A GP has told Talk Radio that masks have no place in schools and that “children have been convinced by society that they are the ones letting Grandma die.”
Speaking to Julia Hartley-Brewer, Dr. Renee Hoenderkamp said:
“In fact there are lots of arguments to not have masks in school. There are so many harms that are done by masks and I am so tired of hearing people say, “it’s nothing, it’s easy to wear a mask.” It isn’t.
I have seen children over the last 20 months reduced from gregarious, outgoing, confident young teenagers, into gibbering wrecks who are having panic attacks all day and coming to see me with their parents because they don’t know how to cope anymore.
And they don’t know how to cope because they have been convinced by society that they are the people that are letting Grandma die. They are the people that are catching this germ at school and then bringing it home and spreading it throughout society. We need to stop.”
It’s unconscionable isn’t it? And yet it is really happening. The nation’s children have been brainwashed into believing that they are walking talking biological weapons who can kill their grandparents with a hug.
If that isn’t child abuse, then what is?
“There are no arguments for masks in schools… there are so many harms that are caused by masks.”
Dr Renee Hoenderkamp says children “have been convinced by society that they are the ones letting Grandma die” and insists masks have no place at school.@JuliaHB1 | @DrHoenderkamppic.twitter.com/F9z2wUyxcD
It was only a matter of time before a vaccine-resistant strain of COVID-19 would surface, and that time has already come to pass. As reported by The Conservative Treehouse October 3, 2021:1
“What this study2 finds is exactly what vaccine developer Geert Vanden Bossche (Belgium) has been predicting. The predominance of antibody-resistant SARS-Cov-2 variants in vaccine breakthrough cases from the San Francisco Bay Area, California …
Dr. Vanden Bossche has been using Israeli data and showing3 how the widespread vaccination rates were creating pressure on the virus to mutate into variants with higher levels of contagion.
The unvaccinated group has been keeping the pressure down by defeating the virus and carrying natural immunity. However, as the unvaccinated population is increasingly made smaller, the pressure on the virus to mutate increases. Subsequently, these mutations stay at higher or more effective levels of infection.”
Vaccine-Evading Variants Are Emerging
The study, posted on the preprint server medRxiv, August 25, 2021, concluded that those who are fully “vaccinated” against COVID-19 are in fact more susceptible to COVID variant infections than unvaccinated people.
Vanden Bossche’s theory was that vaccine antibodies would suppress natural antibody responses, allowing variants to slip through, and this seems to be what’s happening. As explained by The Conservative Treehouse October 3, 2021:4
“Among vaccinated individuals, a COVID variant virus is not recognized by the specialized antibodies provided by the vaccine, and the natural antibodies have been programmed to stand down.”
According to the authors of the study:5
“Associations between vaccine breakthrough cases and infection by SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants have remained largely unexplored. Here we analyzed SARS-CoV-2 whole-genome sequences and viral loads from 1,373 persons with COVID-19 from the San Francisco Bay Area from February 1 to June 30, 2021, of which 125 (9.1%) were vaccine breakthrough infections.
Fully vaccinated were more likely than unvaccinated persons to be infected by variants carrying mutations associated with decreased antibody neutralization (78% versus 48%), but not by those associated with increased infectivity (85% versus 77%) …
These findings suggest that vaccine breakthrough cases are preferentially caused by circulating antibody-resistant SARS-CoV-2 variants, and that symptomatic breakthrough infections may potentially transmit COVID-19 as efficiently as unvaccinated infections, regardless of the infecting lineage.”
“Be careful around vaccinated people, because they can carry a more resistant form of COVID-19,” The Conservative Treehouse warns, adding that the narrow protection you get from the COVID shot will inevitably necessitate a booster shot for each emerging new variant that is resistant to the shots.
UK Data Show Increased COVID Mortality Among Fully Vaxxed
British data also raise serious questions about the wisdom of this injection campaign. In its Technical Briefing 23,6 published September 17, 2021, Public Health England reveals data showing the COVID death toll is actually higher among the fully vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated.
Between February 1, 2021, and September 12, 2021, 157,400 fully vaccinated patients (26.52% of total cases) were diagnosed with a Delta variant. Among the unvaccinated, there were 257,357 Delta variant cases (43.36% of total cases).
However, while Delta infections were far more prevalent among the unvaccinated, these patients also had better outcomes. In all, 63.5% of those who died from COVID-19 within 28 days of a positive test were fully vaccinated (1,613 compared to 722 in the unvaccinated group).
More Signs of Antibody-Dependent Enhancement
In a letter to the editor of the Journal of Infection,7 published August 9, 2021, three researchers point out that “infection-enhancing anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies recognize both the original Wuhan/D614G strain and Delta variants,” which suggests antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) is emerging. According to the authors:8
“Antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) of infection is a safety concern for vaccine strategies. In a recent publication, Li et al. (Cell 184 :4203–4219, 2021) have reported that infection-enhancing antibodies directed against the N-terminal domain (NTD) of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein facilitate virus infection in vitro, but not in vivo.
However, this study was performed with the original Wuhan/D614G strain. Since the Covid-19 pandemic is now dominated with Delta variants, we analyzed the interaction of facilitating antibodies with the NTD of these variants … [W]e show that enhancing antibodies have a higher affinity for Delta variants than for Wuhan/D614G NTDs …
As the NTD is also targeted by neutralizing antibodies, our data suggest that the balance between neutralizing and facilitating antibodies in vaccinated individuals is in favor of neutralization for the original Wuhan/D614G strain.
However, in the case of the Delta variant, neutralizing antibodies have a decreased affinity for the spike protein, whereas facilitating antibodies display a strikingly increased affinity. Thus, ADE may be a concern for people receiving vaccines based on the original Wuhan strain spike sequence (either mRNA or viral vectors).”
As noted by independent journalist Sharyl Attkisson,9 “Despite the fact that multiple medical authorities predicted, told us, and hoped, ADE would not impact Covid-19 vaccines, data from the study indicates it has done just that.”
Antibody Levels Decrease After Second Dose
While you’re not considered “fully vaccinated” until 14 days after your first dose of Janssen’s or AstraZeneca’s shot, or second dose of Moderna’s or Pfizer’s, a recent Israeli study found antibody levels actually decrease after the second dose of Pfizer’s COVID shot. The findings were reported by The Jerusalem Post, October 7, 2021:10
“Antibody levels decrease rapidly after two doses of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine, a study11 by researchers at the Sheba Medical Center published … in the New England Journal of Medicine …
The research also showed the probability that different groups of individuals — based on age and general health status — will find themselves below a certain antibody threshold after a period of six months.”
In all, 4,868 staff members at the Sheba Medical Center participated in the study,12 undergoing monthly serological tests to measure their antibodies for up to six months after their second Pfizer shot.
Everyone, regardless of age or gender, saw a rapid decline in their antibodies after the second dose. IgG antibodies — which are part of your humoral immune response — decreased at a consistent rate over time, whereas the neutralizing antibodies rapidly decreased during the first three months, and then slowed down thereafter. According to the authors:13
“Although IgG antibody levels were highly correlated with neutralizing antibody titers (Spearman’s rank correlation between 0.68 and 0.75), the regression relationship between the IgG and neutralizing antibody levels depended on the time since receipt of the second vaccine dose …
The highest titers after the receipt of the second vaccine dose (peak) were observed during days 4 through 30, so this was defined as the peak period.
The expected geometric mean titer (GMT) for IgG for the peak period, expressed as a sample-to-cutoff ratio, was 29.3. A substantial reduction in the IgG level each month, which culminated in a decrease by a factor of 18.3 after 6 months, was observed.
Neutralizing antibody titers also decreased significantly, with a decrease by a factor of 3.9 from the peak to the end of study period 2, but the decrease from the start of period 3 onward was much slower, with an overall decrease by a factor of 1.2 during periods 3 through 6. The GMT of neutralizing antibody, expressed as a 50% neutralization titer, was 557.1 in the peak period and decreased to 119.4 in period 6 …
Six months after receipt of the second dose, neutralizing antibody titers were substantially lower among men than among women, lower among persons 65 years of age or older than among those 18 to less than 45 years of age, and lower among participants with immunosuppression than among those without immunosuppression.”
COVID-19 Unrelated to Jab in 68 Countries, 2,947 US Counties
The Israeli findings above can help explain the findings of a study14 published September 30, 2021, in the European Journal of Epidemiology, which found no relationship between COVID-19 cases and levels of vaccination in 68 countries worldwide and 2,947 counties in the U.S. If anything, areas with high vaccination rates had slightly higher incidences of COVID-19. According to the authors:15
“[T]he trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people.”
Iceland and Portugal, for example, where more than 75% of their populations are fully vaccinated, had more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than Vietnam and South Africa, where only about 10% of the populations are fully vaccinated.16
Data from U.S. counties showed the same thing. New COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people were “largely similar,” regardless of the percentage of a state’s population that was fully vaccinated.
“There … appears to be no significant signaling of COVID-19 cases decreasing with higher percentages of population fully vaccinated,” the authors wrote.17 Notably, out of the five U.S. counties with the highest vaccination rates — ranging from 84.3% to 99.9% fully vaccinated — four of them were on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “high transmission” list. Meanwhile, 26.3% of the 57 counties with “low transmission” have vaccination rates below 20%.
The study even accounted for a one-month lag time that could occur among the fully vaccinated, since it’s said that it takes two weeks after the final dose for “full immunity” to occur. Still, “no discernable association between COVID-19 cases and levels of fully vaccinated” was observed.18
Key Reasons Why Reliance on Jabs Should Be Reexamined
The study summed up several reasons why the “sole reliance on vaccination as a primary strategy to mitigate COVID-19” should be reevaluated. For starters, the jab’s effectiveness is rapidly waning.
“A substantial decline in immunity from mRNA vaccines six months’ post immunization has … been reported,” the researchers noted, adding that even severe hospitalization and death from COVID-19, which the jabs claim to protect against, have increased from 0.01% to 9% and 0% to 15.1%, respectively, among the fully vaccinated from January 2021 to May 2021.19
If the jabs work as advertised, why haven’t these rates continued to rise instead of fall? “It is also emerging,” the researchers noted, “that immunity derived from the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine may not be as strong as immunity acquired through recovery from the COVID-19 virus.”20
For instance, a retrospective observational study published August 25, 2021, revealed that natural immunity is superior to immunity from COVID-19 jabs. According to the authors:21
“This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.”
Reinfection Is Very Rare
The fact is, while breakthrough cases continue among those who have gotten one or more COVID-19 injections, it’s extremely rare to get COVID-19 after you’ve recovered from the infection. How rare? Researchers from Ireland conducted a systematic review including 615,777 people who had recovered from COVID-19, with a maximum duration of follow-up of more than 10 months.22
“Reinfection was an uncommon event,” they noted, “with no study reporting an increase in the risk of reinfection over time.” The absolute reinfection rate ranged from 0% to 1.1%, while the median reinfection rate was just 0.27%.23,24,25
Another study revealed similarly reassuring results. It followed 43,044 SARS-CoV-2 antibody-positive people for up to 35 weeks, and only 0.7% were reinfected. When genome sequencing was applied to estimate population-level risk of reinfection, the risk was estimated at 0.1%.26
There was no indication of waning immunity over seven months of follow-up, unlike with the COVID-19 injection, which led the researchers to conclude that “Reinfection is rare. Natural infection appears to elicit strong protection against reinfection with an efficacy >90% for at least seven months.”27
All Risk for No Reward?
The purpose of informed consent is to give people all of the data related to a medical procedure so they can make an educated decision before consenting. In the case of COVID-19 injections, such data initially weren’t available, given their emergency authorization, and as concerning side effects became apparent, attempts to share them publicly were suppressed.
In August 2021, a large study from Israel28 revealed that the Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA jab is associated with a threefold increased risk of myocarditis,29 leading to the condition at a rate of one to five events per 100,000 persons.30 Other elevated risks were also identified following the COVID-19 jab, including lymphadenopathy (swollen lymph nodes), appendicitis and herpes zoster infection.31
Dr. Peter McCullough, an internist, cardiologist and epidemiologist, is among those who have warned that COVID-19 injections are not only failing but putting lives at risk.32
According to McCullough, by January 22, 2021, there had been 186 deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database following COVID-19 injection — more than enough to reach the mortality signal of concern to stop the program.
“With a program this size, anything over 150 deaths would be an alarm signal,” he said. The U.S. “hit 186 deaths with only 27 million Americans jabbed.” McCullough believes if the proper safety boards had been in place, the COVID-19 jab program would have been shut down in February 2021 based on safety and risk of death.33
Now, with data showing no difference in rates of COVID-19 cases among the vaxxed and unvaxxed, it appears more and more likely that the injections have a high level of risk with very little reward, especially among certain populations, like youth.
Mass Vaccination Drives Mutations
It’s well-known that if you put living organisms like bacteria or viruses under pressure, via antibiotics, antibodies or chemotherapeutics, for example, but don’t kill them off completely, you can inadvertently encourage their mutation into more virulent strains. Those that escape your immune system end up surviving and selecting mutations to ensure their further survival.
Many have warned about immune escape due to the pressure being placed upon the COVID-19 virus during mass vaccination,34 and according to one mathematical model,35 a worst-case scenario can develop when a large percentage of a population is vaccinated but viral transmission remains high, such as it is now. This is a prime scenario for the development of resistant mutant strains.36
At this point, COVID-19 injection failures and serious jab-related health risks are both apparent. We now also have data showing that having a high vaccination rate does nothing to lower COVID-19 incidence.
It might actually increase it slightly, as we’re seeing in India. In Kerala, India, which boasts a 93% vaccination rate, more than half of all new COVID cases are fully vaccinated, as are 57% of COVID-related deaths.37 With all data pointing in the same direction, it’s clear that COVID shots aren’t the answer. As noted in the European of Journal of Epidemiology :38
“Stigmatizing populations can do more harm than good. Importantly, other non-pharmacological prevention efforts (e.g., the importance of basic public health hygiene with regards to maintaining safe distance or handwashing, promoting better frequent and cheaper forms of testing) needs to be renewed in order to strike the balance of learning to live with COVID-19 in the same manner we continue to live a 100 years later with various seasonal alterations of the 1918 Influenza virus.”
If You’re ‘Vaccinated’ You May Be High-Risk for COVID
As predicted from the very beginning of the mass vaccination campaign, we’re now starting to see evidence of ADE, which makes people more prone to serious illness rather than less.
Even if your risk for ADE is small (and we have no data on prevalence as of yet), the data we do have suggest the shots aren’t ending outbreaks, and indeed can’t, end them, as it’s the vaccinated who are facilitating the emergence of vaccine-evading variants. The real answer is natural herd immunity, as natural immunity protects against most variants and not just one.
To be on the safe side, I recommend considering yourself “high-risk” for severe COVID if you’ve received one or more shots, and implement known effective treatment at the first sign of a respiratory infection.
Options include the Zelenko protocol,39 the MATH+ protocols40 and nebulized hydrogen peroxide, as detailed in Dr. David Brownstein’s case paper.41 Whichever treatment protocol you use, make sure you begin treatment as soon as possible, ideally at first onset of symptoms.
How many times has it been said on The Richie Allen Show, that if the NHS stopped testing for covid-19, the pandemic would disappear? I must have said it a thousand times.
Yesterday, Professor Sir Andrew Pollard told the commons science and technology committee:
“If you look across western Europe, we have about 10 times more tests done each day, per head of population. We do have a lot of transmission at the moment, but it’s not right to say that those rates are really telling us something that we can compare internationally.”
Pollard, who is credited as a co-creator of the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab, went on to say:
“I think when we look at these data it is really important not to bash the UK with a very high case rate, because actually it’s partly related to a very high testing rate. I’m not not trying to deny that there’s plenty of transmission at the moment, because there is. It’s just that the comparisons are problematic.”
The latest numbers suggest that there are around 50,000 new covid cases a day in the UK. This has led to calls for the return of restrictions including mandating masks again, working from home and vaccine passports.
However, Pollard said that hospital admissions and death figures were “misleading” as the real-time data cannot differentiate between those who are admitted or die “with” Covid and admissions or deaths due to Covid. He said:
“If you have a lot of transmission in the community, lots of people will die from lots of other causes that are not Covid but will be included in the numbers. The death rates are quite misleading at a time of high Covid in the community. Secondly, the hospital admission data are also misleading because they’re also generated in real time. So if I’m admitted for appendicitis today and I had a Covid positive test, that will appear in the daily data.”
This is the second time in a week that Pollard has said that the data is being misrepresented. This isn’t new. The government and its scientific advisers know this. The threat from covid-19 is being wildly exaggerated.
However, the broadcast media refuses to touch it. There is no pandemic. There never was. The tyranny would end in a heartbeat if the media explained to the public that they are being played and that they have nothing to fear from covid. Fat chance though.
The rediscovery of a series of grisly experiments on beagle puppies has galvanized social media users into demanding the arrest of “America’s doctor” Anthony Fauci. But where was everyone when his work was harming humans?
Images of a sad pair of beagle puppies, their heads encased in square cages as they lie hopelessly on a table, have yanked at America’s heartstrings since they were shoved back into the national spotlight by White Coat Waste Project, a group that calls out US government labs for animal cruelty and other misuse (and abuse) of citizens’ money.
Millions of taxpayer dollars were used to essentially torture the puppies to death in labs in and out of the US, according to the organization, which unearthed evidence of the cruelty in the form of over $21 million spent on a total of four experiments – none of which was medically necessary. One involved severing 44 puppies’ vocal cords so that their pained barking and whining wouldn’t bother the scientists; another deliberately infected them with sand flies over the course of 22 months, restricting their movements by locking their heads in boxes so that they could not even swat the insects away as they were being eaten alive.
It’s horrific stuff by any measure, beyond cartoonish levels of evil. Indeed, even Texas Senator Ted Cruz (R) claimed he thought the tweets he’d read about Fauci “literally ‘torturing puppies’” had to be “metaphorical.”
But while the outrage is justified, it’s also old news. One could ask why the masses have turned against Fauci only now, when his National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases has been funding the torture of puppies for years, with one of the horrific experiments dating from 2016. The most recent grant dated from 2020, meaning Fauci’s agency was vivisecting helpless furry animals at the University of Georgia even while he was being worshiped as America’s Doctor™ and posing for photos with other people’s dogs.
Even White Coat Waste Project refers to its own revelations as “Fauci’s other international scandal,” implying knowledge of a better-known episode in the fame-hungry doctor’s life.
One must ask why the popular outrage against Fauci over animal cruelty is not matched by an equal (if not more forceful) outrage over the doctor’s crimes against humanity. From his enthusiastic support of gain-of-function studies to his efforts to sideline a cheap, effective drug that could have saved thousands of lives during the AIDS epidemic in favor of a highly toxic alternative, Fauci’s hands are covered in the blood of humans as well as that of canines.
Indeed, Fauci’s behavior during the Covid-19 outbreak – trashing cheap but effective treatments in favor of expensive alternatives lacking proof of efficacy – eerily mirrors his actions during the early years of AIDS. Thousands of people have died in both cases after Fauci pushed deadly or ineffective medications – most notably the failed cancer drug AZT in the 1980s and the failed Ebola drug remdesivir in the last two years – while safer and more efficacious remedies sat on the shelf.
Discoveries that members of the National Institutes of Health, parent of Fauci’s NIAID, had hefty investments in Gilead, maker of remdesivir, as well as in Moderna, one of the manufacturers of an mRNA vaccine for Covid-19, have only raised more questions about Fauci’s motives during the coronavirus pandemic.
Fauci has also been caught lying repeatedly about his involvement in gain-of-function research aimed at making bat coronaviruses more infectious in humans. Despite his profuse denials of even funding such research in recent months, he previously defended the work by arguing that any knowledge gained from bolstering the infectious potential of such pathogens was “worth the risk” of unleashing a pandemic. Whether or not his NIAID-funded research played a part in the Covid-19 outbreak has not been proven, but Fauci’s furious tap-dancing around any questions regarding the Wuhan lab or gain-of-function research in general does him no favors.
Yet, somehow, none of this elicits anything like the howls of rage coming from dog-lovers on social media. The same outrage-on-demand contingent who demand countries like China and Vietnam stop eating dog meat, signing a petition with one hand while biting into a well-done burger with the other, insist on the closure of “barbaric” wet markets like the one we were told spawned the novel coronavirus in late 2019. This group’s problem is less animal cruelty than being reminded of that cruelty. They’d rather wait until their meat is shrink-wrapped and frozen in a supermarket than pick out the tastiest-looking chicken in the bunch and have it slaughtered then and there.
Ultimately, Fauci being arrested is an endpoint that animal rights activists, human rights activists, and the normally comatose members of Congress – 24 of whom actually signed a letter demanding answers from the once-untouchable Coronavirus Pope – should see eye-to-eye on. But the diminutive doctor must not be permitted to skate on his real crimes – whether it’s pandemic profiteering, bankrolling gain-of-function research in China that was at the time illegal to perform in the US, or allegedly perjuring himself in congressional testimony. Fauci has much to answer for. Dozens of dead puppies are just the tip of the iceberg.
Unfortunately, like other gleeful architects of the Covid-19 police state who’ve been caught in the midst of scandal – former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, for example – arresting Fauci on the basis of popular rage over dead puppies is likely to close the book on further prosecution, no matter how heinous his “real” crimes.
Just as Cuomo is unlikely to ever be held to account for the thousands of elderly New Yorkers who died because of his nursing-home order to house Covid-positive patients with the helpless elderly, Fauci will be permitted to enjoy his retirement – and big fat pension – in peace. Americans who have lost everything to his mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic must not let that happen.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Telegram
1. We cannot vaccinate ourselves out of the Covid problem. Mass vaccination is forcing the virus to produce variants, which escape any protection provided by the jab (see here for a report covering 68 countries). Instead, the vaccine should be offered only to those most vulnerable, such as the very elderly.
2. It is especially wrong to give it to children. They are at almost zero risk from Covid but subject to a real risk of damage from this particular vaccine, unrecognised during its development.
3. Cheap and effective treatment is available which keeps the vast majority of patients out of hospital. Health officials and regulators should support doctors who want to use these treatments, and to educate patients in how to strengthen their responses to the virus.*
4. Lockdowns and official fear-inducing propaganda have blighted the lives of millions, especially children, and must never be repeated.
The discussion is a must view for concerned individuals. It offers a completely different perspective from that of the NHS chiefs now calling for booster jabs and the return of Covid restrictions.
These edited contributions give a flavour of the discussion:
Dr Robert Malone, key architect of the mRNA technology that made possible the most commonly used Covid vaccines: ‘The virus is evolving very rapidly. This is akin to what happens if you overuse antibiotics. With universal vaccination, we’re driving towards an endpoint of vaccine-resistant mutants. The vaccines need to be used intelligently.
‘This set of vaccines that we have right now are gene therapy-based, and they have a common problem: they only have one antigen. It’s the spike antigen. When they were developing them, they didn’t realise the spike was biologically active. No fault of theirs. Everybody was in a rush.
‘But now it’s time to take a breath and say, “Hey, does this really make sense?” We don’t have to be just Left or Right, pro- or anti-vaccine. There’s a middle ground. We, as a community, need to protect people at high risk, not just here in our community, in our states; in my opinion, we need to protect the elders throughout the world. We don’t need to hoard all the vaccine for people that don’t really need it.
‘I’m not an anti-vaxxer, I’m a guy who’s spent the majority of my adult life developing vaccines. This is a technology platform that has enormous promise. And right now it’s in its infancy. The safety of the underlying technology is not yet fully demonstrated.
‘People did what they did in good faith and focused on a protein that they thought was fully safe – spike. But now, over a year later, we know that in the virus, this protein is responsible for much of the disease – the pathology in your vascular endothelial cells [blood vessel linings], the coagulation. And it’s unfortunate that this particular protein, in what appears to be a biologically active form, was used in these vaccines.’
Dr Richard Urso, ophthalmologist, Texas: ‘When people say, “They died of Covid”, they died of an inflammatory, thrombotic disease. They didn’t die from the virus running through their body. There’s a bunch of drugs that can be used for the purpose of inflammation in this disease. There’s a bunch of drugs for thrombosis. Hopefully at some point we’ll have a really good, early treatment that’s directed to the virus itself. Right now we have other, very effective treatments.
‘About 330 children have died of Covid in a year and a half [under-19s in the US]. Typically, about 50,000 children a year die – many from drownings, from car accidents. You need to look at that as you look at the risk to children. And do they spread? – No, at least seven different studies show that children spreading to adults is close to zero.’
Dr Brian Tyson, family doctor, California, who has successfully treated more than 6,000 Covid patients and now finds children are getting sick from typical winter illnesses, rather than Covid: ‘With treatment started from day 1 to 7, I have had zero deaths. From treatment started from day 7 to 14, I have four – two died the same day they showed up at the clinic, and two died in hospital.
‘Under that data Dr Urso was talking about, not one healthy child died from Covid-19. It was children who had four or five risk factors – morbid obesity being number one, diabetes number two, weakened immune system number three; kids on chemotherapy and things like that. So yes, they’re going to have opportunistic infections, but that’s no different than would normally take out these kids anyway, unfortunately.’
Dr Heather Gessling, family doctor, Missouri: ‘My numbers exactly match up with Brian’s. I’ve treated about 1,500 and I’ve had one death, because there was some delay in treatment.’
Dr Mark McDonald, child psychiatrist, Los Angeles: ‘Fear has been the driving force of this pandemic from the very beginning. What’s driving the fear now is propaganda. I see kids all day long. The developmental stage that children need to go through – babies, toddlers, young adults – is being foreclosed on them.
‘Brown University department of paediatrics published a study that found babies born after January 1, 2020, have an IQ drop of 20 points. Why? They don’t see faces. They don’t play. They don’t have exposure to friends. They don’t go to school. They’re basically locked in their homes, looking at their parents for a year and a half. And their brains have not developed.
‘My concern is that we are building a generation of young people who are so traumatised that they will never fully recover. They’re always going to be scarred emotionally.
‘I don’t mean to be depressing. I mean to be alarming, so everyone can finally say, “Stop!” We’ve got to stop the damage, and then figure out what to do about it.’
Dr Gessling: ‘I think “Stop the damage!” means to acknowledge what we have done wrong. We should reverse all the measures that have been implemented. Patients, families, parents, should take it upon themselves to feel empowered. We need to get back to the basics, because we’ve done this wrong for so long.
‘One of the books we all had in medical school was Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine. This is what we have forgotten: “Many specific host factors influence the likelihood of acquiring an infectious disease: age, immunisation history, prior illnesses, level of nutrition, pregnancy status, coexisting illnesses and perhaps emotional state – all have some impact on the risk of infection after exposure to a potential pathogen.” All we have done is focus on one of those: immunisation history.
‘The ability to provide early, effective treatment should make us feel empowered. We should not feel afraid any more.’
Dr Pierre Kory, pulmonary and critical care specialist; founding member and president, the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance; co-author of two Covid prevention and treatment protocols: ‘My hopes are that more and more attention is going to be paid to early treatment strategies, especially now the vaccinated are getting sick. Many people were led to believe that if you get your vaccine, we’re going to end this thing, you don’t have to worry about it, you can carry on with your lives.
‘But guess what? My colleagues are talking about even scarier variants that are coming. And so we need more tools to fight this. The positive message is, we have them, and they can handle any variant that comes at us. We just need to get that message out. I don’t believe anybody has died who’s had effective early treatment.’
Dr John Littell, family doctor, Florida: ‘What we’re seeing now is that patients are getting early treatment with ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and a host of other medications, because of this free exchange of ideas in this group of physicians and others around the world.
‘Dr Tyson, Dr Gessling and myself are family physicians, OK? So we’re the folks who have been in those front lines getting the phone calls in the middle of the night from concerned parents. And what you’ve just heard from Dr Kory and from us is that is that if you take the right preventive treatment, you’re approaching zero per cent mortality.’
Dr Kory: ‘If we have effective treatments, why aren’t they being recognised and disseminated across the world? I think we’re up against two forces.
‘The first is that in general, our health agencies are suffering what’s called regulatory capture. They’re largely driven by financial interests that are making sure that the solution to the pandemic is one that is profitable. Vaccines are profitable.
‘The other, somewhat overlapping challenge is that in academia, in the last ten years, there’s been this increasing belief that the only proof of efficacy of a drug has to come out of a large, double-blind, randomised controlled trial. You have to make the diagnosis – everyone has to have a positive test; they have to have symptoms; they have to be enrolled, consented, randomised, and then the drug is delivered. Each one of those steps takes time. So it’s often very delayed, and under-dosed – they’re using doses that I was using six months ago.’
Dr Ryan Cole, medical director, Cole Diagnostics, Idaho, who has done more than 100,000 Covid tests in the past year: ‘Covid is a clotting disease. When we give a spike protein [through the vaccine], that is an active biologic molecule. We chose the wrong molecule, which causes disease.
‘So what do I see under the microscope? We see clotting under the skin, in the lungs, in the blood vessels, in the brain – not from the virus, but from the spike from the vaccine itself.
‘Now consider the numerator and the denominator. Are most people going to be fine? Yes. And I want to emphasise that.
‘[But] in our data from around the world, from the United States, from the UK, from EudraVigilance in Europe, we have seen more death and damage from this one medical product than all other vaccines combined in the last several decades, in just a short, eight-month window of time. It has done more damage than any other medical product, therapy, shot, modality, of anything we’ve ever allowed to stay on the market to this point.
‘Do I mean to sound alarmist? No, I’m being factual. And when I look at it under the microscope and I see the parts of people – or people that are no longer with us – the damage and the disease is caused by that spike protein. It is present.
‘A virus is a humanitarian issue. When we divide ourselves in thought and don’t listen to science any more, we’re going down the wrong paths.
‘We are forgetting what our amazing immune system does. How many of you had chickenpox when you were a kid? And how many of you have ever had it again? Did you need a shot? No. Grandma had measles – has grandma ever had it again? No, because her immune system works.
‘Half of kids in the US have already had Covid. We’re not antibody testing – we’re treating everybody with this terrible oppression of, “You’ve got to wear a mask . . . you’ve got to stay home if somebody in your classroom tests positive.” It denies basic science.
‘Under age 50 with no co-morbidities, your chances of dying from this disease are about nil, and if you get early treatment they are even closer to nil. So if you are a Covid recoverer, you don’t need a shot.
‘The shot can damage the hearts of children. There are more children who’ve had myocarditis – and there’s never such a thing as mild myocarditis. That’s inflammation of the heart. Once you get inflammation, you get scarring. Those kids’ hearts are damaged for life. Kids have died of heart attacks after the shot, and there are more kids that have had myocarditis than have died from Covid. Kids aged zero to 18 survive this virus at a statistical 100 per cent – 99.997 per cent. So why are we punishing kids for a virus they survive?’
*For up-to-date guides to home treatment of Covid, see here and here.
“Because science” is new slang terminology that refers to bogus explanations or justifications for why things are done a certain way during the pandemic.
I have come to love the term because it encapsulates the contempt for the public evidenced by officials who usually know little about science but regurgitate “the science” to justify some unjustifiable policy.
Aaron Siri, a wonderful attorney, has challenged US health agencies on many of their illogical and often illegal pandemic policies.
He just posted the exchange he has had with CDC over its refusal to acknowledge the presence of immunity to COVID in the recovered.
While the whole document is interesting, the very end contains some of CDC’s “because science” answers.
Let me explain what CDC has been doing over the past year: whenever there is strong evidence that shows a CDC claim or policy is dead wrong, CDC’s “scientists” conduct a bogus study which can involve cherrypicking endpoints, choosing specially selected time periods, and a variety of other shenanigans to produce “evdience” that calls into question the real science. They have done this with masks, lockdowns, recovered immunity, and vaccines for children, that I can recall off the bat. I worked with a group of scientists who tried to reproduce the CDC’s calculations. But we couldn’t, because even though the CDC “scientists” were friendly and seemingly open, they never would provide enough information on their data set and their algorithm(s) for us to check their work. Clearly that was CDC policy, even though it flies in the face of standard ICMJE medical publication standards.
And that is what they did in this case. Despite mountains of evidence regarding the strength of recovered immunity, CDC just cited its own bogus study, while leaving the door open in case “the science” changed in the future. Where is the shame?
And, the agencies don’t mind dragging litigation on forever, since it is your money that is paying for it.
An NHS surgeon who’s contributed to the Daily Sceptic before has sent us an email offering us his perspective on the current NHS ‘crisis’. It’s a reminder that even though the current pressure on the NHS cannot realistically be attributed to Covid hospital admissions – which remain at around 5% of the total – that doesn’t mean that the NHS isn’t under strain.
There are various debates about whether or not the NHS is under pressure with pundits rightly pointing out that the NHS is not under pressure due to Covid-related disease. I think at this stage this is an unhelpful diversion. The fact is there is a big problem and trying to disprove it by just looking at Covid is missing the bigger picture.
The NHS is under a lot of pressure due to processes unrelated to Covid workload. While hospitals are not yet full to the brim, the overall activity levels are higher than usual for certain regions (whether this is due to the catch-up effect, neglect, the iatrogenic effect of recent non-pharmaceutical or other interventions/measures, etc.). The main crisis is related to staffing. This labour shortage has been noted in many sectors of the economy, but the staffing crisis (mainly non-doctoral) in the NHS has been chronic and worsening for years. This year tipped the balance (psychological exhaustion, physical exhaustion, sickness absence, track and trace, etc.). In our region hospitals are routinely cancelling (relatively non-essential) surgery due to lack of staff required to either run operating theatres or wards/ancillary services. Hospitals are routinely running extra activity on Saturdays to try and catch up on cancer work. This is a weekly occurrence not limited to the place I work. Factor in the very long (self-created) waiting lists and the winter (which has not even started), and the crisis could become unmanageable.
I am pessimistic. Regardless of the Covid workload, the Government may use a real crisis in the NHS to justify more pointless non-pharmaceutical interventions and vaccine passports (complete nonsense from a medical, ethical and social perspective) out of desperation, misconception, or both.
I find myself in the position that I must use an alias for fear of reprisal. Those days may be quickly coming to an end, as hospitals are denying requests for vaccine exemptions with impunity. I will likely soon be out the door, with nothing to lose. Even if I survive this round, if the “pandemic” continues, it won’t be long before I am shelved like a can of spam.
Doctors need to be called out. From early in the pandemic, it was like a mass hypnosis or forgetfulness of everything we had learned in medical school. Immune system knowledge was shelved and replaced by government dictates. The thought of early outpatient treatment with “off label” drugs that could modulate the immune system was forbidden. We essentially told patients that they had to go home and wait until they were sick enough to be hospitalized, then treatment would begin. Imagine telling all diabetics that there is no metformin, Glucophage, or insulin. Would we really wait until patients are in diabetic ketoacidosis, and then treat them only at the hospital? It is medical malfeasance of a grand scale.
We physicians gave up our training and our reasonable medical thought process. The reasons are multiple. First, it was the easy way out. Second, many of us are employed and fear reprisal. Third, despite what the public thinks, we physicians are not bold leaders, we tend to be sheep, and are afraid of having an entire institution ostracize us or our colleagues to think us crazy.
As we got to the point of vaccine rollout, doctors were not using the scientific method, questioning and challenging prevailing hypotheses. They kept their heads down, closed clinics, converted to telemedicine, and pushed only the jab.
I had conversations with doctors who are supposed experts in virology and immunology denying the lasting immunity of natural infection. Conversations about natural immunity:
“I have antibodies.”
“But they will wane.”
“But I have memory cells.”
Dumbfounded look.
Really, are these the leaders we want?
Other conversations about the safety of vaccines:
“The vaccine is safe.”
“No, we would have shut down any trial in the past after even 100 deaths.”
“This is more serious.”
“But the survival rate is about 99.6%.”
“It’s killing people.”
“So is the vaccine”
“You can’t believe VAERS.”
“It was set up to help protect the public, and if anything, it is underreporting side effects.”
“You’re a conspiracy theorist.”
Or conversations about early treatment
“You must get the vaccine, it is the only “proven” treatment, there are no other treatments.”
“Really, ivermectin has eradicated COVID in India, parts of Mexico, Japan….”
“It is a horse dewormer.”
“It won a Nobel Prize in medicine, is a WHO essential drug, and has been around for decades with a great safety profile.”
“No, only the vaccine works.”
“But it is failing”
“You are a denier and a conspiracy theorist.”
“Sigh….”
Lately, it has been all about getting 100% of the population jabbed. For what reason? I am not sure, and some of the more detailed and investigated theories scare me. I shudder to think. But last year’s heroes are being labeled selfish and villainous for not getting the vaccine. Hospital systems have abandoned their community’s health and ignored early successful outpatient treatment in favor of huge government subsidies for inpatient and ICU treatment. The success of these treatments was not great, but that is another article. Now we have the same hospital systems turning their backs on their own employees. Basically, health providers have a choice, get shot, or get fired. How does that help? Both vaxxed and unvaxxed can spread the virus, so it doesn’t help anyone. It only helps the hospital to get more government money by meeting quotas.
I, for one, will remember that when we faced a real crisis, the hospitals and many physicians chose money and profit over their own community’s best interest. Perhaps it is time for groups of physicians to get back to running their own healthcare clinics and hospitals. We used to have a code of ethics. We used to put patients first. Not anymore.
As for physicians, those who are blindly following the government edicts are culpable in a moral atrocity. Bullying and deriding patients who chose to refrain from this still experimental therapy is an abomination. (You will say it isn’t experimental anymore, to which I would say that just because the government broke its own rules regarding approval, doesn’t make it legal or right). Patients have sincere beliefs for making their choice. Respect their thoughts. Do you yell as much at smokers, drinkers, fornicators, drug abusers, etc? No, I think not. I think you chose to fit in because it gives you a sense of righteousness.
And going so far as to encourage vaccination in children and pregnant women is crazy. There is blood on the hands of any physician who does this. With children, there is no benefit to the vaccine, only harm. They would serve themselves and society better with natural immunity. The vaccine hasn’t been studied on women and their babies. It is pregnancy category X (unknown) but being pushed wholesale on these poor women without proper studies. Shame on you, doctors who are doing this. I certainly have lots to answer for when I meet my maker, but this is on another level.
I beg physicians to get back to basics, remember all the epidemiology and immunology that bored us to tears in school. Investigate the real literature and take a stand. Society needs us to do this. Even if you have been vaccinated, help those who are fighting for their lives. Stand up against this forced vaccine tyranny. Support those who have legitimate reasons for declining the jab. If you don’t stand up now, who will stand up for you when you are faced with your choice of yet another booster or your job.
We see unprecedented use of ‘unprecedented’ today. Yes, it applies to putting entire nations under house arrest. Yes, it applies to the near-universal wearing of masks (more accurately muzzles). Yes, it applies to needing a passport to be normal. But perhaps the entire phenomenon we are experiencing is not unprecedented.
Let us look back in time to 380, when Rome became the superspreader of Christianity by making it their empire’s official religion. Within 100 years the Roman Empire collapsed but despite the death of its host, Christianity survived and for over 1000 years the head of the Catholic Church was the most powerful figure in all of Europe.
Most rulers of nations, then and now, have one core raison d’être, which is to protect us from other versions of themselves. But the Catholic Church would tolerate no other versions. Its Pope reigned supreme, having spiritual authority over kings, dukes, princes and local overlords. As the Lord’s Prayer tells us “…thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Your local priesthood conveyed the will to be done on earth, working hand in glove with the local lord, whose temporal power was recognised by God’s official mouthpiece, the Pope.
You may ask how the church came to have and maintain such power. The answer is simple: faith and fear.
They had agents throughout the land, with a church in every town. The priest class, from archbishops down to parish priest, were the most highly-educated and respected sector of society. The priesthood was a sought-after secure profession, and people had faith in the truth of what the priest told them. It was often sound advice they could find nowhere else. The church had a near monopoly on education, with part of the core curriculum being God and creation, Jesus and miracles, sin and salvation, as well as good deeds, forgiveness, and useful guidance. Most priests were good people, people of faith, and following their advice was the passport to Heaven.
Then there is the fear. The devil can manifest anywhere in the world, tempting people to stray from the path of righteousness. The devil can be lurking unseen within any one of us, prompting urges that God wants us to supress. We must be on our guard from those he may have corrupted. We must follow the priest’s advice to avoid the fearsome prospect of Hell.
Believers knew that if they behaved badly during their 50 or so years of this existence, they would suffer a miserable and horrific existence in Hell, forever – like eternity. What a terrifying prospect! This was the picture the church taught and most people absolutely believed what they were told by the highly educated priests. Bastards, born out of wedlock, were a product of sin and not welcome in society. Those who missed church on Sunday were avoided. Just speaking with these dangerous people could infect one with sinful thoughts.
Not all the ‘common’ people bought into the church’s teachings or went to priests for advice on things spiritual or material. Some chose a more direct spiritual interface with the living world. Many were women who also practiced unlicensed healing, whether through herbs or ‘occult’ practices invoking natural energies of the earth and human body. Tens of thousands of these women were burned, drowned or tortured to death as witches, for their deviant beliefs.
Of course, being a God-fearing church goer did not stop people from being sinners but at least you were trying and could confess your sins to the priest, do some penance and be forgiven. Without that escape clause, the ungodly sinner was doomed to Hell.
Those who wrote or spoke publicly in contradiction of the church’s teachings were guilty of heresy and their books burned and banned, as well as the heretic at times. To speak disrespectfully of things holy was considered blasphemy, punishable as a serious crime, occasionally warranting death. This unfortunate situation still prevails in many Islamic nations, with a religion 600 years younger than Christianity.
The Christian church does not have the power it once held over the minds of those in so-called Western cultures. There are still some who believe in a God who created the Universe in a few days and did it all for the benefit of humankind, before throwing us out of the Garden of Eden. Most, if not indoctrinated early, instinctively reject the idea that we are born with the burden of sin and can only find spiritual truth and salvation through the son of God, whom we crucified. The spiritual credibility of the church has not been helped in recent years by the paedophile scandals surrounding its priesthood.
Today we are witnessing a new “religion” taking hold and this one has nothing to do with spirituality, yet has spread faster than any before. It has gripped the minds of billions across the planet and is also powered by faith and fear, with an enemy as invisible as Hell and the Devil himself. Curiously, it has had its greatest success to date in the ‘West,’ perhaps filling the fear vacuum that has been created in the world’s traditionally Christian cultures.
Today’s priesthood is embodied in the medical industry, staffed by highly trained professionals with secure careers, for whom the public has high regard. Just as we once needed priests to act as intermediaries to God, we now need trained doctors as intermediaries to our bodies and guardians of our health. Many people are sadly out of touch with their mortal frame and have unquestioning faith in doctors knowing best – the high priests of health.
The medical establishment does not like competition for its services, doing whatever it can to ban or denigrate healing practices other than their own, whether herbs or naturopathy, prayer or acupuncture, homeopathy or reiki. Theirs is the only true path to health, and all other routes are portrayed as fraught with danger.
We do not know how well organised Christians were before the Romans assimilated them – before Christian belief was standardized and regulated at the Council of Nicaea. We do know that before the healing profession was dominated by the World Health Organisation, The Centre for Disease Control, and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, there was full medical freedom of choice for the individual. In 1880 there were more homeopaths in the USA than allopathic doctors, while mechanics earned more than either of them. It is no accident that the WHO, CDC, and GAVI are largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry, and headed by their chosen men and women. They have become today’s equivalent of the Vatican during its 1000 years of dominance. They claim a monopoly on truth and woe betide those who question or counter it.
Notable physicians, respected virologists, vaccine designers, even a Nobel Prize winner have countered the official narrative and lost their positions, been discredited and denounced. They are denied any further involvement in the hospitals, clinics and practices spread across the land as thickly as were early chapels, churches and cathedrals. Popular speakers, performers and entertainers have had their bookings cancelled for refusing to be vaccinated, or for questioning the push to global vaccination. We could view these outspoken characters as being excovidicated from the medical and media establishments.
It takes a lot of faith to accept being injected with a partially tested new-concept mRNA injection. Taking the second jab could be seen as one’s baptism into the Covidian Church. Like it or not, it is an affirmation and commitment. And unlike the splashing of holy water and utterance of sacred words, it may be difficult to decouple our immune system from the one implanted by Big Pharma. This new system will need an upgrade every 6 months to keep your internal software up to date. Where have we heard this before? What will system crashes look like?
Just as going to church does not prevent God-fearing folk from sinning, taking the injection does not prevent Covid-fearing folk from getting the virus, or from spreading it. But, we are told, if the case is bad enough to need hospitalisation, the sufferer will be less likely to die. Considering that the Covid survival rate, before vaccination began, was over 99.9%, how much the vaccine increases it is, perhaps, a moot point.
In today’s somewhat free society, it is okay to declare that the Queen is a shape-shifting lizard, okay to accuse the Bush family and their associates of taking down the three towers (the twins and WTC 7); okay to accuse Hilary Clinton of running a paedophile ring and drinking an extract of tortured children.
It is decidedly NOT okay to counter the narrative of the BIG PHARMA’ three – to suggest that Covid-9 is not an existential threat; to recommend tested known treatments for it; to disclose that natural immunity is widespread and better than jabs; to publicise the hundreds of thousands of documented adverse reactions to the injection. Those who question or counter the narrative on any level are guilty of (forgive me) ‘blaspharmy.’ Thou shalt not speak against the trinity of the CDC, WHO and GAVI.
Instead of burning books today, they ‘burn’ the online platforms of those who question or challenge the narrative of Big Pharma. YouTube channels are shut down without warning, with all their content removed from view – troves of information that was approved and online for years. Twitter accounts are terminated. Much like the bad old Soviets used to remove people from official photos when they fell out of favour, today Wikipedia entries of repeat blaspharmers can be erased, with Google searches relegating links to 20th places. This all may be more ‘climate-friendly’ than burning books, but does immense harm to the free flow of ideas, the emergence of truth, and the connected feedback loops that power positive evolution.
The parallel has been made with the Papal precedent. There is much of positive value to gain from Christian teachings but they are not and never were the only source of spiritual and moral guidance. Neither is the medical establishment the only viable source of sound and effective advice on healing and health. It’s biggest player, Big Pharma, does exceedingly well out of poor health.
We are at a unique and yes, unprecedented turning point in the story of our species. Do we remain independent human beings, able to freely associate and communicate with each other, how and where it suits us? Do we remain able to choose what we eat, and travel by the means of our choice, all while having primary responsibility for our health and well-being?
Or do we welcome being merged with outside agencies, starting with one that manages our vital immune system with regular injections? Vaccine passports, once established, would (for greater ease) morph into a body implanted chip and soon also serve as door key, passport, credit card, wallet, bus/train ticket, bar tab, membership card – and desirable citizen monitor.
We know how once wild animals were so attracted by regular food and a roof that domestication became possible. Are we sacrificing the last vestiges of personal freedom and privacy to become part of a digitally managed body of people? What are the consequences of this? We do not know, but the ‘religious’ suppression of opposition to its rapid implementation does not bode well. Technology has and can make our lives easier without being under central control by coercive bodies, sometimes headed by psychopathic personalities.
If it looks like an externally managed future is being forcibly rammed down our throats that could well be because it is. What can we do about it? The most powerful tool we have is mass non-compliance, which begins with each and every one of us, including small businesses, and those big ones with customer interests at heart. If enough employers, employees, diners, care workers, café goers, hospitality staff, shoppers and so forth refuse to pretend there is an existential killer on the loose, the scheme will immediately fall apart. And that’s another article…
In a recent viral tweet, the anti-Brexit campaigner Jolyon Maugham criticised the Government’s initial Covid strategy (which, as we know, was later ditched in favour of lockdowns).
I’m no defender of the Government’s response to the pandemic, but it’s hard to imagine a more wrong-headed criticism than this. Indeed, it’s impressive how many fallacies Maugham managed to pack into 280 characters.
First: “Herd immunity”. As the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration have tirelessly pointed out, describing any response to the pandemic as a ‘herd immunity strategy’ is like describing a pilot’s plan to land a plane as a ‘gravity strategy’. Given that Covid cannot be eliminated, herd immunity will eventually be reached, regardless of what we do.
The goal of any plan to address Covid, write Kulldorff and Bhattacharya, “should be to minimise disease mortality and the collateral harms from the plan itself, while managing the build-up of immunity in the population.”
Second, the implication of Maugham’s tweet is that the Government’s initial strategy was motivated by Conservative ideology, and that the alternative – lockdown – is what’s backed by science.
Yet, as I and others have pointed out, it’s actually lockdown that deviates substantially from the pre-Covid consensus. Indeed, the UK’s pandemic preparedness plan does not even mention the term. And in 2019, the WHO classified “quarantine of exposed individuals” as “not recommended under any circumstances”.
Given that the first lockdown was implemented by a communist one-party state, and that subsequent lockdowns were imposed with almost no prior discussion, it would make more sense to say lockdown was motivated by ideology.
Third, the virus does not “target” working class and poorer people, while leaving Etonians and bankers unscathed. It is not some pathogenic agent of class warfare.
If “target” is taken to mean “infect”, then the virus targets people who aren’t immune to it. And if “target” is taken to mean “kill”, then it would be most accurate to say the virus targets the old and the immunocompromised. After all, these groups account for the overwhelming majority of deaths.
Now, it’s true that death rates have been higher in working class occupations, as I noted in a previous post. But this is far more plausibly due to lockdown than to the Government’s initial strategy, which was in any case abandoned in March of 2020.
As the art critic J. J. Charlesworth quipped, “There was never any lockdown. There was just middle-class people hiding while working-class people brought them things.” Middle-class people like Jolyon Maugham, I might add.
On July 28, the Wall Street Journal ran our article “Why Is the FDA Attacking a Safe, Effective Drug?” In it, we outlined the potential value of the antiparasitic drug ivermectin for Covid-19, and we questioned the FDA’s vigorous attack on ivermectin. Many people praised us and many criticized us. We had clearly covered a sensitive subject. It didn’t help that one of the studies we referenced was retracted shortly before we submitted our article. Within hours of learning that fact, we sent a mea culpa to the Journal’s editors. They acted quickly, adding a note at the end of the electronic version and publishing our letter. It’s important to address two criticisms of our work. The first is that we exaggerated the FDA’s warning on ivermectin. The second is that Merck’s stance on ivermectin proved that even the company that developed ivermectin thought that it doesn’t work for Covid-19.
First, we didn’t exaggerate the FDA’s warning on ivermectin. Instead, the agency changed its website after our article was published, probably to reflect the points we made. Second, Merck had two incentives to downplay ivermectin’s usefulness against the novel coronavirus. We’ll explain both points more fully.
Ivermectin was developed and marketed by Merck & Co. while one of us (Hooper) worked there years ago. Dr. William C. Campbell and Professor Satoshi Omura were awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. They earned it for discovering and developing avermectin. Later Campbell and some associates modified avermectin to create ivermectin. Merck & Co. has donated four billion doses of ivermectin to prevent river blindness and other diseases in areas of the world, such as Africa, where parasites are common. The ten doctors who are in the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance call ivermectin “one of the safest, low-cost, and widely available drugs in the history of medicine.” Ivermectin is on the WHO’s List of Essential Medicines and ivermectin has been used safely in pregnant women, children, and infants.
Ivermectin is an antiparasitic, but it has shown, in cell cultures in laboratories, the ability to destroy 21 viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the cause of Covid-19. Further, ivermectin has demonstrated its potential in clinical trials for the treatment of Covid-19 and in large-scale population studies for the prevention of Covid-19.
Contradicting these positive results, the FDA issued a special statement warning that “you should not use ivermectin to treat or prevent Covid-19.” The FDA’s warning, which included language such as, “serious harm,” “hospitalized,” “dangerous,” “very dangerous,” “seizures,” “coma and even death,” and “highly toxic,” might suggest that the FDA was warning against pills laced with poison. In fact, the FDA had already approved the drug years ago as a safe and effective anti-parasitic. Why would it suddenly become dangerous if used to treat Covid-19? Further, the FDA claimed, with no scientific basis, that ivermectin is not an antiviral, notwithstanding its proven antiviral activity.
Interestingly, at the bottom of the FDA’s strong warning against ivermectin was this statement: “Meanwhile, effective ways to limit the spread of COVID-19 continue to be to wear your mask, stay at least 6 feet from others who don’t live with you, wash hands frequently, and avoid crowds.” Was this based on the kinds of double-blind studies that the FDA requires for drug approvals? No.
After some critics claimed that we overstated or overreacted to the FDA’s special warning, we reviewed the FDA’s website and found that it had been changed, and there was no mention of the changes nor any reason given. Overall, the warnings were watered down and clarified. We noticed the following changes:
The false statement that “Ivermectin is not an anti-viral (a drug for treating viruses)” was removed.
“Taking a drug for an unapproved use can be very dangerous. This is true of ivermectin, too” was changed to the less alarming “Ivermectin has not been shown to be safe or effective for these indications.” (Indications is the official term used in the industry to denote new uses for a drug, such as new diseases or conditions, and/or new patient populations.)
The statement, “If you have a prescription for ivermectin for an FDA-approved use, get it from a legitimate source and take it exactly as prescribed,” was changed to, “If your health care provider writes you an ivermectin prescription, fill it through a legitimate source such as a pharmacy, and take it exactly as prescribed.” This more clearly acknowledges that reasonable physicians may prescribe ivermectin for non-FDA-approved uses, such as Covid-19.
The ending statement about masks, spacing, hand washing, and avoiding crowds was replaced with one that recommended getting vaccinated and following CDC guidelines.
The reasonable statement “Talk to your health care provider about available COVID-19 vaccines and treatment options. Your provider can help determine the best option for you, based on your health history” was added at the end.
The new warning from the FDA is more correct and less alarming than the previous one.
In a statement from February, Merck, the company that originated and still sells ivermectin, agreed with the FDA that ivermectin should not be used for Covid-19. “We do not believe that the data available support the safety and efficacy of ivermectin beyond the doses and populations indicated in the regulatory agency-approved prescribing information.”[2]
To some, this appeared to be a smoking gun. Merck wants to make money, they reason, and people are interested in using ivermectin for Covid-19, therefore, Merck would warn against such usage only if the scientific evidence were overwhelming. But that’s not how the pharmaceutical industry works.
Here’s how the FDA-regulated pharmaceutical industry really works.
The FDA judges all drugs as guilty until proven, to the FDA’s satisfaction, both safe and efficacious. By what process does this happen? The FDA waits for a deep-pocketed sponsor to present a comprehensive package that justifies the approval of a new drug or a new use of an existing drug. For a drug like ivermectin, long since generic, a sponsor may never show up. The reason is not that the drug is ineffective; rather, the reason is that any expenditures used to secure approval for that new use will help other generic manufacturers that haven’t invested a dime. Due to generic drug substitution rules at pharmacies, Merck could spend millions of dollars to get a Covid-19 indication for ivermectin and then effectively get zero return. What company would ever make that investment?
With no sponsor, there is no new FDA-approved indication and, therefore, no official recognition of ivermectin’s value. Was the FDA’s warning against ivermectin based on science? No. It was based on process. Like a typical bureaucrat, the FDA won’t recommend the use of ivermectin because, while it might help patients, such a recommendation would violate its processes. The FDA needs boxes checked off in the right order. If a sponsor never shows up and the boxes aren’t checked off, the FDA’s standard approach is to tell Americans to stay away from the drug because it might be dangerous or ineffective. Sometimes the FDA is too enthusiastic and these warnings are, frankly, alarming. Guilty until proven innocent.
There are two reasons that Merck would warn against ivermectin usage, essentially throwing its own drug under the bus.
Once they are marketed, doctors can prescribe drugs for uses not specifically approved by the FDA. Such usage is called off-label. Using ivermectin for Covid-19 is considered off-label because that use is not specifically listed on ivermectin’s FDA-approved label.
While off-label prescribing is widespread and completely legal, it is illegal for a pharmaceutical company to promote that use. Doctors can use drugs for off-label uses and drug companies can supply them with product. But heaven forbid that companies encourage, support, or promote off-label prescribing. The fines for doing so are outrageous. During a particularly vigorous two-year period, the Justice Department collected over $6 billion from drug companies for off-label promotion cases. Merck’s lawyers haven’t forgotten that lesson.
Another reason for Merck to discount ivermectin’s efficacy is a result of marketing strategy. Ivermectin is an old, cheap, off-patent drug. Merck will never make much money from ivermectin sales. Drug companies aren’t looking to spruce up last year’s winners; they want new winners with long patent lives. Not coincidentally, Merck recently released the clinical results for its new Covid-19 fighter, molnupiravir, which has shown a 50% reduction in the risk of hospitalization and death among high-risk, unvaccinated adults. Analysts are predicting multi-billion-dollar sales for molnupiravir.[3]
While we can all be happy that Merck has developed a new therapeutic that can keep us safe from the ravages of Covid-19, we should realize that the FDA’s rules give companies an incentive to focus on newer drugs while ignoring older ones. Ivermectin may or may not be a miracle drug for Covid-19. The FDA doesn’t want us to learn the truth.
The FDA spreads lies and alarms Americans while preventing drug companies from providing us with scientific explorations of existing, promising, generic drugs.
David R. Henderson is a Senior Fellow with the American Institute for Economic Research.
He is also a research fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and emeritus professor of economics with the Naval Postgraduate School, is editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
David was previously the senior economist for health policy with President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers.
***
Charles L. Hooper is President and co-founder of Objective Insights, Inc. He is also the author of Would the FDA Reject Itself? (Chicago Park Press, 2021), currently available as an ebook on Apple Books and Amazon Kindle. A paper version is forthcoming.
Prior to forming Objective Insights in 1994, he worked at Merck & Co., Syntex Labs, and NASA.
He is a former visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
His experience is in decision analysis, economics, product pricing, forecasting, and modeling.
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