By Noah Carl | The Daily Sceptic | May 16, 2022
Back in March, I wrote a post noting that excess mortality data from Europe and Israel were hard to reconcile with claims of 95% vaccine effectiveness against death. However, I also noted that some countries data were consistent with very high vaccine effectiveness against death.
The two examples I gave were Australia and Iceland – both countries with very high vaccination rates. By the end of 2021, each country had double-vaccinated 77% of its population, compared to only 70% in the U.K. and only 63% in the U.S. (see below).
At the time I wrote the post, Iceland had only seen a minor uptick in excess mortality, while Australia had not seen any at all – despite both countries experiencing major outbreaks in the winter/spring of 2022. If countries like Germany, the Netherlands and Israel had seen deadly post-vaccination waves, why hadn’t Iceland and Australia? That was the puzzle.
It appears that ‘puzzle’ is now solved – we just needed to wait for more data. The latest figures from Iceland and Australia show sizeable upticks in excess mortality. First, let’s look at Iceland:
After bouncing around the zero mark for the first two years of the pandemic, excess mortality jumped to 74% in the first week of March. And it has now been above zero for eleven of the last thirteen weeks. Next, let’s consider Australia:
Over the first two years of the pandemic, excess morality averaged roughly zero – dipping lower in the summer and rising higher in the winter. Yet since the start of October, it has been consistently positive, jumping to 26% in the third week of January.
It should be noted: these upticks in excess mortality are not as large as those seen in European countries during 2020 and 2021.
However, they indicate that even very high vaccination rates are not sufficient to prevent mortality from rising when there’s a major outbreak. And they cast further doubt on claims that the vaccines are 95% effective against death. If they were 95% effective against death, excess mortality should hardly have risen at all in Iceland and Australia.
Given that 77% of the entire population was double vaccinated before the latest outbreaks began (and that’s the entire population, not just over 16s), you’d have to believe that excess mortality would have been many, manty times higher in the absence of vaccination to rescue the claim of 95% effectiveness against death.
What’s probably true instead is that the vaccines do reduce mortality from Covid – but not by 95%.
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | May 16, 2022
Health authorities in Scotland have launched an investigation after a mystery surge in deaths of newborn babies, the second time the phenomenon has been recorded in the space of six months.
A report by the Herald newspaper highlights the “very unusual” spike in deaths of babies, with the alarm being raised after 18 infants died within four weeks of birth in March.
That same control limit was also breached in September last year, when 21 neonatal deaths were reported, the first time this had occurred since records began.
“The neonatal mortality rate was 5.1 per 1,000 live births in September and 4.6 per 1,000 in March, against an average of 1.49 per 1000 in 2019,” reports the newspaper.
Public Health Scotland (PHS) said the deaths could not have been down to chance, while the cause behind the previous spike in September also “remained a mystery.”
The report notes that vaccination uptake has increased in expectant mothers and that COVID infections during pregnancy are associated with a higher chance of premature birth, but found no “direct link” between COVID surges and the deaths.
PHS Scotland says COVID infections “did not appear to have played a role” in the September spate of deaths.
Edinburgh University’s Dr. Sarah Stock said, “The numbers are really troubling,” but admitted she didn’t know the cause of the deaths.
By Laura Perrins | TCW Defending Freedom | May 16, 2022
DEAR reader, I’m going to tell you something and you are not going to like it. People don’t care about you. Deep down, deep, deep down, people who don’t know you don’t really care about you. Not really. Not in any way that matters.
As many readers will know, all last week Mark Steyn interviewed victims of the Covid vaccine. They include widows whose husbands were killed by the vaccine, and survivors who were left with life-changing injuries from the vaccine. If you haven’t watched them, please do try to catch up on YouTube, or at Mark’s website.
As I sat through these testimonies, what struck me was the quiet dignity of the widows and survivors. They were all articulate and dignified. Some were careful to say they were not anti-vax; they just wanted to be listened to, their loss acknowledged and adequately compensated for by a government that forced them to take this vaccine. (And once we look at the propaganda and emotional blackmail it was coercion.)
Some other disgusting journalist took issue with Mark interviewing these victims, saying he was ‘exploiting’ them. Nothing could be further from the truth. The only reason Mark Steyn ended up with these interviews is because every other media outlet ignored them. The government ignored them, the vaccine manufacturers ignored them and the media, who usually would be all over stories like this, ignored them.
There was no rage or anger but plenty of bemusement, bewilderment and hurt as to why and how these victims could be treated like this. The most repeated phrase was that the victims were not scared about getting Covid themselves, but they did not want to spread it to others, they were told to get the vaccine, and they wanted to do the ‘right thing’.
At this point, I felt genuine pity for them. They trusted the government, they trusted the mainstream media and they were injured for it. I especially felt for Charlotte Wright whose husband, Dr Stephen Wright, had died leaving sons aged seven and one.
Those boys, Izaac and Elijah, will grow up without their father because he took a vaccine he did not need. Those boys were told, Daddy is not coming home, ever. To lose a father is bad enough. To lose a father because your government coerced him to have a vaccine is an outrage. Not even to compensate the family is evil.
We now know the vaccines do not stop transmission. As such, why healthy people who had no underlying conditions were told to take them should be subject to a public inquiry. In fact, the population were not just told to take them – they were shamed, bullied and threatened with dismissal from their jobs and civil society itself if they didn’t take them. Leading commentators – Andrew Neil, Piers Morgan, Claire Cohen – advocated for a system of apartheid and punishment for ‘vaccine refuseniks.’ These vaccine victims didn’t stand a chance.
At one point I did seriously consider getting the vaccine. I had just the baby and the government propaganda was seeping even into our No BBC house. I also worried about my husband. I worried that one of us would catch Covid and die leaving the four kids. It didn’t make any sense, but everyone breaks sometimes. Everyone. Luckily, a friend called me and told me to pull myself together and that I stood a much greater chance of being injured by the vaccine than Covid. So that moment passed.
Which brings me back to people not caring. When I considered getting this vaccine, what also stopped me is that for all the talk of ‘do the right thing’, I knew that if my husband died from it, no one other than close family and friends would care. Ultimately Matt Hancock was not going to call at my door and say, Don’t worry you are not going to starve to death even though your husband has died.
If I got injured and couldn’t drive, which would devastate the workings of the family, Claire Cohen wasn’t going to rock up and say, Don’t worry, I’ll do the school run. Childless Andrew ‘Punish refuseniks’ Neil certainly wasn’t going to take the baby if I could barely carry him. Neil had his house in the South of France to retreat to – so shut up and take your vaccine.
Ultimately, these people don’t care. They don’t care because they have never once recognised the injuries caused by the vaccine they so passionately advocated for. They don’t care because from my viewpoint they have never once written about it, or had the victims on their shows.
The same goes for the ordinary public. The bottom line is we all have a limited supply of sympathy and empathy to go around, and if we felt every loss we couldn’t get out of bed. But to advocate in such strong terms for a vaccine that has killed and injured people – that was morally abhorrent.
By Paula Jardine | TCW Defending Freedom | May 15, 2022
This is the fifth instalment of Paula Jardine’s six-part investigation into the planning behind ensuring vaccine acceptance and countering vaccine ‘hesitancy’. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here and Part 4 here.
THE starting point for universal vaccination is that virtually everyone is (indeed, needs to be) a suitable recipient. This has proved the case for the Covid-19 vaccines even though they are still technically under emergency use authorisations pending the completion of clinical trials, and even though the disease is a serious mortality risk for only a minority of the older demographics.
This presumption is at odds with the fallout from the 1976 landmark US judgment in Reyes v Wyeth Laboratories. The parents of a child who was paralysed by polio caused by the Sabin oral polio vaccine she had been given sued the manufacturer and won. In affirming the decision the Federal Court of Appeal said the manufacturer had a duty to market and inform potential customers of the dangerous vaccine and that this duty was heightened since the manufacturer had knowledge of the vaccine’s harmful potential.
In the wake of the case the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) added a ‘duty to warn’ clause to all its vaccine purchase contracts which required that ‘vaccines be administered only after an individualised medical judgment by a physician, or after “meaningful warnings related to the risks and benefits of vaccination” were provided in understandable language.’
Today the CDC advocates what it calls ‘medical provider vaccine standardisation’, saying offering vaccination should be a default option at patient visits. Ideally, the vaccine is available to be administered then and there, for the sake of convenience, and lest upon further reflection there be a change of mind.
Informed consent guidelines require that an explanation of both the risks and the benefits is provided, that the decision is voluntary and is not influenced by pressure from medical staff or others. Vaccine confidence literature, however, suggests the trusted health care practitioner’s role is to influence decisions by presenting vaccine-positive information so that patients or parents will choose vaccination. Safe and effective is the familiar mantra.
The World Health Organisation technical advisory group on behavioural insights and sciences for health have considered the ways in which vaccination decisions can be influenced. They say that ‘anticipated regret’ – when people expect that an unpleasant outcome would lead them to wish they had made a different decision – ‘shows promise as a predictor of intentions and behaviour’. They go on to suggest that ‘leveraging regret’ is a strategy that can be used ‘to tackle motivational barriers to vaccine acceptance and uptake’.
Dr Heidi Larson, a professor of anthropology, risk and decision science, who set up the ‘Vaccine Confidence Project’ at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine but is not a member of the behavioural insights advisory group, offers the same advice saying, ‘Regret is an important dimension in conversations with parents, but the important thing is to shift the anticipated regret towards how they might feel if their child is not vaccinated and becomes seriously ill or even dies from a vaccine preventable disease rather than being more focused on the potential side effects of the vaccine.’
Another strategy that this advisory group has recommended to help increase vaccine uptake is to emphasise the social benefits (or disadvantages of not) such as being able to stay in the workforce or provide for your family. Lisa Fazio, a psychologist who participated in the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Covid communications expert group, also recommends leveraging altruism. What was required for Covid vaccines, she said, was ‘a call to action beyond “getting” the vaccine for yourself, but using emotions via an aspirational approach. The call to action is something that is elevated and aspirational and focused on the benefits and that sense of normalcy. The call to action is not getting a vaccine that is available to you. The call to action is, “Protect your family, protect your loved ones. Help the world get past this crisis”.’
Another pitch offered by yet another NIH adviser, Paul Slovic, a psychologist who studies risk perception, was that being vaccinated could help people feel that they’re taking back control. ‘One of the things that makes Covid scary is that it’s difficult to control,’ said Slovic. ‘It’s invisible, people can carry and transmit the disease without showing symptoms, and there are limited treatment options. People have profound discomfort with uncertainty, and so offering the vaccine in the context of regaining control could be quite powerful.’
Persuasion isn’t left on its own to do the work. The 2019 Global Vaccination Summit endorsed behavioural nudging to increase uptake: ‘Interventions which focus directly on supporting individual behaviour and making vaccination as easy and convenient as possible have more impact than interventions attempting to modify attitudes and beliefs. In other words, “nudging” and behaviourally-informed strategies can trigger vaccine confidence.’
The idea behind nudging (though a doubtful science) is that it works to increase uptake by making people feel as though they are making a free choice. ‘Offer a default option that’s determined by experts, with an opt-out possibility. This retains people’s sense of freedom, but default architecture will guide them into the experts’ recommendations.’
The Covid-19 vaccination campaign in the UK used this presumptive approach by inviting people to vaccination appointments rather than asking people to request them. It may have been the fear/urgency factor that worked. But that does not lessen the manipulative intent.
Regardless, anyone trying to sell you an investment product by inflating past performances, failing to ascertain its suitability for you as an individual, and using manipulative talk while providing insufficient information for you to make an informed decision in order to make a quick sell, would be deemed to have engaged in unethical practice. Depending on the nature of the misinformation, it could even be illegal.
Vaccines are biological pharmaceutical products, and in the case of mRNA Covid vaccines gene transfer therapies, ones that permanently and irreversibly alter the physiology of healthy people. Having claimed that the case for universal vaccination is a moral one, for the greater good, the strategies employed in pursuit of coverage targets to increase uptake have been and are to varying degrees ethically suspect.
As Covid vaccination uptake figures show, most people do accept vaccines but, despite all the nudging and the hard sell, the 100 per cent coverage that is meant to deliver a disease-free utopia remains elusive. Demand generation at that level would require universal uncritical acceptance of vaccines.
Larson likened people exercising their right to refuse the medical procedure of vaccination to an epidemic requiring crisis management. The various vaccine confidence projects describe their aim as helping populations become more resilient against what they call rumours or misinformation, a nebulous category of anything that might threaten the War on Microbes, that cause people to reject vaccination.
‘We need to be more sophisticated and to build strong transnational networks to pick up rumours and misinformation early and surround them with accurate and positive information in support of vaccination,’ said Larson, chillingly.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) provided the Vaccine Confidence Project with research assistance to support its Covid vaccination work. In the six months from November 2020, NetBase Quid technology was used to ‘scrape’ online forums and social media for conversations about vaccines “to get a deep understanding of the obstacles to vaccine adoption, barriers to building trust and the communication strategies that move people to action”.
No fewer than 66 million conversations were identified and analysed to provide insights on how to target communications for Covid vaccines. It enabled a market segmentation of messaging, microtargeting different messages for different audiences.
This is the fourth instalment of Paula Jardine’s six-part investigation into the planning behind ensuring vaccine acceptance and countering vaccine ‘hesitancy’. You can read Part 1, published on Wednesday, here, Part 2, published on Thursday, here, and Part 3, published yesterday, here.
TCW Defending Freedom – May 14, 2022
WHEN Unicef launched the Child Survival Revolution in 1983, it openly acknowledged that infectious childhood diseases in industrialised countries had ceased to be a serious threat before vaccines were introduced, thanks primarily to improvements in sanitation and nutrition.
Later, something resembling a bait and switch took place in traditionally accepted scientific thinking on this empirical observation. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) now brands the central role played by improved sanitation and nutrition an anti-vaccination myth, and largely credits vaccines for the reduction in disease burden instead. This amounts to a misrepresentation, an untrue statement of a material fact that is being used to inflate the past performance of vaccines. It would count as unlawful mis-selling in other commercial contexts.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) says: ‘Immunisation is a global health and development success story, saving millions of lives every year.’ It puts the number of lives saved annually at between 3.5million and 5million.
Yet, perversely, universal vaccination may be masking health and mortality problems that arise from the vaccines as, by definition, there’s no control group for comparison. Igor Chudov analysed the 2021 statistics from Florida: ‘What I found is that in 2021, parents of newborns in Florida were much more “vaccine hesitant”, for reasons obvious to my readers, and therefore childhood vaccinations decreased from 93.4 per cent previously to only 79.3 per cent in 2021. During the same time, “all cause” infant mortality under one year of age in Florida also DECREASED by 8.93 per cent.’ (his emphasis)
Chudov’s findings chime with those of Australian physician Dr Archie Kalokerinos who investigated a doubling of the infant mortality rate in Aborigine communities in the 1970s on behalf of the Northern Territories government. He discovered the death rate rose after they began vaccinating malnourished Aborigine children. In some communities, every second child was injured or died.
A 2016 meta-analysis of studies into the DTP vaccine, against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (whooping cough) found it increases female mortality rates. Court cases in the US in the 1970s linked it with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The CDC calls this association ‘one myth that won’t seem to go away’. Disturbingly in this context, the extent of DTP vaccination coverage is a metric used to monitor access to primary health care and is used by the vaccine alliance GAVI as an equity measure.
A 2021 vaccination impact study led by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London made the great claim that vaccine campaigns in low and middle income countries had saved a total of 23million children’s lives over the past two decades, and projected that this figure will increase to 37million by 2030. But as with any honest cost-benefit analysis, Ferguson’s estimates need to be offset against another statistic. GAVI itself acknowledges that vaccination campaigns had, until a decade ago, negligently added to the chronic infectious disease burden in the developing world: ‘In 2000, roughly 39 per cent of all healthcare-related injections administered globally were delivered with reused disposable or inadequately sterilised syringes, which resulted in an estimated 23 million people infected annually with hepatitis B, hepatitis C and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).’
It took a decade to reduce these incidental infections to near zero by using disposable syringes.
The official line from the WHO is that people have become complacent: vaccines are such a successful intervention that the public have forgotten how serious and how deadly the diseases were. To keep people compliant with national immunisation schedules and hit WHO vaccination coverage targets, practitioners are told to tell parents ‘better safe than sorry’.
The example that is used to generate sufficient anxiety or fear is measles, a highly transmissible virus which remains a leading cause of death in parts of Africa and Asia. The CDC insists that getting the vaccine is safer than getting the disease yet provides no statistics to illustrate the relative risk.
According to the UK-based Vaccine Knowledge Project, ‘in high income regions of the world such as Western Europe, measles causes death in about 1 in 5,000 cases, but as many as 1 in 100 will die in the poorest regions of the world. Worldwide, measles is still a major cause of death, especially among children in resource-poor countries.’ One US-based website aimed at public health students and practitioners ignores the nuance, putting the risk of death from measles at 1 in 500 while selectively setting it against a one in a million chance of an allergic reaction to the MMR and ignoring the risk of all the other potential adverse reactions on the US government’s official table of measles vaccine injuries.
A measles mortality map produced by the US government in 1890, seventy years before the vaccine was introduced and before the improvements in sanitation, water quality and nutrition occurred, shows geographical differences in death rates that indicate other underlying factors contributing to measles deaths. The greatest of these risk factors was shown to be malnutrition, as the body’s demand for vitamin A increases in response to a measles infection. Likewise people whose diets are lacking in animal protein, vitamin A’s primary dietary source, are at the greatest risk of death or serious complications.
In countries where malnutrition is a problem, the antibody response to measles vaccines can be boosted by giving vitamin A supplements. Protein malnutrition is amongst the leading causes of death in many places where measles mortality remains high.
Free West Media | May 14, 2022
Chinese biotech firm Kexing Holdings has made a fortune selling Sinovac’s Chinese vaccine. A few days ago, however, it became known that the bonus payments were withheld and most of the workforce has been laid off. Exports of Chinese vaccines (Sinovac, Sinopharm, CanSino) were 97 percent lower in April than in September 2021.
The Chinese outlet Caitong News reported, citing Kexing employees, that the company made a profit of 82 billion yuan (around 11.6 billion euros) last year. At the same time, the company announced that the year-end bonus payment for the past year would be “postponed”.
Shortly thereafter, Kexing suddenly announced massive layoffs. According to Kexing officials, the company has given staff two options: resign themselves and collect an indefinite severance pay, or take indefinite leave. In the latter case, with 80 percent of Beijing’s minimum wage as compensation.
According to the report, Kexing (Sinovac) has already laid off up to 70 percent of its staff. After the last wave of layoffs was completed in April of this year, the year-end bonuses were then distributed to the remaining employees on April 25. There is no statement or justification for the layoffs by Kexing. However, according to Japanese media reports, China’s vaccine exports have fallen sharply.
Thus, Nikkei Asia, citing UNICEF, reported that the vaccine against Covid-19, which is manufactured by three Chinese companies Sinopharm, Sinovac and CanSino, exported a total of 6,78 million doses in April this year. This is a drop of 97 percent compared to the peak exports in September 2021.
Massive drop in exports also for other Covid jabs
Global demand for vaccines has fallen sharply this year. Not only the exports of Chinese vaccines have fallen sharply due to their ineffectiveness against the Omicron variant.
Exports of Moderna’s and Pfizer’s mRNA drugs are also down 57 and 71 percent, respectively, compared to September last year, according to the report. Pfizer’s exports are nevertheless still eight times those of the three Chinese companies combined.
In South Africa, vaccine production has been grinding to a halt due to the fact that there are no orders.
Vaccine production in Africa almost halted
In South Africa, for example, the pharmaceutical company Aspen, which produces its own filling of the vaccine from Johnson & Johnson and sells it under the name Aspenovax, reported that there were no orders.
“It is feared that the production of the vaccine in South Africa will have to end. There is simply no demand for it. Not a single order has come in for weeks,” German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reported.
The risk is “very high that the company will actually stop producing Johnson & Johnson vaccines,” the head of the African health authority (African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is quoted as saying in the report. Only around 12 percent of the population in Africa have been vaccinated twice. About 40 percent of the vaccine doses shipped to Africa were not used.
The over-supply of free Covid-19 vaccine doses — donated by high-income countries — had closed the gap that Aspen was meant to fill in the market.
According to another German daily, the Tagesanzeiger, millions of BioNTech vaccine doses will have to be disposed of in June.
The comparatively young population of Africa is hardly affected by Corona and faces completely different challenges, such as malaria or the impending starvation catastrophe. Against the background of the threat of starvation or an infection with malaria, which affects millions of people and kills hundreds of thousands every year, there is simply no room for media hysteria around the Corona virus.
By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | May 14, 2022
AFTER two years of being closed for business, New Zealand has re-opened its borders. The outcome: unprecedented numbers are leaving rather than arriving. The question is, are you willing to take their place?
For those of you in the UK who are worried that there is one law for the government and another for the people, spare a thought for the people of New Zealand where the government is actually following its own advice.
At least in the UK you can look at your leaders partying and think ‘If they can do that, so can I’. We have to listen to the voices of our leaders filtered through a mask, and then follow them.
Last week I visited Wellington, seat of government and dull party central of the civil service. It was an extraordinary experience. Conformity to the fore. Masking was as near 100 per cent as makes no difference.
This has happened despite there being almost no evidence that masking reduces the spread of infection, and a great deal of evidence that it harms our health.
Medical mask exemptions will soon have to prominently display your name. Fines and jail sentences related to masking non-compliance are slated to be introduced.
Students still have to be fully vaxxed to enrol in universities. Many, if not most, apprenticeship schemes require Covid vaccination.
The government has allowed businesses to continue to enforce vaccination mandates, and many have. In some industries, even employees working from home are being required to show proof of Covid vaccination – to no one.
Just imagine if you are watching The Chase on TV and between every contestant you are subjected to a 60-second government Covid vaccine ad advising you to ‘keep your family safe’with an ineffective mRNA vaccine known to be dangerous. Not only do you know that it is borrowed money paying for this saturation government messaging, but you and your children are going to have to repay it for decades. You are not told that government statistics show that boosted individuals are more likely to end up in hospital with Covid than the unvaccinated – too embarrassing to warrant a media mention.
Can you imagine the level of despair if the leader of the opposition is also a vaccination freak? Ours is on record before the pandemic saying that single mothers should lose benefits if their children are unvaccinated.
Third party leader David Seymour (ACT Party) told people who have lost their jobs due to coercive mandates that it was their choice. So no joy there either.
The Green Party is more pro-mandate than the government and additionally would have us all back on bicycles. Their deputy leader struggled to hospital riding a bicycle to give birth while already in labour, presumably just to show us retirees how it is done.
Undercover surveillance is on the increase. Anti-mandate bloggers have had visits from the police.
Last week a 78-year-old farmer was fined $30,000 (£15,300) for selling a pail of raw milk to a government undercover agent who, along with his back-up team, had taken weeks to worm his way into the veteran farmer’s confidence. In contrast, France has made an international business success out of selling cheese made from raw milk. NZ, dairy capital of the world, has opted out of opportunity.
The government is ready and willing to encourage habits that damage health. Jacinda has famously said that NZ is on track to stamp out smoking within a decade but she forgot to mention that the government has encouraged the switch to vaping. A survey completed in November found an unprecedented and alarming 26 per cent of NZ school students vaped during the previous week. Another good markup for commercial pharma.
There is no end to our nanny state. This week it was suggested that the government would enter the supermarket business. We may soon be collecting our meagre processed rations from them.
So if it’s still on your bucket list and you will be visiting us, well done. Put on a brave face. You will need to test prior to departure and three more after landing. You may not know if anyone you meet is smiling or not, but you can always imagine that you are part of a fan club for the Mask of Zorro.
Oh, and by the way, our Labour tourism minister says NZ now wants to give preference to wealthy tourist. You may think that is a bit rich, or just a sign of an antisocial illness.
By Megan Redshaw | The Defender | May 13, 2022
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today released new data showing a total of 1,261,149 reports of adverse events following COVID-19 vaccines were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and May 6, 2022, to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S.
The data included a total of 27,968 reports of deaths — an increase of 210 over the previous week — and 228,477 serious injuries, including deaths, during the same time period — up 1,774 compared with the previous week. There were 5,794 additional total adverse events reported to VAERS over the previous week.
Excluding “foreign reports” to VAERS, 815,384 adverse events, including 12,899 deaths and 81,830 serious injuries, were reported in the U.S. between Dec. 14, 2020, and May 6, 2022.
Foreign reports are reports foreign subsidiaries send to U.S. vaccine manufacturers. Under U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, if a manufacturer is notified of a foreign case report that describes an event that is both serious and does not appear on the product’s labeling, the manufacturer is required to submit the report to VAERS.
Of the 12,899 U.S. deaths reported as of May 6, 16% occurred within 24 hours of vaccination, 20% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination and 59% occurred in people who experienced an onset of symptoms within 48 hours of being vaccinated.
In the U.S., 578 million COVID-19 vaccine doses had been administered as of May 6, including 341 million doses of Pfizer, 218 million doses of Moderna and 19 million doses of Johnson & Johnson (J&J).
Every Friday, VAERS publishes vaccine injury reports received as of a specified date. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed.
Historically, VAERS has been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.
U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to May 6, 2022, for 5- to 11-year-olds show:
U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to May 6, 2022, for 12- to 17-year-olds show:
U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to May 6, 2022, for all age groups combined, show:
Pfizer’s COVID efficacy fades rapidly just weeks after second and third doses
Second and third doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine provide protection against the Omicron variant for only a few weeks, according to peer-reviewed research published today in JAMA Network Open.
“Our study found a rapid decline in Omicron-specific serum neutralizing antibody titers only a few weeks after the second and third doses of [the Pfizer-BioNTech] BNT162b2,” the authors of the research letter wrote.
The authors said their findings “could support rolling out additional booster shots to vulnerable people as the variant drives an uptick in new cases across the country,” Forbes reported.
Danish researchers studied adults who received two or three doses of BNT162b2 between January 2021 and October 2021, or were previously infected prior to February 2021 and then vaccinated.
They found that after an initial increase in Omicron-specific antibodies after the second Pfizer shot, levels dropped rapidly, from 76.2% at week 4, to 53.3% at weeks 8 to 10, and 18.9% at weeks 12 to 14.
After the third shot, neutralizing antibodies against Omicron fell 5.4-fold between week 3 and week 8.
Megan Redshaw is a staff attorney for Children’s Health Defense and a reporter for The Defender.
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | May 12, 2022
Derek Sloan, a former member of Canada’s parliament and now the leader of the Ontario Party, was permanently suspended from Twitter over alleged violations of the platform’s policies.
The permanent ban came after he criticized comments made by the Canadian Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam about long Covid symptoms.
On Sunday, Rebel News board member Efron Monsanto posted a clip of Tam claiming that about half of the people getting Covid have long Covid symptoms, which refers to displaying symptoms of Covid for months.
“We probably anticipate that the impacts of long COVID is going to be quite substantial,” said Tam, adding that the solution is booster shots.
Replying to the tweet, Sloan wrote: “Their next move will be to rebrand the symptoms of COVID vaccine injury as ‘long COVID.’
The cure for ‘long COVID’ will be more vaccine boosters, which will create more ‘long COVID.’ Public health isn’t on your side.”
Following the comments, Sloan’s account was immediately suspended.
“This account will not be restored. This case will now be closed and replies will not be monitored,” Twitter told Sloan.
Speaking to LifeSiteNews, Sloan said he hopes Elon Musk will reinstate his account once he takes over in the next few months.
Meanwhile Sloan is campaigning for the provincial elections to be held on June 2. He said the campaign is going “very well.”
“People are really resonating to our main messages, no World Economic Forum, Digital ID, no foreign buying of real estate or farmlands, medical privacy, no censorship, and free votes,” Sloan told LifeSiteNews.
“Education not indoctrination,” he added.
By Paula Jardine | TCW Defending Freedom | May 13, 2022
This is the third instalment of Paula Jardine’s five-part investigation into the planning behind ensuring vaccine acceptance and countering vaccine ‘hesitancy’. You can read Part 1, published on Wednesday, here, and Part 2, published yesterday, here.
IN 2018 the Wellcome Trust reported that vaccine scepticism is highest in high income industrialised countries where over 80 per cent of all global vaccine sales occur. Months before Covid-19 was declared a Public Health Emergency, the World Health Organisation had listed vaccine hesitancy as one of ten threats to global health, threatening to reverse progress made in tackling vaccine-preventable diseases: ‘Given that the majority of parents accept vaccines, pro-vaccine messages may be needed to reinforce and support positive sentiment and help prevent emerging hesitancy from expanding.’
In fact they had been working for years trying to shore up positive sentiments, in 2003 establishing the WHO endorsed global network of websites called the Vaccine Safety Net to provide ‘trustworthy’ information to ‘counterbalance websites that provide unbalanced, misleading and alarming information on vaccine safety’.
A decade later, in 2013, this counterbalancing programme had not proved enough for some. David Ropeik, who taught risk communication at Harvard School of Public Health, chillingly said, ‘What’s dangerous about widely broadcast vaccine debates, in a sense, is the debate itself: by putting out misleading information to people with little fundamental understanding of the performance and value of vaccines, the anti-vaccine movement and its social media echo chambers create doubt when, in fact, there is not a true scientific debate.’
So certain was Ropeik of the absence of a debate that he called for punitive measures, including restricting the ability of the unvaccinated to participate fully in community activities, to be used as a means of achieving full vaccination, long before Covid saw countries introduce such restrictions by way of vaccine passes.
Dr Emily Brunson, an anthropologist who like Dr Heidi Larson, referred to yesterday, studies vaccine confidence issues, was less absolutist than Ropeik. ‘I think we need to avoid the trap of thinking that information or knowledge is enough, because for a lot of the people, and when you look at hesitancy and parental vaccine hesitancy in the US, the group who is most likely to purposefully choose to not vaccinate are highly educated . . . these are people who have read the primary literature themselves, and they’re correctly interpreting it, so it’s not a misunderstanding. They have other concerns that go beyond the traditional public health message of “This is what you should be doing”.’
Communications strategies that are ‘vaccine positive’ and developed with input from the vaccine confidence teams are disseminated around the world today. Larson and Brunson were both members of the expert panel convened by the US National Institute of Health (NIH) to develop communications guidance as the Covid-19 vaccines rollout under emergency use authorisations began. They both contributed to a Vaccine Communications Principles guide published by the Centre for Public Interest Communications which describes its mission as ‘building communications strategies for the common good’.
Larson was also a member of the WHO Scientific Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) working group on vaccines that developed a model to address hesitancy based on what it calls the three Cs: confidence, complacency and convenience. The key to confidence, they observed, lies with health workers, who are trusted by the public and able to influence vaccination decisions.
Over recent years, seasonal and pandemic influenza vaccine uptake has become the bellwether for vaccine confidence amongst health care workers. One lesson learned from the 2009 swine flu pandemic was that many of these workers began to exhibit less than universal enthusiasm for vaccines. In the United States fewer than half accepted the swine flu vaccine. Of course, if they were not taking the vaccines themselves, they couldn’t be relied upon as recruiting sergeants for the War on Microbes. Some needed more than education, they needed pressganging. So health departments and employers began mandating vaccines as a pre-condition of employment. Others stopped short of mandates, requiring instead that unvaccinated staff wear masks so that they could be more easily identified.
In England, where annual flu vaccine uptake by NHS staff hovers around 64 per cent overall with a wide variation in uptake between trusts, a different ‘inducement’ approach was introduced. In 2016, NHS England began offering financial incentives to the trusts linked to the number of staff inoculated. Behavioural modification tactics courtesy of the behavioural psychologists were deployed including ‘social norming’, that is creating peer pressure to make people think ‘if everyone else is doing it, I should too’. As NHS England explains, ‘Even something as simple as a sticker to show they have had their jab can be worn as a sign of pride and signal to others that they should have the flu vaccination.’
Whether volunteers or conscripts for the War on Microbes, the job of these trusted voices is to sell to the public products that are meant to be a long-term investment in their own health or their children’s health. The 2019 Global Vaccination Summit said more could be done to support them to provide ‘trusted, credible information on vaccines’ by giving more prominence to vaccination and communication skills in medical curricula and by increasing continuing professional training on vaccination issues.
The question is, what exactly are they being taught?
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By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
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