On The Worship Of Sacred Cows
The strange death of real journalism
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | November 1, 2022
One of the extraordinary things about the past few years is the extent to which data which very obviously suggests one thing has been reinterpreted to suggest something else, merely to fit the “approved” narrative.
For no subject is this more apparent than that of the miracle covid injections. As a society we strained to attribute as many deaths as possible to “covid” — however unlikely they seemed to be connected. When discussing the vaccines, however, many defenders of the covid-cult seem willing and able to twist themselves into ludicrous contortions in an attempt to explain away any observations which don’t fully support the “safe and effective” (and necessary) official narrative.
This week has actually seen a flurry of such articles, of which the three below are just a selection.
Firstly, Canadian TV News excitedly reported on a study published in JAMA which found that the more severe the symptoms after mRNA vaccination, the higher the antibody levels generated.
This is, of course no surprise whatsoever, though is of questionable relevance given that even the CDC has said that there are “no correlates of protection” in terms of antibody levels. This is amply illustrated by the fact that despite extremely high Spike protein antibody levels in the population, seasonal waves of covid infections still appear to come and go in highly vaccinated countries, and triple (or more) vaccinated people still seem to be getting severely ill and even dying from covid.
The authors, all US clinicians or scientists, conclude their paper thus:
“In conclusion, these findings support reframing post vaccination symptoms as signals of vaccine effectiveness and reinforce guidelines for vaccine boosters in older adults.”
So, despite a complete lack of evidence for the clinical relevance of the raised antibody levels, they’re essentially saying “tell them that the more ill you are, the better it is working”.
Aside from the dubious ethics of this approach given the lack of supportive evidence of clinical relevance, this would of course discourage recipients from reporting adverse events, further compromising proper safety surveillance and signal detection in relation to these products, not that regulators appear to have actually performed any such useful analysis.
Lest those NOT experiencing side-effects be concerned about a lack of protection, CTVNews was of course happy to reassure them, apparently unaware of the contradiction with their main “message”, stating that:
But even though some people may have small, localized side effects or no symptoms at all, the vaccine still elicits robust immune responses in them too. Nearly all study participants exhibited a positive antibody response after completing a two-dose Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine series.
Our second example of delusional thinking this week is from the UK’s Daily Telegraph. Their staff writer Sarah Knapton, who has fairly reliably been against the lockdowns and other restrictions, still cannot bring herself to question the “vaccine is our saviour” story, as evidenced in this bizarre piece, claiming, “Covid vaccines appear to work better for active people… suggesting that hard lockdowns were counterproductive.”
It is of course well known that fit and healthy and regularly active people were always at much lower risk from covid and stopping people exercising during lockdowns was just one of the more ridiculous features of such policies.
Hence it is difficult to see why this observation by a researcher in South Africa should come as a surprise to anyone:
“In terms of policy, retrospectively we can say those hard lockdowns were counterproductive from an immune point of view, and trying to facilitate exercise is beneficial.”
The paper’s authors, writing in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, conclude that:
“Public health messaging should encourage physical activity as a simple, cost-effective way of enhancing vaccine effectiveness to mitigate the risk of severe Covid-19 illness requiring hospital admission.”
So, apparently, the reason exercise works in reducing covid mortality is by “enhancing vaccine effectiveness”? It seems hard to believe that anyone could fail to see the ridiculousness in that conclusion. However, Sarah clearly doesn’t want to miss an opportunity to promote the vaccines, hence, combining her disdain for lockdowns with her cult-like devotion to the vaccines, she gives her piece the title:
Covid vaccine study finding contradicts lockdown rule
Later, she states that:
A new study by South African researchers has found that people who got the most exercise responded better to the vaccine, with fewer ending up in hospital following the jab.
So basically: lockdowns are bad as they reduce vaccine effectiveness.
You really cannot make this stuff up (well, apart from the fact that some people are making this stuff up).
Finally, this week also saw the publication of a major analysis of the waning over time of vaccine efficacy (for both Astrazeneca and Pfizer mRNA products) in the United Kingdom in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
This was a “target trial”, which seeks to emulate a “real” trial by identifying naturally occuring exposure groups. The study is notable for its size, covering 12.9m people.
Here is not the place to delve into the results in detail, except to mention that within the period of the study vaccine efficacy became negative (meaning an increased risk over the unvaccinated) for deaths and hospitalisation within just a few months of injection for all doses except the 2nd dose of the Pfizer product.
The results are summarised here:
The curious reader may ask why they are combining deaths and hospitalizations into a single metric; if there had actually been any reduction specifically in deaths (or the waning for protection against death had been less), the authors would surely have highlighted that.
The next point about this is that when they say the vaccine efficacy remained above zero “throughout” what they mean is “throughout the period observed”, which was stated to be 98 days (although in the graphs the data appears to extend approximately another week or so beyond that).
It can clearly be seen from the graph below that efficacy is tending consistently downwards (as the RR, or relative risk, trends upwards towards 1), and by eye one can estimate that it too would turn negative after around 120 days, or 4 months.
No mention of this is made in the paper.
The final point to make is that in attempting to explain away this phenomenon, the authors claim that:
We believe that the most likely explanation for negative VE/rVE is that vaccination caused recipients to believe they were protected, leading them to change their behaviour in ways that increase their chance of contracting the infection.
Aside from there being no evidence for this assertion (or “belief” as they quite rightly call it), it is to be noted that most of the severe illness is seen within the elderly and frail, and it is hard to imagine these people deciding suddenly to start partying after vaccination.
In fact, a notable feature of the vaccination campaign was that, in the elderly at least, the level of fear and apprehension about the virus appeared to be largely unchanged afterwards.
Moreover, for the authors’ explanation to have any credence, the vaccinees’ confidence would have had to have increased over time since injection, to account for the direction of travel of vaccine efficacy, whereas surely the opposite would seem more likely.
Stop Press:
Sarah Knapton has written a further piece for the Daily Telegraph. The headline and byline are below. The word “vaccine” does not appear anywhere in the article, despite the plethora of published papers now linking the mRNA vaccines to cardiac issues.
ICAN OBTAINS SHOCKING NEW V-SAFE DATA
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | October 27, 2022
Del revisits the momentous case ICAN took against the CDC and reveals the data they withheld from their own Covid-19 vaccine injury reporting system, V-Safe.
Emily Oster proposes “a pandemic amnesty”
Suggests that “we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID”
eugyppius – a plague chronicle – october 31, 2022
I don’t know much about the American pandemic pundits, but I gather that Brown University economist and “parenting guru” Emily Oster is far from the worst of them. Her Twitter timeline suggests she spent the early months of the pandemic terrified about the virus until school closures took their toll on her kids, at which point she repositioned herself as a kind of lockdown moderate, opposing the worst of the hystericist excesses while validating their central premises whenever possible to save face with friends and colleagues.
“Employer mandates” mean firing people who don’t share your medical and political opinions.
Emily Oster’s latest act of moderation is the suggestion that we forgive and forget all the disastrous policies inflicted on us by terrified wealthy urbanites, clueless technocrats and mad scientist vaccinators since 2020, because, hey, these were just honest mistakes, anybody could’ve messed up like that, it’s all good.
April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks. Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”
These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.
The thing is, Emily Oster, that we did know. We’ve studied respiratory virus transmission for years. All the virologists and epidemiologists who aren’t total morons knew your 2020 mask routine was crazy and they just didn’t care. They wanted you to do it anyway, because they thought that if they got you to act paranoid and antisocial enough, your insane behaviour might have some limited effect on case curves. Joke’s on you, and it’s sad you still haven’t realised.
[T]here is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate. …
No, reasonable people could see already in March 2020 that SARS-2 posed no measurable threat to children. There was never any honest debate to be had about this.
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. …
We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. … [W]e need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.
Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.
I’m sorry somebody called you genocidal, Emily Oster. That must’ve been tough for you. You know what’s also tough? Getting your head kicked in by riot police because you had the temerity to protest against indefinite population-wide house arrest.
Or being fired from your university job and banned in perpetuity from the premises because you uploaded a video to social media complaining about the onerous and expensive testing requirements imposed upon unvaccinated staff. Or being confined to your house and threatened with fines because of personal medical decisions that had no chance of impacting the broader course of the pandemic in the first place. But somebody called this woman genocidal in French and she’s ready to move on, so it’s all good.
Emily Oster may have said a few reasonable things in the depths of her pandemic moderation, but she can take her proposal for pandemic amnesty and shove it all the way up her ass. I’m never going to forget what these villains did to me and my friends. It is just hard to put into words how infuriating it is, to read this breezy triviliasation of the absolute hell we’ve been through, penned by some comfortable and clueless Ivy League mommyconomist who is ready to mouth support for basically any pandemic policy that doesn’t directly affect her or her family and then plead that the horrible behaviour and policies supported by her entire social milieu are just down to ignorance about the virus. We knew everything we needed to know about SARS-2 already in February 2020. The pandemicists and their supporters crossed many bright red lines in their eradicationist zeal and ruined untold millions of lives. That doesn’t all just go away now.
Where’s Walensky? – A Rebound update
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | October 31, 2022
CDC Director, Rochelle Walensky first tested positive for Covid on 21 October. This was weeks after getting her fifth jab. This is the same Rochelle who assured us that the vaccinated don’t carry the virus and don’t get sick. My Post – A picture is worth a thousand words highlighted her journey to Covid infection.
Well the vaccinated clearly do carry the virus.
And they clearly do get sick. Although Walensky only had mild symptoms she took a course of the antiviral pill Paxlovid. Paxlovid, on rare occasions, causes a COVID rebound, i.e. you start testing positive again. This is so rare, Jill Biden rebounded, Joe Biden rebounded and Anthony Fauci rebounded. They just all must be really unlucky.
People were getting worried about Walesnky. She had gone quiet for longer than expected. 10 days had passed and she had only been seen on the odd video. Where had she gone?
You’ve guessed it, after taking Paxlovid, Walensky has also rebounded. After testing negative, mild symptoms returned on Sunday and she is isolating at home again.
Paxlovid seems to return symptoms quicker than the Speed of Science.
The question is, why are they all so keen to tell us that their safe and effective vaccines and drugs are no longer effective? They could easily disappear for a few weeks and nobody would be any the wiser that they had rebounded or even contracted mild Covid in the first place. There is clearly a nudging agenda going on.
Dr. McCullough Fights to Keep his Board Certifications
A doctor who publicly questions COVID-19 vaccine orthodoxy is severely punished
Giordano Bruno is burned at the stake for heresy on the Campo de Fiori in Rome, February 17, 1600.
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | October 30, 2022
Imagine the history of medicine if—every time a new disease emerged or was described for the first time—an Official Cure was quickly imposed by government authorities, and any doctor who questioned this Official Cure was branded a dangerous spreader of misinformation.
To students of history, such a scenario is reminiscent of the Roman Catholic Church’s Holy Office of the Inquisition, founded to prosecute anyone in the church’s jurisdiction deemed to have publicly uttered or written statements that questioned Church orthodoxy on spiritual and temporal matters. In the scientific realm, the Inquisition’s most notorious prosecutions were of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Both were convicted of heresy for their heterodox views. The former was first publicly humiliated by being hanged upside down on Rome’s Campo de Fiori and then burned at the stake. His ashes were then thrown in the Tiber River. The latter spent the last nine years of his life under house arrest.
For a while I lived in Rome in the Via Tor di Nona, in an apartment on the site of the Tor di Nona prison in which Giordano Bruno was incarcerated for seven years before he was put to death, and I often walked past his stately monument on the Campo de Fiori—a monument to his life and death, and also to the inhumanity, illiberality, and shame of the Holy Office.
By all accounts, Bruno was an exceedingly adventurous and courageous man. At his trial, upon receiving his dreadful sentence, he reportedly gazed directly into the eyes of his judges and said, “Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.”
Because the US Constitution was so ingeniously framed, the American people lived in a free republic for over two centuries. Sometime during the last ten years or so, we lost sight of the fact that the great advances our people have made in science, technology, and medicine were entirely predicated on free speech and the free exchange of ideas. James Madison, the author of our constitution, understood that the danger of infringing free speech greatly exceeded the danger of people making erroneous utterances. The reason for his conclusion is simple: The only way to correct erroneous perceptions and beliefs is to discuss and debate them.
Six months ago, Dr. Peter McCullough received a letter, dated May 26, 2022, from Richard J. Baron, M.D., who is President and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine. The letter was a formal notice that the ABIM was considering potential disciplinary sanction of Dr. McCullough. As Dr. Baron stated:
ABIM has learned that you have made numerous, widely reported and disseminated public statements about the purported dangers or lack of justification for Covid-19 vaccines.
Because of Dr. McCullough’s statements—which the Board deemed to be misinformation—the Board was considering revoking Dr. McCullough’s ABIM certifications in Internal Medicine and Cardiovascular Disease. In other words, the ABIM has assumed the function of maintaining/defending the official orthodoxy of Covid-19 vaccines.
It doesn’t matter that these are a based on a novel gene transfer technology, developed at Warp Speed, and deployed on the public by means of an Emergency Use Authorization. According to Dr. Baron, the ABIM’s understanding of these products and how the body reacts to them is a completely settled matter. Therefore, doctors who question the safety and efficacy of these products are, in effect, committing scientific heresy and subject to disciplinary action.
As Dr. McCullough and I document in our book, the COVID-19 vaccines—especially the mRNA products developed by Moderna and PfizerBioNTech—were (already in March of 2020) heralded as the solution to the pandemic, even before they were tested. As Bill Gates proclaimed in a press interview on April 6, 2020, he considered it imperative that mass manufacturing of these vaccines commence even before they were tested. This and countless other statements by Gates and his friends in public health agencies and the mainstream media indicated that the forthcoming vaccines and their mass deployment were a fait accompli.
As a medical scientist and treating physician, Dr. McCullough knew all too well the history of drugs that initially seemed safe and effective, but were later revealed to cause adverse reactions. OxyContin is a notorious recent example. Since SARS-CoV-2 arrived in the United States, Dr. McCullough has been at the forefront of researching the COVID-19 syndrome it causes and how to treat it. When the new vaccines were rolled out, he was at the forefront of investigating their safety and efficacy in the general public.
In the late spring of 2021, Dr. McCullough grew increasingly alarmed about the emerging vaccine safety data. According to the CDC, 6,207 deaths of people who’d received the COVID-19 vaccine were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) up to July 26, 2021. This was a staggering number. By comparison, the 1976 Swine Flu mass vaccination program was shut down after about 25 deaths and 550 cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome were reported.
McCullough pointed this out in his media interviews to the consternation of his hospital administrators who regarded his statements as grounds for termination. Since then, he has been systematically stripped of three professorships, multiple editorial positions at academic medical journals, and a host of other professional memberships and benefits. All that remains of his long and distinguished career are his Texas Medical License and his Board Certifications in Internal Medicine and Cardiovascular Disease. Now the ABIM wants to strip him of his certifications.
In a letter dated October 18, 2022, the ABIM gave Dr. McCullough notice that its Credentials and Certification Committee (CCC) had “determined to recommend that your board certifications be revoked.”
The ABIM’s CCC claimed that Dr. McCullough’s primary offenses were:
1). Understating the risk of COVID-19 death for people under the age of 50.
2). Overstating the risk of death from COVID-19 vaccines.
In making this determination, the ABIM ignored the obvious fact that both of these risks are highly complex and multifactorial and are therefore matters of ongoing inquiry and debate. Again the ABIM made the erroneous assertion that its understanding of these complex phenomena is final, settled, and therefore codified in official orthodoxy.
By inflicting this grave punishment, the ABIM ignores the other salient fact that Dr. McCullough has, in the course of his career, achieved decades of perfect clinical performance, board scores, and hundreds of peer reviewed publications. His patients—including a growing body of vaccine injured patients—consistently give him glowing reviews as a healer.
Since I started working with him over two years ago, I have gotten to know him not only as a compassionate doctor (who frequently takes calls from sick patients in the evening and makes house calls) but also as a devoted family man and loyal friend. Beyond his boundless passion for medical scholarship, he is deeply interested in the entire human condition and the integrity of our Constitutional Republic. In the two years I’ve known him, I’ve never once heard him complain. He has borne his ongoing persecution with perfect stoicism and dignity.
He and his lawyer are doing everything they can to challenge the ABIM’s determination, but doing so is an extremely time-consuming and costly endeavor. If his stripping is finalized, it will impair his status with medical insurers and therefore his ability to be paid for his services as a physician. Welcome to the New American Inquisition.
Trudeau invoked Emergencies Act despite deal to end protests, hearing finds
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | October 28, 2022
During the ongoing public hearings into the use of the Emergencies Act, it was revealed that the Freedom Convoy organizers, the federal government, and police were on the verge of reaching a deal to end the protests before the government invoked the authoritarian act anyway.
The Emergencies Act allowed the government to freeze the bank accounts of the civil liberties protesters.
Freedom Convoy’s counsel Brendan Miller asked Ontario Provincial Police Inspector Marcel Beaudin what happened to the deal to end the protest peacefully that was proposed on February 11. Beaudin said that he felt the proposal was “dead in the water,” and it was probably not presented to the federal government before the EA was invoked.
Miller said the deal was presented to the federal government, they just ignored it.
Miller asked: “Did you know that meeting was at 3:30 pm and that it was with cabinet and that it was the incident response group of the political executive meeting and that your proposal was provided to them?”
Beaudin said, “No.”
“It was. I can tell you that. And then they invoked the Emergencies Act,” Miller responded.
A memo outlining the deal read: “The deal would be: Leave the protest and denounce unlawful activity and you will be heard.”
Freedom Convoy organizers would have honored their end of the deal by removing over 100 trucks from residential streets and would remove more as negotiations went on.
“The recommendation was essentially, the political branch of the Government of Canada would agree to a meeting with the protesters but there would be certain conditions to that and they would have to denounce anything unlawful and get out of downtown Ottawa,” said Miller.
The invocation of the EA before attempting to reach a deal is a potential violation of the EA, which states that it should only be used when there is a situation “that cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.”
The EA was revoked a few days after it was invoked. However, within those few days, the police had forcefully removed peaceful protesters from the streets and the bank accounts of supporters of the protest frozen.
EU sticks to lockdowns, masks and vaccine passports
By Will Jones | TCW Defending Freedom | October 27, 2022
The EU has set out its commitment to the continued use of lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine passports and other restrictions this winter to control the spread of Covid-19, and also to the creation of a ‘legally binding’ global pandemic treaty with a ‘reinforced World Health Organisation at its centre’.
The document, published on September 2 and titled EU response to COVID-19: preparing for autumn and winter 2023, was prepared by the EU Commission (the EU executive) and sent to the EU Parliament. It reveals how much in thrall to the new biosecurity orthodoxy the EU leadership is and bodes ill for the future management of contagious disease in the bloc and globally.
On lockdowns and other restrictions, it proposes a framework of ‘key indicators to assess when deciding on reintroducing non-pharmaceutical measures’. These indicators include severe disease and hospital occupancy data, and importantly are stated to relate not just to Covid-19 but to influenza as well, potentially making this part of normal winter disease management indefinitely.
It suggests mask mandates as a ‘first option to limit community transmission’, giving a preference for FFP2 masks.
The document recommends the pre-emptive imposition of work-from-home and gathering limits before any rise in infections to try to avoid the ‘need for more disruptive ones such as lockdowns, closing businesses and schools, stay-at-home recommendations and travel restrictions’. It stresses the need for ‘political commitment’ to make lockdowns and other measures work.
The one welcome aspect of the document was the clear statement to avoid disrupting children’s education and lives any further, though even here school closures were not ruled out: ‘The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted the lives of children and adolescents affecting their everyday routines, education, health, development and overall well-being. It is therefore important to keep in mind the negative impacts of school disruptions on the health and development of children. The implementation of measures at schools should be aimed to be kept at a minimum and the further loss of learning should be prevented.’
The document discourages travel restrictions – freedom of travel and the elimination of internal borders being an article of faith for the EU. However, it recommends use of the EU Digital Covid Certificate (i.e., vaccine passport, though it also recognises natural immunity) wherever travel restrictions are necessary’, boasting about how widely it is already used.
‘The EU Digital Covid Certificate has been a major success in providing the public with a tool that is accepted and trusted across the EU (and in several third countries) and in avoiding fragmentation of multiple national systems. As of August 1st 2022, 75 countries and territories from across five continents are connected to the EU Digital Certificate system (30 EU/EEA Member States and 45 non-EU countries and territories), and several more countries have expressed interest in joining the gateway or are already engaged in technical discussions with the Commission. This makes the EU Digital Covid Certificate a global standard.’
What this fails to mention, of course, is any rationale for the passes. What’s the point of restricting the travel of the unvaccinated (or not-sufficiently-vaccinated) when the vaccinated are no less likely to spread the disease? This key question is entirely unaddressed.
On vaccination, the document provides 15 ‘objectives’, ‘priorities’ and ‘actions’ for Covid-19 vaccination strategies. These include the ‘priority’ of encouraging take-up of the original vaccine (that’s right, for the extinct Covid strains) among all eligible children and adolescents, and an action point of making sure GPs are spending enough of their time vaccinating people (don’t they have anything else to do?) It suggests administering boosters as often as every three months, implying they are of little use after six months. It also encourages governments to counter ‘misinformation’ in the media and online to ensure ‘clear, consistent and evidence-based messaging demonstrating the continued safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines’. It links worries about vaccine safety with ‘anti-Western and anti-EU narratives’ and with websites which also go off-narrative on the Ukraine war.
The document also trails a forthcoming ‘EU global health strategy’ which ‘will provide the political framework with priorities, governance and tools, enabling the EU to speak with one influential voice and making the most of Team Europe’s capacity to protect and promote health globally’.
This is a very disturbing document. For those of us who still hold to the evidence-based pandemic strategies of pre-2020, premised only on mitigating impacts by expanding emergency healthcare capacity and finding safe and effective treatments, and not imposing intrusive, harmful and unproven methods of trying to prevent the spread of a disease that is anyway harmless to most people, this bodes ill indeed for the current direction of travel in Europe and globally.
Will Ursula von der Leyen be forced to resign, and will her deeds be investigated?
By Vladimir Danilov – New Eastern Outlook – 28.10.2022
Europe has been rocked by large-scale protests over the last few weeks, and many politicians and media organizations in the EU see this as a reflection of public dissatisfaction with the policies of the European Commission and especially its head, Ursula von der Leyen. The main concern is the rising cost of living, the rapid increase in energy and food prices, and the anti-Russian policies of the European Commission, which have led to an energy and economic crisis that is affecting not only Europe but many other countries who have committed themselves to a close relationship with Europe.
Always keen to show her unwavering support for Washington and London, in her speech at the inaugural summit of the European Political Community, the President of the European Commission extended a warm welcome to Liz Truss – despite the fact that no-one other than Ursula von der Leyen considers the former British premier’s policies to be a success. As the Daily Express notes, the speech was greeted with an uncomfortable silence.
Internet users in the EU have criticized Ursula von der Leyen’s most recent promises to help the Kiev regime “as long as is necessary” and provide Ukraine with billions upon billions of Euros in credit. Her statements have been attacked on social media as ignoring the interests and wishes of EU citizens, and users have called for her resignation.
Writing on Twitter, the French politician Florian Filippo criticized her call for regular subsidies for Ukraine: “Ursula is completely crazy! Lock her up!”
In an interview with Le journal du Dimanche, the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has accused the European Commission of lacking the authority to make decisions on arms purchases. As he explained, the European Commission is an administrative body, and it is unclear on what basis Ursula von der Leyen considers that she has the authority to speak up on matters relating to foreign policy or arms purchases. Just a few days after the beginning of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine, the President of the European Commission announced that the EU would finance “the purchase and delivery of arms and other military equipment” to Ukraine. Europeans are continually hearing about the need to provide the Kiev regime with billions of euros from EU coffers to buy arms, and they blame Ursula von der Leyen. Nicolas Sarkozy alleges that the EU’s policy in relation to Ukraine was too dependent on “escalation, irritation and thoughtless actions.”
The Israeli television channel i24news and the former Socialist candidate for the French presidency (in the 2007 elections) Ségolène Royal have also recently criticized Ursula von der Leyen’s stance. Ségolène Royal claims that instead of helping Russia to stop the war, the President of the European Commission is lobbying on behalf of the USA’s Ukraine policy and has effectively become a NATO and Pentagon press secretary.
In addition to the criticism’s of her policies, Ursula von der Leyen has also found herself at the center of corruption scandals in recent months. Especially since the beginning of the European public prosecutor’s investigation into EU purchases of COVID-19 vaccines. Public attention in relation to the scandal has centered on the role played by the President of the European Commission, who, as even Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council noted on October 20, “went all out and purchased 4.6 billion(!) COVID-19 vaccine doses from Pfizer pharmaceuticals at a cost of 71 billion (!) euros.” “That is 10 vaccine doses for every EU citizen,” he added.
According to the journal Politico, Ursula von der Leyen has admitted to exchanging text messages with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla while the EU was negotiating the vaccine purchase contract. Two EU supervisory bodies have already accused her of wrongdoing in relation to the purchase, criticizing the Commission for refusing to provide the documents required for the investigation into the matter to proceed further.
However, the Pfizer purchase is not the first scandal that Ursula von der Leyen has found herself involved in. There was another scandal three years ago, when, shortly after a call from the EU elite to “make the process of electing the EU leadership more democratic,” the members of various different political groupings complained that at the beginning of 2019 the heads of the main EU bodies were selected in closed meetings “under cover of night.” The presidency of the European Commission did not go to the leader of the group winning the most votes in the May 2019 elections, but was instead “handed to” Ursula von der Leyen, as Donald Tusk, evidently satisfied that he had done his duty, informed journalists at the end of a two-week EU summit.
This political backroom deal in which the position was clearly reserved for Ursula von der Leyen took place at a time when the EU was supposedly undergoing a “democratic reform.” Since 2014 the so-called leading candidate procedure has been in effect, for the purpose of selecting a new President of the European Commission. Among other requirements, the procedure requires that the candidates from Europe-wide parties who won the largest numbers of votes in European Parliament elections should be given priority when selecting the President of the European Commission.
The reservation of the post for Ursula von der Leyen, the then German Minister of Defense, was highly controversial at the time, even in her native Germany, both among politicians and within the expert community. For example, Markus Söder, at the time head of the Christian Democratic Union, described his views to the DPA press Agency as follows: “Manfred Weber would have been a legitimate President of the European Commission, his election would have been democratic. It is a pity that democracy failed, and the winner was chosen in a behind-the-scenes deal.” The heads of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)-led coalition, in government at the time, also opposed her nomination to the most senior post in the EU. “The decision to award the presidency of the European Commission to the Minister of Defense undoes all the efforts that have been made to strengthen democracy in Europe, take into account citizens’ interests and support the role of the European Parliament,” the SPD leaders claimed in a statement.
Significantly, at the time Ursula von der Leyen did not even take part in the election campaign, did not stand as a candidate in the European elections, and was probably most known for her anti-Russian position and her unquestioning support for Washington. It was most likely that support that played the key role in bringing about her nomination as President of the European Commission.
So, one may ask, what did Ursula von der Leyen do to achieve the honor of being given the post she now occupies? She is the daughter of Ernst Albrecht, a high-ranking politician in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and between 1988 and 1992 she worked as an assistant doctor in the gynecological department of Hanover Medical School. However, in 2016 Hanover Medical School checked her doctoral thesis for plagiarism, and noted its “obvious shortcomings.”
Having raised seven children, she is often informally referred to in her native country as “the mother of Germany.” Her political career began in 1990, when she joined Angela Merkel’s CDU, and in 2005 she was appointed to her first ministerial post, as Minister of Family Affairs and Youth in the Merkel administration. In 2009 she was appointed Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, and in 2013 she became Minister of Defense, a post which she occupied for six years, during which she was involved in regular scandals and responsible for controversial decisions. According to statements by Germany’s three main parties (the Green Party, the Left Party and the Social Democrats), many of the 3,800 contracts concluded during her “management” of the German Armed Forces from 2014 onwards (relating to the restructuring of the Armed Forces and also its IT systems) appear to have been awarded to the “right people,” including relatives and friends, and some contracts may even have involved some form of bribery. Back in 2017 the German newspaper Bild, citing a report by the Federal Audit Office, accused Ursula von der Leyen of being strikingly incompetent during her time as Minister of Defense, when it was revealed that not one German submarine was operational, and less than half of its frigates and tanks and just a third of its military helicopters were in working condition.
With such a “success” record, Ursula von der Leyen was already being seen as a burden on the Armed Forces and the CDU. As, with the elections coming up, there was no suitable free ministerial post she was “nominated” for the presidency of the European Commission – a convenient decision for Germany at the time.
However, as time went by it became clear that the EU could not expect to derive much benefit from her appointment.
For Washington, however, which has no interest in the EU being led by strong politicians following their own line independent of the US, the decision to give Ursula von der Leyen the presidency of the European Commission in 2019 played right into its hands. And as a result she is now promoting the interests, not of European citizens, but of Washington alone, by helping US pharmaceutical companies make huge profits from selling the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine or by providing the US military-industrial complex with millions upon millions of euros in arms orders, paid for by European taxpayers, to support the Kiev regime.
In the present circumstances it will be interesting to see how Ursula von der Leyen’s “career” ends – will she be brought down by the results of investigations into the corruption scandals which she has clearly been involved in, or following demands for her resignation by the European public, who are becoming increasingly critical of her actions…
The MSM’s cancer ‘cure’ stories are bio-firm hype, not hope
By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | October 26, 2022
GLOBALISED mainstream media equates not just with a uniform, poorly-informed world, but a manipulated world.
In Britain, the Times runs a story entitled: After centuries of cut, burn and poison, could a jab cure cancer? by Tom Whipple. Eleven thousand miles away in New Zealand, the same story appears in Stuff newspaper.
This is one of those ‘isn’t it wonderful?’ reassuring stories that unfortunately don’t look quite so rosy after close scrutiny, but like bad pennies are turning up everywhere. On the surface informative and exciting, underneath sadly lacking in that investigative depth we were expecting – and certainly over-hyped.
This particular story would not be out of place in a glossy brochure seeking investment funds for BioNTech. According to the Times article, RNA vaccine technology is rather like buying a piece of furniture from Ikea. Each person could very soon have their own personalised cancer vaccine off the shelf. What could possibly go wrong?
The tremendously hopeful note that the story strikes is based on a lot of over-simplified theory and the success (???) of the Pfizer Covid vaccine co-developed with BioNTech. It sounds reassuringly easy to design mRNA vaccines that rush to your aid and eliminate those nasty cancer cells.
Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, founders of BioNTech, are pictured in white coats, and are quoted promising: ‘We stimulate the immune system, do something magic, and the tumour disappears.’
Heady stuff, but the cited evidence is less than thin. A decorated cancer researcher who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007, then tried all his innovative ideas out on himself, and died in 2011. In 2020, 16 patients with pancreatic cancer were treated by BioNTech. Eighteen months later, eight have died and eight are cancer-free after 18 months. The details are sadly lacking.
What stage were they at and how does that compare with their expected prognosis? The missing piece of the jigsaw is the article’s lack of scrutiny of the safety of BioNTech’s only commercialised mRNA vaccine product – the Pfizer Covid vaccine.
If you want to ask questions and also seek answers, you will need to turn to a completely different kind of journalism. Igor Chudov is a mathematician – like the Times author – but he writes on Substack and is therefore not constrained by any editorial policy or any no-go areas dictated by the newspaper owners, their advertisers, or subtly imposed government guidelines.
Chudov has published a very different cancer story, headlined: Cancer rates are Increasing and may get much worse. Wiped out immune systems take time to manifest.
According to the article, we are seeing the first ripple of a coming storm of cancer deaths. Chudov reports the work of the Ethical Skeptic (another Substack researcher) whose analysis of figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – the public health agency of the US – has shown that the rate of US cancer deaths accelerated in 2021 and 2022, coinciding with the rollout of the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA Covid vaccine and other biotech vaccines.
It is the effect size that is surprising – 9 sigma. What does this mean? Well perhaps you can remember from your school maths lessons that for a Bell curve, two-thirds of data points lie within one standard deviation of the mean, that is known as 1 sigma. Ninety-five per cent lie within two standard deviations (2 sigma) and 99.7 per cent lie within 3 sigma.
I’m going to translate for you what the observed 9 sigma deviation from the prior pattern of cancer deaths probably implies in very simple layman terms:
1. A hugely statistically surprising number of people already infected with cancer have suffered a rapid progression of their condition to death. Covid vaccination reduced their likely longevity.
2. Some people who previously had no evidence of cancer, and possibly no lifetime expectation of cancer, are becoming ill and dying in the weeks and months following Covid vaccination. And it is not due to Covid infection – it didn’t happen in 2020.
Read Chudov’s article. It is a long read, but well worth the effort. In addition to the US data, he looks at the official UK cancer mortality data, which shows a similar increase. He also quotes another Substack author, A Midwestern Doctor, who analyses and references in detail what it is about mRNA vaccines that causes cancer. The approach is investigative, as we should expect it.
There are concerning issues that Whipple, author of the fawning Times article, chooses not to address. He failed to discuss questions that constitute the normal substance of scientific debate, but his piece was beamed around the world.
We expect the Times to ask questions, but it is not doing so. It has quietly rolled over and followed the biotech PR line. It is not alone – the mainstream media are collectively failing the sniff test.
We are being manipulated. If you want real journalism, it is flourishing elsewhere. GLOBE (the Campaign for Global Legislation Outlawing Biotechnology Experimentation) and other independents are asking vital questions that few are prepared to countenance.
Biden’s Bivalent Booster Blunder
Vinay Prasad’s Observations and Thoughts | October 26, 2022
The Biden administration has made a fool of themselves with their bivalent vaccine roll out. Pretty much all decisions were errors, and very likely these will hurt them politically. The only way for Biden to save himself from his terrible Covid policy is to fire all his advisors and rehire good ones. Let’s review the facts:
The Biden administration granted emergency use authorization to Pfizer and Moderna for a bivalent booster that targeted Wuhan and BA45. That vaccine received EUA based on mouse data (8-10 mice). There were no human data at the time of approval. (Please don’t confuse the BA4/5 with BA1 bivalent)
Since then, both companies have press released results, but do not specificify the numeric values of antibodies generated in people. No one has clinical data– i.e. is there a reduction in hospitalization? Severe disease? And if so, we don’t know which people (how old) have a further reduction in severe disease or hospitalization from this vaccine.
We also know breakthrough can occur. Rochelle Walensky herself received the vaccine and then had COVID one month later. Ironically, this is probably the peak vaccine efficacy (peak Ab). I don’t know what the vaccine effectiveness is, and neither does she, but my guess is it isn’t terrific.
The Biden administration said that we didn’t have time to wait for clinical trials in people. But each passing day reveals that is a lie. The uptake of this vaccine is abysmal. No one wants it. If no one was going to get it then why not take the time to run the proper studies?
A recent pre-print has shown that the bivalent booster is not better at generating BA45 antibodies than getting the old booster one more time. This is the failure of not generating human trial data.
You could have sorted this out pre-market. *Let’s be clear, these are not clinical data (living longer/better) but without better antibodies, clinical endpoints seem unlikely to be met*
Many universities are now requiring this vaccine for 20-year-old college students who have had three prior doses and Omicron. I think you have to be dropped on your head to actually believe a 20-year-old man in good health who’s gotten three doses and just had Omicron will derive any benefit from this bivalent booster. I have never met even one doctor who thinks that that is true. And yet that is the position of the Biden administration.
They are so hellbent on earning Pfizer money– I mean vaccinating people who just had covid —that they are willing to ignore the mountain of data that suggests that’s not what you should be spending your energy on.
More than a year ago, Marion Gruber and Philip Krause the number one and number two at the US FDA vaccine branch resigned, citing White House pressure to approve boosters for all ages. Their published remarks suggest that they wanted to do it only for the elderly and vulnerable. Their message was repeatedly ignored as the Biden administration rammed booster after booster through the US food and drug administration for ultra low risk populations.
They have actually said a 5-year-old who has had three doses and had covid should get this booster. It’s insane.
Their entire vaccine policy seems to be interested in giving Pfizer and Moderna a perpetual market share for a yearly vaccine. But seems to have no interest in generating credible randomized control trial evidence to inform the public. As such, they fail the American people.
I am concerned that after this White House stint: Ashish Jha, Rochelle Walensky, Vivek Murthy, and Peter Marks (post FDA) will work for or consult for Pfizer and Moderna. That would be devastating.
American people obviously do not want to receive a vaccine every year with non-trivial adverse events without knowing that it gives them some benefit. Benefit to third parties cannot be had because it cannot stop transmission.
Some misguided policy makers argue that even a small reduction in transmission is meaningful. That’s nonsense. The problem is that you can get COVID every single day of your life from now until the end of your life. Even changing the probability modestly won’t change the outcome. Because the probability you will get COVID is one over time. Think of it this way:
You can play Russian roulette with one bullet or three bullets. I would much rather play with one bullet, if I had to. But if you have to play a thousand times in a row, we all know how that game ends.
That’s COVID 19. It’s not going anywhere. You’re going to have to play over and over and over again. And that means you’re all going to get COVID. So the only question is how many doses minimize severe disease? And who needs that to be minimized?
Today in the governor’s debate of New York state, only the Republican candidate was opposed to children’s mandates. It’s amazing that the Democrats are clinging to a failed vaccine policy. Their covid-19 policy is going to lead to catastrophic losses.
They need to fire all their advisors and start new. That’s the only way to fix the situation.
‘Criminal Neglect’: CDC Knew COVID Vaccine Could Cause Myocarditis in Young Males Months Before Telling the Public
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 25, 2022
Two months after COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out to the U.S. public, a statistically significant vaccine safety signal for myocarditis in males ages 8 to 21 appeared in the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) — but CDC officials waited another three months before alerting the public, according to a new study.
The study, “Delayed Vigilance: A Comment on Myocarditis in Association with the COVID-19 Injections,” by Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., and Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., was published on Oct. 17 in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research.
In an interview with The Defender, Hooker, chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, said:
“This important paper shows that a strong, statistically significant vaccine adverse event ‘signal’ for myocarditis in males 8 to 21 years of age was seen on the VAERS database as early as Feb. 19, 2021, just two months after the release of the COVID-19 vaccine to the U.S. public.
“Instead of sounding the alarm regarding this signal, CDC officials buried the connection between COVID-19 vaccination and myocarditis until May 27, 2021. By this date, over 50% of the eligible U.S. population had received at least one mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.
“Withholding this type of information is criminal.”
According to researchers at the National Organization for Rare Disorders, myocarditis can result from infections or may result directly from a toxic effect such as a toxin or a virus. “More commonly the myocarditis is a result of the body’s immune reaction to the initial heart damage,” researchers said.
Severe myocarditis can permanently damage the heart muscle, possibly causing heart failure.
In their study, Jablonowski and Hooker recorded and analyzed the increasing incidence of myocarditis as it progressively became a statistically significant “signal” in VAERS, the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S.
“It [myocarditis] became a discernible measure of harm over time, and here we show when it became statistically significant in the week of February 19, 2021,” the authors explained.
Only two months later, the VAERS data from the week of April 23, 2021, showed that the discerned level of myocarditis in young men following COVID-19 vaccination had increased to an extreme statistical level.
Generally, p-values less than .05 are considered to be statistically significant — meaning the observed result cannot reasonably be attributed to chance — and p-values less than .01 are considered to be very statistically significant.
By the week of April 23, 2021, Jablonowski and Hooker saw a p-value of less than 0.0001 (p<0.0001).
“At that p-level, a contrast as great as the one observed in the VAERS data would be expected to occur fewer than one time in 10,000 similar experimental drug trials,” they said.
“That statistic was obtained when 43.78% of the U.S. population had received at least one [COVID-19] injection — 31.20% had received all of those injections available to them or pressed upon them, and 12.58% had received one or more of the COVID-19 injections but not all of them.”
Despite this safety signal, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on May 10, 2021, expanded the Emergency Use Authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine to individuals as young as 12 years old, and the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted to recommend that all that persons age 12 or older get the vaccine.
Around the same time, the CDC’s V-safe post-vaccination data collection tool began accepting entries from adolescents ages 12-15 years. A few weeks later, the CDC finally acknowledged publicly that there may be an association between mRNA COVID-19 vaccination and myocarditis.
“On May 27, 2021, the CDC published on their website ‘Myocarditis and Pericarditis following mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination,’ (an announcement that is no longer available at the time of this writing; however, see Das et al., 2021),” the authors said.
“However, the important point we want to underscore here is that the general public was apparently coming to the realization of the particular life-threatening dangers of myocarditis at a time after 50.56% of the U.S. population had already received one or more up to the limit of all available COVID-19 injections — 42.25% had received the complete series of shots and 8.31% had received some but not all of them.”
“Why the irreversible delay in vigilance?” they asked.
The CDC’s choice — “whether by intention or neglect of the unfolding evidence” — to not warn the U.S. public of possible widespread harm from the mRNA COVID-19 until May 27, 2021, “when 50.56% of the U.S. population had already been injected, some of them multiple times” could be characterized as “criminal neglect.”
Jablonowski and Hooker concluded:
“From February 19, 2021, the signal in VAERS data was already loud and clear after only 14.23% of the U.S. population had been administered at least one of the injections. Subtracting that group from the 50.56% who had taken the risks associated with the shots by May 27, left 36.33% of the U.S. population (or roughly 120 million people) in the dark about the known adverse outcomes, including the irreversible damage of myocarditis, associated with the COVID-19 injections.”
VAERS data show 24,371 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis between Dec. 14, 2020, and Oct. 14, 2022. Of those cases, 1,333 reports occurred among 12- to 17-year-olds, 47 reports occurred among 5- to 11-year-olds and 5 reports occurred among 6-month-olds to 5-year-olds.
The CDC uses a narrowed case definition of “myocarditis” that excludes cases of cardiac arrest, ischemic strokes and deaths due to heart problems that occur before one has the chance to go to the emergency department.
While reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed, the system has been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication.
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.
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Book Excerpt
Biden’s Closed Circle on Russia
An excerpt from ‘The Great Betrayal’
By James W. Carden | The Realist Review | June 14, 2026
Joe Biden’s presidency may ultimately come to be seen as a cautionary tale. Here was a president who showed little interest in entertaining arguments that might have contradicted his most deeply held assumptions.[1] And there were precious few within the upper ranks of the administration who might have attempted to do so, after all, only policy hands and political operatives who had come up through the ranks of the Clinton and Obama administrations or had longstanding ties to the citadels of the foreign policy community were invited into the fold. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- A California Pediatrician Shares 30 Years of Insight on Vaccinating vs. Not Vaccinating Children
- What Is Defensive Medicine?
- CDC Awards Pfizer $1.24 Billion for COVID Vaccines for Kids and Adults
- Historic blow to South Korea’s military intelligence agency
- Russian frigate fires warning shots in English Channel
- Radio Free Europe, the Cold War ‘Weapon’ Congress Still Funds
- UN: Israel continues to violate Lebanon airspace in defiance of Iran-US MoU
- Araghchi: Israeli occupation of Lebanese land a violation of MoU
- Hezbollah fighters confront intruding Israeli forces in southern Lebanon
- The Straight of Hormuz is Open for Iranian Business… Oil is Moving and Iran is Getting Paid
- If Americans Knew
- Pro-Israel Donors Power Last-Minute Surge of Espaillat Spending
- “They Stole Our Home and Our Life”: Israel Permanently Displaces Syrians in Quneitra
- Massie Recognizes USS Liberty Attack. Here’s Why That Matters
- The blatant racism and cruelty that define Israel’s settler movement
- Israeli army ‘murdered child’ in Gaza and then dumped body on a roadside
- The Forward’s Hit Piece on Thomas Massie and USS Liberty Veterans
- Israel’s former defense minister compares settler ideology to Nazism
- The Pro-Israel Lobby’s Quiet Cash Shuffle
- Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) Propagandizes for Israel’s Wars
- A grim milestone: Gaza’s death toll surpasses 73,000 – Daily Update
- No Tricks Zone
- Beyond The Pitch: Why FIFA’s World Cup Is One Of Humanity’s Best Investments
- Climate Alarmists Now Using Natural Phenomena To Support Their Claims
- New Study: Significant CO2 Fluxes From Non-Volcanic Sources Are Largely Neglected In Carbon Budgets
- Women Climate Scientists Being Harassed, Insulted By Skeptics, Claims Berkeley Earth Researcher
- Germany’s Longterm Spring Climate Data Show “No Climate Trend”
- New Study: Solar Photovoltaic, Wind Power Fail To Meet Annual Energy Demands 62% Of The Time
- Germany’s Die Welt: “Too Much Is Too Much” … Green Energies Are Cannabalizing Each Other!
- Germany’s Ecological Holocaust… Once Fairy Tale Forests Getting Cleared For Wind Turbines
- A Grand Solar Minimum Has Arrived…Global Cooling Of At Least 1°C Is Expected By The 2030s, 2040s
- European “Expert Commission” Urges COVID-19-Like Global Climate State Of Energency!
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