NIH Sued Again for FOIA Violations
By Gary Ruskin | US Right to Know | November 8, 2021
A year ago, a fearful world was struggling to emerge from a paralyzing pandemic, a confusing health care crisis that emerged swiftly to sicken and kill millions.
Today, nearly two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, we are still struggling to find our way back from the catastrophic global consequences of the vicious coronavirus. And we are still without answers as to how and why this virus emerged seemingly out of nowhere. Scientists around the world have been seeking answers about the origin of Covid-19 because knowing how this virus moved into and through the human population could be crucial to avoiding, or preparing for, a similar event in the future.
That is why our nonprofit research group U.S. Right to Know has filed seventeen Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), asking this taxpayer-funded government agency to provide us – and the public – with correspondence, reports, and other information about the NIH knowledge of, and response to, the pandemic.
As a public interest group, our mission is focused on a fundamental tenet: Our government officials work for us, and we have a right to know what that work entails. That belief is not just sentiment; it is backed by public records laws across the country, and decades of court rulings that codify our right to know. We had hoped that the NIH would agree that there is a pressing public desire for transparency regarding Covid-19.
But after waiting and attempting to work with the NIH for more than a year, today we filed a lawsuit against the agency for violating the Freedom of Information Act regarding nine of our record requests. As an example, the NIH has not yet provided even a single record in response to a request we filed on Nov. 5, 2020, nor has the agency even provided a timeline for when it might provide documents. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, seeks a wide range of NIH records, including the following:
- Communications between the NIH and a U.S. group called the EcoHealth Alliance, which has received tens of millions of dollars in U.S. government funding, and has partnered with and funded China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The record requests seek EcoHealth grant applications, progress reports, funding agreements, and related documents.
- Communications between the NIH and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
- Documents regarding NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories.
- Documents regarding the “Preventing Emerging Pathogenic Threats (PREEMPT) Program,” which is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
- Communications between the NIH and the World Health Organization concerning the origins of COVID-19.
This is our second FOIA lawsuit against the NIH regarding the origins of Covid-19. In our first FOIA suit against NIH, the NIH proposed to provide the documents it was required to provide by law in a thirty-year timeframe. Even though we filed that FOIA request on July 10, 2020, the NIH has yet to provide us with a single document it has not previously released.
We’ve been told for almost two years now to ‘follow the science,’ to look to our government institutions for the facts about Covid-19, including how this novel coronavirus came to be. We’re trying to get to those facts and to bring them to light. Why the NIH is fighting us on this is not clear.
We know this much: It shouldn’t take lawsuits to get to the truth.
Gary Ruskin is executive director of US Right to Know.
Dr. Mercola Files Lawsuit Against US Sen. Elizabeth Warren
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | November 8, 2021
In early September 2021, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren sent a letter1 to Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon.com, demanding an “immediate review” of Amazon’s algorithms to weed out books peddling “COVID misinformation,” stressing that Amazon’s sale of such books was “potentially unlawful.”2,3,4
Warren specifically singled out my book, “The Truth About COVID-19,” co-written with Ronnie Cummins, founder and director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), as a prime example of “highly-ranked and favorably-tagged books based on falsehoods about COVID-19 vaccines and cures” that she wanted banned.
“Dr. Mercola has been described as ‘the most influential spreader of coronavirus misinformation online,” Warren wrote,5 adding: “Not only was this book the top result when searching either ‘COVID-19’ or ‘vaccine’ in the categories of ‘All Departments’ and ‘Books’; it was tagged as a ‘Best Seller’ by Amazon and the ‘#1 Best Seller’ in the ‘Political Freedom’ category.
The book perpetuates dangerous conspiracies about COVID-19 and false and misleading information about vaccines. It asserts that vitamin C, vitamin D and quercetin … can prevent COVID-19 infection … And the book contends that vaccines cannot be trusted …”
Warren Fancies Herself Above the Law
Warren should know that as a government official, it is illegal for her violate the U.S. Constitution, and pressuring private businesses to do it for her is not a legal workaround.
Since she willfully ignores the law, Cummins and I, along with our publisher, Chelsea Green Publishing, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wrote our foreword, are suing Warren, both in her official and personal capacities, for violating our First Amendment rights. The federal lawsuit, in which Warren is listed as the sole defendant, was filed in the state of Washington. As noted in our complaint:
“Once upon a time, the First Amendment was understood to guarantee that books challenging governmental orthodoxy could be sold without fear of governmental intimidation or reprisal.
Almost sixty years ago, in Bantam Books v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58 (1963), the Supreme Court held that state officials violated the First Amendment by sending letters to booksellers warning that the sale of certain named books was potentially unlawful.
The ‘vice’ in such letters and in the ‘veiled threat’ of legal repercussions they communicated, explained the Court, is that they allow government to achieve censorship while doing an end-run around the judiciary, ‘provid[ing] no safeguards whatever against the suppression of … constitutionally protected’ speech, thus effecting an unconstitutional ‘prior restraint.’
It made no difference that the officials who sent the letter lacked the ‘power to apply formal legal sanctions’ — i.e., that the officials did not themselves have the power to sanction or prosecute the booksellers in any way. Indeed this fact made the unconstitutionality more apparent.
The officials ‘are not law enforcement officers; they do not pretend that they are qualified to give or that they attempt to give distributors only fair legal advice … [T]hey acted … not to advise but to suppress.’
It also made no difference, the Court expressly found, that the letters were framed as mere ‘exhort[ation]’ or that the booksellers were in theory ‘free’ to ignore the letters, because the officials had ‘deliberately set about to achieve the suppression of publications deemed ‘objectionable’,’ and ‘people do not lightly disregard public officers’ veiled threats.’
Today, certain members of the United States Congress have apparently forgotten, or think they are above, the law set forth in Bantam Books.”
Warren’s Attack on Constitutionally Protected Speech
There’s no doubt our book, “The Truth About COVID-19,” is constitutionally protected speech, and that Warren’s letter is calling on Amazon to suppress protected speech.
In our book, we share viewpoints, ideas, opinions, verifiable facts and factual hypotheses that our federal government just so happens to disfavor, as it counters their chosen narrative that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally, cannot be prevented by any means other than experimental gene therapy, and cannot be treated by any other means than certain experimental and exorbitantly costly drugs.
Since the start of the pandemic, government has systematically sought to suppress the kind of information shared in our book, using the same tactic as Warren used against us here — warning Internet-based companies that if they don’t censor these views, the full weight of the government’s wrath will be turned against them. As explained in our complaint:
“The term ‘vaccine misinformation’ as Warren uses it is propagandistic and false. As she uses it, ‘vaccine misinformation’ refers to any speech challenging the safety and efficacy of the COVID vaccines, even when that speech consists of factually accurate information or protected opinion …
On September 10, 2021, as a direct result of Warren’s letter, a major national bookseller chain, Barnes and Noble, notified the publisher of The Truth About COVID-19 by email that it would no longer sell the work as an e-book. Barnes and Noble has — for now — reversed that decision.
It is impossible for Plaintiffs to know with certainty whether, as a result of Warren’s letter, Amazon is now covertly demoting, downgrading, or otherwise suppressing The Truth About COVID-19 in numerous ways that would be hidden from view, but Plaintiffs believe that Amazon is in fact covertly taking such action.
Even if no bookseller in the country had yielded to Warren’s threats, her letter would still be actionable as a clear violation of the First Amendment.
In Backpage.com, LLC v. Dart, 807 F.3d 229 (7th Cir. 2015) (Posner, J.), relying on Bantam Books, the Court held that a governmental official ‘violates a plaintiff’s First Amendment rights’ if by ‘threat’ or ‘intimidation’ the official attempts to induce ‘a third party’ to stop ‘publishing or otherwise disseminating the plaintiff’s message,’ and emphasized that ‘such a threat is actionable and thus can be enjoined even if it turns out to be empty — the victim ignores it, and the threatener folds his tent.’
Such threats go ‘by the name of ‘prior restraint,’ and a prior restraint is the quintessential first-amendment violation.’ Accordingly, Plaintiffs ask this Court to vindicate clearly established law, to vindicate Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights, to vindicate the First Amendment itself, by declaring Warren’s conduct unconstitutional and by enjoining her from repeating such conduct in future.”
Warren Calls Out ‘Misinformation’ With Misinformation
In our complaint, we also emphasize the fact that Warren’s claims of misinformation are themselves misinformation. For example, Warren claims our book falsely “asserts that … vitamin D … can prevent COVID-19 infection.” According to Warren, this claim has no scientific basis. This is clearly and verifiably false as there are many studies, published in 2020 and 2021, supporting this claim.
For example, in May 2021, the National Institutes of Health’s website, PubMed.gov, published a Journal of Medical Virology article titled “Vitamin D Deficiency Is Associated With COVID-19 Positivity and Severity of the Disease.”6 Many other scientific articles have also linked vitamin D deficiency with a higher risk of COVID infection, more severe outcomes and increased rates of death.
Indeed, a recent systematic review7 of the literature, posted on the U.S. National Library of Medicine, which is another National Institutes of Health website, concluded that “blood vitamin D status can determine the risk of being infected with COVID-19, seriousness of COVID-19, and mortality from COVID-19.
Therefore, maintaining appropriate levels of Vitamin D through supplementation or natural methods … is recommended for the public to be able to cope with the pandemic.” As noted in our complaint:
“Thus while Warren professes to champion true COVID information to save lives, she is purveying false information that could lead to COVID deaths. Warren is telling people that vitamin D levels don’t matter for COVID, when in fact — as readers would learn from The Truth About COVID-19 — correcting vitamin D deficiencies could save their lives.
By her own logic and according to her own demands, every major social media platform should have banned Warren’s letter as ‘COVID misinformation.’ But officials like Warren only denounce ‘COVID misinformation,’ demand its censorship, and threaten legal repercussions when the statements in question challenge the COVID narrative they support — not when they themselves are misrepresenting the truth about COVID-19.
Warren’s letter further accuses The Truth About COVID-19 of disseminating ‘false and misleading information about vaccines,’ including by (in Warren’s words) ‘contend[ing] that vaccines cannot be trusted.’
The book’s stated thesis about the COVID vaccines is that their effectiveness ‘has been wildly exaggerated and major safety questions have gone unanswered.’ This statement is accurate and well within the bounds of constitutionally protected opinion …
Warren’s letter further cites a June, 2021, review of The Truth About COVID-19 that purports to list examples of the book’s ‘misinformation,’ the first of which is the following: ‘the authors argue that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was engineered in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.’ It is true that The Truth About COVID-19 argues that that ‘the preponderance of evidence’ supports the lab-leak theory of the origins of the COVID virus.
But the claim that this position is ‘misinformation’ is, once again, itself misinformation. The lab-leak theory — long denounced as a ‘conspiracy theory’ by federal actors and suppressed on social media — is in fact supported by substantial and growing evidence. See, e.g., Wall St. Journal, ‘Science Closes In on Covid’s Origins: Four studies — including two from WHO — provide powerful evidence favoring the lab-leak theory,’ Oct. 5, 2021.8
The review’s next example of the supposed ‘misinformation’ in the The Truth About COVID-19 is this: the book ‘insists multiple times that the public health measures and restrictions will be permanent. Not true.
The CDC announced that fully vaccinated Americans could resume activities without wearing masks or physically distancing, resume domestic travel, and refrain from quarantine even when following a known exposure to the virus if they remain symptom-free.’
This CDC announcement obviously proved to be false, while the prediction made in The Truth About COVID-19 that health restrictions would continue after vaccination has proved more accurate.
Moreover, it is not the case that the Truth About COVID-19 ‘insists’ that these restrictions will be permanent — it says that certain restrictions on our liberty, beginning in the pandemic, will ‘probably’ be permanent, reflecting a humility about the certainty of one’s assertions that Warren might have profited from.”
This Is Only the Beginning
As noted in a press release by Cummins, this lawsuit is just the beginning. OCA and I are launching a campaign to fight back against the censorship that is taking root. This includes unraveling the threads that lead back to the fake fact checkers and disinformation agents in the media, but all of this will take time, so be patient.
As explained by Cummins:
“OCA’s federal lawsuit, filed jointly with Dr. Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Chelsea Green books is not just directed against Elizabeth Warren, but is intended to establish a legal precedent against the increasing censorship, slander, and intimidation coming from a wide variety of government, corporate, and media sources.
This Big Pharma/Big Media/Big Government Inquisition is fueled by disinformation and dark money coming from powerful international public relations firms such as the Publicis Groupe and front groups such as the so-called Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).
We are under attack, not because we are purveyors of dangerous disinformation and hate, as Warren and her Establishment cohorts allege, but rather because, in the midst of an international health, economic, and political crisis, we are trying to expose the truth about the lab origins of this catastrophe, and explain how preventive and natural medicine and health, healthy organic food, natural supplements, low-cost generic drugs, strong immune systems, and a healthy environment are our best defenses against chronic disease and engineered pathogens.
We are not anti-vaccine, but rather pro-vaccine safety. We are not purveyors of disinformation, but rather firm defenders of free speech, unobstructed scientific inquiry, and freedom of choice …
We are castigated as ‘conspiracy theorists’ for publicizing the behind-the- scenes machinations of billionaires like Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum, and their ‘Hall of Shame’ collaborators9 in the military-industrial complex.
We are under siege for exposing the existential risks of genetic engineering and lab manipulation, a mad science not only contaminating our food, seeds and animals, but essentially weaponizing pathogenic viruses, bacteria, and insects, part of a catastrophic biological and medical arms race that threatens us all.
We are saddened and alarmed by the now routine attacks on free speech, free association, and medical freedom of choice. We are troubled by the extreme polarization and anger poisoning the body politic, and the debilitating impact of fear-mongering and shaming on our children and the public at large.
We are alarmed by the collateral damage to our health, our psyches, and the entire social fabric by government authoritarianism, virologists and gene engineers playing God, and Big Pharma greed …
America, and the once-hoped-for community of nations, are accelerating toward self-destruction. The body politic is sick, frightened, angry, and divided. People have apparently forgotten how to talk to one another when we disagree on politics, COVID responses, vaccine safety, and a range of other polarizing government dictates.
Former friends and co-workers have become enemies. Meanwhile the forests are burning. Water resources are diminishing … Our children and the most vulnerable are forced to struggle harder than ever, just to survive and preserve their sanity, making it harder and harder maintain a positive outlook, enjoy every day life, much less achieve true happiness.
If COVID-19, the product of mad science and insatiable greed, has taught us anything, it’s that we must transform our food and farming systems and take control of our health.
We must acknowledge, prevent, and resolve the dietary, environmental, and public health-related comorbidities of our ailing population, strengthen our immune systems to fight off chronic disease and pathogens, and provide special protection for the most vulnerable.
We must bring profit-at-any-cost corporations, captured media and regulatory agencies, indentured politicians, Silicon Valley surveillance capitalists, out-of-control genetic engineers, virologists, and bioweapons profiteers to heel.”
Stop the Madness
To this end, OCA has launched a Stop the Mad Science campaign. This global grassroots campaign aims to ban the engineering of viruses, bacteria and all potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs). Mounting evidence suggests COVID-19 was indeed the result of gain-of-function (GOF) research, paid for in part by U.S. taxpayers and carried out by U.S. and Chinese researchers.
Unless we put an end to this kind of dangerous research (and it goes on worldwide, not just in the U.S. and China), COVID won’t be the last manmade pandemic we’ll have to face. More than 65,000 people have already signed the petition in support of this effort. Please add your signature here if you haven’t done so already. As noted by Cummins:
“Current ongoing experiments, routinely funded with our tax dollars, that need to be stopped immediately include genetically engineering SARS-CoV-2 so that it can overcome or bypass natural immunity; combining the SARS-CoV-2 virus with deadly anthrax bacteria; engineering the bird flu and Ebola to be more transmissible; and other criminally insane experiments — hiding behind the excuse that lab and genetic engineering of pathogens are necessary for ‘biodefense’ and ‘biomedicine.’
Over the next six months we will begin to organize protests and picket lines outside the GoF labs and institutions where these dangerous experiments are being carried out. These street protests will be amplified by public education, petition gathering, litigation, and grassroots lobbying.”
Sources and References
- 1, 5 Warren’s letter to Andy Jassy September 7, 2021
- 2 National Interest September 12, 2021
- 3 The Guardian September 13, 2021
- 4 New York Times September 8, 2021
- 6 Journal of Medical Virology May 2021; 93(5):2992-2999
- 7 Risk Management Healthcare Policy 2021; 14: 31-38
- 8 Wall Street Journal October 5, 2021
- 9 OCA Gain of Function Hall of Shame
When in doubt, fiddle with the vaccine figures
By Tom Penn | TCW Defending Freedom | November 9, 2021
DR Mary Ramsay, Head of Immunisation at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) and joint ‘chief editor’ of their vaccine database, penned a recent blog post for gov.uk in which she makes a most ludicrous claim.
She states that the dramatic rise in cases in the vaccinated cohort compared with the unjabbed should be interpreted not as evidence of the vaccine’s inefficacy, but rather as consequence of behavioural traits in the vaccinated, whom she alleges are ‘more health conscious and therefore more likely to get tested’, and who ‘behave differently, particularly with regard to social interactions and therefore may have differing levels of exposure to Covid-19’.
According to Ramsay, then, the epidemic of reinfection is the fault not of the vaccine itself but its recipients, who if only they would just stop testing themselves and socialising with each other might just conveniently knock the issue of inefficacy on the head.
It appears that the UKHSA have found themselves between a rock and a hard place vis-a-vis the rollout. Without mass testing there exists no casedemic, and without a casedemic there in turn exists no pandemic. Without an engineered pandemic there exists not the vehicle by which to crush self-determination. However, maintain hypochondriacal mass testing and current levels of faux-freedom, and the casedemic ends up inconveniently betraying the inefficacy of the product, vehicle for the introduction of a universal, health-based identification system; critical in turn to the instalment of a single, global government.
Two recent announcements lead me to speculate that once the majority of children have been vaccinated, the death season is over, and we can supposedly make our way out of the Covid Stadium, ‘Van-Tam Cup’ in hand after a winter playing out the longest tournament of public health intervention-football ever known, the UKHSA’s muddying of data will only accelerate.
The MHRA’s approval of Merck’s molnupiravir antiviral drug to treat symptomatic Covid-19 (Pfizer’s Paxlovid offering is yet to be approved), and the likelihood that vaccine smart patches could begin human trials by the middle of 2022, introduce two more elements to an already obscenely corrupt so-called crisis which may end up prolonging the use of damaging public health controls for many winters to come, as the data harvested from how these various Covid-19 ‘treatments’ interact with each other could provide limitless scope for misinterpretation or outright censure, and thus the basis for manufacturing further interventions.
It is the running theme of this counterfeit emergency that data has been modelled, muzzled, meddled with and misconstrued with a view to help obfuscate an ulterior geopolitical agenda. Dr Mary Ramsay, for example, has solved the matter of vaccine inefficacy by simply defecting from pharmaceutical to behavioural science unchallenged.
What might happen when government agencies begin playing off booster-shot data against molnupiravir efficacy against vaccine smart-patch glitches against case rates against hospital figures, and then measuring it all up against what appears to be a state-decreed behavioural and mental health index? The answer: the end of the current Anthropocene epoch as we know it, and the beginning proper of its successor: the Propagandacene.
Molnupiravir is already being trumpeted as the world’s ‘first’ at-home treatment designed to reduce drastically the chance of hospitalisation from Covid-19, yet we already know that to be a false claim, and so right from the off Merck’s offering is fishy; the words of Dr June Raine from the mostly mute MHRA ringing equally hollow: ‘With no compromises on quality, safety and effectiveness, the public can trust that the MHRA has conducted a robust and thorough assessment of the data.’
Some of us have been knocking on the door of the MHRA’s appalling Covid-19 vaccine Yellow Card Reporting System figures for quite some time now, and yet they still refuse to open. Will it be the same with molnupiravir, vaccine smart patches and Lord knows what else the druids of the post-Covid International Order have in store for us?
Introduce alongside all of the aforementioned the incoming attack on the nation’s constitution by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, the consumer healthcare association’s vision of a decade of self care, and the Nudge Unit’s new Net Zero/Zero Covid psyops campaign, and we shall, if we haven’t already, enter an era of human evolution wherein the blame for every single problem in society, no matter how far removed from the common man’s sphere of influence, will be laid squarely at his feet nonetheless. He will doubtless obediently hang his head in shame whilst the hooded executioner readies yet more killing apparatus.
Iconic singer Van Morrison sued over Covid-19 comments
NO MORE LOCKDOWN, NO MORE FASCIST POLICE, NO MORE TAKING OF OUR FREEDOM AND OUR GOD GIVEN RIGHTS
AS I WALKED OUT
BORN TO BE FREE OF THE COVID SCAM
https://www.bitchute.com/video/4OPLfKgq9i3h/
RT | November 8, 2021
Northern Ireland’s health minister, Robin Swann, has filed a defamation lawsuit against Van Morrison after the rock and R&B legend labeled him “very dangerous” over Covid-19 restrictions during the pandemic.
Swan’s legal team believes Morrison’s repeated public statements harmed the minister’s reputation by implying he was unfit for his position during the health crisis. The statement of claim against the 76-year-old singer-songwriter was filed in September.
“Proceedings have been issued and are ongoing against Van Morrison. We are aiming for a trial in February,” Swann’s lawyer, Paul Tweed, told local media on Sunday.
Swann’s choice of legal representation signals his strong desire to win the case, as Tweed is known as a high-profile libel lawyer, who has previously represented the likes of Harrison Ford, Justin Timberlake, and Jennifer Lopez.
The fallout between the minister and musician occurred in June after Morrison’s gig in Belfast was canceled at the last moment due to coronavirus restrictions.
The singer still got on stage and told the audience: “Robin Swann has all the power. So I say Robin Swann is very dangerous.” He also tried to persuade the crowd to chant: “Robin Swann is very dangerous.” […]
Last year, Swann criticized Morrison over his songs about the coronavirus restrictions, including ‘Born to Be Free’, ‘As I Walked Out’, and ‘No More Lockdown’. … Full article
How Sweden swerved Covid disaster
By Johan Anderberg | UnHerd | November 8, 2021
A hundred years ago, in New York City, 20,000 people marched down Fifth Avenue in protest against one of the greatest public health policy experiments in history. One of them was wearing a sign featuring an image of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” beside the slogan, “Wine was served.” There were posters of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Another read: “Tyranny in the name of righteousness is the worst of all tyrannies.”
For a year, beer, wine and spirits had been illegal throughout the United States. From a public health perspective, it seemed a reasonable enough measure. That alcohol was a dangerous substance was clear: disease, violence, poverty and crime were intimately bound up with it. Even now, despite its failure, it is known as the “noble experiment”. But was it right to prevent people from making drinks they not only enjoyed, but that also served important cultural and religious purposes? Not for the first time, Americans found themselves torn in a balance between freedom and security — nor for the last.
Until recently, prohibition remained the largest experiment in social engineering a democracy had ever undertaken. And then, in early 2020, a new virus began to spread from China. Faced with this threat, the world’s governments responded by closing schools, banning people from meeting, forcing entrepreneurs to shut their businesses and making ordinary people wear face masks. Like prohibition, this experiment provoked a debate. In all the democracies of the world, freedom was weighed against what was perceived as security; individual rights versus what was considered best for public health.
Few now remember that for most of 2020, the word “experiment” had negative connotations. That was what Swedes were accused of conducting when we — unlike the rest of the world — maintained some semblance of normality. The citizens of this country generally didn’t have to wear face masks; young children continued going to school; leisure activities were largely allowed to continue unhindered.
This experiment was judged early on as “a disaster” (Time magazine), a “the world’s cautionary tale” (New York Times), “deadly folly” (the Guardian). In Germany, Focus magazine described the policy as “sloppiness”; Italy’s La Repubblica concluded that the “Nordic model country” had made a dangerous mistake. But these countries — all countries — were also conducting an experiment, in that they were testing unprecedented measures to prevent the spread of a virus. Sweden simply chose one path, the rest of Europe another.
The hypothesis of the outside world was that Sweden’s freedom would be costly. The absence of restrictions, open schools, reliance on recommendations instead of mandates and police enforcement would result in higher deaths than other countries. Meanwhile, the lack of freedom endured by the citizens of other countries would “save lives.”
Many Swedes were persuaded by this hypothesis. “Shut down Sweden to protect the country,” wrote Peter Wolodarski, perhaps the country’s most powerful journalist. Renowned infectious diseases experts, microbiologists and epidemiologists from all over the country warned of the consequences of the government’s policy. Researchers from Uppsala University, the Karolinska Institute and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm produced a model powered by supercomputers that predicted 96,000 Swedes would die before the summer of 2020.
At this stage, it was not unreasonable to conclude that Sweden would pay a high price for its freedom. Throughout the spring of 2020, Sweden’s death toll per capita was higher than most other countries.
But the experiment didn’t end there. During the year that followed, the virus continued to ravage the world and, one by one, the death tolls in countries that had locked down began to surpass Sweden’s. Britain, the US, France, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, Argentina, Belgium — countries that had variously shut down playgrounds, forced their children to wear facemasks, closed schools, fined citizens for hanging out on the beach and guarded parks with drones — have all been hit worse than Sweden. At the time of writing, more than 50 countries have a higher death rate. If you measure excess mortality for the whole of 2020, Sweden (according to Eurostat) will end up in 21st place out of 31 European countries. If Sweden was a part of the US, its death rate would rank number 43 of the 50 states.
This fact is shockingly underreported. Consider the sheer number of articles and TV segments devoted to Sweden’s foolishly liberal attitude to the pandemic last year — and the daily reference to figures that are forgotten today. Suddenly, it is as if Sweden doesn’t exist. When the Wall Street Journal recently published a report from Portugal, it described how the country “offered a glimpse” of what it would be like to live with the virus. This new normal involved, among other things, vaccine passports and face masks at large events like football matches. Nowhere in the report was it mentioned that in Sweden you can go to football matches without wearing a facemask, or that Sweden — with a smaller proportion of Covid deaths over the course of the pandemic — had ended virtually all restrictions. Sweden has been living with the virus for some time.
The WSJ is far from alone in its selective reporting. The New York Times, Guardian, BBC, The Times, all cheerleaders for lockdowns, can’t fathom casting doubt on their efficacy.
And those who’ve followed Sweden’s example have also come in for a lot of criticism. When the state of Florida — more than a year ago and strongly inspired by Sweden — removed most of its restrictions and allowed schools, restaurant and leisure parks to reopen, the judgement from the American media was swift. The state’s Republican governor was predicted to “lead his state to the morgue” (The New Republic). The media was outraged by images of Floridians swimming and sunbathing at the beach.
DeSantis’s counterpart in New York, the embattled Democrat Andrew Cuomo, on the other hand, was offered a book deal for his “Leadership lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic”. A few months ago, he was forced to resign after harassing a dozen women. But the result of his “leadership lesson” lives on: 0.29% of his state’s residents died of Covid-19. The equivalent figure for Florida — the state that not only allowed the most freedom, but also has the second highest proportion of pensioners in the country — is 0.27%.
Once again, an underreported fact.
From a human perspective, it is easy to understand the reluctance to face these numbers. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that millions of people have been deprived of their freedom, and millions of children have had their education gravely damaged, for little demonstrable gain. Who wants to admit that they were complicit in this? But what one American judge called the “laboratories of democracy” have conducted their experiment — and the result is increasingly clear.
Exactly why it turned out this way is harder to explain, but perhaps the “noble experiment” of the 1920s in the US can offer some clues. Prohibition didn’t end because the freedom argument prevailed. Nor was it because the substance itself had become any less harmful to people’s health. The reason for the eventual demise of the alcohol ban was that it simply didn’t work. No matter what the law said, Americans didn’t stop drinking alcohol. It simply moved from bars to “speakeasies”. People learned to brew their own spirits or smuggle it in from Canada. And the American mafia had a field day.
The mistake the American authorities made was to underestimate the complexity of society. Just because they banned alcohol did not mean that alcohol disappeared. People’s drives, desires and behaviours were impossible to predict or fit into a plan. A hundred years later, a new set of authorities made the same mistake. Closing schools didn’t stop children meeting in other settings; when life was extinguished in cities, many fled them, spreading the infection to new places; the authorities urged their citizens to buy food online, without thinking about who would transport the goods from home to home.
If the politicians had been honest with themselves, they might have foreseen what would happen. For just as American politicians were constantly caught drinking alcohol during the prohibition, their successors were caught 100 years later breaking precisely the restrictions they had imposed on everyone else. The mayors of New York and Chicago, the British government’s top advisor, the Dutch Minister of Justice, the EU Trade Commissioner, the Governor of California all broke their own rules.
It isn’t easy to control other people’s lives. It isn’t easy to dictate desirable behaviours in a population via centralised command. These are lessons that many dictators have learned. During the Covid pandemic, many democracies have learned it too. The lesson has perhaps not yet sunk in, but hopefully it will eventually. Then perhaps it will be another 100 years before we make the same mistake again.
Johan Anderberg is a journalist and author of Flocken, a bestselling history of the Swedish experience during Covid-19.
This is an edited translation of an article that first appeared in Sydsvenskan.
NHS accused of ‘lying’ about Covid stats to promote vaccination
RT | November 8, 2021
NHS chief Amanda Pritchard claimed that 14 times as many Covid-19 patients are in Britain’s hospitals as this time last year. However, even the NHS itself has admitted that Pritchard’s claim uses misleading figures.
Multiple news reports on Monday told the same story: Britain’s hospitals are seeing “14 times more coronavirus patients than this time last year,” and the country faces a “difficult winter,” as people gather indoors, where the virus is more likely to spread.
The source of the “14 times” figure is Amanda Pritchard, Chief Executive of NHS England. Pritchard used the apparently alarming surge in hospitalisations to encourage the 4.5 million Britons who still haven’t gotten vaccinated to roll up their sleeves, and those eligible to take their third shot of the vaccine.
However, NHS data shows that Pritchard’s figures are false. According to the health service, a 7-day average of 9,331 Covid-19 patients were in hospital at the beginning of November, compared to 12,654 a year earlier. Just over 1,000 people per day were being admitted to hospital at the end of October, compared to 1,500 last year.
Pritchard was swiftly accused of peddling fake news, with commentators warning that such misleading figures were straying into “resignation territory.”
Amid a growing clamour online, NHS officials told reporters shortly afterwards that Pritchard was citing figures from August 2021 compared to August 2020. Hospital admissions were indeed 14 times higher this August than in 2020, but only for several days toward the end of the month. Since then, they have trended downwards and are now comparable to last year’s rate.
However, hospitalisations persist despite the fact that nine out of 10 people over the age of 12 in the UK have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to NHS statistics. Rising cases too have called into question the long-term efficacy of the jabs, but government officials still insist on vaccination as key to defeating the virus – and studies suggest those vaccinated patients still fare better if they catch the virus.
As Pritchard called on the population to get vaccinated or go in for booster jabs, former Health Secretary Matt Hancock called on Monday for the government to mandate vaccines for healthcare workers. “There is no respectable argument left not to force health and social care workers to get jabbed,” he wrote in The Telegraph, calling the vaccine “the only reason for the safe return of our liberty.”
CDC Director, Walensky, treats LA Senator with contempt for asking simple questions
By Meryl Nass, MD | November 7, 2021
Physician Senator Cassidy asked Rochelle Walensky a few questions the other day. It was remarkable what she did not know or would not answer.
1. How many CDC employees are vaccinated? A: We are educating them.
2. How many CDC emplyees are working from home? He thought 75%? A: I don’t have that information.
3. Do you see empty desks as you walk down the halls? A: She changed the subject.
4. Teachers are back in school teaching. CDC employees, with the best PPE and vaccinations should be back working. Don’t they trust these protections? A: Subject change.
5. Why haven’t you done a prospective study to look into the value of immunity in the recovered? (He asked this at least 3 times.). She tap danced as fast as she could away from an answer.
Fauci Must Be Fired and Arrested
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | November 4, 2021
The crimes of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is making news again as revelations of abusive research on dogs have surfaced. Interestingly, while many shrug at abuse of human beings, including the elderly, far fewer are willing to overlook the torture of dogs.
In the video above, Kim Iversen makes the case that Fauci should resign or be fired over his repeated lies, questionable research ethics and mishandling of the pandemic.
Many others have also chimed in on the matter. In an October 24, 2021, article1 on Substack, Leighton Woodhouse points out that “Fauci has been abusing animals for 40 years,” and that “the stuff you’ve seen on social media barely scratches the surface.”
The Beagle Experiments
In one experiment that has raised public ire, beagles were sedated and their heads placed in mesh cages filled with sand flies that had been intentionally starved before the experiment to encourage feeding.
The study2 in question, “Enhanced Attraction of Sand Fly Vectors of Leishmania Infantum to Dogs Infected with Zoonotic Visceral Leishmaniasis” was published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases in July 2021. Some of the photos from this study have circulated on Twitter and other social media platforms. According to the researchers:
“The sand fly Phlebotomus perniciosus is the main vector of Leishmania infantum, etiological agent of zoonotic visceral leishmaniasis in the Western Mediterranean basin. Dogs are the main reservoir host of this disease. The main objective of this study was to determine, under both laboratory and field conditions, if dogs infected with L. infantum, were more attractive to female P. perniciosus than uninfected dogs.”
Spotlight on Animal Testing
In the Ron Paul Liberty Report above, Ron Paul discusses the public outcry over Fauci’s cruel research on beagles. However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. According to Woodhouse,3 “The experiment was just one of countless tests done on animals with the funding of the NIH, and of NIAID in particular, over the course of decades.”
The White Coat Waste Project4 estimates anywhere from tens of millions to more than 100 million animals — including more than 1,100 dogs — are experimented on in the U.S. each year, and most of these experiments are paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
The NIH funds medical research to the tune of $40 billion annually, and an estimated 47% of that research involves animal testing.5 The NIAID alone has an annual budget of $6 billion, almost all of which goes to funding of animal research.
Other Fauci-funded research on dogs include a 2020 experiment carried out by the University of Georgia where beagles were infected with a parasite before being sacrificed and autopsied.
“The purpose of the experiment was to test a drug that, by the investigators’ own admission, had already been ‘extensively tested and confirmed’ in numerous other animal species,” Woodhouse writes.6
While the University claims this and all other experiments were carried out in accordance with the Animal Welfare Act, four “critical” violation reports have allegedly been filed against the University after U.S. Department of Agriculture inspections in 2021 alone.7,8,9
In 2019, NIAID paid $1.68 million to feed toxic drugs to beagle puppies before sacrificing them. In this case, the puppies had their vocal cords cut “so that lab technicians don’t have to hear them cry and howl in distress.”10
Other NIAID-funded experiments on dogs include research where beagles were infected with pneumonia to induce septic shock and acute hemorrhage. Survivors were euthanized after 96 hours. In another experiment, beagles were infected with anthrax to test the effectiveness of an already approved anthrax vaccine.
In yet another, researchers induced heart attacks in dogs which then underwent MRI scanning before being euthanized and autopsied. What do we have to show from all this torture? Very little, it turns out. Even when medications look promising in animal studies, 90% end up failing in human clinical trials, Woodhouse notes, typically due to differences in physiology.
Why Is NIAID Funding a Psychological Torture Factory?
Perhaps one of the most gruesome experiments paid for by Fauci involves the psychological torturing of monkeys, for purposes that remain unclear. The experiment involves first boosting the monkeys’ capacity for terror by destroying a particular part of their brains with acid.11
The monkeys are then tormented with plastic spiders and mechanical snakes as their behavior is observed. Bizarrely, these particular psychological experiments have been funded for 43 years straight, costing taxpayers nearly $100 million, even though they’ve not resulted in a single drug or medication.
As noted by White Coat Waste Project vice president Justin Goodman, “Some people have made a career out of torturing monkeys.”12 At the end of December 2020, the White Coat Waste Project reported that:13
“As a result of our investigation, Congress has directed the NIH to commission an independent study by the National Academies of the NIH’s intramural primate testing and how modern alternatives can reduce their use. This direction is in the NIH’s 2021 funding bill14 (see page 69).”
A Gain-of-Function Cover-Up?
In related news, in an NIH letter,15,16,17 the agency acknowledges that Fauci lied to Congress when he emphatically insisted the NIH/NIAID have never funded gain-of-function (GOF) research.
The letter, dated October 21, 2021, was sent by NIH principal deputy director Dr. Lawrence Tabak to James Comer, ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, “to provide additional information and documents regarding NIH’s grant to EcoHealth Alliance Inc.”
“It is important to state at the outset that published genomic data demonstrate that the bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. and subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) are not and could not have become SARS-CoV-2,” Tabak writes.
“Both the progress report and the analysis attached here again confirm that conclusion, as the sequences of the viruses are genetically very distant … The limited experiment described in the final progress report provided by EcoHealth Alliance was testing if spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.
All other aspects of the mice, including the immune system, remained unchanged. In this limited experiment, laboratory mice infected with the SHC014 WIV 1 bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with the WIV1 bat coronavirus. As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do …
The research plan was reviewed by NIH in advance of funding, and NIH determined that it did not to fit the definition of research involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential (ePPP) because these bat coronaviruses had not been shown to infect humans. As such, the research was not subject to departmental review under the HHS P3CO Framework.
However, out of an abundance of caution and as an additional layer of oversight, language was included in the terms and conditions of the grant award to EcoHealth that outlined criteria for a secondary review, such as a requirement that the grantee report immediately a one log increase in growth.
These measures would prompt a secondary review to determine whether the research aims should be re-evaluated or new biosafety measures should be enacted. EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant.”
What Did Fauci Know?
In essence, it appears the NIH is throwing EcoHealth Alliance under the proverbial bus. Yes, EcoHealth Alliance ended up conducting GOF research when its manipulation resulted in a virus with wildly enhanced virulence in humans.18 While Tabak claims this was unintentional, that seems a bit odd, considering the experiment in question was testing the “emergency potential” of bat coronaviruses in the human population.
Either way, Tabak claims EcoHealth failed to properly report this outcome to the NIH, so the NIH cannot be held responsible for not taking appropriate action. According to the NIH, researchers must file a report any time a virus produces “a one log increase in growth.” EcoHealth’s experiment resulted in a log increase of 10, which should have triggered an NIH review and potentially shut down of the experiment.
EcoHealth, on the other hand, claims “These data were reported as soon as we were made aware, in our Year 4 report in April 2018.”19,20 Now, if EcoHealth reported the results, then Fauci must have been aware that GOF had taken place, and the NIH for some reason let it slide without review.
Is NIH Looking for a Scapegoat?
As noted by Jordan Schachtel in an October 22, 2021, Substack article:21
“If you read the entire text of the letter, especially in light of the sudden, unexplained resignation of NIH chief Francis Collins, it seems to be desperate to find a scapegoat for the U.S.-approved gain-of-function research.
There are two major unproven claims that have been advanced by the NIH: First, EcoHealth, which has long served as a middleman between U.S. and Chinese Communist Party ‘health’ networks, was accused of violating the terms of the grant it had received …
EcoHealth has long collaborated with the alleged COVID-19 origin lab in Wuhan, China … But the letter seems to be setting up EcoHealth as the ‘fall guy’ entity in this story, pinning all blame on the organization in order to allow for the U.S. Government Health agency to rinse its hands clean of any improper behavior.
The second cause for concern in this letter involves the NIH completely ruling out the possibility that its research grant contributed to the outbreak … It claims it is scientifically impossible for their approved gain-of-function research to have modified this particular virus. And in doing so, they add a strange comparison between human evolution and the evolution of a virus to make their case …
Scientists have weighed in on social media to make it clear that the NIH does not have a definitive case on this front. Renowned molecular biologist Richard Ebright went as far as to label it a ‘false’ claim.22”
Scientist Alina Chan tweeted,23 “How can this type of work not be flagged as gain-of-function research of concern? Knowing what they knew in 2018, there was a reasonable expectation that this type of experiment could enhance the pathogenicity of MERS in humanized animal models and therefore humans.”
Jaime Yassif, senior fellow for global biological policy and programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, told CQ,24 “I would have flagged this project. Looking at the experiment of concern that’s highlighted in the letter, it appears to me as gain-of-function research, even before the ‘one log’ requirement.” Commenting on the letter, Comer stated:25
“NIH confirmed that EcoHealth violated the terms of their grant by concealing data on dangerous coronavirus experiments in Wuhan. Even worse, NIH Director Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci potentially misled the Committee and the American people about its knowledge of this cover up.”
More Incriminating Evidence Against EcoHealth
But there’s more. As reported by Vanity Fair :26
“… another disclosure last month made clear that EcoHealth Alliance, in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was aiming to do the kind of research that could accidentally have led to the pandemic.
On September 20, a group of internet sleuths calling themselves DRASTIC (short for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19) released a leaked $14 million grant proposal that EcoHealth Alliance had submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
It proposed partnering with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and constructing SARS-related bat coronaviruses into which they would insert ‘human-specific cleavage sites’ as a way to ‘evaluate growth potential’ of the pathogens. Perhaps not surprisingly, DARPA rejected the proposal, assessing that it failed to fully address the risks of gain-of-function research.
The leaked grant proposal struck a number of scientists and researchers as significant for one reason. One distinctive segment of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code is a furin cleavage site that makes the virus more infectious by allowing it to efficiently enter human cells. That is just the feature that EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology had proposed to engineer in the 2018 grant proposal.”
Amazingly, NIH Suddenly Revises Its Gain-of-Function Webpage
Adding fuel to suspicions that the NIH/NIAID are trying to cover their tracks is the fact that the NIH suddenly, in the third week of October 2021, deleted the definition of GOF from its website, replacing it with a section on enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPP) research.27
“The National Institutes of Health appears to be engaged in an ongoing misinformation campaign and a coverup of an unprecedented scale,” Schachtel writes.28 “Sure, Fauci lied, but that might only scratch the surface of the ongoing whitewashing campaign advanced by U.S. Government Health institutions.”
Appropriations Bill Bars Federal Funding of GOF
As reported by CQ, the U.S. Congress is now trying to curtail funding of GOF in general and EcoHealth Alliance in particular: 29
“Congressional efforts to curtail funding to EcoHealth Alliance included House votes to prohibit Defense Department funding through the fiscal 2022 defense bill (HR 4432) and the National Defense Authorization Act (HR 4350).
The draft fiscal 2022 Senate Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill does not contain any language targeting gain-of-function research or the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but other bills do.
The House-passed Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill (HR 4502) included language to bar federal funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology or gain-of-function research. It was adopted by voice vote during the markup process.
A Senate-passed technology bill (S 1260) included an amendment to ban any federal agency from funding gain-of-function research in China. The amendment was accepted by voice vote. The House has not taken up the bill yet.”
A Crisis of Trust
Commenting on the latest revelations, health care entrepreneur and political commentator Vivek Ramaswamy tweeted:30
“Another ‘conspiracy theory’ becomes accepted fact … So to sum it up:
1.US bans gain-of-function research
2.Rogue bureaucrats fund it abroad instead
3.Lab leak occurs. Global pandemic ensues
4.Scientific leaders lie about it and label dissenters as racists
Want to create a crisis of trust in science? That’ll do it… The facts have been apparent for a long time. The fact that the media missed it says a lot about the quality of true journalism in the US today: almost entirely absent.”
Sources and References
- 1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10 Substack Leighton Woodhouse October 24, 2021
- 2 PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases July 2021; 15(7): e0009647
- 4 Whitecoatwaste.org
- 7 Twitter Amy Meyer October 25, 2021
- 8 Twitter Amy Meyer October 25, 2021 #2
- 11 White Coat Waste Project Blog February 23, 2020
- 12 Washington Times February 24, 2020
- 13 White Coat Waste Project Blog February 23, 2020, Updated December 30, 2021
- 14 NIH Appropriations Act 2021
- 15 Twitter Richard Ebright NIH Letter dated October 20, 2021
- 16 NIH Letter dated October 20, 2021
- 17, 19, 26 Vanity Fair October 22, 2021
- 18, 24, 25, 29 CQ October 22, 2021
- 20 ZeroHedge October 25, 2021
- 21, 27, 28 Dossier.substack.com October 22, 2021
- 22 Twitter Richard Ebright October 22, 2021
- 23 Twitter Alina Chan October 21, 2021
- 30 Twitter Vivek Ramaswamy October 23, 2021
Are Vaccines Driving Excess Deaths in Scotland, a Professor of Biology Asks
The Daily Sceptic • November 4, 2021
Professor Richard Ennos, a retired Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Edinburgh University, writes:
In Scotland this summer there has been excess mortality for the past 21 weeks with the total excess now exceeding 3,000 deaths. I and others have written to MSPs about the dreadful situation asking for a thorough analysis of what is responsible. In response we have been sent a reply from Anita Morrison, Head of Health and Social Care Analysis and Support, that I reproduce below. Five possible explanations are given, none of which reflect favourably on the Scottish Government’s public health policy. To paraphrase her reply, 45% are due to COVID-19 and the rest are accounted for by one or more of:
- COVID-19 deaths that were not recognised.
- Unintended consequences of the Scottish Government’s non-clinical response to COVID-19 (masks, social isolation etc.).
- Problems with access to the health and social care services (presumably due to Scottish government policy of withdrawing these).
- Patients not accessing services that were available (presumably because they were too scared of catching COVID-19 due to Scottish government exaggeration of the risks).
- Some other cause that has not been identified.
What follows is my reply to Anita Morrison to point out that her response is a damning indictment of Scottish Government public health policy whose outcome should ultimately be measured by the metric of excess deaths.
FAO: Anita Morrison
Head of Health and Social Care Analysis and Support
Directorate for Covid Public Health
Cc Dr. Gregor Smith, Jason Leitch, Caroline Lamb, Maree Todd MSP, Kevin Stewart MSP, Nicola Sturgeon MSP
28th October 2021
Dear Anita Morrison
Thank you for your response to my letter, originally addressed to Sarah Boyack MSP, concerning the unprecedented rise in excess deaths in Scotland this summer that continues as I write (252 excess deaths above five-year average in the past week 42, 24% higher than normal). It is now indisputable that some major health catastrophe is unfolding in Scotland this summer. It is clearly essential that there is serious scrutiny of the health policies that have been adopted by the Scottish Government that have led to this situation. To help with this I would like to look in some detail at the explanations that you have provided for the incredibly worrying situation, and set out the implications of what you have written.
In your response you have put forward the argument that some 45% of these excess deaths have been caused by Covid. This proposition relies on the assumption that all Covid deaths represent excess deaths, a position that is hard to sustain given that Covid deaths are associated with multiple comorbidities, and therefore are unlikely to be exclusively in addition to deaths that would have occurred anyway from other causes.
Setting aside this difficulty, and assuming that 45% of excess deaths are due to Covid, this indicates that the policies that have been pursued by the Scottish Government have been unsuccessful in controlling deaths from Covid this summer. This is in contrast to the summer of 2020 when there was no such excess of deaths due to Covid or any other cause. This increase in the impact of Covid in Scotland between the summers of 2020 and 2021 is nicely illustrated using National Records of Scotland data from the two years stratified by different age groups.
A simple and compelling explanation for these data is that a policy has been enacted in 2021 that was not enacted in 2020 that has caused a three- to six-fold increase in summer Covid hospitalisations. What could that be?
Let us now turn to the majority of excess deaths that cannot be accounted for by Covid. I will be using the most up to date figures from the National Records of Scotland for the summer period 2021 up to week 42 that indicate 3,028 excess deaths (rather than your figures that extend only to week 40). The National Records of Scotland classify these deaths according to their causes, location and age. This is illustrated below.
Here we see that Covid can actually account for a maximum of only 26% of excess deaths in summer 2021. Significant rises in cancer and circulatory deaths are concerning, but perhaps of greater note is that 44% of excess deaths come under the classification of ‘Other’. They are not the kinds of deaths that are readily classifiable into the normal categories that we expect in Scotland, or they would have been placed in those categories. It is therefore these ‘Other’ deaths, some 44% of the total, that we need to investigate in great detail.
From the other panels in the graph above we can see that these ‘Other’ deaths are occurring at home, implying that they are likely to have been sudden because there has been no hospital admission. Furthermore, these excess deaths are not confined to the oldest age groups, where we expect most deaths, but are extended into the younger age group. Analysis of the timing of this rise in excess death shows that it started in the oldest age group and is initiated sequentially in ever younger age groups (see graph below). This strongly suggests that there is some cause for these excess deaths at home that operates first in the elderly and works its way sequentially down the age groups in Scotland. What could this be?
Now let us look at the non-Covid explanations that you have provided for the dramatic increase in excess deaths in Scotland over the past summer.
Your first explanation is that the summer excess deaths recorded as non-Covid are actually due to Covid, but have not been certified as such. I see that you yourself are not convinced by this explanation given the level of testing that has taken place. However, let us suppose this to be true. In that case the Scottish Government’s public health measures that have been put in place in summer 2021 to prevent Covid have been far worse than those put in place in summer 2020 – indeed they have been disastrous.
Your second explanation is that the non-clinical responses to COVID-19 put in place by the Scottish Government (mask-wearing, social isolation etc.) have had unintended deleterious consequences on public health and have dramatically increased the rates of death in the Scottish population. This is an admission of abject failure of the Scottish Government’s public health response to Covid. Public health policy is all about balancing the benefits and risks of interventions to achieve the lowest possible impact during a health emergency. It is pertinent to remember that no benefit-risk assessment of non-clinical interventions on the physical and mental health of the Scottish population was conducted before these interventions were enforced.
Your third explanation is that there has been a problem with access to health and social care services, and patients have not received the care they required from the NHS. Access to these services over the past 20 months has been under the control of the Scottish Government, so if this explanation is correct, then the Scottish Government is culpable for increasing the death rate in Scotland. Numerous policies have been deliberately pursued to dramatically reduce GP face-to-face consultation, to cancel appointments and operations in hospitals etc., so the evidence to support this, as at least a partial explanation, is overwhelming.
Your fourth explanation is that individuals who are in poor health have not referred themselves to health and social care services as they would at other times. To some extent this would be confounded with Scottish Government policies of restricting health care provision discussed above. However there has also been a concerted and relentless media campaign by the Scottish Government to increase fear in the public, particularly fear of hospitals where they may catch Covid. This has meant that they have not gone for treatment when it was necessary. Whatever the proximal cause of failure to seek medical attention, the ultimate cause and responsibility lies in Scottish Government policy.
Your final explanation for the dramatic rise in excess deaths in summer 2021 is that there is some other cause that has not yet been identified. As noted earlier the phenomenon of excess deaths in the presence of a Covid epidemic was not seen in summer 2020, but is seen in summer 2021. What differs between the two years? The glaringly obvious answer is the rollout of COVID-19 vaccination. There was no COVID-19 vaccination programme in 2020, but there was rollout of Covid vaccinations in a sequential way to increasingly younger age groups in 2021, a pattern that we see in the manifestation of excess deaths. All of the COVID-19 vaccines are novel and experimental with no long-term safety data. They are now associated with a wide range of serious side-effects (blood clotting, myocarditis, Guillain-Barre syndrome) whose likely frequency in the wider population was not assessed in the small-scale phase one and two trials that included only a subset of healthy volunteers. The Yellow Card adverse events reporting system, that capture only a fraction of events, has already recorded over 1,700 deaths in the U.K. population associated with the COVID-19 vaccines. There is therefore a prima facie case for COVID-19 vaccination being a contributing factor to the dramatic rise in summer excess deaths in Scotland in 2021.
I am very grateful for your response to my original letter. It has been extremely helpful in crystalising my thoughts about the causes of the dramatic and continuing rise in excess deaths that we currently see in Scotland. My conclusion is that whatever the true explanation for the phenomenon, it is rooted in the misguided and disastrous public health policies of the Scottish Government. The analysis has moreover highlighted that a significant contributor to the excess death of the Scottish population this summer may be adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccines, a factor that apparently has not occurred to either the Scottish Government or yourself. I would be grateful if you would pass on this insight to the Scottish Health minister so that unnecessary suffering and death is not meted out on the adults, and now children of Scotland.
Yours sincerely
Richard Ennos
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From the Archives
Mutually Assured Delusion (MAD)
By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | November 5, 2013
Groupthink: A pattern of thought charaterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.
Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets, by Roland Benabou, published in the Review of Economic Studies. Benabou also has a talk (ppt slides) on this subject.
First, a definition of groupthink (from the ppt slides):
Janis (1972)’s eight symptoms [of groupthink]:
- illusion of invulnerability
- collective rationalization
- belief in inherent morality
- stereotyped views of out-groups
- direct pressure on dissenters
- self-censorship
- illusion of unanimity
- self-appointed mind guards
Sound like any groups that we know? … continue
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