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COVID Vaccines Pose 112,000% Greater Risk of Brain Clots, Strokes Than Flu Shots

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | November 7, 2024

COVID-19 vaccines pose a 112,000% greater risk of brain clots and strokes than flu vaccines and a 20,700% greater risk of those symptoms than all other vaccines combined, according to a peer-reviewed study that calls for a global moratorium on the vaccines.

The study, published last week in the International Journal of Innovative Research in Medical Science, found reports of 5,137 cases of cerebral thromboembolism after COVID-19 shots over 36 months. This compares to 52 reported cases following flu vaccination and 282 cases for all vaccines over the past 34 years.

According to the study, this represents an “alarming breach in the safety signal threshold concerning cerebral thrombosis adverse events” following COVID-19 vaccination.

The study’s authors — independent researcher Claire Rogers, obstetrician and gynecologist Dr. James A. Thorp, independent researcher Kirstin Cosgrove and cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough — used data from the U.S. government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), for their analysis.

The data also indicated 9,821 reports of atrial fibrillation — an irregular heart rhythm that is “the most common identifiable cause of cerebral arterial thromboembolism” — following COVID-19 vaccination in 41 months, compared to 797 cases reported in 34 years for all other vaccines combined.

Rogers told The Defender the findings confirm anecdotal evidence of an increased incidence of stroke seen during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rogers said:

“Cerebral thrombosis case reports in VAERS substantially increased after the COVID vaccines. Not only have clinicians witnessed this in the hospital setting, but the average citizen has seen increased reports of stroke in celebrities, athletes and young people.”

McCullough told The Defender the study employed a “reasonable vaccine safety research strategy” by comparing “a new vaccine to the routine influenza vaccination as a ‘safe’ standard.” He said the results showed “horrific outcomes” following COVID-19 vaccination.

These outcomes led the study’s authors to call for an immediate global moratorium on the use of COVID-19 vaccines “to mitigate further risk with an absolute contraindication in women of reproductive age.”

“Our study joins the growing chorus of analyses calling for all COVID-19 vaccines to be removed from the market,” McCullough said. The withdrawal “should be the first priority” for the next administration.

Spike protein implicated in increased stroke risk

According to the study, the spike protein found in the SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19 vaccines is likely a significant contributor to brain clots and strokes.

“Early in the COVID pandemic, it became evident that there was a thrombogenic effect of the Sars-CoV-2 virus and it is now believed that the spike proteins [are] one of the major contributors to this thrombogenic effect,” the study said.

According to the study, the original strain of the virus led to “a variety of severe thromboembolic events.” However over time, “natural evolution may have resulted in less virulent strains.”

This original risk was replaced by an increase in the incidence of microclots, “affecting the smaller vessels in the circulatory system.” The study noted that it is “widely understood that cumulative exposure to the spike protein” leads to an increased risk of such clots in patients.

According to Rogers, “One mechanism by which the spike protein is thought to contribute to this pathogenesis is by triggering endothelial dysfunction” — a condition that exists when coronary arteries are constricted even though there isn’t a physical blockage.

The study did not compare the different COVID-19 vaccine types — the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines, and the Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) and AstraZeneca adenovirus-based vaccines. Rogers noted, though, that the adenovirus vaccines were withdrawn in the U.S. and Europe following reports of blood clots.

Noting that VAERS “is regulated, owned, and maintained” by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the study addressed the relative advantages and disadvantages of using this database for such an analysis.

“Despite the bias of the CDC/FDA and their attempts to hide, conceal, and ‘throttle’ the deaths and injuries caused by the COVID-19 vaccines, there remains an unprecedented breach of the safety signal using their own criteria,” the study said.

This safety signal is evident even though the “relative underreporting factor … in VAERS is thought to be in the range of 30-100.”

A 2011 Harvard study found that less than 1% of all adverse events are reported to VAERS.

Calls intensify for a moratorium on COVID shots

Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist at Children’s Health Defense, told The Defender that despite “the limitations of using VAERS data to infer risk,” he was “startled” by the study’s results. He said the study adds to the growing number of voices calling for a moratorium on the administration of the COVID-19 vaccines.

“While one study does not justify a moratorium, a cacophony of studies does,” Jablonowski said.

According to the study, “There are now 3,580 studies published in peer-reviewed medical journals documenting injuries, disabilities, and deaths after COVID-19 vaccines,” strengthening calls for their withdrawal.

Last month, Idaho’s Southwest District Health said it would stop offering COVID-19 vaccines, following testimony by members of the local community and by experts including McCullough and Thorp.

This followed last month’s release of a Slovak government report calling mRNA shots “dangerous” and calling for their ban. Also last month, a town council in Western Australia called for a ban on mRNA products.

In January, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo called for a “halt in the use of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines” over safety concerns.

Psychotherapist Joseph Sansone, Ph.D., author of the “Ban the Jab” resolution adopted by 10 Florida counties, supported the study’s call for a moratorium on the COVID-19 vaccines.

He said:

“COVID-19 and mRNA nanoparticle injections are biological and technological weapons of mass destruction. It is time for the medical community to tell the truth and admit they were lied to like everybody else. These injections harm those injected and those not injected, via the shedding of this technology.

“All mRNA nanoparticle injections need to be prohibited immediately and there needs to be a thorough investigation into the criminals behind this attack on humanity.”

Organizations including the World Council for Health, Doctors for COVID Ethics and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons have also called for a moratorium on the COVID-19 vaccines.

“COVID vaccine uptake by the public is at an all-time low,” Rogers said. “The need is no longer there for production of these products.”

Jablonowski said:

“A global moratorium on the COVID-19 vaccines would be a major step forward for humanity, not just in human health but for our humility.

“We would have to admit that we were fooled into taking a dangerous product and that our governments, scientists and pharmaceutical companies were all too willing to fool us. Our brighter future starts when we come to these terms.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

November 10, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Stunning Revelations in Massive Robert Koch Institute Leak

Breathtaking November 2 presentation in the German Parliament

By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | November 9, 2024

A massive leak of internal e-mails and memos from Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (federal agency and research institute for controlling infectious disease) reveals that the institute’s scientists understood that virtually every aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic response was NOT guided by science, but by political machinations to spread fear, control the population, and promote the experimental vaccines. On November 2, 2024, Professor Stefan Homburg gave a presentation on the leaked documents in the German Parliament.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have suspected that governments throughout the world were committing the greatest organized fraud in history, but I still found Professor Homburg’s presentation to be absolutely breathtaking in the sheer ruthlessness of the lies and manipulation revealed in these leaked documents. Perhaps the most perfidious is a memo from September 28, 2020.

Translation: 28.09.2020: FDA approval [of COVID-19 vaccines] before the US Elections is not desired, also not by European authorities.

In other words, both U.S. and European public health authorities were afraid the COVID-19 vaccines—which had been heralded as the forthcoming saviors of mankind—could help to get Donald Trump elected if they were approved before the election. And so they found it expedient to withhold approval until after the election, even though they claimed the vaccines could save millions of lives.

I strongly encourage everyone to watch the video presentation (in German with English subtitles) and to share it far and wide.

A whistleblower obtained 10GB from Robert-Koch-Institute, the German CDC. This so-called RKI-Leak reveals that Covid was a scam from start to finish. The presentation took place in the second largest room of the German Bundestag, which is actually intended for committees of inquiry. Recorded 2 November 2024 in Berlin, English subtitles provided by the speaker.

Internet sources:

The RKI-Leak The Federal Ministry of Health has confirmed the authenticity of the leak. You can download the entire material anonoymously and free of charge from https://rki-transparenzbericht.de/

Here is a convenient search tool: https://www.rkileak.com/

Lauterbach‘s Post on X: https://x.com/Karl_Lauterbach/status/…

Lauterbach and political independence https://www.bild.de/politik/inland/rk… Spahn: Test, test, test https://www.aerztezeitung.de/Politik/…

CNN reporting emergency authorization https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/11/he…

RKI-Grapah Influenca like illnesses (ILI) https://influenza.rki.de/Wochenberich…

WDR-Graph vaccine development https://www.quarks.de/gesundheit/medi…

Lauterbach on the unvaccinated https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschla…

Citation Dr. Brigitte Keller-Stanislawki https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/gesun…

Steinmeier, Merkel, Scholz, Lauterbach, Spahn were allegedly vaccinated https://www.bundespraesident.de/Share… https://www.aerzteblatt.de/nachrichte… https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutsc… Lauterbach on child vaccination https://x.com/Karl_Lauterbach/status/…

RKI risk levels (deleted, only available from the internet archive) Go to https://archive.ph and type:https:/www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus/Risikobewertung.html Intensive care unit occupation https://infektionsradar.gesund.bund.d…

November 10, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

The CDC Planned Quarantine Camps Nationwide

By Jeffrey A Tucker | Brownstone Institute | November 7, 2024

No matter how bad you think Covid policies were, they were intended to be worse.

Consider the vaccine passports alone. Six cities were locked down to include only the vaccinated in public indoor places. They were New York City, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. The plan was to enforce this with a vaccine passport. It broke. Once the news leaked that the shot didn’t stop infection or transmission, the planners lost public support and the scheme collapsed.

It was undoubtedly planned to be permanent and nationwide if not worldwide. Instead, the scheme had to be dialed back.

Features of the CDC’s edicts did incredible damage. It imposed the rent moratorium. It decreed the ridiculous “six feet of distance” and mask mandates. It forced Plexiglas as the interface for commercial transactions. It implied that mail-in balloting must be the norm, which probably flipped the election. It delayed the reopening as long as possible. It was sadistic.

Even with all that, worse was planned. On July 26, 2020, with the George Floyd riots having finally settled down, the CDC issued a plan for establishing nationwide quarantine camps. People were to be isolated, given only food and some cleaning supplies. They would be banned from participating in any religious services. The plan included contingencies for preventing suicide. There were no provisions made for any legal appeals or even the right to legal counsel.

The plan’s authors were unnamed but included 26 footnotes. It was completely official. The document was only removed on about March 26, 2023. During the entire intervening time, the plan survived on the CDC’s public site with little to no public notice or controversy.

It was called “Interim Operational Considerations for Implementing the Shielding Approach to Prevent COVID-19 Infections in Humanitarian Settings.”

“This document presents considerations from the perspective of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) for implementing the shielding approach in humanitarian settings as outlined in guidance documents focused on camps, displaced populations and low-resource settings. This approach has never been documented and has raised questions and concerns among humanitarian partners who support response activities in these settings. The purpose of this document is to highlight potential implementation challenges of the shielding approach from CDC’s perspective and guide thinking around implementation in the absence of empirical data. Considerations are based on current evidence known about the transmission and severity of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and may need to be revised as more information becomes available.”

By absence of empirical data, the meaning is: nothing like this has ever been tried. The point of the document was to map out how it could be possible and alert authorities to possible pitfalls to be avoided.

The meaning of “shielding” is “to reduce the number of severe Covid-19 cases by limiting contact between individuals at higher risk of developing severe disease (‘high-risk’) and the general population (‘low-risk’). High-risk individuals would be temporarily relocated to safe or ‘green zones’ established at the household, neighborhood, camp/sector, or community level depending on the context and setting. They would have minimal contact with family members and other low-risk residents.”

In other words, this is what used to be concentration camps.

Who are these people who would be rounded up? They are “older adults and people of any age who have serious underlying medical conditions.” Who determines this? Public health authorities. The purpose? The CDC explains: “physically separating high-risk individuals from the general population” allows authorities “to prioritize the use of the limited available resources.”

This sounds a lot like condemning people to death in the name of protecting them.

The model establishes three levels. First is the household level. Here high-risk people are“physically isolated from other household members.” That alone is objectionable. Elders need people to take care of them. They need love and to be surrounded by family. The CDC should never imagine that it would intervene in households to force old people into separate places.

The model jumps from households to the “neighborhood level.” Here we have the same approach: forced separation of those deemed vulnerable.

From there, the model jumps again to the “camp/sector level.” Here it is different. “A group of shelters such as schools, community buildings within a camp/sector (max 50 high-risk individuals per single green zone) where high-risk individuals are physically isolated together. One entry point is used for exchange of food, supplies, etc. A meeting area is used for residents and visitors to interact while practicing physical distancing (2 meters). No movement into or outside the green zone.”

Yes, you read that correctly. The CDC is here proposing concentration camps for the sick or anyone they deem to be in danger of medically significant consequences of infection.

Further: “to minimize external contact, each green zone should include able-bodied high-risk individuals capable of caring for residents who have disabilities or are less mobile. Otherwise, designate low-risk individuals for these tasks, preferably who have recovered from confirmed COVID-19 and are assumed to be immune.”

The plan says in passing, contradicting thousands of years of experience, “Currently, we do not know if prior infection confers immunity.” Therefore the only solution is to minimize all exposure throughout the whole population. Getting sick is criminalized.

These camps require a “dedicated staff” to “monitor each green zone. Monitoring includes both adherence to protocols and potential adverse effects or outcomes due to isolation and stigma. It may be necessary to assign someone within the green zone, if feasible, to minimize movement in/out of green zones.”

The people housed in these camps need to have good explanations of why they are denied even basic religious freedom. The report explains:

“Proactive planning ahead of time, including strong community engagement and risk communication is needed to better understand the issues and concerns of restricting individuals from participating in communal practices because they are being shielded. Failure to do so could lead to both interpersonal and communal violence.”

Further, there must be some mechanisms to prohibit suicide:

Additional stress and worry are common during any epidemic and may be more pronounced with COVID-19 due to the novelty of the disease and increased fear of infection, increased childcare responsibilities due to school closures, and loss of livelihoods. Thus, in addition to the risk of stigmatization and feeling of isolation, this shielding approach may have an important psychological impact and may lead to significant emotional distress, exacerbate existing mental illness or contribute to anxiety, depression, helplessness, grief, substance abuse, or thoughts of suicide among those who are separated or have been left behind. Shielded individuals with concurrent severe mental health conditions should not be left alone. There must be a caregiver allocated to them to prevent further protection risks such as neglect and abuse.

The biggest risk, the document explains, is as follows:

“While the shielding approach is not meant to be coercive, it may appear forced or be misunderstood in humanitarian settings.”

(It should go without saying but this “shielding” approach suggested here has nothing to do with focused protection of the Great Barrington Declaration. Focused protection specifically says: “schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.”)

In four years of research, and encountering truly shocking documents and evidence of what happened in the Covid years, this one certainly ranks up at the top of the list of totalitarian schemes for pathogenic control prior to vaccination. It is quite simply mind-blowing that such a scheme could ever be contemplated.

Who wrote it? What kind of deep institutional pathology exists that enabled this to be contemplated? The CDC has 10,600 full-time employees and contractors and a budget of $11.5 billion. In light of this report, and everything else that has gone on there for four years, both numbers should be zero.

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.

November 8, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Appeals Court Rules Against CHD, RFK Jr. in Landmark Censorship Case

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | November 5, 2024

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) is weighing next steps after an appeals court late Monday ruled against CHD and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in their landmark censorship case against the Biden administration.

The 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled the plaintiffs — CHD, Kennedy and news consumer Connie Sampognaro — have no legal basis to sue the Biden administration for pressuring tech giants to censor their social media posts.

Monday’s ruling overturned a lower court decision, made in August by Judge Terry Doughty from the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, who ruled the plaintiffs do have standing to sue the administration.

Standing is the legal doctrine requiring plaintiffs to show they’ve suffered direct and concrete injuries and that those injuries could be redressed in court in order to sue.

The lawsuit, Kennedy v. Biden — filed in March 2023 — alleges top government officials and federal agencies “waged a systematic, concerted campaign” to compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor their constitutionally protected speech.

“We are, of course, disappointed with and disagree with the 5th Circuit’s decision here,” CHD General Counsel Kim Mack Rosenberg told The Defender.

Mack Rosenberg added:

“We believe that the additional evidence CHD presented more than sufficiently established standing for Children’s Health Defense. We pointed the court to ongoing censorship activities by the government and we demonstrated that the government has a significant and improper role in the social media platforms’ censorship of CHD.”

Mack Rosenberg said that plaintiffs are weighing the next steps.

Censorship lawsuits against Biden administration continue to drag on

The decision marks the latest major development in the ongoing anti-censorship litigation against the Biden administration.

Two separate cases — Murthy v. Missouri (originally Missouri v. Biden) and Kennedy v. Biden were filed in May 2022 and March 2023 respectively against the Biden administration in Louisiana District Court.

The cases have different plaintiffs but make similar allegations: that the administration colluded with social media companies to censor plaintiffs’ speech.

Both cases cited the disclosures of secret communications between social media companies and federal officials — in the “Twitter Files,” other lawsuits and news reports — revealing threats by President Joe Biden and other top officials against social media companies if they failed to aggressively censor content that ran counter to official narratives, including those on COVID-19 origins and vaccines.

Doughty consolidated the two cases, allowing them to share processes, such as discovery of evidence. However, the courts continued to hear and rule on the cases separately.

Plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden sought and won a preliminary injunction in the lower court to prevent the Biden administration from pressuring social media companies to censor certain content. The administration appealed in July 2023 and in June 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the injunction.

The Supreme Court ruled the plaintiffs lacked standing because there was insufficient evidence they were directly injured by the government’s actions.

The Louisiana District Court later granted a preliminary injunction in the Kennedy v. Biden case; however, the court simultaneously issued a stay pending the Supreme Court’s decision on the injunction in Missouri v. Biden.

After the Supreme Court struck down the injunction in Missouri v. Biden, the 5th Circuit sent the Kennedy v. Biden case back to the District Court to rule on standing, where plaintiffs presented supplementary evidence.

The Kennedy v. Biden plaintiffs argued they had a stronger case for standing than the plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden because there is explicit evidence that both Kennedy and CHD were specific targets of censorship and that they continue to be censored.

In a declaration by CHD President Mary Holland, Holland said CHD was deplatformed from Facebook and YouTube in August and September 2021 and continues to be deplatformed from major social media sites to this day.

Doughty found the government’s conduct is traceable to direct statements and instructions to social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. He said Kennedy and CHD showed they faced ongoing injuries that could be redressed by the court.

In October, a three-judge panel in the 5th Circuit heard oral arguments in the Kennedy v. Biden case.

In its ruling late yesterday, the 5th Circuit disagreed with Doughty and concluded CHD, Kennedy and Sampognaro lacked standing for the same reasons the Supreme Court found the Missouri v. Biden plaintiffs lacked standing.

The court didn’t deny that pressure to censor and subsequent censorship of Kennedy and CHD had happened. Instead, it said the meetings between the government and social media companies had stopped in 2022.

Even if pressure exerted at that time led to the platforms censoring CHD, the organization could not tie ongoing censorship to government action, the court ruled. Therefore, plaintiffs have a “redressability problem,” and don’t have standing, it concluded.

Kennedy’s campaign Chief of Staff Brigid Rasmussen also described a series of content moderation actions taken by social media platforms against the Kennedy campaign.

The court ruled that Kennedy’s argument that he would be subjected to future censorship is speculative — and even more speculative now that his presidential campaign is suspended — and that he also therefore lacks standing.

The 5th Circuit’s decision voided the preliminary injunction and sent the case back again to the District Court.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

November 5, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | 1 Comment

Healthcare Workers Reject COVID, Flu Shots Amid ‘Tremendous Erosion of Trust’ in Health Agencies

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | November 4, 2024

The number of healthcare workers receiving COVID-19 and flu vaccines declined during the 2023-24 cold and flu season, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Only 15.3% of acute hospital workers and 10.5% of nursing home personnel received a COVID-19 vaccine during the 2023-24 season — down from 17.8% and 22.8% respectively, the CDC said in its Oct. 31 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Based on data from the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network, flu vaccine rates for the same healthcare worker groups were higher than COVID-19 vaccine rates — 80.7% for acute care hospital personnel and 45.4% for nursing home personnel.

However, the rates remained “persistently below the levels during the prepandemic period.” For example, the flu vaccine rate for hospital workers in 2019-20 was 91%.

The CDC figures also showed that nearly 1 in 100 healthcare workers reported “a medical contraindication” to receiving either the COVID-19 (0.71%) or flu (0.89%) vaccine. The CDC figures did not provide information on the rate of vaccine side effects reported by healthcare workers.

The CDC said more research is needed “to identify effective strategies to improve vaccination at a time when health care personnel are susceptible to low vaccine confidence.”

Such studies would also seek to improve “confidence about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines among health care personnel through, for example, providing additional education about the safety and effectiveness of vaccination to health care personnel.”

Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), told The Defender the data didn’t surprise her.

“It is no longer possible to deny safety signals and lack of effectiveness,” Orient said. “A large percentage [of healthcare workers] have themselves had several episodes of COVID, had adverse reactions themselves, or know someone who did.”

Pulmonologist Dr. Pierre Kory, founder of the Leading Edge Clinic and president emeritus and co-founder of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, said the CDC figures represent “a welcome trend” that he hopes will continue. He said:

“Regardless of the reasons for the decline, the data shows healthcare workers’ tremendous erosion of trust in our regulatory agencies. Allowing this distrust to continue will further undermine the public’s confidence in our healthcare agencies.”

Kory noted the symbolism of healthcare workers turning their backs on the COVID-19 vaccine in particular. “If the vaccine is not for us, it is certainly not for them,” Kory said.

Danielle Baker, a certified hospice and palliative care registered nurse injured by the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, agreed.

“With the current state of public healthcare, I am not surprised by the figures. In healthcare, there were positions where you agreed to some annual vaccinations upon hire, but the events of 2021 forever shook the core of even that practice,” Baker said.

Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, an ear, nose and throat specialist who was suspended by Houston Methodist Hospital for treating COVID-19 patients with ivermectin, said, “85% of healthcare workers are opting not to get the COVID shots because they know these shots are all risk and no benefit.”

‘Why should we trust you?’

Dr. Marty Makary, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets it Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health,” said the disparity between the CDC’s COVID-19 vaccination recommendations and the actual coverage rate “is telling.”

“It’s also embarrassing for the CDC director [Dr. Rochelle Walensky], who has made pushing the new COVID booster a leading priority of her tenure,” Makary said.

Orient said that doctors and other healthcare personnel who stood up to vaccine mandates and pressure from their employers to get vaccinated “are vindicated” by the CDC’s data “and should be applauded.”

“The message to the public should be obvious,” Orient said. “Why should we trust you?”

Others, though, do not feel vindicated. Sarah Choujounian, co-founder of the Canadian Frontline Nurses, told The Defender that while “many have been awakened to the fact that vaccines are not safe,” she and other nurses who opposed vaccine mandates are still facing professional repercussions.

“This news does not bring vindication as I, amongst many others, am still in court being dragged through a disciplinary hearing for standing up to the corruption and standing up for what is best for our communities,” Choujounian said.

Dr. Danice Hertz, a retired gastroenterologist who was “horribly injured” after receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, said lawmakers and policymakers need to open their eyes to the growing distrust of the COVID-19 vaccines by the medical community.

Hertz said:

“I personally have been injured by the Pfizer COVID vaccine. I believed what I was told by our agencies, that these vaccines are safe and effective. I learned the hard way that they were not telling the truth.”

Bowden said that doctors haven’t done enough to speak out. She said:

“Why are physicians not speaking out? Our profession has veered off course, and physicians today are more concerned with protecting their jobs over upholding the Hippocratic oath.

“We have an abundant amount of data showing adverse events from these shots, but we don’t have anyone in authority who will look at the data. Physicians need to get vocal and stand up to the government doctors who have taken over our healthcare system.”

Orient said more doctors are starting to speak out, but “intense indoctrination, financial incentives and fear of ostracism and licensure are huge barriers to overcome.”

Kory said if the medical establishment and the government are to have any hope of reestablishing trust, they need to “recognize the truth about the COVID-19 vaccines. Until that happens, no message from them will be taken seriously, and the little public trust left in these institutions will eventually be gone.”

Baker said he believes the public has reached a point where they no longer need to look to healthcare professionals for an answer when it comes to COVID-19 vaccination. He said:

“People pay attention. The mass media messages, governmental overstep, blanket mandates, lack of agency support for those adversely affected and unwillingness to see and hear responses to these things have caused an implosion.

“Enough of the general public has reached a consensus when it comes to this particular shot from the collective set of experiences over the past years.”

CDC data leave unanswered questions

The CDC data — self-reported by hospitals and nursing home facilities — also demonstrated regional differences in vaccine uptake. COVID-19 vaccine update was highest in the Pacific region and lowest in the Mountain and Southern states.

For the flu vaccine, uptake was highest in the Mountain region and lowest in the Pacific region for acute care hospital employees, while for nursing home personnel, uptake was highest in the Northeast and lowest in the South.

Figures for the current respiratory illness season are not yet available.

Pediatrician Dr. Michelle Perro told The Defender the data still leaves some unanswered questions.

“One criticism is that it did not delineate which types of healthcare employees were opting out of the flu and COVID vaccines. It appears that this data may not have been readily available,” Perro said.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

November 5, 2024 Posted by | Deception | , | Leave a comment

RIPPLE EFFECT

The HighWire | October 31, 2024

Jefferey Jaxen Guest Hosts! First, the continued demise of legacy media and the rise of new media delivering the truth; Jefferey reports on a massive Alzheimer’s fraud, and is the UK going to mandate weight loss injections?; Fluoride Win Attorney Walks through Video Depositions and Evidence Exposing Fluoridation as one of the most damaging public policies in American History.

Guest: Michael Connett, Esq.

November 1, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , , | Leave a comment

House Floats Law to Make Colleges That Mandated COVID Shots Pay for Vaccine Injuries

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 30, 2024

Colleges that mandated the COVID-19 vaccine would be liable for medical expenses for students who experienced adverse events from the shot, under a bill introduced Tuesday in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The University Forced Vaccination Student Injury Mitigation Act of 2024 would require higher education institutions to cover medical costs for students who were — or still are — required to get a COVID-19 shot for class attendance and who experienced an injury.

The bill — introduced by Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) — stipulates colleges must cover the medical costs or risk losing all federal funding from the U.S. Department of Education.

“If you are not prepared to face the consequences, you should have never committed the act,” said Rosendale in a press release. “Colleges and universities forced students to inject themselves with an experimental vaccine knowing it was not going to prevent COVID-19 while potentially simultaneously causing life-threatening health defects like Guillain-Barré Syndrome and myocarditis.”

“It is now time,” Rosendale added, “for schools to be held accountable for their brazen disregard for students’ health and pay for the issues they are responsible for causing.”

Reps. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) and Bill Posey (R-Fla.) co-sponsored the bill.

Dr. Joseph Marine, professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, explained in the press release why he supports the bill:

“COVID-19 vaccine mandates for college students were flawed policies that did not alter the course of the pandemic and were not needed to keep college campuses ‘safe.’ I had to make efforts to prevent my own high school and college-age children from receiving COVID-19 booster shots that they did not want or need.

“It seems reasonable to me that institutions that implemented such policies without a sound medical or scientific rationale should take responsibility for any proven medical harm that they caused.”

If passed, the bill would allow students to submit a formal request for reimbursement, the Washington Examiner reported.

The request would have to include a record of COVID-19 vaccination, certification from a medical provider that the vaccine caused some kind of disease and a detailed account of related medical expenses.

Diseases covered by the legislation include myocarditis, pericarditis, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, Guillain-Barré syndrome and any other diseases that the U.S. Secretary of Education determines to be linked to COVID-19 vaccination.

After the student’s request is vetted to ensure it’s valid and contains sufficient evidence, the college would have to pay the medical costs within 30 days.

It is unclear when a vote on the bill will take place.

CHD took college mandate challenge to U.S. Supreme Court

Rutgers University was the first college or university in the U.S. to mandate the vaccines, threatening to disenroll noncompliant students in the fall 2021 semester. In August 2021, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) sued the university in an attempt to block the mandate.

The case was dismissed in January 2023. After losing on appeal in February, CHD in May asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case, but the court declined. Meanwhile, a month earlier, Rutgers abruptly ended the mandate.

Meanwhile, a federal appeals court this summer ruled that employees in the Los Angeles Unified School District can sue the district over its COVID-19 vaccine mandate because the shots don’t prevent transmission.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) acknowledges that myocarditis and pericarditis may occur after COVID-19 vaccination. And research shows that adolescents and young adults are particularly at risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis.

As of Sept. 27, there were 1,604,710 Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports of injury or death following a COVID-19 vaccination.

VAERS is the primary mechanism for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before confirming the reported adverse event was caused by the vaccine. VAERS has historically been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.

Meanwhile, citing concerns about the shots’ efficacy and safety, Idaho’s Southwest District Health last week voted to no longer offer COVID-19 vaccines at all 30 locations where it provides healthcare services.

17 colleges still have COVID vaccine mandates

By late May 2021, more than 400 U.S. colleges and universities required students to be vaccinated against COVID-19, The New York Times reported.

As of Oct. 19, 17 of those institutions still have a COVID-19 vaccination requirement for students to be able to enroll or live on campus, according to No College Mandates, a “group of concerned parents, doctors, nurses, professors, students and other college stakeholders working towards the common goal of ending COVID-19 vaccine mandates.”

Lucia Sinatra, co-founder of No College Mandates, said in the press release:

“College students were never at risk of severe injury or death from any variant of the COVID-19 virus and institutions of higher education had this data well in advance of mandating COVID-19 vaccines.”

According to the CDC, age is the “strongest risk factor” for severe outcomes from COVID-19 — meaning that the older a person is, the greater their risk for severe symptoms and death.

The CDC said its National Center for Health Statistics shows that “compared with ages 18–29 years, the risk of death is 25 times higher in those ages 50–64 years, 60 times higher in those ages 65–74 years, 140 times higher in those ages 75–84 years, and 340 times higher in those ages 85+ years.”

In other words, the typical college student — ages 18-22 — isn’t usually at risk of severe disease or death from COVID-19 when compared with older age groups.

Nonetheless, Sinatra said, many colleges imposed “some of the most coercive and restrictive vaccination policies” on college students, stripping them of their “fundamental right to bodily autonomy and informed consent.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

October 31, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

Idaho Health Board First in U.S. to Defy CDC and FDA by Removing COVID Vaccines From Clinics

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 29, 2024

Idaho’s Southwest District Health will no longer offer COVID-19 vaccines after its board voted 4-3 last week to pull the shots from the 30 locations where it provides healthcare services.

“It’s the first health agency in America to do that,” Laura Demaray, a Southwest Idaho resident and nurse who attended the Oct. 22 vote, told The Defender.

Miste Karlfeldt, executive director of Health Freedom Idaho, agreed that the board’s vote is historic. “It’s thrilling,” she told The Defender.

The board’s vote came after it received about 300 public comments urging the district, which encompasses six counties, to stop promoting the shots.

Just before the board voted, members heard presentations from cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole, pediatrician Dr. Renata Moon and obstetrician and gynecologist Dr. James Thorp on safety concerns related to the COVID-19 vaccines.

Dr. John Tribble, the board’s only physician, invited them to speak.

“Dr. Tribble was a very brave board member who is very aware of the harms of the COVID injection,” said Demaray. “He asked me to help gather the presenters.”

Demaray, who said she knows many people injured by the COVID-19 vaccines, and others reached out to experts who could present data related to COVID-19 vaccine harms to the board. “It was total teamwork.”

Mary Holland, Children’s Health Defense CEO, applauded the board’s action:

“After hearing from 300 constituents, listening to well-informed physicians and assessing the public record, the Southwest Idaho Health District Board made an informed decision not to stock its own clinics with COVID shots.”

Demaray and Holland pointed out that the board didn’t take away anyone’s freedom to get a COVID-19 vaccine. “If residents want, they can obtain the shots from other pharmacies and doctors’ offices,” Holland said.

Demaray said the board’s decision showed “there’s some distrust in this shot.” She added:

“If a health district is giving a shot in their own clinics, then it means they believe in the shot and they don’t think somebody will get hurt. It means they support it tacitly.”

Holland said, “The Health District Board was conveying its values to the public — ‘these products are unsafe and we do not promote them’ — and the board was within its authority to do this.”

A precedent for other health agencies?

Tribble told The Defender some of the backstory leading up to the historic vote. “The people of this district were demanding answers,” he said. “Many came forward with heartbreaking stories of vaccine injury.”

After listening to its residents, the board members felt it was important to allow “the free and open discussion and evaluation of the evidence for and against the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine.”

In addition to hearing presentations from McCullough, Moon, Cole and Thorp, the board also heard from district staff physician Dr. Perry Jansen who recommended keeping the vaccine on the district’s clinic shelves.

“In the end,” Tribble said, “the evidence clearly showed a lack of safety and efficacy as it compares to the risk from COVID-19 and their [the board members’] decision reflected that.”

The board members who voted to remove the shot “exhibited courage” because they did so “based on the evidence, in direct opposition to the federal health agencies’ recommendations.” Tribble said:

“I believe our actions here stand as an example and precedent for other health agencies to take back control of their health and freedoms from a corrupted federal system. I hope this will inspire other health agencies to openly discuss this issue and evaluate the evidence for themselves.”

‘That is how you open up a can of truth’

Karlfeldt said she’s confident the board’s landmark decision will embolden other health administrators across Idaho and the rest of the U.S. to make similar moves.

Demaray agreed. She said she already heard from two other Idaho health districts that are now considering pulling the COVID-19 shots from their clinics after learning of the Southwest District’s vote.

Demaray encouraged other U.S. citizens to reach out to their local health board members, asking them to review the safety information on the COVID-19 vaccines.

Many federal health agency leaders are captured by industry, but that’s not the case with most local-level health officials, Demaray said. “They aren’t all bought out yet.”

“If you bring your local doctors like Dr. Tribble — or Dr. Cole, Dr. McCullough, Dr. Moon and Dr. Thorp — if you bring them and they make presentations, it is public record and your community gets to see that,” she said.

“That is how you open up a can of truth,” Demaray added.

There’s a lot of power at the local level because while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends COVID-19 vaccines and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves them, it’s typically the local agencies that adopt policies to promote them.

Holland said, “Sadly, people need to accept that they cannot trust the federal government anymore when it comes to their health.”

VAERS: 1.6 million reports of injury or death after COVID vaccination

Nicolas Hulscher, an epidemiologist at the McCullough Foundation, commended the board for its action.

“Southwest Idaho Health District has made the correct and brave choice to remove COVID-19 injections from their clinics,” Hulscher said. “The updated boosters were never tested in humans, while previous iterations have demonstrated that they’re not safe for human use.”

Hulscher noted that Boise State Public Radio’s coverage of the vote labeled the presentations by McCullough and others as “anti-vaccine.”

The Boise State Public Radio article — which referred to McCullough and the other presenters as “doctors widely accused of spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation” — appeared to “blindly favor COVID-19 vaccines,” he said, “while ignoring deeply worrisome safety data.”

For instance, the number of injuries and deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) following COVID-19 vaccination continues to climb.

VAERS is the primary mechanism for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before confirming the reported adverse event was caused by the vaccine. VAERS has historically been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.

As of Sept. 27, there were 1,604,710 VAERS reports of injury or death following a COVID-19 vaccination.

The board’s vote has helped create greater public awareness that the COVID-19 shots “are massively injurious gene therapy products,” Holland said.

Tribble agreed:

“People need to understand that these shots are not vaccines by the traditional definition. That is to say, they do not impart immunity or prevent transmission.

“They were rushed to market, given legal immunity and coercively pushed upon the world’s population backed by unfounded fears spread by governments and media.”

Moreover, the safety and efficacy data we have is limited and primarily released by the same vaccine companies that stood to make hundreds of billions of dollars off of these injections, Tribble added.

“This experiment with mRNA gene therapy during COVID-19 will be shown to be one of the most egregious examples of democide in world history,” he said.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

October 30, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

NIH Spending $2.2 Million to ‘Nudge’ Elderly to Get More Vaccines

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 29, 2024

Using U.S. taxpayer dollars, researchers at two universities are identifying older people behind on their recommended vaccines and testing personalized “nudges” to coax them into getting more shots. nih-nudge-more-vaccines-feature.jpg

According to grant documents obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is funding the $2.2 million “BE IMMUNE” clinical trial, which began in 2020 and will run through 2025.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Washington are using Electronic Health Records (EHR) data — the electronic records from doctors’ offices containing patients’ detailed health and demographic data — to target African American, Hispanic and Asian people with lower flu, pneumococcal and herpes zoster vaccination rates.

The ongoing study blames the “poor vaccination rates” on patients’ and clinicians’ “widespread decision-making biases.” The trial is testing strategies drawn from behavioral economics, which uses insights from psychology to understand — and in this case to “nudge” or direct — people’s decision-making behavior.

The randomized controlled study is headed up by Dr. Shivan Mehta and a team of healthcare management experts who combine medical and business-based strategies to run studies like these.

The trials often are based in Penn Medicine’s in-house “Nudge Unit,” where behavioral design teams are dedicated to figuring out how to influence patient choices.

The grant is part of a massive initiative by the NIH to increase vaccine uptake by changing how people make decisions. The initiative has included hundreds of millions of dollars in grants since 2020 to create “culturally tailored” pro-vaccine materials to promote COVID-19 and flu vaccines.

It also included more than 50 grants worth $40 million designed to increase HPV vaccine uptake.

Testing the ‘ladder’ of behavioral interventions

The study is testing different “nudges” at more than 100 primary care practices at Penn Medicine, University of Washington Medicine and the Veterans Affairs Health System, one of the world’s largest EHR vendors in the world.

Over 1,000 primary care physicians and thousands of eligible patients at those practices are involved in the trial.

The range of tested interventions is scaled on a ladder.

Nudges lower on the ladder try presenting people with information so they can make their own decisions about vaccines —- methods that typically are not very effective for increasing vaccine uptake, the researchers said.

Nudges higher on the ladder either prompt people to make decisions, or simply plan their decisions for them.

For example, one nudge automatically sets up vaccination appointments for people, compelling them to go to their appointment and get vaccinated unless they intentionally opt out.

The “opt-out” framework has been effective in other areas of healthcare, such as colorectal cancer screening or persuading more people to take their flu shots, the researchers reported.

Netflix uses prompts to encourage binge-watching — healthcare should prompt people to get more shots

Penn’s “Nudge Unit,” which bills itself as the “world’s first behavioral design team embedded within a health system,” houses the study, which is also being conducted in a similar unit at the University of Washington.

Economist Richard H. Thaler and legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein popularized nudging in their 2008 book, “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness” as a method to create a “choice architecture” designed to influence people’s behavior in a predictable way “but without restricting choice” — particularly for policies or measures that might otherwise be unpopular.

Penn launched its Nudge Unit in 2016, inspired by British Prime Minister David Cameron’s Nudge Unit, established in 2010 to shape citizen behavior in the United Kingdom — a strategy the Penn researchers thought should also be applied to healthcare.

Penn’s Nudge Unit founders argued in a 2018 New England Journal of Medicine article that healthcare should use the same strategies businesses use to influence consumer behavior.

For example, they said, airlines require consumers to actively choose whether to purchase trip insurance before they can buy a plane ticket. Netflix changed its default settings to automatically play the next episode in a TV series to encourage binge watching.

“Similar opportunities exist to direct clinicians and patients toward better health care in situations where there’s consensus about desired behaviors,” they wrote, citing effective drugs, vaccines and targeted therapies as examples.

The strategy is being implemented globally — management consulting firm McKinsey reported that about 400 “nudge units” had been established globally by 2021.

However, even the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed Gavi concedes, “the theory has its critics — detractors argue that nudges can be paternalistic, invasive, ideological, and coercive in ways that erode public trust.”

The researchers behind this study also found that often the nudge approach doesn’t work.

In those cases, they argue “a stronger intervention—a ‘shove’—may be needed.”

EHR — an opportunity to scale up the nudge

The researchers celebrated EHR for offering a unique opportunity to develop and rapidly scale up personalized nudges.

The records increasingly are used for research and clinical trial recruitment because they contain a wealth of data. And new technological tools now allow researchers to “mine, assimilate, analyze, link, reproduce and transmit information” gleaned from that data.

Twila Brase, a registered nurse and author of “Big Brother in the Exam Room: The Dangerous Truth about Electronic Health Records,” told The Defender most people think the privacy of their EHR is protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, better known as HIPPA — but that’s not the case.

HIPPA only guarantees your data will be secure as it is passed among the various entities that have access to it, including researchers, Brase said. And that access can be provided without your consent.

“Nowhere in the law does HIPPA give you control over your medical records,” she said.

Because the records contain massive amounts of personal information that can be used and linked in many different ways, researchers studying EHR-based research argue that the use of EHR also raises “pressing questions concerning privacy, confidentiality, and patient awareness.”

They say that the use of one’s EHR data for research reasons can be confusing or even impossible to opt out of because often the provision of healthcare is linked to accepting a policy allowing researchers to use EHRs.

And EHR research often operates on the same logic as the nudge — an “opt-out” approach where permission is assumed unless a patient explicitly indicates they want to revoke it.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

October 30, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Despite Concerns About ‘Vaccine Fatigue,’ CDC Recommends Extra COVID Boosters, Including for Some Infants

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 24, 2024

Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Wednesday recommended two COVID-19 boosters during the 2024-2025 season for people ages 65 and older and for younger people who are moderately or severely immunocompromised.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) also recommended that immunocompromised people ages 6 months and older take “additional doses” of the shot — three or more — based on shared clinical decision-making between doctor and patient.

The vote for all three new COVID-19 vaccine recommendations was unanimous.

The committee also voted 14-1 to recommend Pfizer and Merck’s pneumococcal conjugate vaccines — designed to protect against meningitis and pneumonia — for all adults who have never received the vaccine ages 50 and older, lowering the recommended age from 65.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in June approved Merck’s Capvaxive for prevention of invasive pneumococcal disease and pneumococcal pneumonia in adults.

The vote expands the market for both companies, who will now be able to market their vaccines to millions more eligible adults, boosting their annual revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars, FiercePharma reported.

CDC Director Mandy Cohen endorsed the recommendations after the meeting, making them official CDC recommendations.

“CDC will continue to educate the public on how and when to get their updated vaccinations so they can risk less severe illness and do more of what they love,” Cohen said.

“ACIP loves advising that people receive the most vaccines possible,” internist Dr. Meryl Nass told The Defender.

She added:

“When ACIP talks about shared decision-making, what they mean is this: ‘We lack the data to recommend this vaccine for this group, so we could be criticized (or worse) for making an unscientific recommendation. But we really want you to have it.’

“So we think the patient and doctor (who is much less educated about the minutiae regarding the vaccine than the ACIP members are) should together decide whether the patient should get it. That way we protect ourselves while maximizing the number of jabs.’”

Nass said that if ACIP members were serious about shared clinical decision-making, “They would put all their thoughts down so clinicians could become educated and then jointly evaluate the risks and benefits with patients.”

The committee also voted unanimously to add high-dose and adjuvanted flu vaccines to the Vaccines for Children Program — which provides free vaccines to children whose families can’t afford them — for transplant recipients taking immunosuppressive medications.

ACIP is described as an independent, nonfederal expert body of professionals with clinical, scientific and public health expertise. The committee decides which vaccines should be recommended to the public, who should take them and how often.

In practice, most members have financial ties to vaccine makers that they don’t consider to be conflicts of interest. For example, in Wednesday’s meeting, paid Merck consultant and researcher Noel Brewer, Ph.D., declared “no conflict” before voting to recommend Merck’s vaccine.

More recommendations may ‘exacerbate existing vaccine fatigue’

The CDC said that in the 2023-2024 COVID-19 season, only 8.9% of people over age 65 and 5.4% of immunocompromised adults age 18 and older had received two boosters.

The presenter, Dr. Georgina Peacock, said there was “obviously a need for additional education and recommendations,” but raised concerns that additional recommendations “may also exacerbate existing vaccine fatigue.”

Ruth Link-Gelles, Ph.D., presented COVID-19 vaccine efficacy data that provided the rationale for the new recommendations. Efficacy is affected by time since the last booster dose, changes in COVID-19 variants and the time since someone was last infected with COVID-19, she said.

Link-Gelles said those are hard to disentangle, especially given that all adults have high rates of infection-induced immunity. Infection-induced immunity rates ranged from 72% for people over age 65 to 89% for those ages 16-49 and 84% for those ages 50-64.

In adults over 65, she said protection waned to zero against emergency room visits and hospitalization by four to six months and was somewhat more effective against critical illness.

She also said that additional education alone wasn’t effective in increasing uptake.

Waning efficacy: an argument for more shots or proof of natural immunity?

Link-Gelles presented a slide that showed COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness waned significantly among people ages 18-64, beginning at 30% and dropping to negative 15% by six months post-vaccination.

When pressed on how to interpret the negative efficacy, she said, “There is no biological plausibility for the vaccine increasing your risk of disease.”

Vaccine effectiveness data is relative, meaning it’s a measure of how much more protection a vaccinated person has than an unvaccinated one, she said. Therefore, “what we think is happening” is that unvaccinated people were getting natural immunity during that time, giving them more robust immunity and skewing the baseline for comparison.

Because vaccine efficacy is a comparison of the disease in the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated, if the efficacy is negative, “then the unvaccinated have more protection than the vaccinated,” Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist at Children’s Health Defense, told The Defender.

Jablonowski pointed out that Link-Gelles suggested the unvaccinated are exposed to wild-type COVID-19 and then gain immunity, compared with the vaccinated who would not gain that same wild-type immunity.

“What Dr. Link-Gelles is not entertaining, that which she sees ‘no biological plausibility,’ is the possibility of diminishing immune health of the vaccinated,” he said.

Jablonowski added:

“Both scenarios reduce the infections in the unvaccinated relative to the vaccinated. Either scenario points to the same conclusion, that the unvaccinated have superior long-term (180-299 days) immune health when facing the COVID-19 pandemic.

“More broadly, you cannot present VE [vaccine efficacy] analysis as a valid assessment of how well a vaccine works and then disregard the analysis when it shows the vaccine is not working.

“It is clear, from CDC’s own data and presentation, that the vaccinated had a higher long-term incidence of disease than the unvaccinated.”

Watch the Oct. 23 ACIP meeting here

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

October 27, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , | 1 Comment

The Most Devastating Report So Far

By Jay BhattacharyaJayanta Bhattacharya | Brownstone Institute | October 27, 2024

The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.

HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.

The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.

Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.

The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.

The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.

President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?

In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.

During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.

In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.

In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.

Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.

HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.

When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.

In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.

The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.

In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?

The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.

The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.

I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.

In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.

With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.

The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.

Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.

You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a physician, epidemiologist and health economist. He is Professor at Stanford Medical School, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Faculty Member at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute, and a Fellow at the Academy of Science and Freedom. His research focuses on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. Co-Author of the Great Barrington Declaration.

October 27, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

‘Seismic’ Verdicts: SF Transit System Must Pay Almost $8 Million to 6 Workers Fired for Refusing COVID Shots

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 25, 2024

The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) must pay about $7.8 million to six former employees who lost their jobs after the district denied their requests for accommodations for religious exemptions from BART’s COVID-19 mandate.

In the largest financial win yet for workers fired for failing to comply with COVID-19 vaccine mandates, a federal jury composed of entirely vaccinated jurors on Wednesday awarded the plaintiffs between approximately $1.2 million and $1.5 million each to compensate for economic losses and mental anguish.

The case is one of hundreds filed across the country since 2021, representing thousands of workers who say they lost their jobs when their employers illegally denied their requests for religious accommodation to the COVID-19 mandate.

“These verdicts are seismic — a 7.8 San Francisco legal earthquake,” Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, which represented the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “This amazing outcome represents so much hard work by our team, perseverance by these clients, and fairness from our judicial system.”

The workers’ attorney, Kevin Snider, told The Defender that because of BART’s mandate, “The workers were forced to either deny their faith or lose their jobs.” He said they chose the latter, demonstrating the sincerity of their religious convictions.

The lawsuit began as three separate cases representing 35 employees fired by BART. The three cases were later consolidated into a single lawsuit. Twenty-nine of the plaintiffs settled with BART, but the remaining six went to trial this month.

“These workers lost their jobs and have struggled for more than two years,” Snider said. “It was a devastating disruption to their lives and to their families. Being able to settle or get a jury verdict helps them to put closure on this and for those who went to trial, they felt heard and understood by a jury, which can be important.”

This was the second time the case went to trial. The first trial ended in a mistrial in July when the jury could not reach a unanimous decision, as required in federal civil trials.

BART, which can appeal the decision, declined to comment. Bloomberg Law reported that BART filed a motion for judgment as a matter of law during the trial, which U.S. District Judge William Alsup said would be argued in December.

The motion argues that the plaintiffs have insufficient evidence to reasonably support their case, even if a jury finds otherwise. In response, the judge can allow the verdict to stand, order a new trial or overrule the jury’s verdict.

Religious objectors had option to comply, retire, resign or be terminated

The plaintiffs first sued BART in December 2022, alleging the agency violated their First Amendment rights to religious freedom and federal and state anti-discrimination laws.

The BART system, which operates in five counties across the San Francisco Bay area, issued a mandate on Oct. 14, 2021, requiring employees to be fully vaccinated as a condition of employment.

Employees could apply for a religious or medical exemption. If granted, BART determined whether to provide them reasonable accommodation. Between October 2021 and February 2022, 204 of Bart’s 4,000-plus employees sought an exemption.

Approximately 179 of those were for religious beliefs by people practicing a variety of religious faiths, including various forms of Christianity, Islam and Ruism, according to Snider.

BART granted 70 of the religious exemptions and denied the rest, according to the complaint.

But even the employees granted an exemption were denied reasonable accommodation so they could continue working. Although BART acknowledged their right to a religious exemption, the agency said it couldn’t reasonably make accommodations, like allowing them to work at home or do weekly testing.

However, 1 in 3 of the employees seeking medical exemption were granted exemption and given accommodation, according to the complaint.

Instead of proceeding on the assumption that the accommodation requests were based on sincerely held religious beliefs, the complaint alleges, BART launched a probe into the sincerity of the employees’ beliefs.

Employees’ claims were investigated using an interviewer template that asked for a detailed explanation of their beliefs and why taking the COVID-19 vaccine would violate them. The template included questions like, “What do you think will happen to you if you take the COVID-19 vaccine?”

BART proceeded to deny all requests for accommodation from religious objectors and gave them the option to comply with the mandate, retire if qualified, resign or be terminated.

All of the plaintiffs refused to comply and lost their jobs.

Over the next couple of years, many of those employees, working with the Pacific Justice Institute, sued BART and settled their cases. The cases that couldn’t reach a settlement proceeded to trial — which Snider said carried a serious risk, because “San Francisco is probably the most difficult venue in the entire country to have a vaccine case.”

The trial happened in two phases. First, the jury was asked to rule on whether BART could have granted the requested accommodations. They rejected the agency’s argument that it couldn’t reasonably accommodate the employees seeking religious exemptions without facing an undue hardship.

Then they heard testimony about the sincerity of the plaintiffs’ religious beliefs and the damages they suffered.

Sinder, whose firm represents plaintiffs alleging religious discrimination in more than a hundred vaccine mandate lawsuits across the country, said that he thought public opinion was slowly changing to favor workers.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

October 26, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

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