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It’s time to open the AstraZeneca files

By Dr Ros Jones | TCW Defending Freedom | November 2, 2022

The AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine has all but disappeared from use. We need to know why, and whether troubling evidence from its trials was ignored by the regulators or withheld from the public. That is why HART, the independent Health Advisory and Recovery Team, has demanded a ‘Pfizer files’ style data release from the Medicines and Healthcare Product Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

Last week, we submitted an FoI request to the MHRA prepared by PJH Law requiring the release of all data submitted by AstraZeneca in their application for a licence for their Covid-19 vaccine (AZD1222/Vaxzevria), the data that the MHRA relied on before granting a conditional marketing authorisation for its use.

We asked for:

1. Pre- and post-authorisation safety and efficacy data for this product;

2. All information that allowed a ‘rigorous scientific assessment’ of all the available evidence of quality, safety and effectiveness by the MHRA;

3. All information and full data set that the MHRA stated their expert scientists and clinicians reviewed from the laboratory preclinical studies, clinical trials, manufacturing and quality controls, product sampling and testing of the final vaccine and the conditions for its safe supply and distribution;

4. Anonymised data from their clinical trials.

Why is this necessary?

AstraZeneca’s Vaxzevria was approved for use in the UK on December 30 2020 to a fanfare for UK science. It had been pre-ordered and prioritised for Britain by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who boasted it was not just safe and effective but a triumph for ‘Global’ Britain. To date the failings of this novel technology vaccine have been brushed under the carpet, never explained and never apologised for.

Within weeks of AZ’s rollout, concerns about the vaccine (trials of which had been paused twice, see here and here) were being flagged. In a short time successive European governments followed Denmark’s lead in suspending its use. The UK’s advisory body, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) continued to insist it was still safe, but in May advised it should not be given to anyone under 40. By that stage millions of doses had been administered. From the start, the vaccine was disproportionately associated with adverse reactions, yet it was administered to children: some 11,500 have received 1st doses and 8,700 second doses and ‘extremely limited boosters’. These have resulted in 266 Yellow Cards at an adverse reaction reporting rate of 1 in 43 children.

To date, 49.16million adult AZ doses have been administered and 246,393 people impacted by adverse effects, according to the MHRA’s Yellow Card adverse reports, admitted by the MHRA to be likely to be only 10 per cent of the true number.

The first pay-out under the vaccine injuries compensation scheme was to the widow of a 48-year-old who died of brain blood clots commencing days after his AZ vaccination, a death that occurred two months after Denmark had suspended AZ use because of side effects. The US never purchased the AZ vaccine because of health officials’ concerns.

The British people have a right to see all the data provided by AstraZeneca to the MHRA, both as a basis for the initial conditional use authorisation, and subsequently as part of AstraZeneca’s ongoing safety surveillance. Firstly, because a large sum of taxpayers’ money was allocated to the development and subsequent rollout of this vaccine, but secondly because people put their faith in the safety of this home-produced vaccine. When told that vaccines were our way out of the pandemic, who wouldn’t want to get jabbed? Indeed, the WHO’s definition of herd immunity was changed in November 2020 to remove all mention of naturally acquired immunity, leaving only vaccination as the new ‘gold standard’ – ‘fool’s gold?’ one wonders.

The AstraZeneca product officially remains in clinical trials until next year, though like the other vaccines, volunteers in the control arm were vaccinated early on, negating much of the scientific basis for a randomised controlled trial. The latest autumn booster programme states that AstraZeneca is ‘currently unavailable’ but at no point has the public been told why this is the case. Does the company or the regulator know something that has not been shared?

‘Safe and effective’, the marketing banner whenever the ‘vaccines’ were being discussed by the MHRA, MSM or Pharma, is of grave concern, especially when it comes to the vaccination of healthy children. But at all ages, it is clear that properly informed consent has been set aside, in contravention of the General Medical Council Good Practice Guidelines.

The battle to obtain the data and information relied upon by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to licence the Pfizer vaccine pointed to the secrecy that had shrouded these trials. The FDA planning to retain the material for 75 years, but a court granted an FoI request and required the FDA to release all the data over eight months. This has resulted in 451,000 pages of information now being analysed by 3,500 experts and 250 lawyers. Evidence of fraud would negate any indemnity for Pfizer.

The overstating of efficacy and understating of harms continues unabated not least by the MHRA, the very same UK body responsible for ensuring that medicines meet applicable standards of safety, quality and efficacy, and for pharmacovigilance across the UK, the objectives of which are to:

·  Prevent harm from adverse drug reactions in humans arising from the use of authorised medicinal products;

·  Promote the safe and effective use of medicinal products, through providing timely information about the safety of medicinal products to patients, healthcare professionals and the public.

At a press briefing on the AstraZeneca vaccines in December 2020, the MHRA chief Dr June Raine glibly stated:

·  Safety of the public comes first, and this comes after a thorough and scientifically rigorous review of all the evidence in terms of safety, effectiveness and quality;

·  ‘We are facing one of the biggest threats to health, in the UK and around the world’;

·  The vaccine ‘protects’ against Cov-19 and will save many thousands of lives;

·  There are no specific precautions if you have had Covod-19 and you do not need testing before the injection;

·   Vaccines should be considered for pregnancy (and those breastfeeding) when the potential benefit outweighs the risks following individual talks with every woman and their healthcare professional.

The latter directly contradicted the MHRA’s own summary assessment that ‘it is considered that sufficient reassurance of safe use of the vaccine in pregnant women cannot be provided at the present time’. 

Dr Raine’s alarming unilateral declaration of the MHRA’s switch from a regulatory function to  an enabling role alongside her consistent ‘playing down’ of vaccine injuries and treating adverse effects as coincidental, further underlined the need for the AZ trials data disclosure.

We need to know whether the MHRA has a defined point at which it pulls a drug or vaccine and if not, why not?

Conclusion:

The government has invested millions of taxpayers’ monies to develop and market the AZ product. A large percentage of its population have been injected with a liability-free vaccine and we therefore require complete transparency. It would show utter contempt for our democracy if the British people are denied access to this information.

If their due diligence has been thorough, releasing this data should confirm their oft-repeated declaration that the AZ vaccine is safe and effective, thus providing reassurance.

The public’s need for this information is urgent, given that the vaccination programme is ongoing. Despite the evidence of unprecedented harms (deaths and debilitating injuries) on their own pharmacovigilance databases, governments across the world have told their citizens and our children that the covid-19 genetic vaccines are safe. It is time for total transparency and honesty.

The full background report to the HART FoI and the FoI itself can be found on HART’s website here. 

November 2, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

All Those Responsible Must Pay a Price for Terrorising and Harming the People They Are Meant to Serve

BY DR GARY SIDLEY | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | NOVEMBER 2, 2022

I belong to a privileged generation. Not that I was raised in affluence; far from it. Born in 1958, to a mother who worked all her life as a weaver in the textile industry and a father employed as a maintenance mechanic at the local factory, I lived on a council estate for the first decade of my life. Money was tight, holidays were basic and infrequent, and treats – in the form of confectionary – were rare, usually restricted to a Turkish Delight chocolate bar each Sunday evening. Although I never realised it until I was 62, I was, however, part of a cohort who possessed something sacrosanct, something so very precious and – deplorably – something future generations may never enjoy again: individual freedom.

To be clear, the world I have lived in has been far from perfect. My era has been one incorporating fundamental inequalities and injustices, widespread poverty, discrimination and – particularly in my young-adult years – a recurring risk of physical assault. But despite this context, each of us took for granted a range of basic human rights: to meet with whomever we wished; to leave our homes whenever we chose; to eat whatever we wanted; to express opinions others might not agree with; to take risks, make mistakes and learn sometimes painful lessons; to wear whatever we wanted; to work to improve our career prospects and earn more money to enhance our lives and those of our families; and to decide what drugs and other medical interventions to accept. When cheap flights emerged in the 1970s and 80s, the whole world became wonderfully accessible.

My perception (probably a naïve one) of successive Labour and Conservative Governments was that, although often inept and guilty of policy errors, they broadly sought to improve the lives of their citizens and could at least be relied upon to protect us against external malignant forces. Furthermore, it seemed that the life-spans of our elected politicians were dependent upon keeping us – their constituents – satisfied by acting primarily in the interests of U.K. citizens.

But 30 months ago, this illusion was shattered.

I knew something was awry as early as February 2020. By March the same year my early-warning detector would not rest. While the media, politicians and the science ‘experts’ informed us – incessantly – that a uniquely lethal pathogen was spreading carnage across the world, and unprecedented and draconian restrictions on our day-to-day lives were essential to prevent Armageddon, I wasn’t buying it. I formed the view that a momentous event, unparalleled in my lifetime, was unfolding, but it was not primarily about a virus.

Why, at that point in time, did I recognise that something sinister was underway while almost everyone else I met seemed to be swallowing the dominant narrative? It is a difficult question to answer. Perhaps my time in the early 1980s as a psychiatric charge nurse in an NHS hospital, occasionally interfacing with the ‘infection control’ department, gave me insight into how this professional group operate. Although well-meaning, their advice regarding how to minimise the spread of contagion on a ward often seemed impractical, revealing an apparent inability to see the bigger picture. Or maybe my in-depth knowledge of risk assessment (gleaned in my doctoral thesis during my time as a clinical psychologist) had impressed upon me how woefully inaccurate we are in gauging the relative threat levels posed by various hazards inherent in our environment. What I did know for sure was that Big Pharma – arguably the most corrupt industry in the world – would exploit the emerging ‘crisis’ for its own ends. And how right I was.

The list of state-driven human rights abuses we have endured under the pretence of ‘keeping us safe’ and the (ominous) ‘greater good’ is long: prohibition of travel; confinement in our homes; social isolation; closure of businesses; denial of access to leisure activities; de-humanising mask mandates; directives (scrawled on floors and walls) dictating which way to walk; an arbitrary ‘stay two metres apart’ rule; exclusion from the weddings and funerals of our loved ones; the seclusion and neglect of our elderly; school shutdowns; children’s playgrounds sealed off with yellow and black tape; muzzled children and toddlers; students denied both face-to-face tuition and a ‘rites-of-passage’ social life; and coerced experimental ‘vaccines’ that turned out to be more harmful and less effective than initially claimed. Equally egregious were the strategies deployed to lever compliance with these restrictions, namely psychological manipulation (‘nudging’), pervasive censorship across the media and academic journals and the cancellation and vilification of anyone brave enough to speak out against the dominant Covid narrative. All-in-all, a state-driven assault on the core of our shared humanity.

As the state-orchestrated infringement of our basic human rights continued, I felt compelled to act in ways that were far outside of my comfort zone. The 61-year-old man who had never been on a protest march until summer 2020, and who had innocently assumed that most of society’s leaders were decent people who tried to do what was right, had changed. I found myself walking with tens of thousands of others along Regent Street, London, screaming “Freedom!” I pushed “Back to Normal” leaflets through the letterboxes of hundreds of my neighbours. I stood on the corner of our local shopping street with a placard held aloft stating, “Say No To Vaccine Passports”.

Throughout 2020 and 2021, I struggled to find reasons for the irrational, masochistic Covid restrictions and the ubiquitous infringement of our basic human rights. My explanations evolved. Initially I clung to the ‘panic and incompetence’ rationale, that our governments had been spooked by the images coming out of China – remember the videos of people falling dead in the streets – and the mono-focused, blinkered and catastrophic prophecies of our so-called epidemiological experts. As the atrocities persisted, this explanation was rendered inadequate, and it morphed into an ‘opportunistic agendas’ account where activists – promoting green aspirations, digitalised IDs, social credit systems, a cashless society, universal income, a biosecurity state – had exploited the anxieties associated with the emergence of a novel respiratory virus. By 2021 these conclusions, in turn, seemed insufficient to explain the persistence of the horrors we were enduring and it – belatedly – became clear that globalist and ‘deep state’ powers were at work, striving to realise their inhuman aspirations. My further reading about the activities of World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the European Union, the World Health Organisation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, Anthony Fauci and Big Pharma, and others, confirmed this emerging conclusion.

As the Covid event fades from media attention (replaced by a focus on similarly dehumanising and totalitarian responses to environmental threats, the war in Ukraine and the imminent cost-of-living crisis) it is intriguing to reflect upon its residual effects.

I continue to mourn what I have lost, a process associated with a complex mix of fluctuating emotions. For two years, our Government, aided and abetted by state-funded scientists, denied us opportunities for fun and human connection, stymied our freedoms and orchestrated a systematic campaign to coerce us to both accept experimental ‘vaccines’ and to slavishly cover our faces with cloth or plastic. Consequently, I feel anger and disgust towards many of our politicians, epidemiological ‘experts’ and behavioural scientists who were complicit with this shameful period in our history. And I now distrust all sources of information, whether it be the media, the ‘scientific’ world or public health experts. Without an anchor for truth, I float – incredulous – in an ocean of mainstream-generated misinformation.

My 60-plus years of naivety have been shattered. I believe only those few who have shown selfless integrity throughout the Covid debacle. Also, I am now sceptical about much of the green agenda: state-funded scientists lied to us about Covid so why wouldn’t they show the same self-serving dishonesty about the climate?

Closer to home, it is clear my life has changed. I feel disappointment and irritation towards many people who I previously respected and liked, such as friends who colluded with the catastrophically damaging Covid restrictions because of fear, ignorance or a desire to avoid hassle and condemnation. Many relationships are now more distant. On the rare occasions we meet there is often an ‘elephant in the room’, and when the Covid issue is touched upon I typically feel frustrated that many do not want to consider the implications of what has been inflicted upon us.

I feel similarly towards mental health colleagues who, for years, I had stood alongside and respected, collectively fighting the tyranny of biological psychiatry (its human rights infringements, coercion, overuse of drugs and vilification of those who questioned them) but who failed to recognise a much bigger tyranny when it emerged in 2020. While a handful of this anti-psychiatry lobby did soon recognise the totalitarian threat inherent to the Covid response, most bought into the dominant narrative. Heated disagreements ensued with a few, followed by ongoing mutual resentment; for most we just avoid each other.

But the residual effects of the Covid debacle are not all negative. New friendships have emerged with people from across the political spectrum. Based on a mutual respect, enduring bonds have formed with fellow sceptics both locally (through the Community Assembly and the Stand in the Park initiatives) and nationally via joint endeavours in HART, Smile Free, and PANDA. And it was uplifting to recently discover – via a chance meeting in the local pub – that the family I had lived across the road from for the last seven years, yet had rarely spoken to, had always been as sceptical as me about the dominant Covid narrative.

Furthermore, I have noticed that my behaviour has changed in subtle ways. I now make more of an effort to smile and gain eye contact with – unmasked – strangers. Similarly, when greeting acquaintances, I’m more inclined to hug or shake hands as compared to pre-2020 levels of bodily contact. (Non of that fist-bump and elbow-touch nonsense for me.) It’s as if I’m striving to compensate for the human connection deficit that we’ve accrued over the last 30 months. Or perhaps I’m making a defiant metaphorical one-finger salute to any onlookers who still adhere to the risk-averse and dehumanising dominant Covid narrative?

While we continue to drown in a sea of propaganda, censorship and coercion, who knows what the future might hold?

One thing is for sure: We must never forget what the political leaders and public health specialists inflicted upon us. Whether the reason was weakness, groupthink, conflict of interest or unadulterated corruption, the miscreants must all be held to account and pay a price for terrorising the people they are meant to serve. This assertion is not fuelled by a primitive desire for retribution – well, not primarily – but by an expectation that, if the guilty are not named and shamed, the same totalitarian impositions will be repeated again and again.

The conviction sheet is a long one. It includes political leaders at home (Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer, Nicola Sturgeon, Mark Drayford) and abroad (including Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Joe Biden and Jacinda Ardern); Bill Gates and his various funding agencies; SAGE scientists who danced to the tune of their academic and political paymasters; the behavioural science ‘nudgers’ at the helm of the worldwide psychological manipulation strategy; the professional organisations that have manifestly colluded with the state-driven tyranny (including the British Medical Association and the British Psychological Society); the conflicted drug regulators (such as the MHRA); the powerful, profit-driven pharmaceutical companies, deploying their financial clout to influence health policy decisions; and the mainstream media, who have slavishly peddled the dominant Covid narrative while dismissing alternative viewpoints.

To successfully expose the wrongdoings of such powerful individuals and institutions is a big ask. Realistically, only bottom-up resistance and protests from millions of ordinary people could achieve this aim, and in this regard there are reasons for optimism. Truth will – eventually – reveal itself. Despite the ongoing censorship and manipulation, public dissent to the attempted imposition of a biosecurity state is becoming increasingly visible. Masking in the community is – at the time of writing – practised only by an eccentric minority. The net harms of Covid restrictions are more widely recognised. Ordinary citizens increasingly claim they will not be locked down and separated from their loved ones ever again. And – perhaps more importantly – the ‘safe and effective’ vaccine narrative is crumbling, as indicated by more and more people rejecting the jabs.

If we do not wish to live in a ‘transhuman’ society devoid of personal freedoms, where our day-to-day decisions – where we go, what we say, what we eat, how we spend our money, what drugs we ingest – are determined by the state’s version of the ‘greater good’, we must all continue to show visible dissent to the globalists’ new world order.

Together, I believe we can defeat the biggest threat to Western values witnessed in my lifetime. And even if we don’t succeed, history will show that at least we tried.

Dr. Gary Sidley is a retired NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist and co-founder of the Smile Free campaign. He blogs at Coronababble

November 2, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

My Friends are Dying of Heart Attacks

A 50th birthday celebration and reunion is marred by multiple deaths

By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | November 2, 2022

I’m headed out to Maui to celebrate my brother’s 50th birthday. One of our oldest friends—a 53-year-old named Dan who was my roommate in graduate school—was scheduled to be on my flight, but he isn’t because he died of a heart attack two weeks ago. Both of his parents attended the funeral; both were in exceptionally good physical condition in spite of their advanced age. Dan received the initial two doses of a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine last year, but apparently decided to forgo the boosters.

Another one of our closest friends—a 55-year-old surfing legend named Loch Eggers —was also looking forward to celebrating with us. I spoke to him on the phone last week. He expressed great excitement about our forthcoming reunion and all of the fun we are were going to have surfing, barbecuing, and partying.

Loch also won’t make it because he had a fatal heart attack last Saturday. His life and death are chronicled in this beautifully illustrated obituary.

Loch’s case was especially poignant. He was found on the side of a hiking trail that led to a peaceful place where he’d recently erected a shrine to his brother, Hunter, who died of a heart attack a few months ago. Both Loch and Hunter were in exceptionally good physical condition from daily water sports. Loch was one of the greatest amateur surfers on earth.

The Maui County Medical Examiner mentioned to Loch’s devastated girlfriend that he’d autopsied Hunter a few months ago and noted that his heart was conspicuously inflamed. I am waiting to hear the autopsy report in Loch’s case. Both brothers received the mRNA vaccinations. Loch also received a booster. I’m not sure if Hunter was boosted or not.

Both of their parents reached life expectancy. Their father died of a heart attack at 82. Their mother was in exceptionally good condition for her advanced age when she died of choking on food.

That both brothers died of heart attacks in their mid fifties raises the suspicion of a genetic basis of sudden death after receiving COVID-19 vaccines. Such a condition was documented in a recent study by Chupong Ittiwut et al. The authors propose that the period of acute danger is within 7 days of vaccination. However, the case of the Eggers brothers warrants an investigation to determine if this particular genetic condition—or some other genetic condition not yet documented—may result in a longer period of danger following COVID-19 vaccination.

Our entire medical establishment, and especially medical examiners, need to get very serious about investigating such sudden deaths.

Do the vaccines initiate a cardiovascular disease process that may not manifest with life threatening symptoms until months or even a year later?

Alternatively, is it possible the vaccines amplify existing cardiovascular disease processes that would eventually result in death, but not (without the vaccine) until much later in life?

November 2, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

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.

November 1, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

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.

November 1, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , | Leave a comment

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.

October 31, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

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.

October 31, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

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.

October 30, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

FDA Slow-Walked Studies on COVID Vaccine Safety Signals in Elderly

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 26, 2022

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took more than a year to follow up on a potential increase in serious adverse events in elderly people who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, according to an investigative report published Tuesday by The BMJ.

According to The BMJ, in July 2021, the FDA “quietly disclosed” the findings of a potential increase in four types of serious adverse events in elderly people who had received a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine: acute myocardial infarction, disseminated intravascular coagulation, immune thrombocytopenia, and pulmonary embolism.

The FDA disclosure lacked specific details, such as the magnitude of the increased potential risk, and the agency said it would “share further updates and information with the public as they become available.”

The FDA did not alert physicians or the public, via a press release or any other means, The BMJ investigator said.

Eighteen days later, the FDA published a study planning document that outlined a protocol for a follow-up epidemiological study for investigating the matter more thoroughly.

The BMJ said:

“This recondite technical document disclosed the unadjusted relative risk ratio estimates originally found for the four serious adverse events, which ranged from 42% to 91% increased risk. (Neither absolute risk increases nor confidence intervals were provided.)”

That was over a year ago. “More than a year later, however, the status and results of the follow-up study are unknown,” The BMJ reported, adding:

“The agency has not published a press release, or notified doctors, or published the findings by preprint or the scientific literature or updated the vaccine’s product label.”

The BMJ report also alleged the FDA has not “ publicly acknowledged other published observational studies or clinical trial reanalyses reporting compatible results.”

FDA ‘irresponsible’ for keeping information from scientific community, critics say

Critics of the FDA’s failure to warn the public voiced their concerns about the data to The BMJ and called on the FDA to notify the public immediately.

“To keep this information from the scientific community and prevent us from analysing it ourselves, is irresponsible,” said Dr. Joseph Fraiman, an emergency medicine physician in New Orleans who recently carried out a reanalysis of serious adverse events in Pfizer and Moderna’s randomized trials. “It presumes that these organisations are perfect and cannot benefit from independent scrutiny.”

Dr. Tracy Høeg, an epidemiologist and physician currently conducting COVID-19 vaccine research with the Florida Department of Health and California’s Marin County Department of Health and Human Services, told The BMJ :

“The fact that the FDA found these four safety signals means they should have followed up on the results and I don’t understand why we haven’t had more information since then.

“It has been over a year.”

Fraiman concurred. “The protocols say that they’re looking into these data further, but I’d like to know the results now, it’s been long enough. They need to view this from a public health perspective, they need to consider a person’s right to informed consent.”

“As physicians, we recommend medical therapies and we need to explain the full risks and benefits to the patient. This is not happening,” Fraiman added.

Dr. Dick Bijl, an epidemiologist in the Netherlands, pointed out, “The FDA managed to determine the efficacy of the vaccines in a short period of time, but they have not analysed the pharmacovigilance data with the same speed. If they found signals in July 2021, they should have been analysed and published within months.”

Bijl is the president of the International Society of Drug Bulletins and has campaigned for years to get safety data communicated to doctors in a timely fashion. He told The BMJ he credits his organization for prompting the World Health Organization to begin publishing regular updates about drug safety signals in its WHO Pharmaceuticals Newsletter so that all doctors can take note of them.

Bijl said:

“The FDA should have informed doctors about any early safety signals from the vaccines.

“Most doctors are not trained to, nor are they focused on, recognising side effects, especially because vaccines are generally regarded as quite safe. It’s important that doctors are told what to look out for.”

Why the delay in acknowledging safety signal study results?

The FDA’s July 2021 findings came from the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) “near real-time” surveillance system called Rapid Cycle Analysis (RCA) that the FDA used to monitor a list of 14 adverse events of special interest.

Data obtained from the RCA system is not intended to establish a causal relationship between a vaccine and adverse events but rather is intended to detect potential safety signals rapidly.

The RCA data referenced by the agency in its July 2021 disclosure study appeared to only detect safety signals associated with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

“The agency said the associations were not identified for the other two COVID-19 vaccines authorised in the U.S. made by Moderna and Janssen (Johnson & Johnson),” The BMJ said.

The July 2021 follow-up study protocol stated there is a “manuscript in preparation” for the original RCA study but to date, nothing has been published for either that original study or the follow-up study.

According to The BMJ, the FDA’s medical record review and statistical analyses have recently been completed, and the overall study results are “currently under internal review.”

The FDA downplayed the findings:

“The findings to date from the fully adjusted epidemiologic study on the primary series vaccinations do not provide strong support for an association between the vaccine and any of the four outcomes described in the posting to the FDA website. Additional analyses, including evaluation of booster doses, are still being conducted. Release of the study findings is expected later this fall.”

Furthermore, according to The BMJ, the FDA made no public announcement when the results from an unspecified study it conducted raised safety concerns — but instead “buried” the findings in the introduction section of an Aug. 31, 2022, research protocol document:

“In a cohort study of the third dose safety in the Medicare population where historical controls were used, we detected a statistically significant risk for immune thrombocytopenia (incidence rate ratio 1.66, confidence interval 1.17 to 2.29) and acute myocardial infarction (IRR 1.15, CI 1.02 to 1.29) among people with prior covid-19 diagnosis as well as an increased risk of Bell’s palsy (IRR 1.11, CI 1.03 to 1.19) and pulmonary embolism (IRR 1.05, CI 1.0001 to 1.100) in general.”

Additionally, a June 2022 observational study from three Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland and Norway — found statistically significant increases in thromboembolic and thrombocytopenic outcomes following both Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

Dr. Christine Stabell Benn, M.D., Ph.D., a vaccinologist and professor in global health at the University of Southern Denmark, told The BMJ of yet another study — this one done by her research group that is currently published in preprint.

“The safety signal seems to be gathering around cardiovascular and cerebral vascular events, things to do with circulation and our larger organs, and these are the same signals that appear to be popping up in the FDA surveillance data as well,” Benn said.

She added, “We don’t want to create a lot of unnecessary anxiety and we can’t say there is now proof that the vaccines cause these events because the data are of poor quality, but we can say there is a danger signal, and the medical profession needs to be alerted to this.”

Earlier this year, the CDC admitted to deliberately withholding critical data on the COVID-19 booster shots and hospital admissions, The BMJ reported.

Kristen Nordlund, CDC spokesperson, in February told the New York Times the agency had been slow to release data to the public on breakthrough infections “because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.”

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. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.

his 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 29, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

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  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.

October 28, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

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.

October 28, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

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…

October 28, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

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