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ONS slapped down by UK statistics watchdog for misleading claim that unvaccinated have “32 times” risk of Covid death

By Will Jones • The Daily Sceptic • November 26, 2021

Ed Humpherson, Director of U.K. Statistics Authority the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), has written to Emma Rourke, Director of Health Analysis at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to criticise the agency for a report it put out in October claiming that: “Between January 2nd and September 24th 2021, the age-adjusted risk of deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19) was 32 times greater in unvaccinated people than in fully vaccinated individuals.”

As James Wells, a statistician who served as head of the ONS UK trade team until 2019, pointed out when he wrote to the OSR to complain about the report earlier this month, this statistic uses data from January 2nd to September 24th 2021, which includes the bulk of the winter deaths at a time when almost no one was vaccinated. This skews the implied vaccine effectiveness, as a fair comparison would only include periods when a significant proportion of the country was vaccinated.

In Mr Humpherson’s letter to Ms Rourke he wrote:

The headline in the publication is the age adjusted risk of deaths involving COVID-19 for vaccinated and unvaccinated groups for the period January 2nd to September 24th. This was also the key message in the main tweet associated with the publication. Focusing on the headline figure has been unhelpful and has undermined the more helpful analysis provided later in the report. The headline figure is based on a time period driven by data availability. While the age-standardised mortality rates for deaths involving COVID-19 are consistently lower for people who have received two vaccinations, the size of the difference varies enormously depending on the time frame chosen. The data cover a period when very few people had two doses of vaccination, to a period when the majority of the adult population had two doses (data taken from gov.uk on 24 November 2021 show second dose uptake for age 12 and over in England was 0.8% on January 10th 2021 and 77.4% by September 24th 2021). It also covers a period when case rates varied significantly as well as the levels of natural immunity in the population…

Given the analysis carried out, more should have been done to highlight the uncertainty associated with the headline figure… I would urge you to take the focus off the headline figure in any future publications.

The truth is that statistics are being spun like this all the time by Government and others during the pandemic to bolster the preferred narrative. It’s just on this occasion the effort was so egregious and prominent that it couldn’t be ignored.

November 26, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

New Zealand Doctors Speaking out with Science

NZDSOS – 15/11/2021

‘NZ Doctors Speaking out with Science’ featuring Drs Alison Goodwin, Matt Shelton, and Emanuel Garcia. News Conference 15th November, 2021.

See also:

CV19… four basic assumptions

November 26, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Vaccinated “No Less Infectious” Than Unvaccinated, CDC Study Finds

By Will Jones • The Daily Sceptic • November 24, 2021

A pre-print study out this week from the U.S. Government’s Covid Response Team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found vaccinated people to be “no less infectious” than unvaccinated people.

The study tested inmates in a federal prison with high vaccination rates daily during a SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant outbreak.

The study was very thorough. Inmates who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were, where willing, PCR-tested for 10 consecutive days and reported symptoms via a questionnaire. The researchers performed whole genome sequencing and viral culture analysis on a high proportion of the 978 specimens collected, allowing them to assess the duration of PCR positivity and viral culture positivity.

There were 95 participants in total, of whom 78 (82%) were double vaccinated and 17 (18%) were not double vaccinated (two having received one dose and 15 having received none). No significant differences were found between double vaccinated and not double vaccinated either in duration of PCR positivity (13 days each) or in duration of culture positivity (five days each).

The authors conclude that “clinicians and public health practitioners should consider vaccinated persons who become infected with SARS-CoV-2 to be no less infectious than unvaccinated persons”.

This is in line with the findings of Public Health England and others.

While this sounds like more good news for countering vaccine passports, vaccine mandates and all other vaccine-based coercion and discrimination, it may be less good news for ending general restrictions and interventions. The authors state: “These findings are critically important, especially in congregate settings where viral transmission can lead to large outbreaks.” Which suggests they think the lack of efficacy against transmission is a reason to intervene more generally to prevent “large outbreaks” in “congregate settings”. It could be a long winter.

November 25, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

French Presidential candidate Marine Le Pen speaks out against vaccine passports

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | November 25, 2021

Presidential candidate in next year’s election in France, Marine Le Pen, has promised to remove vaccine passport mandates if she is elected because they are “useless” and a “disproportionate” restriction.

She will be running against current President Emanuel Macron, who supports the controversial measures.

“What is the vaccine passport for, apart from imposing a useless and disproportionate constraint on the French people?” Le Pen said in an interview on French radio France Inter.

Le Pen is against mandatory vaccination for everyone, including medical professionals. She supports “vaccine-freedom,” especially considering the vaccine does not prevent you from getting COVID or from contaminating others.”

Referring to vaccinated Prime Minister Jean Castex testing positive for the virus, Le Pen said, “I think we have a good example at the top here.”

“The real question is: can the vaccine prevent the spread of the virus? I think today the answer is no,” she said.

When asked if she supported vaccine boosters, she reiterated that vaccination should be a choice.

“I don’t have to be for or against it. I think everyone has to be free to do it or not, since in reality, it’s only your own life which is at stake,” Le Pen said.

“Everyone has to determine the risks and benefits for themselves.”

Le Pen said those with a vaccine passport could be more dangerous than the unvaccinated because they “shake hands and go to the restaurant” while sick with the virus.

“Nothing, it seems, can stop the spread of this virus, so all these constraints are meaningless,” she insisted.

She said she would remove the “senseless restrictions” if she is elected, particularly the suspension of healthcare workers who have not been vaccinated.

“The suspension of healthcare professionals is useless, [and] we need them,” she said.

“Hospitals are the main problem,” she added.

“It’s the government’s responsibility [to ensure there are enough hospital beds]…. They’ve removed beds [and] have allowed hospitals to become medical deserts with 30% of posts now vacant,” she continued.

“For the rest, we remove all of these constraints which are obviously useless.”

November 25, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Ignorant and Afraid

Politicians and bureaucrats aren’t immune to their own propaganda, and they really are as ill-informed as they seem.

eugyppius | November 25, 2021

I’ve mentioned this episode a few times: On 11 March 2020, Angela Merkel held a press conference where she remarked that the best hope was to slow the spread of SARS-2, and that 70% of Germans could be infected. The Italian lockdown was only a few days old, and it was plainly not Merkel’s intent to go down the path of mass containment. The United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden and likely a few other countries too still planned for an ordinary approach to Corona, with minimal mitigations.

All the while, though, Team Lockdown was hard at work behind the scenes, to bend policy in their direction. As this leaked email from 20 March shows, German medical bureaucrats deputised by the Ministry of the Interior were soon consulting experts on how best to instil “fear and a willingness to obey in the population.”

Because Western governments doubted their capacity to enforce Chinese-style lockdowns outright, fomenting mass panic became a non-pharmaceutical intervention in its own right. The histrionic media messaging has continued to this day, and it has contributed to a profoundly important division in our society: There are on the one hand those people in essential roles, who have endured exposure to Corona from the beginning, and most of whom have had the virus by now. And there are on the other hand those in Martin Kulldorf’s “laptop class,” that is to say well-off urban professionals, who have spent most of the last 21 months at home, hiding from a virus that many of them believe is approximately as dangerous as SARS. Mass infections among these people are only starting to happen right now.

As members of this privileged, sheltered class, politicians and bureaucrats have absorbed the virus hysteria that they helped seed in their social milieu. In the beginning, Merkel did not especially fear the possibility of mass infections in Germany. Six months of press hysteria later, in October 2020, she had grown accustomed to carrying two plastic envelopes in her bag. One was for the careful, hygienic disposal of used surgical masks. The other carried precious new ones, whenever she judged her current mask had reached a dangerous state of virus saturation.

Press photographs captured her awkward mask-changing routine:

Merkel’s remarkable virus paranoia, quietly acknowledged by the press now for months, explains her fixation on social isolation, closures and curfews as the only acceptable pandemic policies.

She is a 67 year-old sedentary woman who likely suffers from one or more undisclosed health problems. And she is surrounded by other older, unfit government officials, like 73 year-old interior minister Horst Seehofer, who nearly died of a B19 virus infection in 2002, and so has a reason to fear viral infection. For months and months, all of these people have been taking every possible personal precaution – including house-arresting the entire domestic populations of the countries they govern – in the vain hope of escaping Corona.

You could feel their collective relief when the vaccines were rolled out. All of them eagerly accepted vaccination. Merkel even provided pictures of her personal yellow vaccine pass to the press, with the stamp documenting her first dose of AstraZeneca. (Her purpose, in part, was to allay public concerns over the propensity of AstraZeneca to cause blood clots.)

To the profound disappointment of Merkel and everybody like her, the vaccines have not eradicated Corona. Every day, the prospect of personal infection looms for these people as a new, uncomfortable certainty. Every day, they and the rest of the work-from-home bureaucracy become ever more terrified. The prime minister of Austria is so afraid that he has confined all unvaccinated Austrians to their homes. When asked, he declared that this measure would have no end date. The Chief Minister of Australia’s Northern Territory is terrified. New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern is terrified.

You know who isn’t terrified right now? Everyone outside these circles. I and many of the people I know have had Corona, and we’re not terrified. Blue-collar workers have mostly been infected, and they’re not terrified. Grocery clerks, nurses, police officers and bus drivers aren’t terrified. All of the terror is at the top, blaring down at us all of the time. All these people know they are going to get sick in the next few months, and they are railing against this reality.

While I don’t agree with James Lindsay, that we are on the verge of a Second Enlightment, I think his distinction between official, curated, peer-reviewed information and analysis; and counter-cultural internet hive-mind information and analysis, is instructive.

All in all, it is the hive-mind that has been vastly more successful at understanding what is going on – not only as far as Corona, but everywhere. This has been obvious now for years. It is even true in my own field, where the official discourse suffers from a pervasive, unoriginal banality, while alternative theories pondered by intelligent outsiders and anonymous Twitter accounts become every day vastly more interesting. The reasons are simple: There are more people involved; the barriers to publishing are lower; nodes that provide bad analysis are easily removed; the thinkers are more thoroughly networked to each other; they gather audiences solely on the basis of their ability; they consider everything, not just the official line.

Meanwhile, it is only official, curated information that is allowed to inform bureaucratic decisions. Products of the hive-mind are deliberately excluded, via gate-keeping mechanisms like peer review and credentialism. All of the terrified Angela Merkels of the world act within an environment of outdated, poor-quality information, all the time.

Again, this is not unique to Corona. In an interview I will never find again, someone asked Noam Chomsky about the failures surrounding the American debacle in Afghanistan. He responded that it was above all a reflection of the distorted and inaccurate intelligence assessments that pollute the thought of American foreign policy planners and military strategists. Random people on the internet, he said, had a better view of the situation from the start.

Exactly the same phenomenon plagues official responses to Corona. The problem with curated information isn’t just that it is slow, subject to inertia, and produced by insular out-of-touch functionaries. Because the information has political importance, there are incentives everywhere to manipulate and degrade its quality. Bureaucratic actors will lie about what is going on to curry favour, save face or evade blame. What is more, many advisers, analysts and modellers are only in the position of providing analysis in the first place, because we need more women in STEM, or because they tell the Faucis of the world what they want to hear, or because they have the right combination of sociopathy and narrow-mindedness necessary to ascend complex bureaucratic hierarchies.

Corona policies really are as stupid as they look. Politicians and bureaucrats have locked themselves into a sad parody of the film Contagion, and their increasingly unsustainable, erratic behaviour merely reflects their desperation.

November 25, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Covid Scariant With “Horrific Mutations” Arrives In Time For Christmas

By Richie Allen | November 25, 2021

A new covid variant has emerged, just in time for Christmas. It was discovered in Botswana, but is believed to have shown up in South Africa and Hong Kong too. Scientists are claiming that it has 32 “horrific mutations” and might be capable of beating the vaccines.

According to The Mail Online:

British experts have sounded the alarm over a new Covid variant believed to have emerged in Botswana that is the most mutated version of the virus yet. Only 10 cases of the strain, which could eventually be named ‘Nu’, have been detected so far.

But it has already been spotted in three countries, suggesting the variant is more widespread.

It carries 32 mutations, many of which suggest it is highly transmissible and vaccine-resistant, and has more alterations to its spike protein than any other variant.

Professor Francois Balloux, a geneticist at University College London, said it likely emerged in a lingering infection in an immunocompromised patient, possibly someone with undiagnosed AIDS.

Dr. Tom Peacock is a virologist at Imperial College London. He practically shit himself when he looked at the new covid strain, describing it as “horrific.”

He said that B.1.1.529 (its scientific label) has the potential to be worse than any other covid mutation including the world-dominant Delta strain. Good God! Close the borders. Bomb Botswana back to the Stone Age. Cancel Christmas.

They’re nothing if not predictable eh? Covid-19 is the gift that keeps on giving, or taking, depending on your perspective of course.

November 25, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Why another lockdown would be met with mass non-compliance

By Andrew Devine | TCW Defending Freedom | November 25, 2021

LIKE many people, I went along with the first lockdown. I wasn’t very keen, and I was somewhat critical of it, but I believed the lie that it would be a temporary one-off measure. From the time of the second lockdown, I have been vehemently opposed to the policy. While I have never denied that Covid can be a nasty life-threatening illness for some people, I am critical of the way that governments have manipulated data to exaggerate the extent of the threat. 

When Covid 19 vaccines were first rolled out in the UK and around the world in late 2020, we were promised by Western governments and their teams of scientific ‘experts’ who wield enormous, unaccountable power, the media and Big Pharma that the vaccines were a game-changer and that mass vaccination would lead us back to some kind of normality. I was initially very resistant to take the vaccine because it is a new drug with no long-term data regarding side effects and risks. I also have two autoimmune conditions, and while they are easily treated, I am genetically predisposed to a third one that can be quite serious.

However, in the end, and with much hesitation due to the already known side effects and autoimmune risks, I took the Pfizer vaccine. I did so for several reasons. Firstly, I am around my elderly parents a lot, and I thought I would be protecting them as I believed the ‘experts’ that the vaccines would significantly reduce transmission.

This has turned out to be false.

Secondly, I was convinced by the data that seems to show that getting vaccinated almost entirely eradicates the chances of someone my age ending up in hospital with a severe case of Covid. Due to fitness and age, my risk of serious illness was already low, but as a neurotic who is sometimes prone to viewing the glass half empty, I admit to having moments when I worried that I might be one of those outliers for my age group cut down prematurely by Covid and so this was an added factor, but not the main one, in my capitulation. The final reason was because I currently reside in the Republic of Ireland where the government have been very keen to enforce some of the harshest lockdowns globally with draconian rules on both inward and outward travel as well as compulsory vaccine certificates for access to various sectors. Therefore, one of my main reasons for getting jabbed, while I still defended vehemently the rights of others not to do so, was that I thought I would be doing my bit to put an end to these hideous lockdowns and other excessive restrictions once and for all. Looking at what has happened in Austria and Holland and the refusal of both the UK and Irish governments to rule out more lockdowns, it is now clear how very wrong I was. Another way of putting it is that I’ve realised how easily I have been duped.

In recent weeks, I have become even more sceptical of everything that the UK and Irish governments and their appointed health experts tell me with regard to Covid-19. For a start, if they were wrong about the effectiveness of the vaccines with regards to transmission, why would I trust them with regards to how rarely serious side effects occur? There would be far more political and career capital at stake to motivate suppression of this data. I’m not accusing governments, scientific ‘experts’ or Big Pharma of doing so, merely noting that there is a much bigger price for them to pay if they didn’t.

With regards to coercive measures and the removal of rights from the unvaccinated, governments don’t even have recourse to the dubious argument that it’s for the greater good as we now know that the vaccinated can also transmit the virus. I keep making the argument to vaccine zealots that people can exercise their right to abstain from taking any medications due to the risks of side effects, but that many governments now believe this right should be removed solely with regard to Covid vaccines. There is no compelling moral argument for why Covid vaccines fall into an exceptional category that warrants the state using coercion whether it be direct (vaccine mandates) or indirect (segregation and removal of rights) to force its citizens to reluctantly take a medicine they would otherwise refuse.

The enthusiasm for vaccines and excessive restrictions are now articles of faith for their proponents. It has become an ideological stance that no amount of reasoned scrutiny can alter. Rational analysis of the extent of the threat from Covid and strategies to deal with it have been abandoned for the simplistic dogma of ‘vaccines good’ and ‘lockdowns and restrictions good’. The truth is much more nuanced than the doom-mongering analysis which permeates the mainstream media. Lockdown enthusiasts and vaccine zealots, like all ideologues, have opponents whom they despise and whom they seek to demonise. This is why only ‘far Right conspiracy theorists’ and ‘anti-vaxxers’ would have an issue with mandatory vaccines which can have serious side effects being given to children to protect them from a virus that rarely makes children very ill.

How have we reached a stage in Western liberal democracies when those of us questioning and disagreeing with extreme public health policies that strip individual citizens of their inalienable rights under false pretences are the ones deemed to be the extremists? Asking questions and being critical of government policy is now viewed by the obedient media class and the political elites and partisan scientific ‘experts’ they serve as being synonymous with the far Right. In truth, it is your democratic duty to question all government policies and especially more so those that would remove your fundamental freedoms. For any government to wish to suspend the rights of its citizenry on a temporary basis, it must first seek consent from the people after explaining the exceptional circumstances in which they seek to do so. There has been no public debate and little media scrutiny across the English-speaking world about whether the threat posed by Covid-19 meets the very high threshold that could justify temporary lockdowns and other extreme restrictions imposed on the citizenry.

If the UK or Irish government or any of the devolved administrations try to impose another lockdown, I predict there will be mass non-compliance. It is very likely that much of the population of these islands will conclude that if several lockdowns, mask mandates and ‘game changing’ vaccines have not eradicated transmission, why comply with another lockdown, possible financial ruin and separation from loved ones? What would be the purpose? As someone once said (it wasn’t actually Einstein): ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.’

November 25, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

How COVID-19 Jab Benefits Are Exaggerated

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | November 23, 2021

In a November 12, 2021, blog post,1 Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., reviews how the benefits of the COVID-19 shots have been exaggerated by the drug companies and misrepresented to the public by an uncritical media. She has previously given many lectures on how the drug companies conflated absolute and relative risks for statin drugs.2

Demasi was a respected Australian science presenter at ABC television until she produced a Catalyst report on the dangers of Wi-Fi and cellphones. In the wake of the controversy it raised, she and 11 of her staff members were axed and the episode retracted.3 That was 2016. Today, Demasi is one of the few professional journalists seeking and publishing the truth about COVID-19.

Absolute Versus Relative Risk Reduction

In her post, Demasi highlights one of the most commonly used tricks in the book — conflating absolute and relative risk reduction. As noted by Demasi, AstraZeneca and Australia’s health minister, Greg Hunt, claimed the AstraZeneca injection offered “100% protection” against COVID-19 death. How did they get this number? Demasi explains:4

“In the trial5 of 23,848 subjects … there was one death in the placebo group and no deaths in the vaccinated group. One less death out of a total of one, indeed was a relative reduction of 100%, but the absolute reduction was 0.01%.”

Similarly, Pfizer’s COVID shot was said to be 95% effective against the infection, but this too is the relative risk reduction, not the absolute reduction. The absolute risk reduction for Pfizer’s shot was a meager 0.84%.

It’s worth noting that an incredibly low number of people were infected in the first place. Only 8 out of 18,198 vaccine recipients developed COVID symptoms (0.04%), and 162 of the 18,325 in the placebo group (0.88%).

Since your risk of COVID was minuscule to begin with, even if the shot was able to reduce your absolute risk by 100%, it would still be trivial in real-world terms.

According to Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Harding Centre for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute, only quoting the relative risk reduction is a “sin” against transparent communication, as it can be used as a “deliberate tactic to manipulate or persuade people.” Demasi also quotes John Ioannidis, professor at Stanford University, who told her:6

“This is not happening just for vaccines. Over many decades, RRR [relative risk reduction] has been the dominant way of communicating results of clinical trials. Almost always, RRR looks nicer than absolute risk reductions.”

Demasi continues:7

“When asked if there was any justification for misleading the public about the vaccine’s benefits to encourage uptake, Prof Ioannidis rejected the notion.

‘I don’t see how one can increase uptake by using misleading information. I am all in favor of increasing uptake, but this needs to use complete information, otherwise sooner or later incomplete information will lead to misunderstandings and will backfire,’ says Ioannidis.

The way authorities have communicated risk to the public, is likely to have misled and distorted the public’s perception of the vaccine’s benefit and underplayed the harms. This, in essence, is a violation of the ethical and legal obligations of informed consent.”

US Health Authorities Have Misrepresented the Data

U.S. health authorities, like Australia’s, are guilty of misrepresenting the data to the public. In February 2021, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky co-wrote a JAMA paper8 which stated that “Clinical trials have shown that the vaccines authorized for use in the U.S. are highly effective against COVID-19 infection, severe illness and death.”

Alas, “there were too few deaths recorded in the controlled trials at the time to arrive at such a conclusion,” Demasi writes.9 This observation was made by professor Peter Doshi, associate editor of The BMJ, during Sen. Ron Johnson’s Expert Panel on Federal Vaccine Mandates, November 1, 2021.10 During that roundtable discussion, Doshi stated that:

“The trials did not show a reduction in deaths, even for COVID deaths … Those who claimed the trials showed that the vaccines were highly effective in saving lives were wrong. The trials did not demonstrate this.”

Indeed, the six-month follow-up of Pfizer’s trial showed 15 deaths in the vaccine group and 14 deaths in the placebo group. Then, during the open label phase, after Pfizer decided to eliminate the placebo group by offering the actual shot to everyone who wanted it, another five deaths occurred in the vaccine group.

Two of those five had originally been in the placebo group, and had taken the shot in the open label phase. So, in the end, what we have are 20 deaths in the vaccine group, compared to 14 in the placebo group. We also have the suspicious fact that two of the placebo participants suddenly died after getting the real deal.

How You Express Effect Size Matters

As noted in a July 2021 Lancet paper,11 “fully understanding the efficacy and effectiveness of vaccines is less straightforward than it might seem. Depending on how the effect size is expressed, a quite different picture might emerge.”

The authors point out that the relative risk reduction really needs to “be seen against the background risk of being infected and becoming ill with COVID-19, which varies between populations and over time.” This is why the absolute risk reduction figure is so important:12

“Although the RRR considers only participants who could benefit from the vaccine, the absolute risk reduction (ARR), which is the difference between attack rates with and without a vaccine, considers the whole population …

ARR is also used to derive an estimate of vaccine effectiveness, which is the number needed to vaccinate (NNV) to prevent one more case of COVID-19 as 1/ARR. NNVs bring a different perspective: 81 for the Moderna–NIH, 78 for the AstraZeneca–Oxford … 84 for the J&J, and 119 for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.

The explanation lies in the combination of vaccine efficacy and different background risks of COVID-19 across studies: 0.9% for the Pfizer–BioNTech … 1.4% for the Moderna–NIH, 1.8% for the J&J, and 1.9% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford vaccines.

ARR (and NNV) are sensitive to background risk — the higher the risk, the higher the effectiveness — as exemplified by the analyses of the J&J’s vaccine on centrally confirmed cases compared with all cases: both the numerator and denominator change, RRR does not change (66–67%), but the one-third increase in attack rates in the unvaccinated group (from 1.8% to 2.4%) translates in a one-fourth decrease in NNV (from 84 to 64) …

With the use of only RRRs, and omitting ARRs, reporting bias is introduced, which affects the interpretation of vaccine efficacy.

When communicating about vaccine efficacy, especially for public health decisions such as choosing the type of vaccines to purchase and deploy, having a full picture of what the data actually show is important, and ensuring comparisons are based on the combined evidence that puts vaccine trial results in context and not just looking at one summary measure, is also important.”

The authors go on to stress that comparing the effectiveness of the COVID shots is further hampered by the fact that they use a variety of different study protocols, including different placebos. They even differ in their primary endpoint, i.e., what they consider a COVID case, and how and when diagnosis is made, and more.

“We are left with the unanswered question as to whether a vaccine with a given efficacy in the study population will have the same efficacy in another population with different levels of background risk of COVID-19,” the authors note.

One of the best real-world examples of this is Israel, where the relative risk reduction was 94% at the outset and an absolute risk reduction of 0.46%, which translates into an NNV of 217. In the Phase 3 Pfizer trial, the absolute risk reduction was 0.84% and the NNV 119.13 As noted by the authors:14

“This means in a real-life setting, 1.8 times more subjects might need to be vaccinated to prevent one more case of COVID-19 than predicted in the corresponding clinical trial.”

SARS-CoV-2 Specific Antibodies Pose Danger for the Obese

In related news, a recent study15 published in the International Journal of Obesity warns that “the majority of SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies in COVID-19 patients with obesity are autoimmune and not neutralizing.”

In plain English, if you’re obese, you’re at risk of developing autoimmune problems if you get the natural infection. You’re also at higher risk of a serious infection, as the antibodies your body produces are not the neutralizing kind that kill the virus. As explained by the authors:16

“SARS-CoV-2 infection induces neutralizing antibodies in all lean but only in few obese COVID-19 patients. SARS-CoV-2 infection also induces anti-MDA [malondialdehyde, a marker of oxidative stress and lipid peroxidation] and anti-AD [adipocyte-derived protein antigens] autoimmune antibodies more in lean than in obese patients as compared to uninfected controls.

Serum levels of these autoimmune antibodies, however, are always higher in obese versus lean COVID-19 patients. Moreover … we also evaluated the association of anti-MDA and anti-AD antibodies with serum CRP and found a positive association between CRP and autoimmune antibodies.

Our results highlight the importance of evaluating the quality of the antibody response in COVID-19 patients with obesity, particularly the presence of autoimmune antibodies, and identify biomarkers of self-tolerance breakdown. This is crucial to protect this vulnerable population at higher risk of responding poorly to infection with SARS-CoV-2 than lean controls.”

Now, these findings apply to obese people who develop the natural infection, but it makes one wonder whether the same holds true for the COVID jab. If the antibodies produced in response to the actual virus are primarily autoantibodies, will obese people develop autoantibodies instead of neutralizing antibodies in response to the COVID shot as well?

For clarity, an autoantibody is an antibody that is directed against one or more of your own body’s proteins. Many autoimmune diseases are caused by autoantibodies that target and attack your own tissues or organs.

So, this is no small concern, seeing how the mRNA in the COVID shots (and subsequent SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which is what your body produces antibodies against) gets distributed throughout your body and accumulates in various organs.17,18

Vermont’s COVID Cases Despite Highest Vaccination Rate

At this point, there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence showing the COVID shots are not working. What little protection you do get clearly wanes within a handful of months, and may leave you worse off than you were before. We’re seeing data to this effect from a number of different places.

In the U.S., we can now look at Vermont.19 At nearly 72% vaccinated, it has the highest rate of “fully vaccinated” residents in the country, according to ABC News,20 yet COVID cases are now suddenly surging to new heights.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show Vermont had the 12th highest COVID case rate in the nation as of November 9, 2021. Over the previous seven days, cases had increased by 42%. It couldn’t have been due to a surge in testing, though, as the weekly average of tests administered had only increased by 9% in that time.

What’s more, during that first week of November, the hospital admission rate for patients who were fully vaccinated increased by 8%, while the admission rate for those who were not fully vaccinated actually decreased by 15%.

Keep in mind that you’re not considered “fully vaccinated” until two weeks after your second injection. If you got your second dose a week ago and end up in the hospital with COVID symptoms, you’re counted as unvaccinated. This gross manipulation of reality makes it very difficult to interpret the data, but even with this manipulation it is beyond obvious that the vaccines are failing.

Overall, the case rate in Vermont is FAR higher now than it was in the fall of 2020, when no one had gotten the “vaccine.” According to Vermont health commissioner Dr. Mark Levine, the surge is occurring primarily among unvaccinated people in their 20s and children aged 5 through 11 — a curious coincidence, seeing how the shots are just now being rolled out for 5- to 11-year-olds.

Levine blames the surge on the highly infectious delta variant, but delta has been around for months already. The first case of delta in Vermont was identified in mid-May 2021.21 Surely, it wouldn’t have taken six months for this most-infectious of variants to make the rounds and cause an unprecedented spike?

Two clues are given by Levine, however, when he admits that a) Vermont has one of the lowest rates of natural immunity in the U.S. and b) protection is waning among those who got the COVID shot early to mid-year. Breakthrough cases among the fully vaccinated shot up 31% during the first week of November.22

Fully Vaxxed Are Nine Times More Likely To Be Hospitalized

Coincidentally, data from physician assistant Deborah Conrad, presented by attorney Aaron Siri23 October 17, 2021, shows vaccinated people are nine times more likely to be hospitalized than the unvaccinated.

The key, however, was in what they counted as vaccinated. Rather than only including those who had gotten the shot two weeks or more before being hospitalized, they simply counted those who had one or more shots, regardless of when, as vaccinated. This gives us an honest accounting, finally! As explained by Siri:24

“A concerned Physician Assistant, Deborah Conrad, convinced her hospital to carefully track the COVID-19 vaccination status of every patient admitted to her hospital. The result is shocking.

As Ms. Conrad has detailed, her hospital serves a community in which less than 50% of the individuals were vaccinated for COVID-19 but yet, during the same time period, approximately 90% of the individuals admitted to her hospital were documented to have received this vaccine.

These patients were admitted for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to COVID-19 infections. Even more troubling is that there were many individuals who were young, many who presented with unusual or unexpected health events, and many who were admitted months after vaccination.”

Despite these troubling findings, health authorities ignored Conrad when she reached out. In mid-July 2021, Siri’s law firm also sent formal letters to the CDC, the Health and Human Services Department and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Conrad’s behalf,25 and those were ignored as well.

“This again highlights the importance of never permitting government coercion and mandates when it comes to medical procedures,” Siri writes.26

Now, one of the most shocking details gleaned from Conrad’s data collection, which Siri failed to make clear but Steve Kirsch highlights in a recent substack post is that:27

“The only way you can get those numbers is if vaccinated people are 9 times more likely to be hospitalized than unvaccinated. It is mathematically impossible to get to those numbers any other way. Period. Full stop. This is known as an ‘inconvenient truth.’”

Indeed, the more data we gain access to, the worse it looks for these COVID shots. Unfortunately, those who push them seem hell-bent on ignoring any and all data that don’t support their stance.

Worse, it seems data and statistics are being intentionally manipulated by our health authorities to present a false picture of safety and effectiveness. All such tactics are indefensible at this point, and people who believe the official narrative without doing their own research do so at their own risk.

Sources and References

November 24, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

They Live Amongst Us: Anatomy of a Cult

By Dustin Broadbery | OffGuardian | November 24, 2021

Despite a preponderance of the evidence proving COVID to be a non-event for most of us, over 1 million people have fallen foul to vaccine injury. This should be enough to stop most people in their tracks. It hasn’t.

Many emerge from near death experience even more pontifical than before, denouncing the rest of us for not joining in this mortal game of Russian Roulette. Fuelling their self-righteous indignation of us, is other people’s self-righteous indignation of them. It is a perpetual loop of blame and shame.

There can be no avoiding these people. A sort of Provisional Mask Army. The ones acting in good conscience lost to the morally virtuous super spreaders of hyperbole.

They will believe whatever they hear and do whatever they’re told. They have been groomed by something far more powerful than the truth, called ‘the science,’ and they will follow ‘it’ right off the edge of a cliff.

But that’s only half the story. If you’re unfortunate enough to die within two weeks of taking the jab, despite your best effort, the CDC might record your death as ‘unvaccinated,’ the commentariat might report that you “died suddenly and following a short illness,” and family members might take comfort in the fact that “things could have been worse.”

WASHING THE MORAL FABRIC

This unholy mess works because a new ideology has swept across the moral fabric. Unless you’re taking an experimental medical intervention fraught with danger, you’re dancing on the graves of all those who have died.

Ridding people with guilt takes away their power, and blind obedience to authority does the rest, as Milgram discovered in his landmark experiment.

But the fact that humanity is in an abusive relationship with its governments, is only one part of the problem. There’s a long history of cults infiltrating polite society. The cult of personality of Lenin and later Stalin once captured an entire nation. But never in history has the entire world fallen to a cult.

Where the New Normal departs from other cult archetypes is in the instruments of mass communication, in the hands of a few fanatics, that have infiltrated the commons, and created an apotheosis around COVID-19, glorifying it to the divine proportions of Christianity. It has long been understood that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes consensus.

Also of great importance to these evangelists are the decades of behavioural studies by the most distinguished experts in the field of social psychology.

Not everyone in the Asch Experiment conformed, but the reasons why many found solidarity with the group are well understood by the behavioural scientists, on the payroll of HM government, nudging the British people towards existential ruin.

And much of what is happening today in the rank and file of the New Normal, has the lessons of the Third Reich written all over it. If you’re still oblivious to the fact that you’re being indoctrinated into a cult, it’s probably because you’ve already been indoctrinated.

THE END IS NIGH

Cults are established on the back of major events, typically apocalyptic in nature. These biblical, extra-terrestrial, or, indeed, viral prophecies speak to an impending disaster and redemption. A tinderbox setting forces people together under the protection of communitarianism, and encourages the more zealous members to denounce, ridicule and intimidate anyone not acting in accordance with the group.

Deindividuation, as it is known, turns these harmless groups into psychological crowds, and very often results in a mob mentality.

Our need to take refuge in the herd is, after all, hardcoded into our DNA, just as fear of social exclusion and a desire to cooperate are inherited evolutionary traits. Explaining why COVID began with social isolation. And why, after capitulating to every conceivable demand, we continue to be held to ransom, with the threat of further social isolation.

Despite the obvious abuse of power, people remain beholden to their captors, through some bizarre emotional bond, strengthened every time they are released, albeit temporarily, from their captivity.

HIERARCHIES

You can identify cults by their organisational structure. People are assigned a role, as in Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment and many go beyond the call of duty. The problem isn’t so much that ‘we are all in this together’ It’s that we simply are not, it’s the cult nobility lording over the rest of us.

In this heightened state of emergency, however, people will not only accept more authority from those who are beyond the rules, they will emulate the prevailing authoritarian order, rather than become a victim of it. As Hannah Arendt discovered in her landmark thesis, ordinary people in search of purpose and direction, who are dutifully just following orders, have the potential to commit the most atrocious acts of evil.

Throughout COVID, these unpaid, unsolicited officers in the rank and file have spread the communicable indoctrination far wider than any bureaucrat. We are full to the rafters of morally superior COVID-vigilantes, condemning anyone for the mere suggestion that the earth, might in fact, orbit the sun.

The resulting groupthink – if you’re not with us you’re against us – not only isolates new initiatives from outside influence, it removes their right to think and act for themselves and admonishes anyone brave enough to question the All Powerful Redeemer.

In the end, people’s desire to reach unanimous agreement with the group, overrides their motivation for rational, intuitive decision making.

EXECUTIONERS OF THE NEW NORMAL

The habitual lies, backpedalling and science that buckles under the lightest of scrutiny, is no arbitrary event. People understand they’re being duped, but refuse to act on crucial information. Instead, they acclimate to the golden age of false narratives.

Encouraging people to act counterintuitively will, eventually cause them to abandon personal agency altogether, because that violent buffer to critical thinking, called consensus, holds the opposite to be true, to that which is before our very eyes.

In one breath, Boris Johnson implores us to get vaccinated because of the risk versus the reward. In the next, he admits ‘the vaccine doesn’t protect against catching or passing on COVID.’ Meanwhile, his co-conspirator holds Christmas to ransom if people refuse a third shot, and proceeds to threaten those who had previously been the only at-risk group, which this entire debacle was supposed to be about protecting.

When the lips move, brace for lies, any collision with real world events is entirely accidental.

ANATOMY OF A CULT

Cults are illusive by nature. An outlier sailing under the false colours of a normal state of affairs. This is achieved by compounding cult rituals into the everyday humdrum, and converting old cultural touchstones into new ideological frontiers, until one is no longer distinguishable from the other.

There are numerous tell-tale signs you may have accidentally joined a cult, from elbow bumps to muzzles, hand sanitizer to the 2-meter rule.

There is a long history of people’s superstitions being manipulated into performing irrational acts, if they can be demoralised to the point of despair. Under such circumstances people have been known to, commit ritualistic mass suicide, disembowel themselves and even murder their own children.

Things are not so different today. People hold themselves prisoner inside their own homes. They risk the lives of their own children to protect those already on their deathbed. They do this for a disease which has had zero impact on overall mortality in 2021.

Some have been infantilised by their government, others reassured by Big Bird and there are those who have sold their soul at the house of ill repute.

To say that it’s a mad, mad world, doesn’t do it justice.

OTHER CULTS YOU MAY HAVE JOINED

Against this frenzy of health persecution complex, other bizarre ideologies chip away at the social fabric. Membership to society hinges on your range of pronouns. The new cultural etiquette is wokeism. Your affinity with those who have swapped their sexual identity determines your social cachet, while your desire to find the nearest bucket, paints a target on your back.

Otherworldly social theories decouple mothers from giving birth, sexualise children, and encourage toddlers to trade their gender. At the root of all of this is a flagrant attack on humanity, on nature, on carbon-based lifeforms.

You only need to observe the Cult of Personality being visited upon future generations by the lionising of Greta, to catch a glimpse of how climate change will evolve into the New Age Church.

The end game to all of this is the spiritual requisition of the human soul and a day of reckoning for humanity mark 1.0.

But as the circus catches fire there are those watching from the sidelines who are simply not having it. The vestiges of rationality left behind, call them deniers or refuseniks, have formed a cult of their own. A cult of scepticism and non-compliance.

By some accounts, these people are at a greater risk of a long and healthy life, and woe betide, the mob is agitated. Ther are calls for immediate sanctions. Following twenty months of denouncements, public enmity is reaching fever pitch. If the barbaric treatment of another dehumanised social group, pre-Auschwitz, is anything to go by, it could be just a matter of time before the deniers are forced into internment camps, or worse, lined up against firing squads.

On the other hand, the cult has revealed its more sinister aspects, thousands of legitimate voices from science and medicine are pushing back in opposition, and even the double vaccinated are waking up to the fact that their freedoms are in jeopardy every six months.

As a wise man once said, “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win.”

November 24, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

This perverse ban on ivermectin, cheap and proven to work

By Kathy Gyngell | TCW Defending Freedom | November 23, 2021

GIVEN the feared winter resurgence of Covid infection despite, or because of, the government’s mass vaccination programme, the continued ban on ivermectin in this country becomes ever more perverse.

It beggars belief that the British public is still denied access to this proven prophylactic and treatment. If the public health authorities are genuinely worried about pressure on hospitals, why have not the Medicines and Health products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), Public Health England, the NHS and Department of Health all gone flat out over this last year to approve ivermectin with the same zeal they gave emergency authorisation to the limited trialled, novel gene therapy, Covid vaccines?

The answer is widespread misinformation from the top down. Put ‘ivermectin’ into the Google search box and what do you come up with? Topping the list is a warning from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) why it should NOT be used to treat or prevent Covid-19. Their reason? It’s as simple as the fact that they have not approved it and, because they have not approved, it cannot be used. Trials are ongoing they say. Maybe some are. But plenty have been completed, as Dr Pierre Kory’s paper (he was the lead author) ‘Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of Covid-19’, published by the American Journal of Therapeutics earlier this year, made quite clear.

By contrast with this detailed review of the evidence the FDA’s substantive concern appears to rest on random reports of harms deriving from self-medication with ivermectin.

The BBC not to be behindhand entered the fray with its customary selective and biased take on ‘the science’. Its recent report entitled ‘How false science created a Covid ‘miracle’ drug‘ made not even the most minimal of checks on the veracity of their assertions, which are pulled apart here. A letter sent to a programme journalist in response to their request for information (in advance of transmission) by Dr Tess Lawrie, the Director of the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development Group (BIRD), an advocacy group of clinicians and scientists from around the world, setting out the science behind the case for authorising it, was completely ignored. Her letter can be found here.

How the BBC came not to ask how it was that remdesivir – a standard medication for Covid in the UK – was approved on the basis of one study when ivermectin, with 63 studies, of them 31 Randomised Controlled Trials (RCT), 7 meta-analyses, 32 Observational Controlled Trials (OCT), multiple country case studies, expert opinion, patient testimony ALL pointing in favour of the medication, was not, is inexplicable.

This is the news source the public is still told to trust.

A blog posted on BIRD last week asked whether there are indeed any genuine gripes about the quality of the evidence, as the FDA and others suggest?

No, there are not. The author argues it is down to a misinformation campaign based on misleading information produced by high profile public health agencies, like the World Health Organisation, itself a victim of disinformation tactics, that has been ‘perpetrated by a minority of corporations to manipulate and delay government action on matters that would adversely affect their income and profit’. Speculation of course. But every indication points that way.

As reported extensively in TCW Defending Freedom, for example here, the WHO is subject to the huge financial influence of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the organisation’s second biggest donor. Since one of the BMGF’s long-term interest is in delivering vaccines, why would they show any interest in promoting the use of cheap, old repurposed medications in the treatment and prevention of Covid-19? It’s for the very same reason that ivermectin has proved of so little interest to Big Pharma -it’s hardly the money spinner that indemnified world-wide vaccination is.

Worse perhaps than what these big interests have not done is what they have actively done to discredit ivermectin. The BIRD blog relays an analysis by Dr Kory setting out what the WHO ‘did’ with the ivermectin evidence. He says it:

·         Failed to publish a pre-established protocol for data exclusion

·         Excluded two ‘quasi-randomised’ controlled trials (RCTs) with lower mortality

·         Excluded two RCTs that compared ivermectin to or gave it together with other medications, all reporting lower mortality

·         Excluded seven other available ivermectin RCT results

·         Excluded all RCTs and observational controlled trials (OCTs) investigating ivermectin in the prevention of Covid-19

·         Excluded 13 OCTs, more than 5,500 patients, that showed reductions in mortality

·         Excluded numerous published and pre-print epidemiologic studies.

The bottom line, however, remains – if ivermectin is good enough and provenly effective for the more than 20 lower-income countries which do distribute it and also benefit from lower Covid rates, why are the populations of wealthier nations and individuals still being denied?

It’s a point that clearly has bothered the chairman of the Tokyo Medical Association, Dr Haruo Ozaki, who would recommend ivermectin for Covid patients, noting that the parts of Africa that use ivermectin to control parasites have a Covid death rate of just 2.2 per 100,000 population, compared with 13 times that death rate among African countries that do not use ivermectin.

‘I would like,’ said Dr Ozaki, ‘the government to consider treatment at the level of the family doctor’ with the informed consent of the patient. So would we.

November 23, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

RFK, Jr.’s ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’ #1 Overall on Amazon Bestseller List

The Defender | November 19, 2021

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s latest book, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” today claimed the #1 spot overall on Amazon’s bestseller list.

The book, released Tuesday, debuted at #2, but moved up on the list today. The book is also in the #1 spot on the Kindle books bestseller list.

“Conventional wisdom holds you can’t have a bestselling book without plenty of media attention” — and no surprise, ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’ has had a near-total news media blackout,” said Kennedy, Children’s Health Defense chairman and chief legal counsel. “Given that, it feels great to report this good news.”

The hardcover version is available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, IndieBound, Bookshop.org, Target, Walmart, Books-A-Million and at independent booksellers throughout the U.S. and Canada.

The Real Anthony Fauci” chronicles Fauci’s 50-year tenure at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), including his long list of failures.

The book also and sheds light on previously little-known experiments using animals and orphaned children. It recounts recent NIAID experiments performed on beagle puppies. In a recent letter to Fauci, U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and a bipartisan coalition of Congress members described the experiments as ”cruel.”

Social media picked up on the revelations, with trending hashtags #AvengeTheBeagles and #ProtectOurChildren.

“Books might literally be the last bastion of free speech in America,” said Kennedy.“ They can’t be easily erased, deleted, canceled, or disappeared.”

November 22, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Chances of dying from COVID

By Joel S Hirschhorn | November 21, 2021

Nice table showing relatively low lethality from COVID relative to other risks; even for older people:

November 22, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

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