The government of the Australian state of Victoria not only decided to deliberately keep citizens in the dark about court rulings exposing the fact the privacy of their data collected by contact tracing apps can be compromised – but is now doubling down.
And the way the state’s Acting Premier Jacinta Allan, who has currently taken over while Premier Dan Andrews is being investigated for “concealing treason and fraud,” chose to defend the failure to inform people about matters pertaining to sensitive private information about them was to say the government was – shielding them from misinformation.
Australian media say the attempts to hide the truth have been made repeatedly, and Allan’s logic in defending the move is that if revealed, the Supreme Court’s secret ruling that said the data was not “absolutely protected” would have given rise to a “baseless scare campaign” as media reporting the facts would have caused “fear and misinformation.”
She did not clarify what type of “misinformation and fear” was expected to arise from the truth.
“The decision was taken in the balance of providing confidence in the Victorian community that this wasn’t a matter that needed to have that level of misinformation spread about it,” Allan said on Tuesday of the way the multiple levels of deceit had been handled.
This Supreme Court finding came to light after the Herald Sun reported that despite explicit promises of information safety, and its use only for health purposes, this was a lie – and one ongoing for two years.
Instead of making contact tracing data available only in order to fight the epidemic, it was also available to law enforcement, and authorities like the WorkCover agency.
It was precisely that agency’s demands to be given access to tracing app data that launched the legal case, when the Department of Health asked the court to order WorkCover to stop.
Another revelation is that the state’s Covid commander Jeroen Weimar petitioned the court to keep the case secret for five years. He tried to persuade the court that maintaining Victorians’ trust in the tracing system was what really matters – at the same time downplaying the importance of the citizens’ right to know their data can be shared, despite assurances from Covid tracers that this was not possible.
Asked if it was right to hide from the public the truth about the safety of their data – and the fact a court case was unfolding financed by their tax money, Allan said, “They don’t deserve a fear campaign, they don’t deserve misinformation,” and added that their data “will be protected.”
Shadow Attorney-General Matt Bach sees the scandal differently:
“People should be shocked and appalled. We should never become accustomed to this level of dishonesty.”
As of this Friday, December 31 the ubiquitous and infamous PCR test used universally by the public health and medical establishments is gone, according to a CDC declaration issued last July.
To all of the propaganda victims of the pandemic collusion mafia, now is the time (belatedly) to face facts. A huge fraction of all the fear-producing data in COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths are sheer crap. From the very beginning in early 2020 there were experts who said that the PCR test should not have been so used universally as a way to detect and document COVID infection and disease.
You may have noticed that there has been no coverage of this rather important act by CDC in the leftist mainstream media. Why not? Because now they have to admit that massive false positive results from PCR tests have produced totally unreliable data. These PCR tests had the capability of calling the common flu or cold COVID. And so much of the time they were run at very high cycles to create false positives.
The larger point after two pandemic years is that the public should better appreciate just how easy it has been for public health, medical and public policy establishments to totally lie about virtually all aspects of the pandemic.
It started with PCR testing and continues to this day with COVID vaccines. If you were stupid enough to trust testing, then you probably remain stupid enough to trust everything said about vaccines and boosters as ways to curb the pandemic. And add on masking, lockdowns and school closings to the BIG LIES endlessly promoted by Big Media, Big Government and Big Pharma.
And now keep believing, if you remain gullible, that omicron is a huge health threat.
Starting with my book Pandemic Blunder I have worked endlessly to be a truth-teller. But it is not easy to combat the disinformation and lies from all the powerful forces determined to instill fear so that governments can coerce and control the public.
Though I prefer to focus on COVID deaths, there are reasons why these data are also problematic. So many have died with COVID but not from COVID.
Hospitals have utterly failed to effectively prevent COVID related deaths, now over 830,000 and that will surely reach 1 million by the end of March. Why? Because severely ill, late-stage COVID patients in ICUs are not being saved by current hospital protocols. Those patients got to that point because the government prevented wide use of generic medicines for early home treatment and even now for late-stage COVID.
Everywhere I look I see widespread dishonesty, incompetence and corruption. These have produced widespread suffering in all aspects of lives. Time for the revolution. If you have enough critical thinking capability to see all the many lies from the powerful, especially the evil Fauci.
I’ve already covered three studies that found natural immunity protects better against infection than the vaccines. These comprise two fromIsrael, and one from Denmark. In each case, individuals who’d already had Covid were much less likely to become infected than those who’d been vaccinated.
Now a fourth study has come to my attention; this time from India. (The study was published as a preprint back in August.)
Malathi Murugesan and colleagues monitored infections in a cohort of healthcare workers between April and June of this year, during the country’s second wave. They compared four groups, corresponding to the different combinations of previously infected or not, and vaccinated or not.
Note: the vast majority of participants had received the AstraZeneca vaccine. This is in contrast to the Israeli and Danish studies, where most individuals had received another vaccine (mainly Pfizer).
Among those who hadn’t been previously infected or vaccinated, the cumulative infection rate was 14.9%. It was slightly lower among those that had been vaccinated but not previously infected, namely 11.1%. And it was dramatically lower among those who had been previously infected: 2.1% among those who hadn’t been vaccinated, and 1.4% among those who had.
To check that these results were robust, the authors ran a statistical model controlling for age, sex, type of work, and the daily incidence of Covid in the surrounding area (the city of Vellore in Southern India).
They estimated the protective effect of natural immunity to be 86% (which is consistent with a recent systematic review). By contrast, vaccine effectiveness was only 32%. As expected, the protective effect of hybrid immunity was 91% – slightly better than that of natural immunity alone.
There are now four separate studies all showing the same thing: several months after the corresponding event, natural immunity provides substantially better protection against infection than the vaccines.
“Vaccination efforts,” the Indian researchers note, “should be optimised by directing vaccination towards the areas where individuals are non-immune.” In other words, there was no need to vaccinate healthy people who’d already had Covid; those vaccines should have gone to the clinically vulnerable in poor countries.
This is the second of two parts. The first appeared yesterday.
THE revelations in Robert F Kennedy Jnr’s book about Anthony Fauci’s handling of the Covid crisis are damning. That is putting it politely.
He illustrates how the United States chief medical adviser, in charge of healthcare for the American people for over 40 years, presided over the worst coronavirus death rate in the world, nearly double that of many countries. The US suffered 2,107 deaths per 100,000 citizens, while Sweden, who accidentally became the world’s control group by ignoring damaging lockdown and mask mandates, had 1,444 deaths per 100,000.
Fauci is blinkered to affordable treatments, and inexplicably banned them. The rest of the world followed suit with the result that thousands who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were left to deteriorate at home until gasping for breath, when they were finally admitted to hospital and ventilated. Many never came home.
RFK Jnr, 67, son of assassinated US attorney general Bobby Kennedy and nephew of assassinated President John F Kennedy, began his legal career as an environment lawyer. Time.com named him ‘hero for the planet’. These days he is accused of being an antivaxxer, but like most activists in this arena he is simply pro-vaccine safety.
As he says at the beginning of his book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health: ‘Complex scientific and moral problems are not resolved through censorship of dissenting opinions, deleting content from the Internet, or defaming scientists and authors who present information challenging to those in power. Censorship leads instead to greater distrust of both government institutions and large corporations.’
Many formerly respected medics, as well as RFK Jnr, now find they are victims of cancel culture, while those in power are able to dictate undemocratic, unproven and draconian measures with the capability to destroy our lives and economies without censure or challenge.
Here is an edited extract from chapter 1:
‘Peer-reviewed science offered anaemic if any support for masking, quarantines and social distancing, and Dr Fauci offered no citations or justifications to support his diktats. Both common sense and the weight of scientific evidence suggest that all these strategies, and unquestionably shutting down the global economy, caused far more injuries and deaths than they averted.
‘During a speech to HHS [Health and Human Services] regulators, Fauci explained the fruitlessness of masking asymptomatic people. “The one thing historically people need to realise, that even if there is some asymptomatic transmission, in all the history of respiratory borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks. The driver of outbreaks is always a symptomatic person. Even if there’s a rare asymptomatic person that might transmit, an epidemic is not driven by asymptomatic carriers.”
‘Dr Fauci observed in March 2020 that a mask’s only real efficacy may be in “making people feel a little better”. Perhaps he recognised that what masking lacked in efficacy against contagion, it compensated for with powerful psychological effects. These symbolic powers demonstrated strategic benefits for the larger enterprise of encouraging public compliance with draconian medical mandates. Dr Fauci’s switch to endorsing masks after first recommending against them came at a time of increasing political polarisation, and masks quickly became important tribal badges – signals of rectitude for those who embraced Dr Fauci, and the stigmata of blind obedience to undeserving authority among those who balked. Moreover, masking, by amplifying everyone’s fear, helped inoculate the public against critical thinking.
‘By serving as persistent reminders that each of our fellow citizens was a potentially dangerous and germ-infected threat to us, masks increased social isolation and fostered divisions and fractionalisation – thereby impeding organised political resistance.
‘The impact of masking on the national psyche reminded me of the subtle contribution of the “duck and cover drills” of my youth, drills that sustained and cemented the militaristic ideology of the Cold War. Those futile exercises reinforced what my uncle John F Kennedy’s Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, called “National Mass Psychosis”. By suggesting to Americans that full-scale nuclear war was possible, but also survivable, ruinous investments in that project were justified. For the government and mandarins of the Military Industrial Complex, this absurd narrative yielded trillions in appropriations.
‘Social distancing mandates also rested on a dubious scientific footing. In September 2021, former FDA Commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb admitted that the six-foot distancing rule that Dr Fauci and his HHS colleagues imposed upon Americans was “arbitrary,” and not, after all, science-backed. The process for making that policy choice, Gottlieb continued, “is a perfect example of the lack of rigour around how CDC made recommendations”.
‘Finally, the lockdowns of the healthy were so unprecedented that the World Health Organisation’s official pandemic protocols recommended against them. Some WHO officials were passionate on the topic, among them Professor David Nabarro, Senior Envoy on Covid-19, a position reporting to the Director General.
‘On October 8, 2020, he said, “We in the World Health Organisation do not advocate lockdowns as a primary means of controlling this virus. We may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We’ll have at least a doubling of child malnutrition because children are not getting meals at school and their parents in poor families are not able to afford it. This is a terrible, ghastly, global catastrophe, actually, and so we really do appeal to all world leaders: Stop using lockdown as your primary control method . . . lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle – and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.”
‘Dr Fauci and other officials made no inquiry or claims as to whether lockdowns would cause more harm and death than they averted. Subsequent studies have strongly suggested that lockdowns had no impact in reducing infection rates. There is no convincing difference in Covid infections and deaths between laissez-faire jurisdictions and those that enforced rigid lockdowns and masks. Dr Fauci’s mask deceptions were among several “noble lies” that, his critics complained, revealed a manipulative and deceptive disposition undesirable in an even-handed public health official. Dr Fauci explained to the New York Times that he had upgraded his estimate of the vaccine coverage needed to insure “herd immunity” from 70 per cent in March to 80-90 per cent in September not based on science, but rather in response to polling that indicated rising rates of vaccine acceptance.
‘He supported Covid jabs for previously infected Americans, defying overwhelming scientific evidence that post-Covid inoculations were both unnecessary and dangerous.’
‘In September 2021, in a statement justifying Covid vaccine mandates to school children, Dr Fauci dreamily recounted his own grade-school measles and mumps vaccines – an unlikely memory, since those vaccines weren’t available until 1963 and 1967, and Dr Fauci [who is 80 years old] attended grade school in the 1940s. Dr Fauci’s little perjuries about masks, measles, mumps, herd immunity, and natural immunity attest to his dismaying willingness to manipulate facts to serve a political agenda.’
After the Conejo Guardian’s report on alarming trends in Ventura County hospitals, more nurses have come forward to affirm the rise in unexplained heart problems, strokes and blood clotting in local vaccinated patient populations. They also say doctors refuse to consider that these could be adverse reactions to Covid shots.
Sam, a critical care nurse at an ICU in a Ventura County hospital, came forward because, “I’m tired of all the B.S. that’s going on,” he told the Guardian. “It’s crazy how nobody questions anything anymore.”
“NONE [OF THE DOCTORS] QUESTION WHETHER THE VACCINE CAUSES MYOCARDITIS, PERICARDITIS AND THE STROKES THAT ARE COMING IN. IF THEY DON’T TOE THE LINE, THEY COULD LOSE THEIR MEDICAL LICENSE.”
He has witnessed a surge in numbers of young people experiencing severe health problems after receiving Covid shots.
“We’ve been having a lot of younger people come in,” Sam says. “We’re seeing a lot of strokes, a lot of heart attacks.”
One 38-year-old-woman came in with occlusions (blockages of blood flow) in her brain.
“They [doctors] were searching for everything under the sun and documenting this in the chart, but nowhere do you see if she was vaccinated or not,” Sam says. “One thing the vaccine causes is thrombosis, clotting. Here you have a 38-year-old woman who was double-vaccinated and she’s having strokes they can’t explain. None of the doctors relates it to the vaccine. It’s garbage. It’s absolute garbage.”
Another woman, age 63, came in the day she took the Moderna Covid shot. With no previous cardiac history, she suffered a heart attack. Tests revealed her coronary arteries were clean.
“One doctor actually questioned the vaccine, but they didn’t mention it in the chart because you can’t prove it,” Sam says.
While hospitals are seeing more myocarditis, an associated side effect of the Covid shots, “Everyone wants to downplay it — ’It’s rare, it’s rare,’” Sam says. “Doctors don’t want to question it. We have these mass vaccinations happening and we’re seeing myocarditis more frequently and nobody wants to raise the red flag. When we discuss the case, they don’t even discuss it. They don’t mention it. They act like they don’t have a reason, that it’s spontaneous.”
‘Survival mode’
“I FEEL LIKE OUR HOSPITAL IS … BARELY ABLE TO FUNCTION RIGHT NOW. THAT’S HOW BAD IT IS.”
Dana, another ICU nurse, says the number of sick, critically ill people in her Ventura County hospital has become “overwhelming,” pushing her facility’s patient census to the highest levels she has ever seen.
“It has never been this busy, and none of it is Covid-19,” Dana says. “We don’t normally see this amount of strokes, aneurysms and heart attacks all happening at once. … Normally we’ll see six to ten aortic dissections a year. We’ve seen six in the last month. It’s crazy. Those have very high rates of mortality.”
But doctors almost never bring up the possibility of adverse reactions due to Covid vaccinations.
“Doctors are like, ‘It’s probably the holidays,’” Dana says. “I don’t understand how you can look at what’s going on and come up with just, ‘Yeah, it’s the holidays.’ There’s been a big change in everybody’s life, and it’s the vaccine.”
Covid infection numbers remain small, and most patients who come in with Covid have already been vaccinated, she says. Rather, an unprecedented number of patients are “on pressers to keep their blood pressure up, people on ventilators, clotting issues, so we have a lot of Heparin drips to make sure they don’t stroke out,” Dana says.
Meanwhile, “Everybody’s in survival mode because of staffing.”
Nurse shortages, caused by people fleeing California and the health care profession, have local hospitals scrambling to provide care. Dana has been “out of ratio” for the last three shifts, based on the State of California’s maximum allowable nurse-to-patient ratio for safely delivering care.
That is leading to serious lapses.
“Because we’re short-staffed, they are hiring new nurses and I’m seeing mistakes in the hospital that are not even funny — medical errors,” Dana says. “[Hospitals] are trying to fill these spots and are getting any warm body to do the bare minimum. I think it’s terrible what’s happening.”
Recently, Dana took care of a patient who was mistakenly given massive amounts of a certain hormone by a different nurse.
“Now their brain is fried,” she says. “The patient is screwed.”
Unfortunately, most newly-hired nurses “are not capable of safely managing patients,” and yet are being thrust early into this environment, she says.
“The hospital is like, ‘We need to fill these spots. We’re getting killed.’ So they release all these people who’ve been training for two to three months. Normally you train four to six months,” Dana says. “To be honest, I feel like our hospital is on the brink of — we’re barely able to function right now. That’s how bad it is.”
Even the physical space is taxed by the influx of patients with life-threatening health conditions. Dana’s hospital is so packed that they are putting patients in staging areas of operating rooms.
As a result of crowding, equipment is not always where it should be and “when someone takes a dump on you and goes into cardiovascular collapse, you don’t know where your stuff is — and time is tissue,” she says. “Their blood pressure starts dropping, their respiratory rate goes up, and because we’re having to shuffle patients and staff around, equipment is in different spots. Sometimes you need to respond in minutes, and if a nurse doesn’t know where stuff is and is not used to dealing with the numbers of people and the types of critical problems — every second of delay in therapeutic treatment causes more tissue to get damaged and die, whether it’s heart tissue, brain tissue, muscle tissue. Every second counts.”
Green nurses managing more patients, with more serious problems, is forcing unpleasant choices.
“It’s setting up the patients for failure,” Dana says. “How can you manage four to five critically ill patients effectively? You have to pick winners and losers.”
Pressuring the ‘unvaccinated’
Meanwhile, doctors seem obsessed with getting people to take Covid shots.
Sam took the first two Covid shots while working in Los Angeles during the pandemic, but is shocked at how medical professionals and political leaders are demanding universal acceptance of what he says is “not really a vaccine. It’s experimental.”
“They shouldn’t be forcing it on everyone,” he continues. “There isn’t a lot of data. There are risks associated with it and you should be able to turn it down. Now if you don’t take the vaccine, people shun you.”
Hostility toward those who don’t go along runs high among medical co-workers.
“You’re not allowed to say you don’t want it,” Sam says. “Coworkers will talk [trash] about you, they’re so adamant about it. It’s frustrating. … You always hear the conversations behind their backs. ‘She’s not vaccinated, blah blah blah.’ I’m like, who gives a [care]? It’s none of your business. It’s their choice. Before, medical information was really private. Now it’s like, ‘What’s you’re Covid status?’”
Even patients coming into his hospital who have not taken the Covid shots are flagged and treated with disdain, he says.
“The first thing [nurses] say in the history and physical is, ‘He’s not vaccinated. He’s got Covid,’” he says. Meanwhile, “The Covid numbers in ICU are zero.”
As for the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), it may as well not exist. In his hospital, “There’s no protocol [for reporting to VAERS]. Nobody ever talks about that,” he says.
Even those who have strong natural immunity after overcoming the virus naturally are being pressured to take Covid shots.
“If this is about science, why on earth are we pushing people to get the vaccine?” Sam says. “We have rights, but they’ve taken that away. If you don’t get the shot, you lose your job.”
Informed consent also seems to have gone by the wayside.
“When you give someone informed consent, you are supposed to give them all the risks and benefits, and all options,” he says. “I feel like with the vaccine, they don’t give you the risks. They say, ‘Take this vaccine. It’s for the good of the community.’ They won’t be honest about it because it will drive down vaccination numbers. Every other medical product we give, we inform them fully. I don’t understand what it is about the Covid vaccine. They are so adamant about giving it.”
‘No boosters’
“I DON’T WANT TO KEEP INJECTING MYSELF WITH SOMETHING EVERY SIX MONTHS WHEN I DON’T HAVE DATA.”
Sam is most disappointed with doctors and nurses.
“The doctors don’t question anymore,” he says. “None question whether the vaccine causes myocarditis, pericarditis and the strokes that are coming in. If they don’t toe the line, they could lose their medical license. They do what they do because they have bills to pay. I’m disappointed because you have a handful of doctors who will question the narrative, but the rest go along.”
The level of propaganda, in his view, is “out of control.”
“Propaganda creates doubt,” he says. “Half the country buys it and the other half distrusts the system. They [doctors] are smart people but they don’t think for themselves anymore. It’s the propaganda, the repetition of the lie. It’s very effective.”
For his part, Sam has decided not to take any boosters.
“I don’t want to keep getting this thing. What if I clot off and get a heart attack?” he says. “Health care professionals are evidence-based people — or we used to be — and there’s just no evidence what this thing’s going to do in 10 years. We have no evidence what it does to the immune system and clotting system. I don’t want to keep injecting myself with something every six months when I don’t have data.”
He and his wife have decided they will leave the state if they can’t afford to homeschool their child, when the child reaches school age.
“My [child] will never get the vaccine. We will leave,” Sam says. “They are out of their minds to vaccinate these children. Their immune systems are immature. They are growing. I’m not willing to take the risk. No way. Me and my wife feel the same way.”
Florida, which is maintaining medical freedom and privacy, is also their preferred destination if and when he loses his job once governments change the definition of “vaccinated” — leaving him in the same category as those who never took Covid shots in the first place.
“I may end up getting a lawyer if they change the definition of ‘vaccinated’ and you need a third shot,” he says. “California law allows for religious exemptions and hospitals are denying them. That’s discrimination.”
Like all the nurses interviewed by the Guardian, he says he is “sick and tired of the coercion.”
“If you’re vaccinated and I’m not, what the heck are you worried about? It’s my choice, right?” he says. “If I get sick and die, that’s the price of freedom. That’s what we’re built on. In America, we don’t force people to take injections and medical products against their will.”
If a state senator got his way, the state of New York could soon get a new law aimed at regulating what content can appear on social media. The bill is designed to circumvent existing federal-level solutions in some instances and is reportedly inspired by internal documents leaked by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen.
But many legal experts believe that the bill, if passed, would eventually be overturned as unconstitutional for preventing dissemination of protected content.
The bill sponsored by state Senator Brad Hoylman wants to tackle what’s referred to as unlawful online content such as “misinformation” (particularly around Covid/vaccines), and posts that might allegedly lead users to develop eating disorders or engage in self-harm.
Envisaged in the bill is an amendment to New York’s penal code that lets citizens, the state attorney general and city corporation councils sue tech companies behind social media networks, or individuals, if they are suspected of “contributing” to spread of misinformation in a manner that’s “knowing or reckless.”
And while the bill is worded in a way that states content seen as endangering people’s safety or health should be clamped down on if it is “promoted” – including (but not exclusively) by means of algorithms and other methods of recommendation, experts say the distinction between that and any post created by users is not clear enough to stand up to legal scrutiny.
“The distinction between ‘hosting’ and ‘amplifying’ content is incoherent,” Santa Clara University School of Law professor Eric Goldman has told the New York Post, adding that Hoylman has taken that “incoherent” idea – “and embraced its most censorial option.”
According to Goldman, content that Hoylman’s bill takes aim at, such as, but not limited to, what’s considered false or harmful information that concerns Covid or political issues is in fact protected free speech under the First Amendment.
And for that reason, this expert believes, the draft legislation is unconstitutionally overbroad.
Commenting on the bill, David Greene of the Electronic Frontier Foundation concurred that the law would face First Amendment hurdles, and noted that because of the rapidly changing official guidance regarding the pandemic, it is very hard to even define what qualifies for Covid misinformation (when so much “expert” information has turned out to be false.)
“It’s really very difficult to impose liability in an environment where the truth can be hard to grasp at any point in time,” this attorney remarked.
Dr. Tess Lawrie is a world-class researcher and consultant to the World Health Organisation. Her biggest clients happen to be those who are involved in the suppression of repurposed drugs. She has decided to speak out in protest against the current medical establishment at considerable personal risk. She co-founded the BiRD Group; an international consortium of experts dedicated to the transparent and accurate scientific research of Ivermectin, with particular emphasis on the treatment and prevention of Covid-19.
The UK’s efforts to “protect the NHS” from being overwhelmed during the Covid-19 pandemic reportedly extended to asking families of disabled minors whether they should be resuscitated in the event their heart stopped beating.
The so-called “do not resuscitate” orders, known as DNACPRs, were offered to families of children with autism and other learning disabilities amid concerns about pressure on the UK’s socialized National Health Service, the Telegraph newspaper reported on Sunday.
The media outlet cited interviews with families that were presented the opt-out for resuscitation during routine medical appointments. For instance, the mother of a 16-year-old boy with Down’s syndrome said that a clinic employee offered her the option of a DNACPR for her son during a checkup.
“It is a disgusting question,” said the mother, Kent resident Karen Woollard. “The health assistant was following a form and she was very polite about it – suggesting she knew I wouldn’t want it to be ticked – but the question should not have appeared. It was very upsetting.”
The mother of a 16-year-old boy with autism said her son was offered a DNACPR during an NHS appointment and initially agreed because he didn’t understand the question. The boy is happy and healthy and has won gold medals in swimming competitions, said his mother, Debbie Corns.
“I collapsed on the floor crying when I got home,” Corns said. “I am a strong person, but I was devastated… The doctor devalued his life.”
The article follows British media reports earlier this year on patients with mental illness and learning disabilities being given DNACPRs during the pandemic. But unlike the latest report, those allegations concerned adult patients, at least one of whom reportedly died unnecessarily for lack of resuscitation.
DNACPRs are typically used for people who are too frail to be saved through cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the event their heart stops or they stop breathing. Mencap, a UK charity that advocates for people with learning disabilities, reported in January that disabled adults were being told by medics that they wouldn’t be resuscitated if they fell ill from Covid-19.
The UK’s Care Quality Commission said in March that some patients and family members had been denied the opportunity to discuss their DNACPR status or challenge NHS decisions on whether they would be resuscitated. Hundreds of elderly care home residents were written off with unlawful DNACPR decisions, the commission found.
Canada’s Public Health Agency has admitted to secretly tracking location data from at least 33 million mobile devices to analyze people’s movements during Covid-19 lockdowns.
The agency earlier this year collected data, including geolocation information from cell-towers, “due to the urgency of the pandemic,” a PHAC spokesperson told the National Post, essentially confirming a report by Blacklock’s Reporter. The tracking data was allegedly only used to evaluate the effectiveness of lockdown measures and identify possible links between the movement of people and the spread of Covid-19.
PHAC obtained the information, which was “de-identified and aggregated,” through an outside contractor, Canadian telecommunications giant Telus. The contract ran from last March to October, and PHAC said it no longer had access to the data after the deal expired.
However, the agency plans to similarly track the movements of citizens over the next five years toward such ends as preventing the spread of other infectious diseases and improving mental health. PHAC last week posted a notice to prospective contractors seeking anonymous mobile data dating as far back as January 2019 and running through at least May 2023.
Critics argued that government tracking of citizens is likely more extensive than has been revealed and may become more troublesome in the years ahead.
“I think that the Canadian public will find out about many other such unauthorized surveillance initiatives before the pandemic is over—and afterwards,” privacy advocate David Lyon told the Post. He noted, too, that “de-identified” data can easily be “re-identified.”
Author Julius Reuchel said the tracking initiative smacks of a surveillance state spying on citizens “for your safety.” Another author, Paul Alves, said that with its new contract, PHAC will have direct access to all mobile location data, and expressed fear that “contact tracing will no longer require permission or a warrant.”
“In some circumstances a person with COVID-19 may be eligible for assisted dying”. – NZ government
Are patients ‘eligible’ in the same way that we are all ‘eligible’ for vaccination and need to have our arms twisted by forcing us out of normal life?
Patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 can die by euthanasia if doctors decide they might not survive, the New Zealand government has declared.
The Ministry of Health confirmed that a right to a lethal injection under a new euthanasia law could extend to patients who were either dying from the coronavirus or suffering unbearably from its consequences.
In response to a request for clarity on a euthanasia law which came into force last month, the government declared that “in some circumstances a person with COVID-19 may be eligible for assisted dying”.
The admission that COVID patients were eligible for a lethal jab came after Henoch Kloosterboer, editor of the anti-euthanasia The Defender website, made a request under the Official Information Act – the New Zealand equivalent to the 2000 Freedom of Information Act.
He said the policy left “the door wide open for abuse” of elderly and vulnerable patients – especially if the country’s health service came under pressure from a COVID surge.
He said: “It would not be hard to envisage a situation in which a speedy and sizeable rise in COVID-19 hospitalisations could result in pressure to utilise euthanasia and assisted suicide as tools to resolve such a serious crisis.”
The euthanasia law, he added, “has now made the COVID-19 pandemic potentially even more dangerous for the people of Aotearoa New Zealand”.
The 2019 End of Life Choice Act is considered to be one of the most extreme euthanasia laws anywhere in the world, and critics say the safeguards are so flimsy that they are easily circumvented.
It permits both euthanasia and assisted suicide for adults suffering from an illness which would be terminal within six months, or who were in an advanced state of irreversible physical decline or who were suffering unbearably.
The law, ratified following a referendum in 2020, guarantees all residents the right of access to a doctor who will kill them within a period as short as four days from receiving a request.
Doctors receive a government fee of $1,000 plus expenses for every euthanasia death they perform.
Just 96 of the country’s 16,000 doctors have offered to participate, however, and all but one of the nation’s 32 hospices have indicated that they will not permit euthanasia.
The one exception – Totara Hospice in South Auckland – has agreed to allocate space on its premises for the practice while its staff will conscientiously object to any participation.
In the UK, Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, a professor of palliative medicine, said the New Zealand euthanasia law contradicted the fundamental purpose of medicine and health services to heal the sick.
She said: “It is bizarre that a country which has been trying to protect it citizens by closing down completely from a virus from which people can fully recover … is now suggesting that these patients should be killed by their doctors.
“It turns the ethos of medicine on its head,” she said.
“You really cannot predict death 100 per cent,” she added. “So why not support them while they are dying and leave the door open in case they are in the group that defies all odds and recovers completely?”
At present, Baroness Meacher is seeking to legalise assisted suicide in England and Wales through her Assisted Dying Bill, which in October received its Second Reading in the House of Lords.
The crossbench peer, who chairs the campaign group Dignity in Dying, has also tabled an amendment to the Health and Social Care Bill in an attempt to make assisted suicide a part of palliative care.
In Scotland, Liam MacArthur, the Liberal Democrat MP is intending to introduce an assisted suicide Bill and in politicians in Jersey last month agreed in principle to legalised both assisted suicide and euthanasia.
The overwhelming majority of palliative care practitioners and all 12 disability rights organisations in the UK fiercely oppose a change in the law, however.
They argue that assisted suicide and euthanasia would be discriminatory and dangerous and open to abuse irrespective of any safeguard, posing a grave threat to the safety of patients and other vulnerable people.
They also say that the experience of other countries suggests that even a modest assisted suicide law would serve as a beachhead for broader, liberalising amendments which will remove initial safeguards as ‘barriers to access’.
Last month, it was revealed that Nancy Russell, a 90-year-old Canadian woman, chose to die by assisted suicide rather than endure another COVID lockdown in her care home that would isolate her from her friends and family.
An Official Information Act reply to #DefendNZ, from the Ministry of Health, which says that patients with COVID-19 could be eligible for euthanasia, has left National MP Simon O’Connor disappointed but not surprised.
Palliative care improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing life-threatening illness. It provides holistic care (medical, psychological, social and spiritual) to those who are experiencing serious health related suffering due to a life threatening disease.
This video describes six essential components required to provide optimal palliative care with an integrated and people centred approach.
Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance has come to the defence of SAGE and its modelling after some torrid headlines this week following a Twitter exchange between lead modeller Professor Graham Medley and Spectator editor Fraser Nelson in which Professor Medley revealed that SAGE had not been asked to model less disastrous scenarios.
Writing in the Times, Dr. Vallance appeared directly to contradict some of the statements made by Prof. Medley, leaving observers baffled as to which of the two is correct as it is unclear how both can be. Dr. Vallance claimed that modelling of other, less severe scenarios, had been done and presented to Government, while Prof. Medley said it had not, at least by his team at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). Dr. Vallance writes:
The modellers always have to make assumptions and do so across a wide range of possibilities, some optimistic and some pessimistic. They do not, contrary to what you might have heard, only model the worst outcomes. They will make assumptions about vaccine effectiveness, they will model different levels of viral transmission, mixing patterns and different levels of disease severity. The range of assumptions modelled can be very broad; for disease severity for Omicron one model explored a range from 10% of Delta severity through to 100%. For immunity a range of assumptions on vaccine efficacy, speed of vaccine rollout and vaccine coverage in different parts of the population were explored.
This claim is backed up by the minutes of the most recent SAGE meeting, published yesterday, although it doesn’t square with what Prof. Medley told Fraser Nelson. Prof. Medley, who chairs the SAGE modelling committee, said that lower virulence scenarios don’t “add any further information” and implied his committee – SPI-M – had not been asked to provide them.
Fraser asked Prof. Medley: “I guess the question is why LSHTM did not (like JP Morgan) include a scenario of lower virulence – given that this is a very-plausible option that changes outlook massively.”
What would be the point of that? Not a snarky question – genuine to know what you think decision makers would learn from that scenario… If somebody draws a line on a graph it doesn’t add any further information. Decision-makers are generally only interested in situations where decisions have to be made… That scenario doesn’t inform anything. Decision-makers don’t have to decide if nothing happens… We generally model what we are asked to model. There is a dialogue in which policy teams discuss with the modellers what they need to inform their policy.
Fraser later observed that Prof. Medley appeared to be saying his brief was very limited and did not include less severe assumptions and outcomes.
He seemed to suggest that he has been given a very limited brief, and asked to churn out worse-case scenarios without being asked to comment on how plausible they are… Note how careful he is to stay vague on whether any of the various scenarios in the SAGE document are likely or even plausible. What happened to the original system of presenting a ‘reasonable worse-case scenario’ together with a central scenario? And what’s the point of modelling if it doesn’t say how likely any these scenarios are?
From what Professor Medley says, it’s unclear that the most-likely scenario is even being presented to ministers this time around. So how are they supposed to make good decisions? I highly doubt that Sajid Javid is only asking to churn out models that make the case for lockdown. That instruction, if it is being issued, will have come from somewhere else.
Often the job of scientific advice is to allow ministers to understand both a central case and the uncertainty surrounding it, what drives that uncertainty and when the uncertainty might be reduced. Speaking scientific truth to power is a difficult but necessary part of the democratic process if ministers are to be able to make an informed decision. This is what SAGE does.
If Dr. Vallance is accurately describing the advice given to ministers by SAGE, why did LSHTM not model those scenarios and estimate their likelihood? Why did the chairman of the SAGE modelling committee state that such scenarios had not been requested because they do not add anything useful to the discussion? The only explanation I can think of is that the broader range of scenarios referred to in the minutes of the SAGE meeting dated December 20th was not reflected in the SAGE memo circulated to ministers for that afternoon’s Cabinet meeting. That is, SAGE modelled less gloomy scenarios but didn’t bother to include them in the advice it gave to the Cabinet.
Dr. Vallance claims SAGE is a neutral adviser, being neither pessimistic nor optimistic and not pushing for any “dogmatic” answer or directive.
It is not the job of SAGE to take a particular policy stance or to either spread gloom or give Panglossian optimism. Ministers and the cabinet need to hear the information whether uncomfortable or encouraging. They of course need to factor it in to all the other information that provides inputs to policy decisions. SAGE does not provide dogmatic answers or directives, it provides information, advice, scenarios and helps determine possible consequences of actions. Part of the advice may contain a “reasonable worst case scenario” – data that are often seized upon.
But they are just that – a reasonable worst case scenario and one of many possible outcomes and trajectories presented to ministers for planning purposes and decision making.
But Dr. Vallance is failing to acknowledge the reason that prompted the need for his defence of SAGE modelling in the first place, which is that the chairman of his main modelling committee had stated that they had not been asked to provide alternative scenarios to ministers because it “doesn’t add any further information”. Dr. Vallance implies that others are at fault for having arbitrarily “seized upon” the reasonable worst case scenario presented to ministers, ignoring that the present controversy arose because the Government’s lead modeller said no other scenarios were modelled because they were pointless.
Dr. Vallance is also being, at best, naïve about the key role SAGE’s projections and advice have played in pushing the Government into making extreme interventions. His comments here about it being “not the job of SAGE to take a particular policy stance or to either spread gloom or give Panglossian optimism” are contradicted by his enthusiastic endorsement of boosters earlier in the same article – “Vaccine boosters are crucial” – and by what he told the BBC in October about his risk-averse approach to the pandemic.
My mantra for a long time during this (pandemic) has been… you’ve got to go sooner than you want to in terms of taking interventions. You’ve got to go harder than you want to, and you’ve got to go more geographically broad than you want to. And that is the Sage advice. And that’s what I’ve been saying. And I will say it going forward, and the prime minister knows that’s what I think. And he knows that’s what I would do in that situation.
That sounds very much like he’s offering policy recommendations to me, and recommendations of precisely the kind he’s denying SAGE makes in his Times article.
Dr. Vallance concludes with a defence of the role of science and the scientific method in the pandemic.
Science has served us extraordinarily well during this pandemic and has given us many insights as well as new diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutics. Science is self-correcting, and advances by overturning previous dogma and challenging accepted truths. Encouraging a range of opinions, views and interpretation of data is all part of the process. No scientist would ever claim, in this fast-changing and unpredictable pandemic, to have a monopoly of wisdom on what happens next.
Yet two of America’s top scientists, Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, have been exposed as plotting to smear the eminent authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Dr. Collins wrote to Dr. Fauci that the declaration was the work of “three fringe epidemiologists” and “seems to be getting a lot of attention”. He added that “there needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet – is it underway?” Shortly afterwards an online ‘fact check‘ appeared, courtesy of a team that included U.K. Government-linked MP Neil O’Brien.
So much for challenging accepted truths and encouraging a range of opinions.
It’s good to see the gloomy lockdown zealots on the back foot for a change and having to defend themselves. I just wish they could stick with the facts rather than spinning make-believe and changing the ‘facts’ to fit the narrative rather than vice-versa.
Stop Press: Dr. Jenny Harries, Chief Executive of the UKHSA, has also taken to the airwaves in defence of the advisers’ doomy forecasts, telling the BBC that while there’s “a glimmer of Christmas hope in the findings that we published yesterday”, it “definitely isn’t yet at the point where we could downgrade that serious threat”, referring to her earlier claim that Omicron was “probably the most significant threat we’ve had since the start of the pandemic”. For evidence she pointed to the “quite staggering” speed of spread compared to previous variants – despite her own agency publishing data this week showing that the household secondary attack rate (the proportion of household contacts an infected person infects) of Omicron is lower than the direct secondary attack rate (an almost equivalent measure) of the Alpha variant this time last year.
at what point will the world wake up to the fact that we are currently inhabiting far more of a testdemic than a pandemic?
data from the UK is showing that only 1 in 3 recent “covid hospitalizations” is actually in the hospital for covid. the vast majority were there for something else and tested positive after admission. this is literally tripling the reported count of new patients.
“Two-thirds of new Covid hospital patients in England were actually admitted for a different ailment, MailOnline’s analysis of NHS data suggests – as a growing number of studies show Omicron is much milder than Delta.
In the two weeks to December 21, hospitals in England recorded 563 new coronavirus inpatients — the majority of which are believed to be Omicron now that the variant is the country’s dominant stain.
But just 197 (35 per cent) were being primarily treated for Covid, with the remaining 366 (65 per cent) only testing positive after being admitted for something else.
Experts told MailOnline it was important to distinguish between admissions primarily for Covid so that rising numbers do not spook ministers into more social restrictions or scare the public from going to hospital.
The rising number of so-called ‘incidental cases’ – people who are only diagnosed with the virus after going to the NHS for a different ailment – is in line with the picture in South Africa.
Studies in the epicentre Gauteng province have shown up to three-quarters of Omicron patients there were not admitted primarily for the virus.”
how, at this stage of affairs and after 2 years of time to learn to get the stats straight is everyone still getting this all so wrong? it outright beggars belief.
how is anyone supposed to make decisions or analyze data when the quality is this low?
if you relentlessly test everyone in sight, symptomatic or no, for covid using overclocked PCR tests at 40+ Ct you’re going to find it everywhere. these tests were never actually suited for purpose and have been locking onto trace virus, dead virus, and all manner of other non-clinical positives.
this is not a sound basis for analysis or behavior.
hospitalization has been massively tainted by it as nosocomial spread is rife at the trace level. this issue gets amplified by the payout for finding such “cases” as it allows for more billing on new codes and access to additional insurance and coverage pools. this has turned the hyper-aggressive hunt for cases in hospitals into a huge profit center.
deaths are the same. death with (or within 30 days of) discernable trace virus detection by super sensitive assay is an outlandishly inclusive definition that vastly exceeds actual “death from covid” as a primary or even significant cause.
nothing else is counted this way. ever.
not in all of human history has anything remotely like this taken place.
we’re running more covid tests in a week in the US that we’ve run flu tests in entire decades and more in a season than we’ve run flu tests in the history of the nation.
is it any wonder that with such inclusive definitions, over-amplified detection modalities, and obsessive and malincentivized testing regimes that this all looks so “unprecedented”?
of course it does. we’ve never looked for anything in all of human history the way we’re looking for covid. what other result could one even plausibly expect?
we’ve tested our way into a pit of inescapable dodgy data quicksand.
continuing to treat this “data” as though it is clinically or societally meaningful has become a far greater problem than the disease itself.
the cure, of course, is simple:
stop this OCD level testing strategy.
stop testing the asymptomatic altogether
dial down the amplification on PCR to 30Ct at a max and probably something more like 26
stop obsessively testing healthy children
stop encouraging people to test themselves over and over and to demand the same from their friends and family
sending out rapid tests to everyone is not good public health policy. it’s epidemiological derangement.
it’s cosplay medicine that perpetuates panic through performative ritual and obeisance. it serves no useful end save digging this hole deeper.
it will not end, assuage, or mitigate spread or the pandemic. it will only lead to more misguided perception and response.
this is not normal. it’s not science. it’s not even sane.
in another big win for irony (who, let’s face it has been having a banner year) the relentless fear and overtesting is actually becoming a problem for hospitals.
the testdemic has become the problem and is combining with a profound lack of perspective to generate astonishing harm.
“a virus so dangerous that you need to test for it to tell it apart from the common cold” is a laughable pretext for hijacking half the planet.
it’s clear these folks cannot hear themselves anymore.
public health has turned into some sort of golem that cannot be turned off and will mindlessly keep digging a trench until the heat death of the universe unless someone steps in and disables it.
so stop it. stop getting tested.
when you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes and this is a very, very stupid game we’re all taking part in…
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