WHAT do you do with people who refuse to do what they’re told by our great overlords in government?
Why, you lock them up, of course.
If the latest opinion polls are to be believed, 58 per cent of Brits would support an Austria-style lockdown of the unvaccinated, rising to 63 per cent among Conservatives and 72 per cent for pensioners. Note, please, that only children of 12 and under are exempt from the lockdown in Austria. One Austrian official expressed doubts that such a lockdown could be enforced since it applies to only part of the population. Don’t worry about that, the interior minister said, the police will be able to carry out thorough checks. So it’s a return to ‘papers please’ in Austria for a minority. This is a disgraceful turn of events in Europe.
Forcing this kind of medical apartheid on a section of your population who will not play ball would have been unthinkable in Britain just a few years ago. Today various media outlets and of course the polling companies are falling over themselves trying to commission polls that say yes, it’s perfectly normal to demand that your neighbour be put under house arrest. Well, I’ve got news for you control freaks: it’s not!
It was bad enough when the government and members of the public wanted to deprive us of breathing fresh air by forcing us all to wear useless face masks, but the idea that it is morally right to demand your neighbours stay at home because they will not sacrifice their bodily integrity and consent to a vaccine that they have refused in good conscience is outrageous.
The selfishness of these people, people who would like to deprive their neighbours of their liberty, should not at this stage surprise us. The hallmark of the entire lockdown hysteria and fear porn has been selfishness dressed up as moral superiority.
It is also notable that 72 per cent of pensioners would either strongly support or somewhat support locking down their unvaccinated kids and grandchildren. Given how much teenagers have already sacrificed in this Covid mania, it once again is a very sad reflection on the older generation that they seek to jail their own grandchildren who have not consented to a vaccine that’s been around for about two minutes.
We have discussed whether or not the lockdown was a lockdown to save the baby boomers before and I received some pushback from those of the generation who pointed out that they did not support the lockdown. However it is also true that many got in touch with me privately to say that sadly they were indeed a minority and that there was overwhelming support amongst their boomer friends for a national lockdown.
The question is, what is the aim of this sort of medical apartheid? It surely cannot be to save the vaccinated as it would be ludicrous to lockdown the unvaccinated to protect those who have already been vaccinated against the illness they sought a vaccine for. We are on very shaky ground if the aim is to protect the unvaccinated from themselves. We don’t ban the obese from McDonald’s or alcoholics from pubs. It would seem ridiculous to ban those who refuse the vaccine from going about their daily lives. It is also morally indefensible to ban people from going about their daily lives in case they get ill. I didn’t think ‘Our NHS’ discriminated like that.
The only other argument is that it will somehow protect the health system as it’s more likely that the unvaccinated will end up in hospital. In fact frequently the vaccinated do end up in hospital, as for once the ‘the science’ is pretty clear (and acknowledged even by the PM) that two doses of the vaccine do not stop one contracting the virus, nor do they stop person-to-person transmission, nor do they stop hospitalisation, while the jury is out on whether they mitigate the severity of the disease.
All in all, this is a very dark turn in our current Covid regime although it is unsurprising that yet again it is Austria and, it seems likely, Germany who are the first to introduce a medical apartheid.
Although I think it is unlikely that the Conservatives would introduce this kind of discriminatory lockdown and abuse of people’s bodily integrity and medical privacy, we must yet again not give in when it comes to these totalitarian measures being thought about or implemented by our government.
Even if such a draconian move is not made by Boris Johnson, it is unfortunate that the whole idea of medical apartheid can even be thought about in Britain. It causes serious damage to the social fabric in terms of separating those who have been compliant with the government and the medical establishment from those who wish to take a more prudent approach.
What I will not do is engage in a sort of apartheid system of my own or hold any ill will for those who have in their good conscience decided to be vaccinated.
I respect your decision and all we ask for is an equal amount of respect when it comes to our decision as to what we should or should not subject our bodies to.
The basic principles of civil liberties and medical ethics are well established. We will have to fight to conserve these principles that make up a civilised society and liberal democracy.
Radio New Zealand has recently criticized a Facebook live conversation between former National MP Matt King and epidemiologist Dr Simon Thornley. While people should undertake their own research, we provide some comments related to the media’s critique. The evidence related to covid-19 policy continues to change and be updated.
In the interview, Professor Rod Jackson made several claims, decrying Thornley personally during the interview. Let’s examine them in turn.
“There is no trial evidence that ivermectin [an anti-parasitic drug used as early treatment for covid-19 in some parts of the world] works in people with Covid – it doesn’t exist.”
Trials do exist. In fact a meta-analysis or summary study of six such trials exist. The pooled effect of these trials is a 79% decline in all-cause mortality (95% confidence interval: 89% to 58%). These trials are from Iraq, Iran, Bangladesh, Egypt, Turkey and India, places less reticent about its use. But they are trials, and the reduction in all-cause mortality is stark, an endpoint which is generally considered clinically important and free of error and bias. Another trial points to effective treatment, such as from vitamin D supplementation, which reduced intensive care admissions to 1/50 (2%) in the treated from 13/26 (50%) in the untreated in Spanish covid-19 patients.
We’re not advocating ivermectin at all. But we are prepared to look at the evidence. The fact that Jackson didn’t know there were trials invalidates his point.
“Professor Jackson also said claiming Covid-19 was no worse than the flu was nonsense”.
In the interview, Thornley claimed the infection fatality rate of covid-19 was as bad as a ‘severe flu’. A summary study of many countries indicates that the average global infection fatality rate of covid-19 is 0.15% or 1/667 people.
The fatality rate for H1N1 influenza is variable, but this figure from covid-19 is well within the range of estimates presented from a similar summary study.
The comparison between covid-19 and flu is therefore fair and accurate. Jackson’s claim is misinformation.
We should note that many fatality studies take the definition of a covid-19 death at face value but it does not mean the individual died exclusively from the virus. This was exemplified by the counting a recent covid-19 death in a man who was actually shot and killed, yet tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 during the autopsy. This was defended by the Ministry of Health, as it conformed with World Health Organization policy.
We are able to test the accuracy of Jackson’s claimed fatality risk. In May 2020, Jackson admonished Sweden for its lax approach. He said the fatality rate of covid-19 was 1/100 people infected, so predicted 56,000 deaths from covid-19 in the country, assuming 60% of the population would be infected. To date, there have been about 15,000 covid-19 deaths, with an age distribution similar to that of background deaths (figure). In fact, by all accounts, Sweden has fared through the epidemic particularly well compared to other European countries.
Figure. Deaths with covid-19 in Sweden, by age at November 3, 2021. Source: statistica.com
“This is a severe disease and we have a evidence-based treatment [the vaccine] where there is definitive evidence that it reduces the risk of severe disease and death by 95 percent, in that order.”
This is an extraordinary claim for several reasons. First, the original Pfizer trial reported about the same number of overall deaths in the treated and the untreated groups (14 in the treated and 13 in the untreated). In the six-month trial results, only three covid-19 deaths occurred, one in the treated and two in the untreated group. This is not consistent with Jackson’s assertion of a 95% reduction in risk of severe disease and death.
Given the numbers of deaths in the original trial, it is possible to work out whether the trial would have picked up a 95% reduction as Jackson claims. The trial would have been expected to have only one death in the treated group, and would have detected a difference more than expected by chance with 96% certainty.
There is observational evidence from Sweden of reduced covid-19 hospitalisations and deaths (not from all-causes), however, the vaccine effect diminished to zero for all three outcomes eight months after the date that the vaccine was administered.
To compound the confusion about the effect of the vaccine, the original Pfizer trial now is marred by whistle-blowers who have given the British Medical Journal evidence of fraud occurring during its conduct. Sixteen Swedish doctors have now called for the injection to be suspended as a result of these revelations.
Both Jackson and RNZ use extensive use of ad hominem attacks, which are considered an invalid, and lowest, form of argument.
Examples include:
“anti-vax”
“discredited academic”
“And we have someone who is questioning that evidence, who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, talking to an epidemiologist who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“outlier in his field”.
The purveyors and writers of such ‘argument’ appear to have no embarrassment at the anti-intellectualism and inhumanity of their conduct.
We’ll stick to the contest of ideas by again considering Jackson’s accuracy. Back in August 2020, Jackson and his colleagues claimed that elimination was still the best strategy for New Zealand to tackle covid-19. That article has not dated well, yet the personalised tirade and arguments are familiar.
“He [Thornley] is the only dissenter in the epidemiological community,”
“It’s not like this is a discussion like a boxing match with two equal partners. What you’ve got is every experienced epidemiologist in the country supporting the Government’s elimination approach.”
“We are all advising the Government, and we speak with one voice. And you have got a junior epidemiologist who is presenting a different case.”
Jackson has made increasingly inaccurate claims during the pandemic, claiming, unchallenged that one in five infected people will be hospitalised after infection with covid-19. No media have ever fact checked this.
New Zealand’s own government data shows Jackson overestimated by at least a factor of ten, since the proportion of cases (rather than infections) hospitalised is 2% (table).
Table. Counts of cases of covid-19 in New Zealand (16 November 2021).
Count
%
Self-isolation
2058
56%
Isolation Complete
969
26%
Managed Isolation
396
11%
Hospital
73
2%
Other
198
5%
As sailing great Russell Coutts has recently pointed out, it is questionable how “media entities can maintain objectivity when they have accepted a government grant that is conditional on them promoting certain government policies”.
It is prudent to check all sources of information, not only those who dare to question the what is coming from the Beehive.
Like many other pandemic measures, the extended closures of university campuses has been a massive social and public health experiment.
The results in the report published this week in Collateral Global this week on the impact of pandemic restrictions on university students’ mental health – sadly – should not be too surprising. Young people were not a priority during the pandemic. It is quite telling that most countries – and most people – did not change strategies and attitudes after the initial uncertainty, as we gained more evidence about how minuscule young people’s risk is from Covid. We continued imposing population-wide restrictions, including the closures of schools and university campuses, and moving to online-only teaching, even when it became clear that these restrictions would not benefit young people. They did not need protection from Covid as much as they needed protection from the effects of policy responses on their mental health and their psycho-physical development more generally. This report emphasises once more how we failed to protect young people’s well-being from the inevitable harms of prolonged restrictions.
Public health policies are justified to the extent that they produce significant enough collective benefits without disproportionately burdening certain groups. Admittedly, in situations of uncertainty, a rigorous cost-benefit analysis is not always possible. And yet, the stricter the restrictions, the stronger the duty to rigorously gather real-time evidence on what costs they impose on different groups. Like many other pandemic measures, the extended closures of university campuses have been a massive social and public health experiment. But even experiments require constant interrogation as to whether they are working, and a measure of their success must be the continuous evaluation of whether they are creating collateral damage. It seems we didn’t want to see or give due consideration to such damage.
The prolonged closure of university campuses and the decision to move online all the teaching, socializing, and formal and informal interactions that play a central role in young people’s psycho-physical development resulted in enormous costs that we could not see on our computer screens. With the report this week, the evidence of the significant damage we caused to them becomes more apparent – for example, with the studies showing one in three students reporting symptoms of anxiety and depression.
Those of us working in academic institutions (or better, working on that non-existent space that is Zoom) could not see what was happening beyond those discrete windows through which we were delivering classes or supervising students from our homes. When the world exists only to the extent that it appears on a computer screen, it is easy to forget that students’ existence and experiences do not end the moment they disappear from view. When Zoom meetings and classes are over and the computer shuts down, the young people remain out of sight. Many were sitting alone in their rooms, deprived of their lives as students and, indeed, as whole persons, at a developmental stage when experiences and social interactions play a critical role in helping them understand themselves and the world around them. Although we could not see that, it should not have been difficult to imagine the damage already when the cameras turned off.
There may be limited utility at this point in blaming those responsible for the public health decisions that completely disregarded this potential (and foreseeable) damage to students. It also might be pointless to assign culpability to the academics who kept (and continue to keep) supporting tight restrictions and advocating for online teaching from the comfort of their homes while relegating students to social isolation. But what is undoubtedly useful, in light of this week’s report, is to look ahead as winter in the Northern Hemisphere approaches and more people begin putting restrictions back on the table.
Before making any decisions, we must acknowledge that we don’t need to run social and public health experiments on students any more. We have data now about the harm we have caused to them. And we now know the threat that closing campuses and moving the whole student experience online can pose.
Any decision to close university campuses at this point can no longer be construed as an innocent mistake – if, indeed, it ever was.
Dr. Alberto Giubilini is a Senior Research Fellow in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford.
Collateral Global is a U.K.-based charity researching the collateral impacts of the mandated non-pharmaceutical interventions.
Shadows everywhere: The possibility that people might want to reject climate lockdowns and Covid lockdowns of their own volition does not seem to occur to BBC conspiracy theorists.
Covid denial to climate denial: How conspiracists are shifting focus
By Marianna Spring
Specialist disinformation reporter, BBC News
Members of an online movement infected with pandemic conspiracies are shifting their focus – and are increasingly peddling falsehoods about climate change.
Matthew is convinced that shadowy forces lie behind two of the biggest news stories of our time, and that he’s not being told the truth.
“This whole campaign of fear and propaganda is an attempt to try and drive some agenda,” he says. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s climate change or a virus or something else.” […]
And recently, groups like the ones he’s a part of have been sharing misleading claims not only about Covid, but about climate change. He sees “Covid and climate propaganda” as part of the same so-called plot.
The White Rose network
It’s part of a larger pattern. Anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine Telegram groups, which once focused exclusively on the pandemic, are now injecting the climate change debate with the same conspiratorial narratives they use to explain the pandemic.
The posts go far beyond political criticism and debate – they’re full of incorrect information, fake stories and pseudoscience.
According to researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank that researches global disinformation trends, some anti-lockdown groups have become polluted by misleading posts about climate change being overplayed, or even a so-called “hoax” designed to control people.
“Increasingly, terminology around Covid-19 measures is being used to stoke fear and mobilise against climate action,” says the ISD’s Jennie King.
She says this isn’t really about climate as a policy issue.
“It’s the fact that these are really neat vectors to get themes like power, personal freedom, agency, citizen against state, loss of traditional lifestyles – to get all of those ideas to a much broader audience.”
One group which has adopted such ideas is the White Rose – a network with locally-run subgroups around the world, from the UK to the US, Germany and New Zealand – where Matthew came across it.
“It’s not run by any one or two people,” Matthew explains. “It’s kind of a decentralised community organisation, so you obtain stickers and then post them on lampposts and things like that.” […]
While we chat, he mentions “The Great Reset” – an unfounded conspiracy theory that a global elite is using the pandemic to establish a shadowy New World Order, a “super-government” that will control the lives of citizens around the world. … Full article: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-59255165
The Great Reset is a public programme promoted by the World Economic Forum. The annual “Great Reset” WEF Davos event costs more than $50,000. According to Wikipedia, in 2011 an annual membership cost $52,000 for an individual member, $263,000 for “Industry Partner” and $527,000 for “Strategic Partner”. An admission fee cost $19,000 per person. In 2014, WEF raised annual fees by 20 percent, bringing the cost for “Strategic Partner” from CHF 500,000 ($523,000) to CHF 600,000 ($628,000)
A simple google search turns up the WEF page near the top of the list of searches. The page cites Covid and climate change as justifications for their programme.
In my opinion there is room to debate the true nature of the Great Reset programme, but calling it “unfounded”, as in non-existent, is at best plain ignorant, and well below the BBC journalistic standards we once thought we had a right to expect.
As for the White Rose network, never heard of it. I have no doubt White Rose and many similar groups exist, in our unsettled world there are plenty of concerned people seeking out like minded fellows. But some groups are run by people with their own agenda, who are not acting in their member’s best interests, and any significant group will be heavily monitored by the government, so I strongly urge caution for anyone who participates in large private social media groups.
In Britain there is a “malicious communication act”, which makes it an offence to distribute written material which causes offence or anxiety, which has been used to arrest people campaigning against British government Covid policy. I am not a lawyer, but in my opinion it is only a matter of time before this act is used against people who oppose other high priority government policies in Britain. Be careful what electronic footprints you leave, your words could be misinterpreted. Above all, stay within the law, wherever you live.
If we want to end this pandemic, focusing our efforts on an unsafe, non-sterilizing vaccine against an RNA virus in the middle of a pandemic is a recipe for disaster. Geert vanden Bossche has been saying this for a year.
Insanity is the doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.
That, in a nutshell, is the CDC and NIH strategy. Tony Fauci is the spiritual leader of this religion.
Want to end the pandemic? Simple! Just do the opposite of what the CDC says
Bret Weinstein pointed out to me that if we ever want to end the pandemic, it’s really simple: we just have to do the exact opposite of what the CDC says.
When they say not to use a drug or supplement like ivermectin, vitamin D3, fluvoxamine, hydroxychloroquine, NAC, and betadine nasal rinses, it means those drugs work really well.
When they say “wear masks,” it means mask are useless against respiratory viruses and dangerous, especially for kids. Details here.
When they say get vaccinated, it means that vaccination will be more likely to kill you than save your life.
When they start mandating vaccines, it means they couldn’t convince anyone with the scientific evidence so now they have to use coercion.
What we need to do is follow the Aaron Rodgers example: Infect and treat.
What the CDC wants is for people to avoid using any early treatment protocols that use existing approved drugs such as the Fareed-Tyson protocol.
But the truth is that COVID is endemic: you are going to get COVID sooner or later. It’s inevitable.
Get it. Treat it. You’re done.
Just like Aaron Rodgers, a critical thinker who did absolutely the right thing.
A better, safer strategy than getting vaccinated by far.
You will contribute to herd immunity since you can’t pass on the virus. You’ll also be protected against variants in terms of hospitalization and death. You don’t benefit either with vaccination. Surprise!
Early treatment is the true win-win: for you and for society
It’s the patriotic thing to do to end the pandemic.
We need to educate everyone on early treatment protocols. Look at the benefits:
Treatments are super safe never kill or disable you
After you recover, if you catch COVID again, you won’t get sick or infect anyone else. None of these are true if you get vaccinated.
After you recover, you can’t pass on the virus to anyone else (like you can if you just get vaccinated). This is important. This keeps others safe. It is the right thing to do for society. It is the patriotic thing to do.
What’s the catch? They only work if you take the drugs and are treated early (as soon as you have symptoms).
The big problem was never the virus; it is our response to the virus
Meanwhile, the effectiveness of early treatments will continue to be suppressed by the CDC, FDA, NIH, AMA, and WHO among others.
Sadly, doctors in the US and other countries will continue to follow the directions of these authoritarians… whoops, I means authorities…, no matter how many people are killed.
I’m not a doctor and I quit my job, so I can speak out freely. Most other people cannot.
Children’s Health Defense’s board chair and lead counsel Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s highly anticipated book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” is available today in bookstores throughout the U.S. and Canada.
The New York Times bestselling author’s latest work details how Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates and their cohorts used their control of media outlets, scientific journals, key government and quasi-governmental agencies, and influential scientists and physicians to flood the public with fearful propaganda about COVID-19 virulence and pathogenesis, and to muzzle debate and ruthlessly censor dissent.
As people the world over are questioning the origins of the COVID crisis, news continues to emerge about U.S. taxpayers’ funding of gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China. Some U.S. Senators including Rand Paul are calling for Fauci’s resignation while U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace is leading a bipartisan effort to investigate his agency’s treatment of beagle puppies during experiments that the group of lawmakers calls “cruel.”
“The Real Anthony Fauci” exposes a side of Dr. Fauci that has thus far been shielded from the public by the ongoing media blackout of any information that counters the Pharma/government narrative.
“The research I conducted for this book exposes how Fauci’s gargantuan yearly disbursements allow him to dictate the subject, content and outcome of scientific health research across the globe,” said Kennedy.
“These annual disbursements also allow Fauci to exercise dictatorial control over the army of ‘knowledge and innovation’ leaders who populate the ‘independent’ federal panels that approve and mandate drugs and vaccines — including the committees that allowed the Emergency Use Authorization of COVID-19 vaccines.”
Invented and weaponized a parade of fraudulently concocted global pandemics, including bird flu (2005), swine flu (2009) and Zika (2015-2016), in order to sell novel vaccines, enrich their Pharma partners and increase the power of public health technocrats and Gates’ entourage of international agencies.
Made a series of prescient predictions about the imminent COVID-19 pandemic — almost to the day. Their precision soothsaying further awed a fawning, credulous and scientifically illiterate media that treats Gates and Fauci as religious deities, insulates them from public criticism and vilifies their doubters as heretics and “conspiracy theorists.” Adulatory mainstream media abetted Fauci’s conspiracy to cover up COVID’s origins at the Wuhan lab.
Teamed with government technocrats, military and intelligence planners, and health officials from the U.S., Europe and China to stage sophisticated pandemic “simulations” and “Germ Games.” Exercises like these, encouraged by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, laid the groundwork for imposition of global totalitarianism, including compulsory masking, lockdowns, mass propaganda and censorship, with the ultimate goal of mandating the coercive vaccination of 7 billion humans.
Practiced, in each of their “simulations,” psychological warfare techniques to create chaos, stoke fear, shatter economies, destroy public morale and quash individual self-expression — and then impose autocratic governance.
Kennedy discussed “The Real Anthony Fauci” at length Monday with Tucker Carlson on FOX Nation. Portions of that interview were featured last night on Tucker Carlson Tonight.
“Fauci’s COVID policies also spawned new insidious authoritarianism — and propelled America down a slippery slope toward a grim future as a dark totalitarian security and surveillance state,” said Kennedy.
Today someone shared the chart below, generated by the Financial Times. Try to pick out which one of these countries hasn’t implemented a vaccine passport system:
I’ll bet you know which one it is.
Meanwhile, parts of Europe are going back into lockdown.
Austria is locking down the one-third of the population that is unvaccinated.
The Netherlands is 72 percent fully vaccinated and is going into lockdown for everyone, vaccinated and unvaccinated.
Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of inanely blaming “the unvaccinated” for this, the robots on social media would at least admit that this isn’t how they expected it to go, and that there shouldn’t be this level of cases and deaths after the introduction of vaccines?
It’s like Sweden: we were supposed to believe that Sweden would have one of the worst death rates in the world because it ignored the so-called experts demanding lockdown.
Well, Sweden is currently #53 in the world for COVID death rate. Number fifty-three. Not one. Not two. Not ten. Not twenty. Fifty-three.
The crazies are still criticizing Sweden, naturally.
But my question is: when you were screaming hysterically at Sweden to lock down, did you think they’d end up all the way down at number 53 in the world in death rate?
Aren’t you the least bit curious about that? Is there a chance that if we hadn’t wrecked societies it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway?
Same with Florida: did the hysterics expect them to have one of the better rates of age-adjusted COVID mortality in the United States?
Of course not. They were warning that Florida would be one of the worst.
And yet in none of these cases can they bring themselves to say: thank goodness things turned out better than we predicted!
The Journal of the American Medical Association has another stunning paper out, this one on post-Covid symptoms in almost 27,000 French adults.
Researchers asked people to report whether they had had Covid and whether they had any of 18 lasting symptoms like insomnia, fatigue, or cough. They found that self-reported Covid was very strongly associated with nearly every symptom.
But the scientists then went a step further.
They also had Sars-Cov-2 antibody test results for the people they had surveyed, so they didn’t have to depend on self-reported Covid. They knew who really had had Covid and who had not.
They then compared self-reported symptoms in people with antibodies – that is, people who had actually been infected and recovered from Covid – to the general population. And they found no difference in almost any symptom.
Covid was not a risk factor for chest pain, or breathing difficulties, or trouble focusing, or stomach pain, or any of the many, many other complaints that long Covid “patients” and interest groups say are real. There was one interesting exception; people with Covid antibodies did have a much higher rate of anosmia, losing one’s sense of smell. Because anosmia is a known and lasting side effect, it serves as a useful control of sorts.
The researchers also found that almost 60 percent of the people with antibodies HAD NO IDEA THEY HAD EVEN HAD COVID AT ALL. Meanwhile, while more than half the people who said they had had Covid had no antibodies. (Welcome to the plague so severe most halfway healthy adults don’t even know they’ve had it.)
The study strongly suggests that many people are using previous Covid diagnoses – either real or imagined – to help explain away common physical symptoms such as joint pain or cough. It also suggests that actually being infected Covid is far less risky than thinking you have been infected with Covid for many people.
The researchers concluded by explaining that people who claim they have long Covid may need help “to identify cognitive and behavioral mechanisms that may be targeted to relieve the symptoms.” Which is a very polite way of putting the truth.
This study should slow, if not stop, the rush to medicalize long Covid. It is yet more proof that the illness is a group of squishy (if painful and difficult) symptoms looking for a name – and more importantly a billing code.
But so many patients and physicians and public health experts are now invested (in some cases literally) in making long Covid real that the gravy train will likely roll on.
The CDC once was a federal agency that nearly everyone respected. That no longer is the case. Now there are many reasons why the CDC should be widely disrespected. Its latest debacle is how it changed the definition of vaccine.
Just imagine this: The entire push for COVID “vaccines” was based on a lie – they did not meet the official CDC definition of a vaccine. By doing this, the government could coerce the entire population to get the shot. Calling them “vaccines” was the biggest lie from Fauci and the key to drug companies making many billions of dollars.
Why would the government’s key public health agency change the definition of what a vaccine is in the midst of a pandemic? After millions of Americans have taken the shot? And millions more are being beaten into taking it for the first time and others to get booster shots.
Words matter
Here is the key point. It became widely recognized by medical experts and informed citizens that COVID vaccines clearly did not fit the official CDC vaccine definition. The CDC thought the answer was not to fix what was deficient with the COVID vaccines or stop their use by most people as so many medical experts advised. Their response was to change the vaccine definition to fit the so-called vaccines.
This was done so that vaccine mandates could keep getting pushed by the government. Of course, the COVID “vaccines” should be referred to as gene therapy products, even better than calling them experimental vaccines.
To see how corrupt this action by the CDC was, it is necessary to examine the details of the vaccine definition debacle.
Prior to September 1, 2021 here is how CDC defined vaccine:
A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease. Vaccines are usually administered through needle injections, but can also be administered by mouth or sprayed into the nose.
This definition had been used for years and it makes sense. No expert or sensible citizen would find fault with it. But did it honestly apply to the COVID vaccines?
A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases. Vaccines are usually administered through needle injections, but some can be administered by mouth or sprayed into the nose.
Here is what the CDC also said:
Immunity: Protection from an infectious disease. If you are immune to a disease, you can be exposed to it without becoming infected.
Think about that last sentence: You can be exposed to COVID without being infected; but we know that is not true for fully vaccinated people who still get infected.
This is the key language in the original definition:
“stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.”
How rational to invoke the purpose of a vaccine to stimulate an immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease that protects the recipient from that disease. Exactly what everyone for years thought was the correct way to think about a vaccine. People want permanent protection from the COVID infection disease.
But now the CDC has taken out the language referring to getting immunity for a specific disease and getting protection from that disease.
Now, COVID vaccines do not have to directly produce immunity. No, now they only have to stimulate the body’s immune system.
You don’t get immunity because COVID vaccines do not directly produce immunity. They do not directly kill the COVID virus. Vaccinated people can still have high viral loads and also transmit the virus to others. While some individuals may get some health benefits from COVID shots, they do not necessarily protect the entire population. This is why mandates to get everyone the shots really do not make sense from a public health perspective, that Dr. Paul Alexander has well substantiated.
Apparently, the only logical way to understand what the CDC has done is to accept the truth belatedly seen by the CDC that COVID vaccines do not, in fact, produce effective immunity for COVID infection and do not provide effective protection, once vaccinated, from that infection.
Much of the public surely does not yet know what the CDC has acknowledged for the COVID vaccines. Odds are that everyone who depends on mainstream media for good information about the pandemic has not been informed about what the CDC has done and its implications.
The new vaccine definition, if publicly known, would reduce public confidence in current COVID vaccines. You don’t have to be a medical expert to see how the new definition has been created to accommodate COVID shots.
In fact, these definition changes reflect what is now known about the limitations of the COVID vaccines.
Fully vaccinated people can still get COVID disease, referred to as breakthrough infections that, contrary to what the government says, can be very serious, often requiring hospitalization and sometimes causing death, as was the case for Colin Powell. Such serious effects have been well discussed by Dr. Günter Kampf. Other times, breakthrough infections greatly disrupt lives, as recently described by Madrigal, a strong proponent of COVID shots.
Moreover, the COVID vaccines are now widely known from considerable clinical evidence to lose their effectiveness typically in about six months. And even worse, they do not provide hardly any protection against variants like the delta variant. Same disease but from a different virus in terms of its complex genetic makeup. So, befitting the new CDC definition the COVID shots really do not have long lasting effective immunity to the specific COVID infection caused by all variants.
Elsewhere on the CDC website is a glossary of many terms; here is what is especially relevant to the debate about COVID vaccines:
Attenuated vaccine: A vaccine in which a live microbe is weakened (attenuated) through chemical or physical processes in order to produce an immune response without causing the severe effects of the disease. Attenuated vaccines currently licensed in the United States include measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, rotavirus, yellow fever, smallpox, and some formulations of influenza, and typhoid vaccines.
Most people would read this and find that it fits with what they think of as vaccines that have been routinely taken by most people, especially children. Clearly, COVID vaccines do not fit this definition. But seeing this established view of vaccines helps explain why so many people resist and reject the COVID shots. They are so fundamentally different than long accepted and used vaccines.
Natural immunity
One of the biggest pandemic scandals is that the government refuses to give full credit to natural immunity that people get from once being infected by the COVID virus. It should be officially recognized as equivalent to “vaccine” immunity.
The following CDC glossary definition is especially relevant:
Active immunity: The production of antibodies against a specific disease by the immune system. Active immunity can be acquired in two ways, either by contracting the disease or through vaccination. Active immunity is usually permanent, meaning an individual is protected from the disease for the duration of their lives.
This CDC definition of active immunity recognizes that you can get it by contracting the disease versus through vaccination. In other words, it recognizes what today is commonly called natural immunity achieved by once being infected by the COVID virus. And that such immunity is likely permanent and better than vaccine immunity, as recent clinical studies substantiate. But it also infers that active immunity obtained through vaccination is also permanent, which clearly is not the case for COVID shots, as evidenced by breakthrough infections.
Also note that it has recently been revealed that the CDC has not been able to provide any proof of at least one instance of an unvaccinated, naturally immune individual transmitting the COVID-19 virus to another individual.
And a new study found that almost 60 percent of the people with antibodies had no idea they had even had COVID at all. But they would have natural immunity. Quite consistent with the reality that most people suffer no significant health impacts from being infected with the COVID virus, regardless of all the fear mongering by Fauci and others.
Conclusions
To sum up, a close look at what the CDC has done lately reinforces the thinking of millions of people who have reservations and concerns about getting COVID genetic therapy shots that pose myriad adverse impacts and sometimes death.
There is a rational, science basis for thinking that the limited benefits of those shots do not adequately offset their risks. This is true for the vast majority of healthy people, especially children, who have extremely low risk from COVID infection for serious illness, hospitalization or death.
Mandates that do not recognize natural immunity are merely a sham tactic to make money for drug companies.
How interesting it would be, in the context of informed consent, if people were shown the original and new CDC vaccine definitions as a means to stimulate productive discussion with medical providers of COVID shots.
Dr. Joel S. Hirschhorn, author of Pandemic Blunder and many articles, podcasts and radio shows on the pandemic, worked on health issues for decades. As a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he directed a medical research program between the colleges of engineering and medicine. As a senior official at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the National Governors Association, he directed major studies on health-related subjects; he testified at over 50 US Senate and House hearings and authored hundreds of articles and op-ed articles in major newspapers. He has served as an executive volunteer at a major hospital for more than 10 years. He is a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and America’s Frontline Doctors.
Dr. Scot Youngblood spoke to the San Diego county Board of Supervisors on November 2, using the CDC and Pfizer data to show the vaccine provides no net benefit.
This article defines a more effective public health strategy for the current COVID pandemic.
The core issue is that there is a huge array of reactions to both COVID infections and vaccines based on diverse biology, genetics and medical conditions of individuals. Missing from current policy is recognition and support of personalized medical methods.
First, medical history tells us the wisdom of making the medicine fit the person. This is the cornerstone of what is called personalized or individualized medicine. Good physicians also find the combination of drugs to best address an illness or disease. This contrasts with mass use of off-the-shelf, one-size-fits all drugs. Proposed here is an approach to tailor or fine tune medical solutions to individual biologic and genetic characteristics, and personal medical needs and circumstances.
As an example of how trying to get the public to accept a mass medicine is the case of seasonal flu vaccines. A large fraction of the public does not take them. During the 2019-2020 season, 63.8 percent of children between six months and 17 years got a flu shot. Among adults, just 48.4 percent of people got flu shots.
Why is this? Because it is common knowledge that their efficacy rate is relatively low. On average, people who get the flu shot are between 40 and 60 percent less likely to catch the virus than unvaccinated individuals. The truth is that the annual flu vaccine does not fit every individual. Even though there is little medical evidence that taking a flu vaccine poses significant health risks. But people know that the flu infection fatality rate is relatively low.
Many individuals make a sensible risk/benefit analysis, concluding that there are insufficient benefits. Others, especially older people with serious medical conditions and possibly weak immune systems get annual flu shots. The public health system has allowed a personalized approach to seasonal flu vaccines.
And it turns out, based on government data, that low risk is also the case for the current COVID pandemic. For the vast majority of people getting coronavirus infection either means no symptoms or only mild ones not much different than the flu or a very bad cold, and which pass in relatively few days. Here is the reported truth about low coronavirus death risks for healthy people:
“CDC showed that 94 percent of the reported deaths had multiple comorbidities, thereby reducing the CDC’s numbers attributed strictly to COVID-19 to about 35,000 for all age groups.”
This stands in contrast to the widely reported total of over 730,000 COVID related deaths. What this shows is the huge variations in how people respond to COVID infections because of their innate differences.
What COVID infected people do get is natural immunity to this virus that abundant medical research and clinical studies have shown is better than vaccine immunity. The latter declines in about six months, whereas natural immunity lasts longer and better defends against new variants.
Combination Of Medicines
Besides making the medicine fit the patient is established clinical wisdom for using a combination of drugs. And often, in this pandemic, some doctors use a combination that includes more than several generic medicines and, especially in hospitals, government approved drugs. Also widely used are vitamins and supplements. The eminent Dr. Peter McCollough has been the leading proponent of using individualized combinations to treat and prevent COVID infection disease. All this is an alternative to the strategy of mass vaccination for everyone.
Today, anyone without too much effort can find a host of combination protocols to treat and prevent COVID.
The Missed Opportunity Discussed Early In The Pandemic
Between the early 2020 months of the pandemic and the roll out of mass vaccination in late 2020 there was interest in applying the personalized medicine approach to managing the pandemic.
Consider what the Mayo Center for Individualized Medicine said for the COVID-19 response. The document detailed a number of initiatives Mayo was pursuing to address the pandemic by obtaining medical data that could lead to personalized pandemic solutions. This is what Mayo wanted to do:
“When COVID-19 spread across the U.S. in March 2020, the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine urgently responded to accelerate research, development, translation and implementation of novel tests, lifesaving treatments and diagnostics. Now, collaborative teams of scientists are continuing to unravel the mysteries of the novel virus, including using advanced genetic sequencing technologies to investigate how the virus can infiltrate a person’s immune system and wreak havoc on organs, tissue and blood vessels, leaving some patients with long-term effects.”
A September 2020 article had the intriguing title “How to use precision medicine to personalize COVID-19 treatment according to the patient’s genes.” Here are excerpts:
“In recent years, a gene-centric approach to precision medicine has been promoted as the future of medicine. It underlies the massive effort funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health to collect over a million DNA samples under the “All of Us” initiative that began in 2015.
But the imagined future did not include COVID-19. In the rush to find a COVID-19 vaccine and effective therapies, precision medicine has been insignificant. Why is this? And what are its potential contributions?
If precision medicine is the future of medicine, then its application to pandemics generally, and COVID-19 in particular, may yet prove to be highly significant. But its role so far has been limited. Precision medicine must consider more than just genetics. It requires an integrative “omic” approach that must collect information from multiple sources – beyond just genes – and at scales ranging from molecules to society.
The situation becomes yet more complicated for infectious diseases. Viruses and bacteria have their own genomes that interact in complex ways with the cells in the people they infect. The genome of SARS-CoV-2 underlying COVID-19 has been extensively sequenced. Its mutations are identified and traced worldwide, helping epidemiologists understand the spread of the virus. However, the interactions between SARS-CoV-2 RNA and human DNA, and the effect on people of the virus’s mutations, remain unknown.”
… there is an opportunity to begin gathering the kinds of data that would allow for a more comprehensive precision medicine approach – one that is fully aware of the complex interactions between genomes and social behavior.
The NIH has said: “The National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program has announced a significant increase in the COVID-19 data available in its precision medicine database, adding survey responses from more than 37,000 additional participants, and virus-related diagnosis and treatment data from the nearly 215,000 participant electronic health records (EHRs) that are currently available.”
The specialty germane to a personalized pandemic strategy is called pharmacogenomics. It is the study of the role of the genome in drug response. It combines pharmacology and genomics to discover how the genetic makeup of an individual affects their response to drugs, including vaccines.
It deals with the influence of acquired and inherited genetic variation on drug response in patients by correlating genetic factors of an individual with drug or vaccine absorption, distribution, metabolism and elimination. It deals with the effects of multiple genes on drug and vaccine response.
The central goal of pharmacogenomics is to develop rational means to optimize drug therapy, including vaccination, with respect to the patients’ genotype, to ensure maximum efficiency with minimal adverse effects.
By using pharmacogenomics, the goal is that pharmaceutical drug treatments, including vaccination, can replace or at least complement what is dubbed as the “one-drug-fits-all” approach. Pharmacogenomics also attempts to eliminate the trial-and-error method of prescribing, allowing physicians to take into consideration their patient’s genes, the functionality of these genes, and how this may affect the efficacy of the patient’s current or future treatments (and where applicable, provide an explanation for the failure of past treatments).
An August 2020 journal article was titled “Pharmacogenomics of COVID-19 therapies.” Here are its optimistic views and findings:
“Pharmacogenomics may allow individualization of these drugs thereby improving efficacy and safety. … Pharmacogenomics may help clinicians to choose proper first-line agents and initial dosing that would be most likely achieve adequate drug exposure among critically ill patients; those who cannot afford a failure of ineffective therapy. It is also important to minimize the risks of toxicity because COVID-19 particularly affects those with comorbidities on other drug therapies.
We found evidence that several genetic variants may alter the pharmacokinetics of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, ribavirin, lopinavir/ritonavir and possibly tocilizumab, which hypothetically may affect clinical response and toxicity in the treatment of COVID-19. … These data support the collection of DNA samples for pharmacogenomic studies of the hundreds of currently ongoing clinical trials of COVID-19 therapies.
One of the biggest success stories in the field of pharmacogenomics was for a drug used to treat another, highly lethal, infectious disease: abacavir for HIV. … In an acute illness such as COVID-19, pharmacogenetics would only be useful if the genetic test results were already available (i.e., pre-emptive pharmacogenetic testing) or rapidly available (i.e., point-of-care genetic testing). …
In the face of unprecedented challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, collaborative efforts among the medical communities are more important than ever to improve the efficacy of these treatments and ensure safety. Some large national COVID-19 trials are evaluating pharmacogenomics, which will inform the role of pharmacogenomics markers for future clinical use.”
A July 2020 NPR show was titled “Research On Personalized Medicine May Help COVID-19 Treatments.” This was deemed newsworthy:
The nationwide All of Us Research Program aims to tailor medical treatments of all kinds, including treatments that may be developed for the new coronavirus. So far more than 271,000 people nationwide have signed up to share data with the initiative. All of Us started under President Barack Obama in 2018 [sic] and involves institutions across the country.
“This is an exciting opportunity for our participants to have a direct impact on COVID-19 research, watching how their participation in this historic effort is truly making a difference,” said Dr. Elizabeth Burnside. “This focused initiative could be especially important for members of communities that are often underrepresented in health research and who may question the overall and personal benefit of research participation.”
In sum, there was legitimate medical interest early in the pandemic to use personalized medicine, in which drugs and drug combinations are optimized for individuals or certain population demographics. The central goal is minimization of drug and vaccine toxicities and adverse reactions and deaths.
But one thing is now clear. The personalized approach to managing the COVID pandemic has not been aggressively pursued by public health agencies. They have placed their resources and hopes with mass vaccination, both encouraged, coerced and increasingly mandated. The hope that we can vaccinate ourselves out of this pandemic has lost credibility.
In contrast, an alternative personalized approach, used by hundreds of physicians, based on generic medicines, vitamins and supplements have been more blocked than supported by the public health establishment as detailed in Pandemic Blunder.
Proposed New Public Health Strategy
Part One: Individuals decide either on their own or with the advice of their personal physician to be vaccinated for COVID. And to accept what government officials have decided are the best COVID medical solutions for outpatients and inpatients.
Part Two: Individuals choose a preferred medical professional who, on the basis of their education, training, experience and successful clinical results, offers alternatives to vaccination and government promoted medical solutions for outpatients and inpatients. The medical professional uses the patient’s medical history, conditions, needs and unique personal biologic and genetic circumstances to reach the best personalized medical solution.
The new public health strategy is, therefore, twofold. Widely available vaccination becomes focused or finely tuned to meet the desires and needs of part of the population. Along with use of the second part there is no sacrifice of true public health protection in the pandemic.
Part Two of the strategy directly addresses the widespread resistance to COVID vaccination by some Americans.
This is a rational perspective consistent with the belief in medical freedom. If one believes that there are some certain medical benefits of COVID vaccines, then traditional medical practice supports use of them on an individual therapeutic basis. This is a free personal decision, perhaps in consultation with their physician to accept that COVID vaccine risks are outweighed by its benefits.
Risks and benefits may be based on personal research of available medical information on vaccines. Or on information from government agencies, often without advice from their doctor.
Not to be ignored is increasing negative information on COVID vaccines reaching the public. One recent example from a published medical research article is that “cost-benefit analysis showed very conservatively that there are five times the number of deaths attributable to each inoculation vs those attributable to COVID-19 in the most vulnerable 65+ demographic.”
From this same study: within “eight days post-inoculation (where day zero is the day of inoculation), sixty percent of all post-inoculation deaths are reported in VAERS.” This study concluded: “It is unclear why this mass inoculation for all groups is being done, being allowed, and being promoted.”
In seeking to implement the wisdom of fit the medicine to the person, requires accepting the science that no two people, medically, genetically and biologically speaking, are exactly the same; this cannot be disputed. This is why using pharmacogenomics has a role to play. Looking at average statistical vaccine outcomes ignores and disrespects individual biologics, medical conditions, concerns and needs. This is an overselling of vaccines.
Americans have always wanted to see themselves as unique individuals. This translates to medical actions. Mass vaccination for everyone ignores and devalues this traditional belief by Americans.
There are also legitimate concerns that giving informed consent to a shot has not been based on a full, easily understood presentation of data on risks for different kinds of people with various medical histories.
Those who are resisting vaccination have a right to question that government agencies have not strictly followed medical science, data and experience. For example, a vast literature concludes that stay-at-home mandates, lockdowns and masking have not been effective in controlling pandemic impacts.
And there is now considerable evidence that those who are vaccinated can get breakthrough infections and spread the virus. “We have data now through the first week of August from the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, showing that… over 60 percent of seniors over the age of 65 in the hospital with Covid have been vaccinated,” noted the esteemed Dr. Peter McCullough recently.
This erodes the credibility of public health agencies and their medical authority and destroys public trust in federal agencies implementing pandemic policies.
The Fallacy Of Only One Medical Solution
If the government would let some part of the public choose personalized treatment to deal with COVID infection and another part to choose vaccination (and other government actions) why is that not an acceptable public health policy? The two-part strategy will become increasingly important as the government promotes or mandates regular booster shots over months or years.
Choice is rational if, indeed, there are personalized treatment options other than vaccination that can be obtained from some medical professionals. Indeed, there is now a vast medical literature on treatment protocols not only to cure but also to prevent COVID infection. They are being used very successfully by hundreds of American physicians.
And some information reaching the public like the very successful use of the generic ivermectin in India and Indonesia reinforces the inclination of some people to seek alternative medical solutions. Also, that 100 to 200 members of Congress have used this generic.
Moreover, now there is also a vast medical literature, increasingly known to the public, supporting the strong effectiveness of natural immunity obtained through previous COVID infection. It is a rational personal decision to conclude that one’s natural immunity is sufficient medical protection without taking on any vaccine risks. They have the right to seek a medical professional that agrees with that medical reality.
The only conceivable “loser” for this approach would be vaccine makers having a smaller market.
Physicians should have the freedom to advise their patients to either use a generic medicine treatment protocol or help document their natural immunity (with valid testing) to allow patients to embrace personalized medical action rather than be vaccinated.
In this two-part policy approach, of promoting a choice between personalized medical protection versus mass vaccination, the entire population could be fully protected without sacrificing medical freedom and without various forms of vaccine mandates. Public health does not require totalpublic acceptance of one medical solution.
This strategy is consistent with what many physicians said early in the pandemic. Namely that vaccination should be targeted on those with the highest risks of serious COVID impacts, not the entire population. It is widely known by the public and accepted by the medical establishment that this pandemic does not pose a serious threat of either illness or death for people below the age of about 70, unless they have serious comorbidities or serious illnesses. Infection fatality rates for most of the public do not argue for vaccination.
Much of the public wants and deserves the choice to use something other than a vaccine shot to protect themselves. That choice becomes operational only if the government allows and supports medical professionals to offer their patients alternatives to vaccines.
Here is the ethical and medical truth: Protecting individual health trumps protecting public health but is not antithetical to protecting public health. Overly coercive public health actions, such as vaccine mandates, are antithetical to protecting individual health for many people who fear even low probability negative reactions to vaccines.
Here is the ultimate medical truth: When all available medical science and means are fully used then the result is safely protecting public health without sacrificing medical freedom of both physicians and individuals.
The Current Strategy Has Failed
As we approach two years of dealing with this pandemic there is abundant evidence that the emphasis on mass vaccination has largely failed. The US has the highest number of COVID deaths on the planet. Even now, after wide use of the mass vaccination approach, recent 2,000 daily deaths are related to COVID infection. Every week more people are counted as COVID deaths than the 3,000 people who died in the 9/11 disaster.
Not to be ignored is the widely cited journal study titled “Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States.”
Breakthrough infections among the fully vaccinated are mounting. Because after about six months vaccines lose much of their effectiveness, especially against variants. And fully vaccinated people can and do carry and transmit the coronavirus.
If one wants first-hand accounts of how US physicians have documented their own negative impacts of COVID vaccines as well as those of their patients, then read a number of their affidavits.
Conclusions
A new public health strategy that no longer adheres to single-minded mass vaccination can obtain broad public support. Now is the time to endorse and support personalized medicine applied to the pandemic.
Much of the public may not yet know this. But missing from the new CDC definition of vaccine as of September 1, 2021 are these key phrases: “protecting the person from that disease” and “to produce immunity.” The new vaccine definition should reduce public confidence in current COVID vaccines. In fact, these changes reflect what is now known about the limitations of these vaccines. Fully vaccinated people can still get COVID disease and really do not have long lasting effective immunity to it.
Promoting choice is a far better public health approach than wide use of authoritarian pandemic controls that have devastated lives and produced mental stress and many collateral deaths.
On that last point, CDC has now recognized mood disorders put people at high risk for severe COVID cases. Compare pre-pandemic 2019 to 2020 when there were 53 million new cases of depression globally, a 28 percent increase, as reported in The Lancet. Surely, promoting more medical choice for addressing COVID would help people stay both mentally and physically healthy.
Resistance to vaccine mandates should not be seen as unpatriotic or as creating harm for others. Supporting personalized medicine is a way to avoid negative impacts on the American economy because of rigid, inflexible vaccine mandates that compel many Americans to accept job loss that in many ways imperil public safety.
Lastly, staying alive and safe surely is the presumed goal of all people. We have more tools than vaccines to help people meet their goal. Now we need the public health establishment to let all the tools be freely chosen.
Joel S. Hirschhorn’s new book Pandemic Blunder here: amazon.com
A senior bioethicist who heads a research team at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is taking the lead at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the debate over the ethics of COVID vaccine mandates.
Dr. Matthew Memoli, director of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at NIH, will argue against vaccine mandates during a Dec. 1 livestreamed roundtable session, which will be open to the public.
“There’s a lot of debate within the NIH about whether [a vaccine mandate] is appropriate,” David Wendler, a senior NIH bioethicist in charge of planning the session, told the WSJ. “It’s an important, hot topic.”
Memoli opposes mandates for the COVID vaccines authorized for emergency use in the U.S., and has chosen not to be vaccinated.
Memoli sought a religious exemption from the mandatory vaccine requirements imposed by health authorities in the District of Columbia, where he is licensed to practice medicine.
Memoli said he is willing to risk his job and his license for the right not to receive a COVID vaccine. During the scheduled roundtable early next month, he will make the case against mandates.
“I think the way we are using the vaccines is wrong,” Memoli said in a July 30 email to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIAID, and two of his lieutenants. Memoli called mandated vaccination “extraordinarily problematic.”
Memoli told the WSJone of Fauci’s colleagues thanked him for his email. Memoli said he supports COVID vaccines for high-risk populations including the elderly and obese, but said, “blanket vaccination of people at low risk of severe illness could hamper the development of more-robust immunity gained across a population from infection.”
Memoli, a 16-year veteran at the NIH was selected this month for a 2021 NIH director’s award — a top recognition from the head of the agency, for his supervision of a national study into undiagnosed COVID cases early in the pandemic.
Memoli said his children have received their childhood vaccines, and he will support the results of the ethics discussion regardless of the outcome.
“I do vaccine trials. I, in fact, help create vaccines,” Memoli told the WSJ. “Part of my career is to share my expert opinions, right or wrong … I mean, if they all end up saying I’m wrong, that’s fine. I want to have the discussion.”
Christine Grady, head of NIH’s Clinical Center bioethics department and Fauci’s wife, approved the Dec. 1 seminar — a session called “Grand Rounds.”
Grady said in an email she believes there is interest in the topic across the agency.
“Our hope is that the December Grand Rounds will be relevant to the debates that are going on around the country regarding vaccine mandates,” an agency spokeswoman said on Grady’s behalf.
Federal appeals court temporarily halts Biden’s COVID vaccine mandate for private employers
A federal appeals court on Saturday issued a stay temporarily halting the Biden administration’s private-employer COVID vaccine mandate, citing, “grave statutory and constitutional” issues with the requirement.
“Because the petitions give cause to believe there are grave statutory and constitutional issues with the mandate, the mandate is hereby stayed pending further action by this court,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit said in the order.
The case was brought by multiple businesses and several states, including Texas, Utah, Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi. They argued the requirements exceed the authority of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which will enforce the mandates, and amount to an unconstitutional delegation of power to the executive branch by Congress.
The Biden administration on Monday asked the federal court to lift the order blocking the mandate for large private employers. The administration said the petitioners were not claiming a “major prospect of harm” from the rule, so the court should allow the mandate to proceed while the case makes its way through the system.
“Accordingly, there is no need to address petitioners’ stay motions now, and the court should lift its administrative stay and allow this matter to proceed under the process that Congress set forth for judicial review of OSHA standards,” lawyers for the administration argued.
The White House on Monday said businesses should move forward with Biden’s vaccine mandate for private businesses, despite a federal court order temporarily halting the rules, CNBC reported.
“People should not wait,” White House Deputy Press Sec. Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters during a press briefing. “They should continue to move forward and make sure they’re getting their workplace vaccinated.”
The OSHA regulation applies to employers with at least 100 workers, creating an emergency temporary rule that will require employers to mandate workers be vaccinated against COVID or submit to regular testing. A deadline for companies to comply with the regulation was set for Jan. 4.
More than two dozen states have filed lawsuits against the Biden administration over the vaccine mandate for large private employers in the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 11th and D.C. Circuits. Federal law dictates cases be consolidated and heard by one federal appeals court chosen by a lottery.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the lottery could take place on or around Nov. 16, and the case could make its way to the Supreme Court.
Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.
The drug-induced nipple secretions of trans women are as good as mothers’ breast milk for babies, the University of Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust claimed in a letter to campaigners made public in a report by British think tank the Policy Exchange on Sunday.
The healthcare trust’s medical director, Rachel James, argued that the off-label prescription drug cocktail men transitioning to female take in order to produce milk was “similar to the natural hormones which encourage lactation to develop when the baby is newly born.”
“The evidence which is available demonstrates that the milk is comparable to that produced following the birth of a baby,” James wrote in the letter, sent to Children of Transitioners last August.
Biological men who wish to lactate must first take hormones to grow milk glands and then take high doses of either domperidone or metoclopramide to stimulate milk production. Neither drug is approved for this use, though they are occasionally prescribed off-label to biological women who have trouble lactating.
However, domperidone’s own manufacturer, Janssen, warns patients the drug “may cause unwanted side effects affecting the heart in a breastfed baby” and “should be used during breastfeeding only if your physician considers this clearly necessary.” … continue
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