of 1500 organizations in 130 countries dedicated to driving climate alarm at the local level and in every form of media. There are 10 regional nodes and 12 national nodes, including Australia, and a few years ago they triggered a global offensive to enhance the language of alarmism with guidelines that The Guardian announced a few years ago – the standard terms are now global heating and climate crisis so on. Greta Thunberg signalled the new language in her viral tweet:
“It’s 2019. Can we all now call it what it is: climate breakdown, climate crisis, climate emergency, ecological breakdown, ecological crisis and ecological emergency?”[i]
The latest word is that CAN is closing some parts of the network, presumably because its work is done. Radical environmentalism evolved from the efforts of self-funded activists to organizations with enough money to employ fulltime workers to whole government departments like the US Environmental Protection Agency. Has anyone got a list of all the agencies in Australia that are doing climate and energy activism at our expense?. You could start here and here.
Selling the consensus and cat food
This is explained by my co-author Jeff Grimshaw in our forthcoming book Triggerwarming: A primer for politicians and journalists and anyone else who doesn’t know anything about climate science.
Consider the phrase “97% of scientists agree”? And how about “eight out of ten owners said their cat prefers it!”? Have you ever wondered where these promotional numbers come from? In the research conducted by John Cook and colleagues around the world, there were two stages of data collection followed by some very complicated analysis. It is necessary to read the paper several times to be clear about what they actually found, as distinct from their personal opinions and what they want the reader to think that they found. At the first stage Cook and the team read the abstracts of some 12,000 published papers on climate to find if the authors had a position on AGW:
“We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming.”
So how did 32.6 become 97? Have a look at cat food advertisements to explain this. How does anyone know that eight out of ten cats prefer a particular type of cat food? Did they ask the cats? In reality, the company simply asked cat owners if their cats liked their cat food and 80% said yes. So they discovered that cats like the cat food they are fed, and with only a modest distortion of the facts the company could claim that (almost) a consensus of cats liked their brand of cat food. After a complaint to the UK Advertising Standards Authority, the slogan was changed to “eight out of ten owners who expressed a preference said their cat prefers Brand X.” That language hides as much as it reveals (how were they selected and what were they asked?) but the original slogan was well established and a slight change made no difference to the “vibe” of the advertisement.
Getting back to Cook and associates, in the abstract of the paper we read:
“Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”
Nice work with the advertising gimmicks John! Of course he is a psychologist, not a climate scientist and he probably did a unit on Statistical Manipulation for Marketing and Advertising.
So that is advertising part of the deception, and what happened to the two key questions that scientists need to answer in the debate about CAGW – How much warming and how much human contribution? In their capacity as magicians the methodological arm-waving of Cook et al distracted the attention of readers from the lack of content (actually how many people read past the abstract?) and in their capacity as alchemists they transmuted the base metal of dodgy numbers into gold for climate alarmists. Not 24 carat gold to be sure. How do you rank it?
__________________________________________________
Jo Nova’s answer:
Cook’s work was a scientific wasteland from the start. Consensus is a fallacy. Science is not a democracy. The keyword survey of abstracts was always a meaningless proxy for biased government funding, and profoundly unscientific. To discuss it in any other terms is to pretend it had any scientific value at all.
Cook’s study could never tell us anything about the climate around the planet, all it could ever do was measure sociobehavioural aspects of the Climate Academic Complex. The more biased the government funding, the more biased the abstracts would be. If Cook was even slightly competent he might have shown that government funded science will find whatever it’s paid to find. Alas, it’s not that useful. Cook got biased friends to subjectively “rate” abstracts. This is not even junk sociology.
Posts on Cooks “consensus”.
December 20, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Australia, United States |
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‘I’ve seen suffering amongst people on a level that I’ve never seen before. In the last week, I went to my 13th death or cardiac arrest and subsequent death post the vaccine’ –Paramedic, Queensland Ambulance Service
LAST week a regular reader of TCW Defending Freedom sent me a film that, despite all I already knew about Covid vaccine adverse reactions, injuries and deaths, shocked me to the core. In it more than a dozen Australian nurses and paramedics give their testimonies of what they’ve been witnessing and dealing with daily. They fear speaking out loud and openly such is the culture of silence and denial, a culture which defies conscience and medical ethics. Their voices and faces are disguised because they fear for their jobs: ‘It’s been made very clear by our registry board AHPRA that any form of speaking out against the narrative could lead to deregistration. And Queensland Ambulance has made that clear as well.’
Their need for anonymity is self-evident but equally clear is their determination to tell the world what is really happening and what the medical authorities are suppressing. I do not know who made the film but nothing about it suggests to me that it is anything but genuine.
It opens with quotes from various nurses’ and paramedics’ testimonies – their first-hand evidence of vaccine harms. Each is identified by number and job title as confirmed, in the film, by a commissioner of declarations.
‘What I’m seeing on the front line is that, you know, these vaccines are not as safe as we were led to believe. And in a lot of cases, they seem to be doing more harm than good.’ Paramedic (over 15 years) QLD Ambulance Service
‘Four people in wheelchairs present back to the clinics after receiving Pfizer and they were all under 40. These were all people that weren’t able to walk. They had numbness and they couldn’t feel legs and arms.’ Vaccine clinic admin officer, QLD Health
‘So there was a young person who had his jab three days prior, so he had it on the Wednesday and he was last seen well on Saturday night. Sunday morning, he was found unconscious on the floor in his own vomit, and he was diagnosed as being in septic shock and having a massive cardiac infarct. And he went to ICU. And I don’t think he recovered.’ Clinical nurse (over 15 years) QLD Health
‘To be honest, I just wish that we were allowed to speak about this. It is so frustrating to be in a position where we are seeing this stuff and we are seeing what these vaccines are doing and we’re not allowed to speak about it. Under the threat of losing our registration, we’ve been told that we’re not allowed to talk about these things and it is . . . I can’t even begin to put into words how frustrating it feels to be silenced.’ Paramedic, QLD Ambulance Service
‘Everyone’s living in fear of being reprimanded and losing their job.’ Registered nurse (over 15 years) QLD Health
We are told that as of November 1 there were approximately 7,000 Queensland Health employees yet to follow a direction from their employer requiring them to have their first Covid 19 vaccine. What follows in the film is a long edited sequence of deeply distressing accounts of the range of serious adverse vaccine events the nurses and paramedics have been faced with, obstruction by their medical seniors and refusal to acknowledge these reactions are vaccine-related, the absence of any treatment protocols to address these ‘novel’ but extreme reaction, a ‘normalisation’ of such reactions in the form of hospitals discharging patients still in dire need of help and, finally, expressions of deep concern that no one is being told about ‘the horrible side effects’.
You can watch the full film here below. A series of transcribed and representative quotations follow it.
‘I’ve never witnessed anything like this [inaudible], massive rise in strokes, bleed-outs, neurological disorders.’
‘I’ve noticed a big spurt in strokes. I’ve also noticed there’s been a lot of neurological conditions going on, chest pains, there’s been a lot of people presenting with chest pains post-vaccination. Sometimes it’s after the second one, two or three days, five days. Sometimes it’s immediately, the day of.’
‘Since the vaccine has been rolled out on the front line, we are seeing what I would call the effects of this vaccine. We’re seeing, well, I personally have seen an increased number of cardiac cases. In the almost 20 years I’ve been a paramedic, I’ve never before attended six back-to-back cardiac cases in one shift. In all of these patients, all six had been vaccinated.’
‘Never had a seizure before in her life. Again, healthy, well, normal 20-odd-year-old and presented with seizures, post her first Covid shot. That was two days after her Covid shot she presented with seizures on the back of no history of the same.’
‘The thing that bothers me the most is that we’re lying to the patients and we’re telling them that this is going to keep them safe and this is going to keep them out of hospital and this going to prolong their life. And everyone has taken the vaccine under false pretences, no one has been told that there are horrific side effects.’
‘When a patient comes to the hospital, they’e accompanied by a Presenting Problem paperwork and that paperwork clearly says they’ve had the vaccine and they’re now having what appears to be a stroke or bleedouts, bleedouts from the bowel and the . . . noses and just bleedouts, blood clots, passing large blood clots. Neurological disorders, unable to control their body. Patients are having strokes, where they’ve completely lost half the use of their body. Painful tingling in their peripheral nerves that over the next . . . over a period of time become so debilitating they need a wheelchair. I have seen on the paperwork at least four young people that . . . weren’t documented as having any co-morbidities, like . . . health issues, that had have had the vaccine and died within a short timeframe. One of them was 48 hours later. People under 50. And according to the paperwork, there was no paperwork accompanying it to say that they had other health issues.’
‘There was a lady that presented to the hospital with a severe catastrophic stroke. In the end, unfortunately, she did pass away, and her husband was of the firm belief it was the vaccine that had caused this. She had had two doses of AstraZeneca and was well, fit and active until two weeks post the vaccine.’
‘One example of a vaccination injury, which is very concerning, is young mums in their thirties ringing up and . . . or contacting us and saying they’d had a Pfizer vaccine or whatever vaccine they’ve had prior, like three days, one week, shortness of breath, chest pain. They’re generally very healthy. No issues in the past at all. And then suddenly they’ve got these issues.’
‘So often after they’ve waited their 15 minutes and the nurses have checked them off that they’re right to go, they come to the Admin at the checkout and more times than not people are very dazed and they can’t even tell me their names. And they’re sweating and they don’t look good. And we’ve had a number of people actually just drop and faint at checkout. And then they’ll need to be taken to the resus bay and monitored.’
‘What I’ve really noticed is that when this all began, everyone was quite stringently noting that the patient had had a vaccine. In the last [number of] weeks, that history-taking has dropped off. So the vaccine isn’t mentioned alongside with that presentation, it’s found out through other means.’
‘And we’ve had patients who had the first injection and died and there’s been nothing reported. No autopsy, no . . . reporting.’
‘So when these presentations first started happening, we had a team meeting and I just raised the question as to why we thought we were having so many presentations for, you know, this particular . . . you know, pleural effusion or be it the strokes. And everyone just got a little bit nervous. No one wanted to address the concerns. I just . . . I don’t know why. I think we all know it’s happening. There’s been no education as to how to even report these. Usually, you know, if anything comes . . . anything new happens, we would get these big emails of, “This is how you report. This is who you report through.” There’s been no communication at all regarding that.’
‘We’ve been told not to worry about it, because it’s rare. And when you’re doing one every shift, minimally, you know in your heart that it’s not rare.’
‘So many of us have wanted to come forward in regards to what we’ve been witnessing in the hospitals, the adverse reactions from these vaccines. However, any conversation around the viruses [sic, means ‘vaccines’?] within the hospital and amongst colleagues is strongly looked down upon. And that’s mostly due to the fact that we can be reprimanded by AHRPA.’
‘There was a noticeable change in approximately June or July, when there was no documentation about a person’s vaccination status. In fact, this question was not even being asked by the doctors when patients were presenting.’
‘I did speak to a doctor one day and asked if, during the admissions, if they were asking the patients if they had received the vaccine. And his reply was, “No.” When I probed further and asked him, “Why?” – because to me, that’s part of the patient’s medical . . . medication history – his reply was that, ‘Doesn’t everyone? Doesn’t everyone have the vaccine?’ To which I replied, “No.” And he just shrugged it off.’
‘Yeah, the wards are busier, to do with nurse-patient ratio, because we’ve got an increase of elderly patients coming in with upper gastric bleeds and they’re having scopes, but they’re not finding out what’s causing these bleeds. We’ve also seen an increase of pericarditis within elderly patients and young patients. And an increase in shingles in patients since the vaccination.’
‘It’s so under pressure because of the types of patients that are coming in now. When people come in with strokes and brain bleeds and pleural effusions, that’s not a quick stay – that’s a 28-days in ICU and a long stay on the wards. And these people are coming in not because of Covid, but because of the vaccines. They’re short-staffed because they’ve chosen to pay the people working at the vaccination hubs more than the award wage. And so every person who’s ever worked in a nursing pool or is a casual or works for agency has chosen to take up a station in the vaccination hubs. And therefore we have no staff to fall back on. That’s probably the key factor. The second factor is that our staff members that have been vaccinated are very unwell, and so there’s very high sick leave in the hospital setting.’
‘I do an eight-hour shift and we see around 300 to 400 people per day. And we have from three to five adverse reactions every day. ‘
‘I’ve seen four people develop pericarditis, post this vaccine. I’ve seen two women who develop neurological issues. One of them lost control of her legs, one of them lost control of her hands. I’ve seen a marked increase in patients who become septic days after getting the vaccine with no obvious cause of infection. I’ve seen 30-year-olds have massive strokes that shouldn’t be having strokes. They’re healthy, well, 30-year-olds. You know, there’s a marked increase in patients presenting with stroke-like symptoms, patients presenting with cardiac issues that shouldn’t have cardiac issues – healthy, well people who are presenting with arrhythmias and other cardiac problems that everything . . . the only common denominator that they all have is that these things have started post them getting this vaccine.’
‘And then we started seeing the bilateral pitting oedema to the legs. So if you have an underlying condition of heart failure or you’ve got renal failure, you can get swelling in your legs. These people that were coming in had neither of those background illnesses. Yet we couldn’t work out why they had this gross pitting oedema up on to their knees. And there was no inflammatory markers. There was nothing. And these poor people were quite debilitated because the swelling was painful and they couldn’t walk. So they would come in and we would be doing a whole heap of testing on them to find out what was causing it.’
‘And then the strokes started coming in. So we’ve had the intracranial haemorrhages in a wide variety of people. Intracranial haemorrhage, usually, is driven by underlying blood pressure that’s not being controlled, so you’ve got underlying hypertension or you’re on blood thinners and you have a head strike, you hit your head and then you have this intracranial bleed. But with the patients that I’ve observed, they’ve got none of those underlying conditions at the bottom of it. They just have an acute bleed. When you have an acute bleed and it’s a large volume bleed, you don’t recover from that, you end up with a brain injury.’
‘What I noticed at the beginning of the rollout of the vaccine was a pattern emerging where people, younger people, were coming in that we’re not used to seeing on our stroke ward. We do get young people sometimes, but a majority are, you know, older people with other co-morbidities. And the pattern that we were seeing was younger people coming in that had recently had the Covid vaccine and they were coming in and they were shocked that they’d, you know, had a stroke because they were previously well, they had no prior conditions that could possibly have led to a stroke.’
‘So, since the rollout of the Covid vaccines, initially we had a much higher volume of elderly patients presenting with a description of “fall from standing height”, which basically means it’s a loss of consciousness. And that, I think, is what really caught my eye first, because you might have one or two people present with this fall from standing height, but you don’t get seven or eight or ten of them coming in, all in the same day. So when they have that fall from standing height, they will either have a head injury or might break a bone or they’re just genuinely quite unwell. And I started having a look at what was this presenting cause, and most of them had just had their vaccine that week.’
‘There’s also been days where there was just one after the other, after the other, after the other of people who just can’t breathe, get the oxygen in their lungs. We’ve never seen anything like that in health. There are a lot of people getting really chronically sick and having life-changing events, and there’s nowhere for them to report it.’
‘I feel devastated. It’s conscience for me. Every day we go to work and we’re in total denial about what’s happening. Should this be any other drug in any other time, any other place, it would be removed from the market. Why are we not removing this drug from the market? Why are we not able to speak out? Why are we being silenced on social media? In our workplace it’s taboo, we don’t discuss it. ‘
December 19, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | Australia, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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When the state-wide lockdown is lifted, Queensland will allow supermarkets and other businesses providing essential services to implement vaccine passports. The provision could deny those without a vaccine passport easy access to food and other basics.
Queensland will reopen its borders this week. The Health Minister Yvette D’Ath said that once the borders reopen, new health directives will be released, which could be less strict on businesses that have implemented health mandates.
“In the coming days, the Government will issue the guidelines required for business and industry as our border reopens,” she said in a statement.
“This will include information on managing close contacts in the workplace.
“Our objective is to provide an environment where business, particularly essential business, remains open.”
Starting December 17, Queenslanders will be required to show a vaccine passport to enter restaurants, cafes, pubs, bars, clubs, cinemas, theaters, museums, libraries, and stadiums.
The vaccine passport mandate does not apply to businesses providing essential services, like supermarkets, grocery stores, pharmacies, and post offices. However, the Small Business Minister Di Farmer said that essential services can implement vaccine passports if they choose to, especially if they want to continue operations without restrictions.
“The essential services are the things that really remained open during lockdown,” Farmer told 4BC Radio on Wednesday.
“There will also be a range of other businesses who may make the choice just to only have their vaccinated staff and patrons using their business.”
In a press conference on December 9, Farmer explained that every business would be allowed to enforce vaccine passports.
“Any business is able to make that decision, and a lot of them are actually thinking about that very seriously,” she said.
“[When Queensland opens up] you will need to be protected and businesses all over Queensland will be making that decision.
“If a person decides not to be vaccinated, then those are the things that they will take into consideration.”
December 12, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | Australia, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) have provisionally approved the Pfizer vaccine for use in children aged 5-11 years. The roll out will begin on 10 January 2022.
Let’s take a look at the facts.
According to the Department of Health, at the time of writing, there have been 64,388 cases of COVID-19 in those aged 0-19. Tragically, three children have lost their lives.
However, on closer examination, the three children who passed away did so with COVID-19, not from COVID-19. This is an important distinction.
According to a report in The Age, a “child aged under 10 years, who died with COVID-19, also had other serious comorbidities”.
The article also states that a “15-year-old Melbourne girl who health authorities said had a “a number of health conditions” also died with the virus”.
A report in The Guardian claimed that a “teenager from south-west Sydney died in August after contracting pneumococcal meningitis, and while he was also Covid-positive it was not the reason for his hospitalisation or death”.
It is clear that all three deaths were due to other causes, and not from COVID-19. Yet, they are listed as COVID-19 deaths on the Department of Health website.
University of Sydney infectious diseases paediatrician Robert Booy said that the “risk of deaths associated with COVID-19 in children and teenagers were extremely low compared even with vaccinated adults… Of the 25 deaths in COVID-positive children and teens up to the age of 16 recorded in Britain until March this year, half of them were in children who had a major medical problem… For example, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy or severe heart and lung disease.”
A study conducted in Germany and published on the preprint server MedRxiv found that “SARS-CoV-2-associated burden of a severe disease course or death in children and adolescents is low”.
“The lowest risk was observed in children aged 5-11 without comorbidities. In this group, the ICU admission rate was 0.2 per 10,000 and case fatality could not be calculated, due to an absence of cases.”
Another study conducted in Sweden and published in the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrated a “low incidence of severe Covid-19 among schoolchildren and children of preschool age during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic”.
Children are not at risk of severe illness, hospitalisation and death from SARS-CoV-2. Vaccinating children against COVID-19 is completely unwarranted and unnecessary.
The Australian Product Information for the Pfizer vaccine shows that the Phase 2/3 trial (Study C4591007) included 2,268 children aged 5-11, of which 2,158 were followed up for at least two months after the second dose.
Of these 2,268 children, 3 in the vaccine group and 16 in the placebo group developed COVID-19, resulting in a vaccine efficacy of 90.7%, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. This is known as relative risk reduction.
On closer inspection, 19 children out of 2,268 developed COVID-19, which equates to 0.8% of the total number of participants. The absolute risk reduction of the COVID-19 vaccine for those aged 5-11 is 1.9%. This is the actual efficacy of the vaccine, and is a more accurate measure of an individual’s overall risk.
Not only is the vaccine unwarranted given the mild nature of SARS-CoV-2 in children, it is also ineffective at preventing mild to moderate disease.
However, the most disturbing statement in the Australian Product Information is this:
“THE SAFETY EVALUATION IN STUDY C4591007 IS ONGOING.”
A vaccine, which is still in the clinical trial phase until July 2024, according to National Institutes of Health (NIH), and which uses technology that has never been used on a mass population previously, is being injected into children with unknown longer-term safety.
This is completely unforgiveable. This defies all reason and logic. The vaccine should never have been provisionally approved for children aged 5-11 based on this data.
According to the Australian Product Information, “the most frequent adverse reactions in children 5 to <12 years of age that received 2 doses included injection site pain (>80%), fatigue (>50%), headache (>30%), injection site redness and swelling (>20%), myalgia and chills (>10%)”.
The following adverse reactions from post-market experience were derived from spontaneous reports and the “frequencies could not be determined and are thus considered as not known” :
- Anaphylaxis and hypersensitivity reactions (e.g., rash, pruritis, urticaria, angioedema)
- Myocarditis and pericarditis
- Diarrhoea and vomiting
- Pain in the extremity (arm)
- Extensive swelling of the vaccinated limb
The New England Journal of Medicine summarises the safety and efficacy in children aged 5-11 as follows:
“Limitations of the study include the lack of longer-term follow-up to assess the duration of immune responses, efficacy, and safety. However, longer-term follow-up from this study, which will continue for 2 years, should provide clarification. This study was also not powered to detect potential rare side effects of BNT162b2 in 5-to-11-year-olds.”
What dystopian nightmare are we living in?
Let that sink in.
The longer-term follow-up “should provide clarification” and the study was “not powered to detect potential rare side effects”.
What if the longer-term follow up provides clarification that the vaccine is unsafe for use in children? It will be too late. The damage will have already been done.
We have seen from post-market assessment that serious adverse reactions are occurring in children aged 12-17, especially myocarditis and pericarditis.
According to the TGA’s COVID-19 vaccine weekly safety report, there have been 137 cases of suspected myocarditis and 109 cases of suspected pericarditis in those aged 12-17 following vaccination with the Pfizer vaccine.
“We have observed a higher-than-expected number of cases of myocarditis in vaccinated compared to unvaccinated individuals for Comirnaty (Pfizer). The Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety at the World Health Organization has recently stated that current evidence suggests a likely causal association between myocarditis and the mRNA vaccines.”
A study in Clinical Infectious Diseases demonstrated a “significant increase in the risk of acute myocarditis/pericarditis following Comirnaty vaccination among Chinese male adolescents, especially after the second dose”.
“The overall incidence of acute myocarditis/pericarditis was 18.52… per 100,000 persons vaccinated.”
In other words, 1 in every 5,400 children. The clinical trial for those aged 5-11 only had 2,268 participants. This sample size is not large enough to detect an adverse event such as myocarditis or pericarditis.
Another pre-print study in MedRxiv concluded that “post-vaccination CAE (cardiac adverse event) rate was highest in young boys aged 12-15 following dose two. For boys 12-17 without medical comorbidities, the likelihood of post vaccination dose two CAE is 162.2 and 94.0/million respectively. This incidence exceeds their expected 120-day COVID-19 hospitalisation rate at both moderate (August 21, 2021 rates) and high COVID-19 hospitalisation incidence.”
Why are we putting children at risk of a serious heart condition, along with other severe side effects, for a virus that they have almost no chance of dying from?
And finally, this article in the British Medical Journal.
“The number of children that would need to be vaccinated to protect just one adult from a bout of severe covid-19 – considering the low transmission rates, the high proportion of children already being post-covid, and most adults being vaccinated or post-covid – would be extraordinarily high”.
“Moreover, this number would likely compare unfavourably to the number of children that would be harmed, including for rare serious events.”
“There is no need to rush to vaccinate children against covid-19 – the vast majority stands little to benefit, and it is ethically dubious to pursue a hypothetical protection of adults while exposing children to harms, known and unknown.”
Enough is enough. It’s time to stand up.
We need to protect our children, for they are our future.
December 9, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science | Australia, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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COMPARED with Australia’s other police-run fiefdoms, South Australia has generally stayed under the Covid madness radar. No public police thuggery and rubber bullets in the back, no beating up grandmothers and pregnant women, no Daniel Andrews, no dictatorial legislation, no forced Covid camps, no rounding up of Aboriginal community members (so far). There has been Covid farce, however – a mind-boggling absence of perspective and proportionality reflective of the manic, embedded zero-Covid ideology experienced in other Australasian jurisdictions.
First, there was the pizza outbreak in November 2020. After a man with Covid-19 lied about his link to an Adelaide pizza parlour, the whole State entered a lockdown slated for six days which ended abruptly after three, due to lack of interest from the virus.
Then there was the ‘don’t touch the football’ affair, when Australian Rules fans were warned to duck if the ball came towards the crowd.
The latest is the case of a South Australian Senator, Alex Antic, a vigorous opponent of vaccine mandates and lockdowns, who was carted off to quarantine in a ‘medi-hotel’ after returning from Parliament in Canberra. (Antic is a conservative Liberal in a State run by so-called ‘moderates’ aka Leftists who should be in another party.)
This is in the State that has experienced four Covid deaths. Four. And 952 ‘cases’. South Australia has no crisis whatsoever, certainly none that can justify the establishment of a mini-police state. But the State is run not by a Premier but by an unelected police commissioner and an unelected chief health officer.
Which brings us to the persecution of Dr Bruce Paix, a doctor of 32 years in South Australia who is now unemployed due to ‘vaccine hesitancy’. Dr Paix has been issuing exemptions for mask/vaccines and is a staunch critic of the Covid vaccine and lockdowns. He contacted a member of Parliament, who happens to be South Australia’s acting attorney general, about matters Covid. This politician, one Josh Teague, or someone in his office, it would seem, notified the police. As a result Dr Paix was visited by officers and told that he should stop contacting the MP to voice concerns about Covid management policies.
He was advised to ‘tone down his emails’ and ‘be careful what he writes’, as his communications were ‘drawing attention to him’. Soft, friendly police power. In reality, an iron fist in a velvet glove.
Dr Paix is responsible for a string of Covid crimes – he is unvaxxed, he strays off message, he speaks out, and, worst of all, he is willing to grant exemptions from the jab. His offence in this case seems to have been his act of approaching his elected representative to seek a meeting to protest against a government policy, and his act of letter writing.
Seven officials raided the surgery of another such dissenting doctor, Mark Hobart, in Melbourne last month and seized confidential patient files, an appointment book, and other documents after he refused to hand them over. Inevitably, Hobart is described as ‘controversial’, such is the embedded state of Covid ideology across the legacy media.
Such doctors are quickly swooped on and threatened with being de-registered. The Victorian state government even changed the rules about exemptions to close off what it sees as ‘loopholes’. Patients were apparently ‘doctor shopping’ to find a practitioner who would give them a medical exemption from the vaccine.
A spokesman for the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency and the Medical Board of Australia has made their message clear: that vaccination is a non-negotiable part of the public health response to the Covid-19 pandemic and that advising against it ‘undermines the national immunisation campaign’.
They said the consequences for doctors of not complying would include having their registrations suspended.
The Australian Covid State has relied massively on third party collaboration for maintaining fear and hysteria and for enforcing Covid mandates. The corporate media and the churches are but two of the most egregious examples. Arguably the role of the medical establishment and behaviour of supine, self-regarding doctors is way more appalling than that of all the other ‘just-following-orders’ functionaries of Covid totalitarianism. They are guilty of
· Bullying patients to get the jab, whatever their medical circumstances;
· Collaborating with government in refusing exemptions to patients who palpably deserve them;
· Propagating lies about Covid and about those who question the official Covid narrative;
· Not speaking up and out against ‘medical tyranny’ in Australia;
· Getting into bed with Big Pharma;
· Making a mockery of the Hippocratic Oath, ‘first, do no harm’ by cheering on the vaccination of healthy youth, some of whom they know will die from the vaccines.
Dr Bruce Paix and Dr Mark Hobart have found themselves at the sharp end of the medical wars over Covid. They are enemies of the Covid State, hunted down like the Aborigines of the past – and under Covid Law are once again.
December 9, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Australia, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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Serious questions have been raised as to why medicine regulators have not pulled the Covid-19 vaccines from distribution to the general public after data on the Australian Government site revealed that there have been eleven times as many deaths reported as adverse reactions to the Covid-19 vaccines over a period of 8 months than deaths reported as adverse reactions to every other available vaccine combined over a period of 50 years.
The Department of Health Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) is the medicine regulator for the Australian Government, and as part of the Department of Health, the TGA regulates the quality, supply, and advertising of medicines, pathology devices, medical devices, blood products and most other therapeutics.
However, a Freedom of Information request made by Doctors for Covid Ethics back in February 2021 revealed that the TGA never saw the extremely limited study data for the Pfizer mRNA Covid-19 vaccine prior to granting it emergency approval and deeming it safe to be injected into the arms of Australians.
The TGA originally attempted to suppress the FOI request by requesting a 6-month extension in view of the amount of work required to respond satisfactorily. But after a complaint was made to the Office of the Information Commissioner the TGA responded confirming that they had never seen or requested the patient data from Pfizer and simply accepted Pfizer’s report of their study as fact, despite their proven history of fraudulent claims.
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc., have been fined £3,573,465,793.97p since the year 2000 for over 80 offences / violations.
This includes over £26.1million in Kickbacks and Bribery offences, £870million in False Claims offences and £2.5billion in healthcare related offences.
The TGA’s admission that they have never seen the raw trial data for the Pfizer jab prior to granting it approval, and Pfizer’s scandalous history of fraudulent claims and bribes, may go some way to explaining why the TGA have so far refused to pull the Covid-19 injections from distribution to the public, despite 6.5 times more adverse reactions, and 11 times more deaths being reported due to the jabs over a period of 8 months than have been reported to all other available vaccines combined since the 1st January 1971.
The TGA has a ‘Database of Adverse Event Notifications‘ that allows visitors to search adverse events reported for medicines including vaccines. The reports come from a wide range of sources, including members of the public, GPs, other health professionals and the therapeutic goods industry.
By searching the database for ‘Vaccine’ and deselecting the four available Covid-19 vaccines, with a date parameter of ‘1st January 1971 – 11th November 2021‘ the following results can be found –
Over those 50 years and 9 and a half months there have been 76 different vaccines available to the Australian public (excluding Covid-19 vaccines), and there have been 19,205 individual reports to all 76 vaccines combined, including 59 deaths. The TGA state that they think there is a possibility that the available vaccines caused 12,366 of those reported adverse reactions.
By carrying out a new search on the database for ‘Covid-19 Vaccine‘, with a date parameter of ‘1st December 2020 – 11th November 2021’ the following results can be found –
The results shows that there have been 81,318 reports made against the available Covid-19 vaccines, including 656 deaths. The TGA state that they they think there is a possibility that the Covid-19 vaccines caused 79.953 of those reported adverse reactions.
The first Covid-19 vaccine was administered in Australia in February 2021. This means that there have been been 11 times more deaths, 4 times more reports of adverse reactions, and 6.5 times more reports of adverse reactions that the TGA suspects were more than likely due to the Covid-19 vaccines, than have been reported to all other available vaccines combined over a period of 50 years and 9.5 months.
According to the TGA database, the leading cause of death due to the Covid-19 vaccines has been an ‘adverse event following immunisation’. The second leading cause of death has been dyspnoea (difficulty breathing), followed by pulmonary embolism (blocked blood vessel in the lung), then cerebrovascular accident (stroke), and then cardiac arrest.
These numbers raise serious questions as to why the Covid-19 vaccines have not been pulled from distribution to the public when just four separate vaccines for Covid-19 have caused over 11 times as many deaths in just 8 months, than 76 separate vaccines combined have caused over a period of nearly 51 years.
December 2, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Australia, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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A damning investigation in Sweden has found that doctors are ignoring the physical harm and irreversible damage caused by giving puberty blockers to primary school children diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
Wherever you stand on trans issues, no one could fail to be shocked by the revelations coming out of Sweden about the life-changing injuries and harmful side effects inflicted on children by cavalier doctors at the Karolinska University Hospital, all in the name of the great gender debate.
The youngsters treated at the Stockholm hospital had all been diagnosed with gender dysphoria – the unshakeable feeling that their physical characteristics were mismatched with how they felt about their gender – and were subsequently injected with regular doses of oestrogen, testosterone or other hormones to effect a physical transition to their new identity.
Gender dysphoria, it must be pointed out, is not a physical affliction in any way. It is all in the head.
Now, some of those children treated at the hospital are showing signs of osteoporosis, reduced bone density, liver damage, massive weight gain – one child piled on 25kg in just one year – and severe mental health issues. Some of those transitioning to male have changed their minds and want to identify as female again, but are stuck with the irreversible characteristic of a deep voice, thanks to testosterone injections, according to an investigation by the country’s national broadcaster SVT.
This is Dr. Frankenstein territory. How can the supposedly super-progressive liberals of Sweden allow this to happen? What’s even more outrageous is that in the case of one 11-year-old in the programme, the treatment continued for three months after doctors were alerted to skeletal deformation.
These are just kids who have been treated like lab rats. Tweenies and even younger who are crying out for help with their mental health, not hormone injections. It’s mind-boggling to think that a child still in primary school can be making life-altering decisions that will put them on a one-way transitioning journey, yet they have not even experienced puberty. Their brains are not fully formed, they can’t legally drink, smoke, vote or drive a car, yet they are being credited with a self-awareness far beyond their years.
One study in the Journal of American Academy of Adolescent and Child Psychiatry revealed that around 80% of children grew out of gender dysphoria, although research for the UK’s Tavistock Gender Identity Clinic found that those who began medical intervention were less likely to change their minds.
That still doesn’t make a majority, however. So surely it makes sense that if the probability is that a child will change their mind about transitioning, then mental health support should be prioritised as the prime intervention, before harmful drugs are administered?
Where in the Hippocratic Oath – ‘primum non nocere’ (first, do no harm) – is the exception for this scandalous abuse? How can medical professionals treat children like this, so that distraught parents are left blaming themselves, with one Swedish mother heartbreakingly admitting, “Of course you feel anger towards those you trusted. But also towards myself; I am the one who will protect my child, but I have not done that in any way”?
The SVT probe found that despite most medical professionals recommending that puberty blockers should not be prescribed for longer than two years, over the last five years, one in five children in what Swedish doctors call ‘trans care’ has been given the hormones for three years. Talk about not reading the label.
One of the medical professionals involved, chief physician and pediatric endocrinologist Ricard Nergardh, admitted that administering puberty blockers was “chemical castration.” But, remarkably, it still didn’t stop him or his colleagues from doling them out.
Sure, it’s all new. Gender dysphoria as a diagnosis has really only been on the radar since around 2013. But it’s a boom time for the medical profession, with many who should know better reluctant to suggest to their younger patients that maybe this is ‘just a stage’ they’re going through, in case they attract unwanted attention from the increasingly vocal trans lobby.
However, it’s not just in Sweden that the pressure is on an increasingly compliant medical profession to imperil the mental and physical wellbeing of our children, while playing along with a wrongheaded critical theory on gender.
Questions will be raised in Sweden, no doubt, but they also need to be raised in the UK, the US, Canada and Australia, where gender transition has become the cause du jour. Before any more children are irreversibly damaged.
December 1, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Australia, Canada, UK, United States |
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An Australian doctor says that he was questioned by police after sending his local MP emails expressing concerns about the Covid-19 vaccines.
The incident took place at the home of Dr Bruce Paix in Adelaide, South Australia. Although police originally said they had come to his house for a firearms check, an officer who was caught on video later admitted that he was there due to emails that Dr Paix had sent to his local MP, Josh Teague of South Australia.
Dr Paix has 32 years of experience and is a former military physician. He has served as a senior doctor in South Australia’s government system, a rescue doctor and also as an anesthesiologist. During his time as a senior military doctor in the Middle East during the MERS outbreak, he managed many health threats.
After educating himself over a long period of time on coronavirus, he concluded that “nothing about the world’s COVID response template makes sense (including in my own state of South Australia) and indeed is likely harmful.”
Dr Paix is particularly concerned about the way that the mainstream media has been censoring reports of adverse reactions caused by the Covid-19 vaccines. He wrote: “The vaccines, in particular, have numerous valid safety risks, and knowledge of these is being systematically suppressed by governments, professional bodies, and media.”
Additionally, the doctor took issue with the ban on alternative treatments against the virus, such as Ivermectin, which is often denied to patients despite a wealth of evidence showing it can be effective in fighting Covid-19.
“Valuable therapeutic options (Vit D, Ivermectin) are being outlawed in favour of a ‘jab or nothing’ strategy,” he lamented.
Dr Paix said that he contacted the MP’s office multiple times to voice his concerns. However, his requests to meet with Teague were denied, and eventually, he says, the MP’s response was to send the police to threaten him.
The doctor pressed the police officer as to why he was there, pointing out that the firearms check was not random and was instead being done in the context of the letters he had sent his MP. In response, the officer told him that he was not aware that the emails contained any criminal offences and that his aim was just to let the doctor know that the police were aware of the emails.
Dr. Paix is not the only physician who has come under fire in the country because of his opinions on the virus. The clinic of Australian physician Dr. Mark Hobart was raided by health officers just a few days before the incident; they confiscated his appointment book and confidential patient files.
Both of the doctors had been giving patients vaccine and mask exemptions, and Dr. Paix had also been instructing patients on how they can obtain Ivermectin for protection against the virus.
December 1, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Australia, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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The Australian Signals Directorate, Canberra’s equivalent of Britain’s GCHQ or the US National Security Agency, will be granted sweeping new powers to spy on Australians for the first time since its November 1947 founding.
The move allows the agency to collect signals intelligence on individuals within the country without a warrant, although allegedly only in situations where there is an “imminent risk to life.” Domestic terror suspects are cited as a key target in the Directorate’s crosshairs, and it will also collect intelligence in conjunction with the Australian Defence Force for military operations, with ministerial authorization.
Rules governing the reform and protecting citizens’ privacy will be published on the agency’s website, and subject to review and scrutiny by the Australian parliament’s security and intelligence committee. While framed as sincerely concerned with keeping Australians safe, experts have expressed grave reservations about the development. Among them is John Blaxland, Professor of International Security and Intelligence Studies at the Australian National University, himself a military intelligence veteran, who warned the powers were ripe for abuse.
“I’m a former insider… I have a much greater appreciation of the need for checks and balances, because power tends to corrupt,” he cautioned. “My concern is the legislation we put forward is being drafted by insiders, it’s drafted with their own concerns in mind.”
Drafted by insiders, the legislation certainly was – it’s inspired by the findings of an extensive review by Dennis Richardson, former chief of Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the country’s FBI, conducted in close consultation with Australia’s assorted intelligence services, in a manner akin to foxes being quizzed on how best to guard a henhouse.
Published in December 2020, his appraisal’s discussion of “authorisations” noted that these agencies can already conduct warrantless intelligence-gathering if they believe it to be “necessary, proportionate, reasonable and justified” in certain circumstances, and “would like the ability” to not only use various investigative techniques without official permission, but also with “protection from criminal liability” when doing so.
Leaked documents exposed by journalist Annika Smethurst in April 2018 showed that high-level plans for untrammeled domestic spying by the Australian Signals Directorate date back even further. They revealed how the respective heads of Australia’s Defence and Home Affairs ministries had discussed allowing the agency to access citizens’ emails, bank records and text messages without approval, or trace. A government source told Smethurst they were “horrified” by the proposals, given “there is no actual national security gap this is aiming to fill.”
Australian Federal Police raided both the alleged leaker of the files and Smethurst the next year. In a perverse irony, the charges against her were dropped in May 2020, as Australian High Court judges unanimously ruled that the warrant secured from a magistrate in relation to the raid was invalid, because it not only “misstated the terms of the offence” but was also ambiguous if not outright absurd.
“[The warrant] lacked the clarity required to fulfil its basic purposes of adequately informing Smethurst why the search was being conducted and providing the executing officer and those assisting in the execution of the warrant with reasonable guidance to decide which things came within the scope of the warrant,” the High Court damningly concluded.
In other words, it was impossible to know from the warrant’s wording what the investigation actually concerned, what evidence or information was sought, and what, if any, crime she may or may not have committed. That this baseless and broad investigative authorization was formally granted at all renders the Directorate’s newfound power to conduct warrantless surveillance all the more disquieting. If such procedural perversion can occur even with putative oversight, what abuses will be engaged-in without any meaningful supervision?
Misuse of these capabilities is almost inevitable. In 1973, the US Supreme Court ruled warrants were mandatory for domestic intelligence gathering. Two years later, a Senate investigation found that the NSA and other US intelligence agencies had nonetheless been engaged in unauthorized spying on American citizens, including anti-war protesters, civil rights activists, and political dissidents, monitoring all their private communications from telephone conversations to telegrams. This led to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which made it a dedicated criminal offense to eavesdrop on American citizens without judicial oversight.
Yet,it was revealed in late 2005 that the NSA had all along continued illegally intercepting the phone calls and digital communications of US citizens, with the witting help of major telecoms giants, which passed copies of all emails, web browsing and other internet traffic to and from its customers at home and abroad to the agency, and its British counterpart GCHQ. Files disclosed in 2013 by whistleblower Edward Snowden confirmed this criminal dragnet was truly global in scale, and very much ongoing.
Key components of this international spying network, known as ‘Five Eyes,’ are situated in Australia, at the Pine Gap and Kojarena satellite surveillance bases. According to investigative legend Duncan Campbell, around 80% of the messages intercepted by the latter – which employs US and British staff in key posts – are sent automatically to GCHQ and the NSA. While every Five Eyes member can theoretically veto requests for such material, “when you’re a junior ally” like Canberra, “you never refuse,” Campbell records.
One can’t help but wonder if the Directorate’s new domestic purview is an experiment, gauging levels of backlash and controversy among the Australian public, before similar measures – provably or potentially already in operation – are openly codified across all Five Eyes member states. Ongoing legal battles against mass data collection in various jurisdictions clearly necessitate the practice being legalized and legitimized. If Canberra’s American and/or British friends politely requested they run such a pilot scheme, would or even could they decline?
Reinforcing this interpretation, mere days after the Directorate’s remit was expanded, the Australian government pledged to introduce new laws forcing social media giants to “unmask” anonymous users who post offensive comments, with hefty fines doled out to those companies which are unwilling or unable to do so. The reasons for Canberra’s haste are unclear, although it’s surely no coincidence that London and Washington have battled for many years to end online anonymity for good – it’s only due to intense domestic opposition that these efforts have so far failed.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
November 30, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Australia, Canada, FBI, Human rights, NSA, UK, United States |
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THE Northern Territory of Australia often produces a vague sense of unease due to its climate, desert landscape, remoteness and isolation. You wouldn’t venture far off the main highways. The Territory is also a focal point for the culture wars in view of its large indigenous population, who generally live in remote communities in often abhorrent circumstances. Despite two centuries of policy failure there has been little evidence of new thinking in the centres of power. And, given the poor health generally– putting it very mildly – of the resident Aborigines, and their seeming caution in taking the Covid jab, it is a powder keg.
Now a story has emerged that links the two issues of Aboriginal affairs and Covid elimination. It is not pretty, and it comes while Europe is awash with Covid developments that are, not to put too fine a point on it, redolent of the Third Reich. Jonathan Sumption has touched on these ‘dangerous precedents’ as the ‘first symptom of totalitarianism’:
‘Across Europe, basic norms of civilised society are giving way to panic. The unvaccinated are being excluded from an ever-wider range of basic rights. Austria has criminalised them. Italy has stopped them doing their jobs. The Dutch police have fired on anti-lockdown demonstrators, seriously injuring some of them. We are witnessing the ultimate folly of frightened politicians who cannot accept that they are impotent in the face of some natural phenomena.
‘If lockdowns, forced closures of businesses and other brutal countermeasures work, then why are these countries on their fifth wave of the pandemic and their third or fourth lockdown? How long must this go on before we recognise that these measures simply push infections into the period after they are lifted?’
There is a broad sense that something is about to give. So, not a good week to be caught shipping the unvaccinated off to a Covid camp down under.
This is a story delivered not just by the fringe media but by the Territory’s Chief Minister, Michael Gunner.
After nine new Covid-19 cases were identified in the community of Binjari, it was reported that the Australian army forcibly removed 38 residents said to be ‘close contacts’ to the Howard Springs quarantine camp in Darwin, which I wrote about in TCW Defending Freedom in September (Australia’s Covid concentration camps). Gunner said: ‘Residents of Binjari and [the nearby community of] Rockhole no longer have the five reasons to leave their homes,’ referring to Australia’s five allowable excuses to avoid lockdown (buying food and supplies, exercising for up to two hours, care or caregiving, work or education if it can’t be done from home, and to get vaccinated). He said it was ‘highly likely’ that more residents would be transferred to Howard Springs.
This is a truly astonishing development, even by bizarre Covid policy standards. Very few cases have occurred on Gunner’s patch since March 2020 and the latest piece of policy overreach is in response merely to ‘close contacts’. We do not yet know whether any of those removed are even sick.
Gunner’s now infamous rant against the anti-vaxxers is world class among elected politicians. His enforced removal of the unvaccinated to a holding camp is a global first, as far as I am aware. Australia continues to break new ground.
As a Labor man, Gunner is a partisan brother of the Premiers of Queensland, Western Australia and of Victoria. Daniel Andrews of Victoria needs little introduction. Not a lot more can be said of the Victorian Covid regime, it would seem, that hasn’t already been said and that could possibly add to the public’s understanding of the raving lunatic down south. Western Australia decided long ago in effect to secede and to impose border closures and lockdowns on less than a whim.
Of Queensland, it has recently been observed that there is no Covid crisis yet there are bizarre plans for imminent vaccine passports to be introduced in high summer (December 17, to be precise), following on from months of inexplicable, hard border closures.
Then there is the recent and chilling development of a contract being awarded to build Queensland’s second dedicated Covid quarantine camp next door to Brisbane Airport. One observer has wondered why this ‘facility’ would require double electric fencing, and whether its purposes might one day include accommodation for the removed-and-unvaccinated as well as for incoming travellers slated for more routine and short-term stays.
Also in the recent news is the descent upon the far north outback Queensland town of Charter Towers by the military police, who are now apparently stopping travellers and locals and demanding their papers.
The alt-news reports that the Australian Army, with no published explanation, is booking out hotel chains for the summer on the Gold Coast. (This story has no independent corroboration to date.)
It was then of little surprise that the head of the Australian Medical Association in Queensland had this to say: ‘Life will be miserable without being vaccinated. You won’t be able to hide. There will be no employment. We will be tracking you. You won’t be able to go anywhere.’
Can anyone see a pattern emerging here?
But back to the Northern Territory and its current travails. Just like the unvaccinated Queenslanders, the First Australians in the Territory have no place to hide, however remote they might be.
There is no confirmation yet of whether any force accompanied the removal of unvaccinated First Australians from the two communities, but a Darwin Aboriginal elder has shared her distress. Judy Mills said on a video that Northern Territory Aborigines are being dragged out of their communities by the army and police, taken to health centres and forcibly inoculated.
She called Michael Gunner a ‘coward who is deceiving and killing our people’ and accused the administration of a genocide of ‘blackfellas’.
In another video posted on social media, a community member said there were reports of police rounding people up, taking them to a clinic and forcibly vaccinating them; food supplies were being withheld from families and Territory child welfare services were ‘waiting like vultures’ to grab children. She said the government had taken control of communications from these remote communities and it was difficult to confirm information. ‘There’s a state of emergency here. I’m putting out a cry for help to the world,’ she said.
These are incendiary claims. To call this a brazen move by the Northern Territory Government would be to understate considerably the utter gall of the latest push. Messing with Territory Aborigines is normally a no-go area, with every move on the part of politicians needing to be backed by visible community buy-in, painstakingly sought and obtained. That this can be done – with, apparently, not only the knowledge of our perpetually slithering Prime Minister but also with his blessing and, indeed, his resources – is a measure of how far we in Australia have travelled down the road towards totalitarian control.
And totalitarian control that has, by and large, received a pass from the citizenry. There is, now, precious little second-guessing of the political class and its more rampant actions in relation to the virus by that middle go-along-to-get-along group that sits between the rabid Covid class and we-the-non-conforming Covid dissidents and outcasts. This is the group, probably quite substantial, that was unkindly but not inaccurately described by a retired Federal Court Judge as being satisfied so long as they have ‘Netflix, a full belly and a warm place to defecate’. Concern for the rights of fellow Australians, now including indigenous fellow Australians, is not likely to be a priority.
It would be interesting to see the reactions of white Australians, especially those on the Left who are forever championing the interest of remote communities. I say ‘would’ as I am yet to find this story even mentioned in the Australian mainstream media.
Given that indigenous affairs are a core issue in the culture wars and an obsession in the Left-of-centre media, the absence of comment to date is both noteworthy and odd. I am guessing they just don’t know what to think or to say about this. Many, no doubt, would be (quietly) cheering if the Caucasian unvaccinated were marched off for re-education and solitude, a ‘safe’ distance from the vaccinated. No one has quite said it in public, yet.
One might even term this awful affair the Covid Stolen Generation, a term that will have deep resonance for those with an interest in the recent history of the indigenous people of Australia. It all takes us right back to Central Europe and the Auschwitz meme. Lord Sumption is correct. These are, indeed, highly dangerous times.
The writer is in Australia
November 29, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Australia, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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