Professor Neil Ferguson, the controversial epidemiologist who predicted there would be as many as 200,000 COVID cases a day in the UK if restrictions were lifted, is facing scrutiny after infections continued to drop for the 6th day in a row.
The day before so-called ‘freedom day’ in England, where most mask mandates and social distancing restrictions were lifted, Ferguson was asked by the BBC’s Andrew Marr where the country was heading as a result.
“It’s very difficult to say for certain, but I think 100,000 cases a day is almost inevitable,” said Ferguson, adding, “The real question is do we get to double that or higher? We could get to 200,000 cases a day.”
The professor went on to warn of “major disruption” to the NHS and the interruption of elective surgeries.
Ferguson is being proven wrong by the statistics once again, which today showed there were 24,950 new coronavirus cases, the sixth consecutive daily fall.
“Lockdown zealots will attribute this decline to the vaccines, but that begs the question of why they weren’t confident the vaccines would prevent cases from surging when they predicted armageddon last Monday?” asks Toby Young.
As Christopher Snowdon highlights, the scientists who claimed England’s unlocking represented “a threat to world” are also being proven spectacularly wrong. SAGE government advisers who claimed that relaxing restrictions was “a dangerous and unethical experiment” also face embarrassment.
The issue once again begs the question; Why does the government continue to follow advice given by arch-lockdown advocates who have got it wrong time and time again?
Don’t forget that it was Ferguson who infamously warned that half a million Brits would die without a draconian lockdown, despite the fact that countries like Sweden which didn’t impose lockdown had similar waves and infection rates.
Not only has Ferguson repeatedly proven himself to be totally unreliable (after having already disgraced himself during the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak), but he infamously betrayed what he really thought about the severity of the pandemic via his own behavior.
During the first lockdown, when Ferguson himself was predicting up to half a million deaths, the professor took the threat of the virus so seriously, he allowed his mistress to violate the rules by traveling back and forth across London to continue the pair’s sordid affair.
On July 21, 2021, the FDA announced a recall of the CDC’s February 2020 PCR test. What this precisely means is creating a lot of confusion on social media.
Here is my take confirmed by Dr. James Lyons-Weiler:
Back in February of 2020 The CDC rushed a PCR test to market that was subpar and created false negatives and false positives like crazy (way worse than what we have today). I remember distinctly at that time Dr. James Lyons-Weiler slamming the CDC for this debacle that so deeply disgusted him as a scientist. Weiler blamed the entire thing on CDC’s greed to own the patent of the test approved in the US.
The CDC then went and created a new PCR testing platform in March and THAT is the basis for the more than 100 PCR tests on the market today. So all the FDA did recently was revoke the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the original CDC test that is no longer in use anyway because everyone has known for over 16 months that it is a garbage test.
I have sent an email to three of TEACHERS FOR CHOICE core attorneys as well as Dr. James Lyons-Weiler asking Dr. Weiler to clear up the confusion that is resulting. I am sure he will be able to get us 100% accurate info in minutes as this falls within his area of expertise.
We will post more as soon as we know more.
UPDATE – Within one hour of sending an email to Dr. James Lyons-Weiler asking him to confirm my below analysis he responded. Dr. Weiler’s full email response is included below:
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Dr. James Lyons-Weiler’s email response on 7-25-21 below:
This is only about the CDC’s original test. It was flawed:
That is the precise name of the test that CDC designed after it refused to adopt the test that had been developed in Germany. There has been speculation that this means that they might drop PCR testing all together however I believe that is unlikely.
The Smoking Gun is the use of a lower CT threshold for people who have been vaccinated. CDC is only reporting breakthrough cases with CT less than 28 and dead or hospitalized. They are reporting in the unvaccinated CT up to 38 or 39. This will bias the reports and make it look like Delta or other variants are occurring only in the unvaccinated.
They know precisely what they’re doing, we called them out on it. The mainstream media and the so-called fact-checkers said that we were wrong, but if you look at the CDC’s website it’s exactly what they’re doing.
This blatant in-your-face biasing of Public Health Data reporting and should be grounds for dismissal and or imprisonment. It is, in my view, falsification of public health records.
I hope this is helpful.
Our approach (at IPAK) is to conduct research on positive and negative PCR cases using Sanger sequencing to determine whether SARS CoV-2 is present or not, and what other pathogens might be present in people who are sent home to wait to see if they get sick enough for emergency care.
WHEN Boris Johnson said in October 2020 that the median age of Covid fatalities was above life expectancy, he was clearly on to something. It is a pity, and a terrible mistake of historical dimensions, that he – and so many others – did not drive their reasoning to the logical conclusions, let alone act on them.
The following is a translation and adaptation of an article which appeared on the German blog Achse des Guten(Axis of the Good) a few days before Johnson’s remarks were made public through his former adviser Dominic Cummings. The numbers are from official German statistics; the percentage distributions derived from those numbers are remarkably similar across the whole Western world.
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In the course of the last 150 years, mankind has landed many notable successes in its fight against disease and death, against infant and maternal mortality. It has thus raised the average age of death in the Western world from 35 years to around 80 years. (1)
Some people still die at a younger age, but fortunately far fewer than in earlier times. A total of 939,520 people died in Germany in 2019, with the following distribution in age groups: (2)
Mortality Table Germany 2019
With the ageing of our population, the total number of deaths has been increasing steadily in recent years. (3) However, the mean age of death and the percentage distribution among age groups have remained relatively constant ; (4,5) they are also fundamentally similar across all countries of the Western world. (6)
For almost one and a half years now, we have been kept in anxiety and fear with the daily cumulative figures of ‘corona deaths’. (7) The age distribution of these deaths ‘with coronavirus’ (the official denomination, i.e. death of a person with a positive test, not necessarily from a viral pneumonia) in Germany up to June 29, 2021, looks as follows: (8)
One may compare the percentage age distribution of these ‘corona deaths’ with the one of the general population and ask the following questions :
– How do the ‘corona deaths’ differ from the natural mortality table ?
– For which subgroups, if any, would it make sense to explore life-prolonging measures?
– Which age groups should be considered in such a discussion about possible life-prolonging measures?
Don’t the deaths ‘with coronavirus’ (i.e. with a positive PCR test) look as though they are part of the normal and unpreventable death pattern in Germany? Is this not the basic hypothesis that every statistician or epidemiologist worth his or her salt would have enounced if it weren’t for the fact that we have entered an era of extraordinary public hysteria? Also, these figures are remarkably similar everywhere in the world – no matter which measures had been taken against the Coronavirus, see for example in Sweden. (9)
Since the virus does nothing to neonates, children and adolescents – or perhaps because they have so far been submitted to fewer tests – people ‘with corona’ actually reach an average age which is a little higher than that of the rest of the population.
In statistical terms, the coronavirus (or rather the positive PCR test) is a ‘random variable’ with regards to the result ‘death’ – like athlete’s foot or wearing red socks. Of course, severe forms of respiratory infections caused by / with SARS-CoV-2 do exist. Of course, medicine is obliged to help and support each and every one of the people affected. Of course, individual cases can be heartbreaking. Of course, NHS capacities may be stretched during the winter (they generally are). On average, however, the ‘corona deaths’ would have left this world at the same time, with corona or from (or with) another virus or another disease.
All those calculations of allegedly lost lifetime (10) claim that the cohort (group) of people who had died ‘with corona’ would have reached an average age of well beyond 90 years, had it not been for the virus. This is statistical nonsense. One cannot and must not transfer the remaining life expectancy of a person alive at age 80 to a cohort of dead people. Following this methodology, it would be possible to declare any random variable (red socks for example) to be a mortal danger. (11)
Some authors (12) have put forward the hypothesis that the mortality risk due to (or with) corona is equal in its age distribution to, but (largely) additional to the normal mortality risk: so the virus acts like a terrorist who kills 100,000 people with the same age distribution as the mortality table in the general population. If this were true, if this were even possible, we would have had to see a corresponding increase in general mortality across all countries – which we have not. (13) As we are talking of people killed by (or with) a respiratory disease which is mild in the majority of cases, not of people killed by a terrorist, we would furthermore again have to ask the essential question: Why should they have lived significantly longer than the rest of the population, what would have pre-destined this particular cohort (of corona test-positives) to a longer than average lifespan? No, this assertion is not tenable either.
People in the 50-70 age groups also die of (or “with”) Corona? Is it normal to die at age 60 the reader may ask. No, it’s not, of course not, every single case is tragic (and deserves medicine’s full and best attention). But our politicians should know that it inevitably happens sometimes, and that you need to compare and analyse numbers on a population level, instead of being swayed by emotion about individual cases. Specifically in answer to that question, in every population, there are always some 50-70 year olds who unfortunately die – this is inevitable in the human condition. Some of these 50-70 year-olds have always died of (or with) a viral respiratory infection (like the one caused by the Coronavirus). The essential question is whether more people of these age groups die because of the Coronavirus than previously. The answer is no because:
1) We have not observed and are not observing a significant excess mortality in these age groups.
2) The percentage of Corona mortality in these age groups is not only not higher, but effectively lower (!) than the one in the general population.
The conclusion is – the Coronavirus has no influence on the mortality of the 50-70 age groups. And that very conclusion is the same for all groups below 80 years of age. As 80 is the average age of death in the population, the general conclusion therefore is that the Coronavirus has no influence on population mortality.
Science and virology have certainly progressed over the last 16 months, and perhaps humanity will benefit from this in the future. Nevertheless, in 2020 and in 2021, the ‘corona deaths’ would have died, on average (not in every individual case), at roughly the same time. We are not immortal. On average, we die at our average age of death.
Since March 2020, our societies have been treating this normality as if it were a catastrophe. However, no short-term political or social intervention can prevent general population mortality at an average age of currently about 80 years. Nor can it prevent our continuous (especially during the cold season) and immunising confrontation with freshly mutated respiratory viruses. We could have known this, many experts and politicians (perhaps Boris Johnson among them) certainly knew it at the latest on March 12, 2020, when the Italians publicly announced the data on their first 2,003 ‘corona deaths’ (largely from Bergamo and its surroundings): Average age 80.3 years, all (‘with two possible exceptions’) suffering from severe pre-existing conditions. (12)
Incidentally, no vaccination can prevent normal population mortality either, and I suppose many of my former colleagues in the pharmaceutical industry know this. As a pre-requisite for any marketing authorisation – even more so for such hasty and therefore risky ones – the regulatory authorities should have demanded mortality studies (i.e. proof of a lower total number of deaths in the vaccinated group compared with the placebo group).
Such a study would have been very unlikely to produce a positive result though, as normal human mortality at the general average age of death cannot be prevented.
Instead, the evidence of a reduction in common cold symptoms with a positive test was declared a relevant clinical endpoint and published with great fanfare, (13) and the seasonal decrease in test-positive cases and deaths – which was already observed last summer – is being celebrated as a success of vaccination. German (and other) professional associations claim, against their better judgement, that the vaccines’ pivotal studies have proven that they prevent severe forms and deaths by almost 100 per cent. (14)
However, even if entire populations become vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, people will continue to catch common colds and flu, severe forms will continue to occur in the elderly and immunologically weakened, and a yearly fluctuating number of average 80-year-olds will leave us as always, with the coronavirus or with other mutated respiratory viruses and with their constantly mutating variants.
If the human consequences of the political and societal response to this one respiratory virus were not so horrific, we could almost watch and enjoy the whole thing as a grotesque farce. Perhaps in the not too distant future, a (hopefully still – or again!) free humanity may learn useful lessons from this dystopian episode. In particular, we need to develop a healthily sceptical distrust of a certain type of scientists who spread fear and anxiety with their model-based predictions, and of their political followers.
A U.K. member of Parliament has come forward writing a blistering op-ed for the Daily Mail. Part whistleblower, part human rights activist, Graham Brady is calling out his own government’s ill-advised Covid mitigation policies, originating from fear, rather than sound public health science.
WHEN the NHS suspended GP Dr Sam White without pay for daring to question the Covid narrative, they thought he would meekly disappear. Thankfully he didn’t, because the lack of debate from doctors over draconian measures the country has endured unnecessarily has been deafening. Instead, he took legal advice and his solicitor fired off a 23-page letter to the chief executive of the NHS, Sir Simon Stevens.
The colour must have drained from Stevens’s face when he opened it, even more so now as it has been made public and read over a million times. It began: ‘Please treat this letter as a public interest disclosure or whistle blow in that it raises allegations of alleged criminal conduct and breach of legal obligations by those leading the Covid response.’
It was Dr White’s viral resignation video that had angered health service chiefs. He described how he had quit as a partner from his Hampshire general practice because of the harm Covid measures were causing. He was also being prevented from using readily available effective treatments for Covid patients and he could see the toll that isolation was taking on the elderly and vulnerable. He was distraught at the thought that children would be vaccinated for a disease from which they are not at risk, whereas the experimental vaccines could cause them catastrophic damage.
All licensed doctors have a revalidation process conducted every five years either by their employer, their contracted health authority or by their governing body the General Medical Council (GMC). This is to ensure they are fit to practise and to prevent rogue doctors, such as serial killer Harold Shipman, slipping under the radar. Dr White had already passed his revalidation by the GMC without comment in December 2020, where he raised his concerns about masks, not being able to prescribe safe and effective drugs and the inaccurate PCR test. He was reassessed in April after his video made the same points, and passed again. After it went viral, however, clocking up over a million views, he was suspended in June. The NHS had had enough and the same doctor who revalidated him effectively sacked him.
Dr White’s legal letter issued by the pjhlaw legal firm accuses HM Government, the executive board of the NHS, Sage, senior members of the civil service and the executive board of the Medicines Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) of breaching common law (derived from hundreds of years of precedent rather than recent statute) obligations, and the seven Nolan principles governing public life. The most important of these is Selflessness, meaning that decisions should be taken solely in the public interest and not for financial gain. As we have seen nine billionaires created thanks to the pandemic, alongside millions of reports worldwide of death and injury post-vaccination for a disease with a 99.7 per cent recovery rate, I think it’s safe to say they’ve trampled all over Nolan.
One of Dr White’s main complaints is that the public were not given proper informed consent before vaccination. In the pop-up vaccination hubs set up in car parks, churches and cinemas, they were not asked about their medical history. This meant if there were contra-indications to receiving the vaccine, the vaccinator did not know the jab should not be given and the vaccinated had no clue they could suffer a serious, life-changing adverse event.
The letter adds: ‘It should be noted that those presenting the information have not publicly declared at the press conferences their financial links to the vaccine industry . . . It should be noted that Moderna’s share price has risen from $10 (£7) to over $200 (£145) in the space of 18 months.
‘Bill Gates and his charitable foundation are significant investors in Moderna. Many of those presenting the information to the public are associated with or employed directly or indirectly by organisations who have been financially funded by the Gates Foundation. The MHRA, the UK regulatory body approving the vaccines, has itself been funded [£1million donation] by the Gates Foundation.’
The letter goes on to cover the unreliability of the PCR tests which are being abandoned by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in December; the fact that in most fatalities patients died ‘with’ Covid rather than ‘of’ Covid; the coercive introduction of vaccine passports for travel and work, and the unnecessary use of face masks.
The NHS has offloaded Dr White’s case to the GMC, who say they have had 18 complaints from unnamed doctors offended by his resignation video, but as usual in all cases of doctors subjected to a witch hunt because they questioned the narrative, none is from a patient.
Dr White said: ‘I have received 155 pages of complaints, which is quite distressing and upsetting, and they are just downright untrue. There is one complainant alleging I used the C-word when talking about a patient, which is something I never would have done.’
The professional standards department of NHS England and NHS Improvement are struggling to find concrete evidence for his alleged misdemeanours. About the only one they can prove is that he did not wear a face mask when walking around his GP surgery (although he wore one to consult with patients) and did not advise his elderly patients to wear them because they found them distressing. Departing from NHS directives is considered unacceptable and to them, raises serious concerns regarding Dr White’s fitness to practise. Forget the fact that it’s been reported widely that face masks can do more harm than good and are nothing more than theatre.
Incidentally, coming back to Dr Harold Shipman, who murdered more than 250 patients, he was not suspended without pay. Shipman, who was arrested in 1998, kept his c£70,000 salary from West Pennine health authority even after he was convicted and jailed for killing 15 patients. He didn’t lose it until two years after his arrest, when the GMC finally struck him off. By then, his family had received more than £100,000. In contrast, the NHS has now decided, on appeal, that Dr White can receive 90 per cent of one month’s earnings from his locum work until after the GMC decide his fate.
Dr White, who is now practising functional medicine, said: ‘Complete uncertainty about my financial future is really worrying.’ He has effectively been reduced to begging for money to live on and to fight his court case against Stevens et al. Two crowd-funders are out there which he hopes will help him do both until he gets back on his feet.
How is a citizenry to respond to Evil, to publicly made threats that they are now in a period where novel viruses, cyberterrorism, and food shortages may strike at any moment?
What about the fact that making threats to achieve political or ideological aims is the very definition of terrorism itself, or the fact that using the internet to do this is the definition of cyberterrorism? When we look at those who have benefited politically and financially from the lockdowns, and who will undoubtedly do the same with the coming cyberterrorism seasons, we are reasonable in asking: Is the World Economic Forum website in fact a terrorist website?
Are the Davos people terrorists? Certainly, the plausible deniability here is that these ‘threats’ are actually just warnings, warnings that other nefarious actors like the so-called DarkSide, “thought” to be behind the Colonial Pipeline attack, are lurking in the shadows of supposed anonymity may carry out attacks or make threats.
What about the rising phenomenon of censorship, and the taking of political prisoners?
Well how about a bit of wisdom from wiseguys and gangsters, new and old, which goes something like this: those delivering warnings work for those behind the threats.
We ought to be able to warn about impending doom without being accused of being the agent of said doom. But in normal criminology, we ask – who benefited, and who had the power to carry it out. When a single agent can both gain from something, and had the power to execute it, they become a suspect.
It is reasonable therefore to look at those giving ‘warnings’, because they become threats when understanding that they also have the most to gain from their own proposed ‘solutions’ to said threats, and also have the power to carry out the attacks themselves. These aren’t solutions, they are the ultimatums.
They furthermore have direct control over political actors whose nominal obligations are to protect and serve the public. In many ways, it is a perfect crime. And if it can happen, then it will happen, and likely has already happened. We should go so far as to propose that this is indeed what has happened, and is happening to us right now.
Fascism at Home
We are nevertheless asked to believe that it’s merely an incredible coincidence that just as the U.S. deep state failed to make victory in a whole array of geopolitical endeavors, that they launch an attack on civil society called ‘the new normal’. It was reasoned by Marxist revolutionaries Antonio Gramsci and Leon Trotsky a hundred years ago that the roots of Fascism lie in dying and frustrated empires; that when the costs of empire exceeded the gains, that the final solution was to turn the gears of the machinery of the state apparatus against the home population of the empire itself.
Then the politics of divide and conquer, deceit and confusion – normal within parliamentary systems anyhow – becomes a deadly game of cancel culture but with mass graves and concentration camps. This is how evil operates in the world
Perhaps this is what we are seeing today. Because we really need to ask, does anyone else find it amazing that right as this series of imperial failures happened all within the short span of a few years, that magically the entire narrative of society transmogrifies overnight into a giant ritual sacrifice to prevent novel viruses, cyberterrorism, and food shortages?
Here we are also asked to suspend rational thinking and science, in the name of rationalizing and trusting the science. Provisions that governments make against an ever-mutating virus are more often at odds with science and the pre-Covid understanding of how transmission works, or what infected means, and what the significance of symptoms are or aren’t. All of the provisions seem aimed at stoking fear, furthering divisions, and transforming this fear into an anger, but yet not at those who created the virus in a laboratory – as U.S. Senator Rand Paul has explained in hearings.
Instead we are required in our obligatory two-minutes of hate, to redirect this weaponized anger at those who question the entire narrative.
Indeed the hallmarks of fascism are abundant, even if in a very superficial and superstructural way the apparent ‘roles’ were reversed. Fascistic gangs (despite their leftist ideology) financed by big business in the form of Antifa and BLM ran rampant for a whole year, in protests that were 95% peaceful and 5% arson and murder. But going back to wiseguys and gangsters, maybe one only needs to take out 5% of adversaries to instill fear in the other 95%. On the streets it’s called ‘making an example’.
Of Stolen Elections & Political Prisoners
Once the populist forces – ‘the Historical Block’ – a united front of minorities, workers, veterans, students, the unemployed, and small and medium business owners nevertheless won the battle of democracy in what appeared as a Trump landslide on election night 2020, the election was stolen.
But the real affront was that it wasn’t truly stolen, it was taken – and taken in broad daylight in front of everyone and God – in an openly publicized non-conspiracy by the Transition Integrity Project, financed by the World Economic Forum’s Nicolas Berggruen and led by Clinton favourite John Podesta, working with Big Tech oligarchs like Zuckerberg and advertised by Jeff Bezos’ The Washington Post.
Even Time Magazine’s write-up read as a confession. No doubt this was to inoculate the last dozen or so geriatric readers of Time Magazine, before they heard about it from friends. First impressions, after all, are lasting impressions.
Then on January 6th, when a tiny fraction of the historical block, still numbering countless tens of thousands, mobilized in a peaceful march on the Capitol, the FBI may have launched a false-flag attack that justified a coordinated parliamentary ‘about-face’ which brought to a halt the hopes of more than 70 million voters that the steal could be stopped. The corrupt DOJ would then proceed to hold a number of political prisoners, as they do to this very day, in grotesquely delayed proceedings on charges that in fact do not resemble the media charge of ‘insurrection’. And there are mounting credible reports that these political prisoners face torture and permanent bodily injury.
As attorney Joseph McBride, representing January 6th prisoners, stated in no uncertain terms in an interview that aired on NewsMax and reported by the Gateway Pundit:
“What I can say about the Jan. 6 protesters who remain incarcerated or detained at this point, is that their constitutional rights and human rights are being violated by the Department of Justice and the Federal Government at this very moment. The law is clear that no type of punishment is appropriate for a detainee. Despite that numerous detainees are being held in solitary confinement for long periods of time. They’re being denied medical care. They’re taking beatings. They’re being denied sleep. They’re being psychologically, emotionally, and physically tortured on a regular basis [by guards,],”
That the torture and abuse of political prisoners is being ignored by the same corporate media that promoted the fraudulent electoral outcome which in turn provoked the demonstration in the first place, is of course no surprise.
But the eminent threat besides the fact that this torture is occurring, is that social media – which until five years ago was a relatively safe bastion for free expression – is now openly collaborating with government to silence dissent.
The ‘real cyber-terrorism’ from the point of view of the corporate-state apparatus aren’t the false flags, past and future, which they have planned for the public. Rather, the threat is citizens utilizing the horizontal, peer-to-peer nature of social media as real people to communicate the real existing dangers in an authentic way.
We Are Plagued by Evil
In conclusion we can say that we are plagued – plagued by an elite which has come to view authority and the correct exercise of power through the lens of the corporate boardroom’s social Darwinism. We have meditated on the utility of this term, of evil, knowing very well the metaphysical connotations it carries.
But we use it now with certainty. There were other ways to carry out changes in society, if in fact climate change and human overpopulation were the actual problems to be solved – if indeed these are problems (questions we have debated elsewhere).
As we have written, this would largely include a process of manufacturing consent through a system of positive reinforcement, not punitive measures, isolation, and coercive technologies. Planned obsolescence would have been done away with, making the production of goods which are the primary cause of carbon emissions, to decrease many-fold almost overnight. This actual solution also happens to fit precisely with the needs of a rising multipolarity which, at least for some intermediate time, appears to necessitate a slow-down of global supply chains. It also fits with the rise of automation and an increasingly post-labor economic system, if we admit that the planned obsolescence model was as much at keeping people employed as it was about increasing the velocity of money in the economy.
Similar goes with cyberterrorism, and as the public has become increasingly aware but reluctant to admit, the over-use of online systems to manage critical infrastructure and food distribution.
It had been noted with great alarm that consequences of the ‘attacks’ such as the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack on May 7th of this year, were unnecessary. There is no rational underlying reason why the computerized system that Colonial uses, which regulates its pipelines, needs to be connected to computers which are in turn connected to the internet.
This raises serious questions about why it was deemed a good practice to have arranged this in the first place. And it also raises serious questions as to whether its computerized system controlling valves, measuring pressure, etc., was indeed connected to the internet. After all, Colonial’s shutting down in turn calls the entire official narrative into question, leading up to more and more of the ‘Russian hackers’ narrative.
In truth, whatever attack occurred or did not really occur, was claimed in thorough reportage to have affected its billing system, not the systems governing physical distribution. And yet, access to the pipeline was cut-off, affecting countless citizens in the process. Why? Was Colonial simply saying that if they don’t have a way to process payments, then we shut down distribution until further notice? Did Colonial attack itself?
The writing is on the wall. The medium is the message. For reasons explained in our works on this subject, the present elite in the west is governed by a misanthropic principle, which views the exercise of power as something measured by the degree to which it can be exercised in the most painful way.
So long as activists on the left and activists on the right are fighting over whether the Great Reset, lockdowns, and cyberterrorism is actually a capitalist plot or a communist plot, then it will be difficult for the public to organize an effective resistance to what this really all is: Evil.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
– Henry David Thoreau
WE LIVE in the age of the oxymoron. Diversity means everyone thinks the same. Tolerance means the vicious exclusion of anyone who doesn’t. Levelling up is literally exacerbating inequality to medieval levels. Freedom passports means you require papers to watch football. Vaccines don’t prevent the infection or transmission of disease. Democracy is the imposition of new laws and policies no one voted for. Journalism is propaganda. Modern Monetary Theory means effect before cause, the ‘wet pavements cause rain’ branch of economics. Education is the process of removing information rather than importing it. That you don’t think but repeat is more important than that you learn and grow. Asymptomatic transmission means the healthy can infect the immunised. Sociopaths are philanthropists. Virtue signalling is camouflage for a collapse in morality. The green new deal is neither green, new or a deal. Environmentalists means a collection of the world’s most polluting corporations. Climate change policies are any act which preserves the most extreme forms of exploitation. War is peace, freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Owning nothing is happiness, as Orwell might have added if he were around today. Probably on social media (another oxymoron, they’re hard to escape).
A parlour game for this age of absurdity is to see how many of these logical inversions you can think of. Now I want to head in a different direction and consider two questions: What is the effect of collective cognitive dissonance? Where will it lead us?
I believe the effect of collective cognitive dissonance is the mass abdication of responsibility to authority. When something becomes impossible to understand or reconcile, the natural human instinct is to rely on authority figures – to herd. When people feel intense insecurity they abdicate freedom for perceived safety.
According to psychologist Erich Fromm (1900-1980): ‘Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking – and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority.’
Fromm described the concept of automaton conformity as ‘changing one’s ideal self to conform to a perception of society’s preferred type of personality, losing one’s true self in the process’. Fromm described the desire to subsume the self into the herd.
The human species now sounds like a herd of animals with the relentless repetition of alliterative phraseology: for build back better I hear moo moo moo, new normal baa baaa etc. A cacophony of mindless agreement is expressed as poetic assonance: ‘double jabbed’, we yabber at each other like a flock of jabbering birds. Another parlour game for the next lockdown is to list all the new terms and phrases which sound like advertising slogans or neuro-linguistic programming. Why the repetition? Why the repetition?
The real pandemic is everyone thinking the same, a culture so mono it feels as if ISIS won. So why is this conformity reckless?
The width of the edge is what really matters in society. Too wide and we have anarchism, too narrow totalitarianism. Mass conformity is the mechanism of totalitarianism, it is the most reckless act. Progress is always ground up, never top down. All the good stuff happens at the edge. Great art is never produced by corporations. Scientific discoveries take place in patent offices, medical breakthroughs in dirty Petri dishes, great music is made by the unemployed, entrepreneurs succeed via repeated failure. Mandela didn’t change the world from Davos. The moment the pressure on de Klerk forced him to widen the edge, the idea of freedom nursed by Mandela blossomed like a giant protea. The campaigners for women’s suffrage were on the edge of society. Nothing changes from the middle. A third game might be to look around you and list everything born of the maverick. Start with the device you’re most likely reading this article on and work your way out.
Returning to the Thoreau quote at the top of this piece: mavericks need space to dance to a different tune. The edge needs to be just wide enough. ‘And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music,’ as Nietzsche might have said. Reckless conformists hear only one note, mavericks the whole range. Think of us as the control group.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, over the last year and a half, has been one of the American governors imposing the most extensive crackdowns on freedom in the name of countering coronavirus. He also famously exhibited extreme hypocrisy in November by flagrantly violating his own California coronavirus-related mandates while taking part in a dinner party at the uber-expensive French Laundry restaurant. Newsom’s attitude seems to be that his rules are for regular people, not for himself and his friends.
Now comes word of another scandal in which Newsom has flaunted the mandate he has imposed in the state. Eric Ting reported Tuesday at the San Francisco Gate that two of Newsom’s children recently attended a basketball summer camp that had informed parents ahead of time that children would not be required to wear masks despite a state mandate that children ages two to 11 do so. After a picture of one of Newsom’s children, along with other children at the camp, with uncovered faces appeared on the internet, Newsom’s kids were pulled out of the camp early. Woops, the Newsom family had missed reading the camp’s email mentioning the camp’s mask policy, explained the communications director of Newsom’s governor office.
It is great that Newsom and his friends can enjoy an “old normal” dinner party with friends, though the dinner party at issue looks like it was also a get-together of government and special interest lobbyists. And it is great that Newsom’s children, who are in an age group for which risk of serious injury or death from coronavirus is nearly zero, can participate in a summer camp without wearing uncomfortable, dehumanizing masks that are known to cause health problems but have not been shown to provide any net protection from coronavirus. It would also be great if more summer camps followed freedom-friendly policies as did the camp Newsom’s children attended. Kudos for people taking part in such forbidden activities that bring joy to life. The problem with Newsom is that he takes these actions for himself and his children while, at the same time, he decrees that ordinary people are prohibited from doing so.
There has been much debate among lawyers as to whether the various “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (i.e., lockdown measures) that have been imposed over the past year and a half are actually legal.
In April of 2020, the barrister Francis Hoar wrote an article laying out the case for the illegality of Britain’s lockdown. While his piece is very much worth reading in full, I will do my best to summarise the main points here.
Hoar argues that lockdown measures were a “disproportionate interference with the rights protected by the European Convention on Human Rights”, and were therefore in breach of the Human Rights Act 1998.
To make his case, he appeals to the so-called Siracusa Principles, which were adopted by the UN Economic and Social Council in 1984. These principles stipulate that government responses to national emergencies that involve the restriction of human rights must fulfil certain criteria.
Specifically, they must be: carried out in accordance with law; directed toward an objective of general interest; strictly necessary to achieve that objective; the least intrusive way of achieving that objective; based on scientific evidence, and neither arbitrary nor discriminatory; of limited duration, respectful of human dignity and subject to review.
Hoar argues convincingly that lockdown measures failed to meet several of these criteria. For example, lockdowns were not strictly necessary, since the same outcomes could plausibly have been achieved with far less intrusive measures (i.e., a focused protection strategy).
And it’s highly doubtful that lockdowns were “respectful of human dignity and subject to review”, given that they initially proscribed all political gatherings and public demonstrations without exception – a measure unprecedented in British history.
Hoar suggests that, “were they challenged by judicial review”, the measures should be “disapplied if necessary”. (Recall that he was writing back in April of last year). Incidentally, a longer and more detailed version of his article is available here.
Another figure from the legal community to argue for the illegality of the UK’s lockdowns is Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court Justice. In a lecture delivered to the Cambridge Law Faculty in October 2020, he claimed that lockdown measures were without legal basis, and described the U.K.’s response as “a monument of collective hysteria and government folly”.
As readers may be aware, there was in fact a major legal challenge to the U.K.’s lockdowns, brought by the entrepreneur Simon Dolan (and funded to the tune of £427,000). The challenge sought a judicial review of the lockdown measures. Unfortunately, it proved unsuccessful.
I’ve been told by people with legal expertise that mounting another challenge would be difficult, given the adverse judgement in the case brought by Dolan. It’s therefore unlikely the Government will be liable for claims from individuals and businesses who’ve suffered due to lockdown.
So while the High Court in London did reject Dolan’s case against the Government, lockdown opponents have won important victories in a number of countries.
And given that the evidenceagainst lockdown has only increased since the judgement in Dolan’s case, lockdown opponents will have plenty of ammunition if any future Government decides to lock down in response to a similar virus.
More than 100K pages of FOIA documents referenced here have been condensed into 173 pages of the most relevant selections in my appendix Prometheus Shrugged. It was here, last February, that the role of Dr. Fauci in ongoing academic censorship of COVID’s origin was first exposed.
A chronological narrative of the events described throughout my research will included in a forthcoming volume of DRASTIC’s set of published collections of evidence.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote that truth goes through 3 stages:
1st, it is ridiculed; 2nd, it is violently opposed; and 3rd, it is accepted as being self-evident
Guess what’s next for us?
Six months ago, I began my first article on scientific censorship during COVID-19 by introducing Dr. Fauci as a surprise character that had emerged unexpectedly while digging through what was then 83,000 FOIA emails, published by US Right-to-Know over the course of the last year:
I’ve been trying for quite some time to get people to understand the full scope of the Dr. Fauci ‘situation,’ but it’s clear that segments of our national leadership are preventing an honest and open inquiry into his actions because they fear the backlash/collateral damage that will result from the tarnishing of their sacred cow. It’s time Americans were told the truth – that the grant money sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV] is merely a footnote in this narrative.
After all, Dr. Fauci controls nearly $4 billion of annual grant funding for the NIAID, the institute within the NIH he has directed since 1984; over 37 years, more than 50,000 research projects have been supported with more than $50 billion [conservatively] of taxpayer funds have been doled out to them.
It’s reasonable to hold him accountable for the results of his organization’s efforts, but the direct funding received by the WIV for Gain-of-Function (GOF) research represents only a tiny fraction of Fauci’s involvement in enabling risky research – the 2017 repeal of the GOF ban was decided without the consultation of the Trump administration, even though news coverage during the pandemic blamed him for the decision.
Neither Fauci nor his boss Francis Collins [the NIH director] bothered to clarify the record, which looks especially disgusting in the wake of persistent rejections of Senator Rand Paul’s assertions [with accompanying evidence] that the NIH ever financially supported such research:
Contents:
Dr. Fauci’s true legacy
The evidence of his involvement
The questions Congress [and everyone else] should be asking Dr. Fauci
The impact of his efforts
First, do no harm … to Fauci’s Legacy
It’s important to plainly state that I’m aware of the intense politicization of virtually every aspect of the pandemic and the pandemic response. Since many readers may not be aware, I’ll point out that my specific motivation for building a COVID-19 website and speaking to a broader audience about the various facets of the pandemic was to offer unfiltered information to counter the disgusting polarization I observed:
I felt obligated to re-iterate my stance, but the nature and importance of the situation can’t be ignored any longer, because Congress is now actively engaged in investigating the pandemic’s origins, and we must confront the truth if we are to gain meaningful insight that can help us prepare for future crises. There is no level of partisanship that justifies ignoring a tragedy of this magnitude.
“Everything rises and falls on leadership” – John Maxwell
It’s hard to place a dollar value on the impact of Fauci’s leadership decisions upon almost all aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is why it’s not difficult to understand the willingness of some to avoid a legitimate inquiry into the issue altogether. After all, he sits at the nexus of –
A) the NIH’s role in supporting the research & development of mRNA technology and new antiviral drugs like Remdesivir, and the resulting conflicts of interest that the NIH continues to ignore
B) His role in pushing those NIH-sponsored inventions; specifically, advocating for Remdesivir on the basis of weak evidence while rejecting legitimate investigations into generic alternatives with no less statistical support, as well as…
C) … His role in obfuscating concerning data and censoring public debate over the risk/benefit evidence emerging about COVID-19 vaccines. Had Fauci been bluntly honest about the unknowns involving the new technology throughout the pandemic, Americans would still largely have assumed the risk – at least, assuming that antibody dependent enhancement [ADE] was not a likely outcome. Oops.
D) His evolving stances on masking, lockdowns, school closures and other non-pharmaceutical interventions [NPI], largely the result of growing public awareness that those decisions have consistently been based upon reducing the accountability of cowardly officials, not the best interest of their constituents [Note: this is a conclusion from my research focus last year, that I will return to once the origin issue allows me to do so].
E) His refusal to address the blatant censorship of vaccine side-effect data; it takes a disturbing level of cynicism to witness the large-scale skepticism and uncertainty that has resulted from such censorship and then vilify those willing to speak up – and blaming them for any future vaccine breakout when one of the most likely causes would be ADE. ADE with SARS-CoV-2 would most likely result from the specific targeting of the MRNA vaccines, not vaccine hesitancy [in the absence of a simultaneous global administration of the jabs – which was never feasible under the geopolitical and temporal constraints of the pandemic.
Each of those factors has contributed to the fading perception of Fauci as ‘America’s Doctor, but each has also become a divisive litmus test for which the evidence for and against is hotly debated. My purpose here is not to offer judgment on those issues; rather, I want to highlight the fact that Dr. Fauci’s legacy includes elements far beyond the scope of my research – and the context of those debates is directly relevant for the proper framing of the failures illuminated here. The same hubris and gaslighting in defense of ‘Science’ has plagued everything.
My disgust doesn’t stem from casual reflection & an exaggeration of weak assertions to fan partisan flames. It stems from my analysis of 100K pages of FOIA documents, 1,000+ research articles reviewed, and my own published analysis of the the impact of Fauci’s censorship, which was the 1st of its kind.
My approach was external to science – from the perspective of an historian seeking to understand the ‘why’ behind the further collapse of trust in our institutions during the pandemic. My conclusions were formed over six months of investigation, and focused on the realization that one of the worst developments of the pandemic is the evaporation of public trust in scientists [see Edifice Wrecks].
I’ve never sought to inflame conspiracies or ignore evidence in support of zoonosis, but I’ve personally entered into discussions with a half-dozen of the scientists highlighted below, and none of them ever addressed the emerging evidence that, under normal circumstances, would’ve been part of the open debate that Fauci pretends already took place.
Every additional moment spent in denial and suppression just adds fuel to the coming backlash, and thus far discussions have ignored what I believe is the largest and most consequential elephant in the room:
F) Fauci quietly but directly ensured that scientific censorship was implemented, in large measure, to prevent public awareness of the extent of his role in GOF research and the controversies surrounding it. The evidence proves that, at the start of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci and many leading scientists moved to protect themselves – not us, who weren’t yet aware of the potential calamity at our doorstep.
Fauci LED the efforts to obstruct research into COVID’s origins, colluding with the President’s Science Advisor Kelvin Dreogemeier and Wellcome Trust head Jeremy Farrar, to proactively undermine consideration of the evidence that directly tied their global research initiatives to the lab at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic.
To date, all of their efforts have been focused on preventing disclosure of embarrassing connections – not preventing another novel pathogen from sparking a global pandemic; to prevent future scrutiny, not future tragedy.
Scientists, if you’re struggling to understand the distinction between degrees of commitment to truth, I offer the example of Thích Quảng Đức, pictured here protesting the corrupt S. Vietnam regime in a prologue of the Vietnam War:
You see, the message for scientists who believe that a threat is existential is that words gain true meaning when they are supported by the actions & sacrifices of the speaker. What message are we supposed to derive from the COVID-19 pandemic?
I’d recommend pausing for reflection – on the image above, specifically – because what the world is beginning to see is that the scientific establishment made a mockery of the trust it had been given. The world’s leading experts in virology and public health called attention to a threat by setting the world on fire, rather than themselves – and then blaming us for being too simple to believe their noble lie.
Priorities
The baseline assumption of the public at large has been that Dr. Fauci has earned the benefit of the doubt thanks to his five decades of public service and consistency in defending establishment science – the admiration of which has risen nearly to cult worship in recent decades. The cognitive dissonance between appearance and reality have created a situation where trust in ‘science’ has reached its sacred peak at the exact moment when such trust is least deserved.
At the center of this incestuous arrogance is Dr. Anthony Fauci, the recipient of unquestioned adulation by those in the political sphere who have spent more than a century arguing that a Platonic ‘philosopher-king’ ideal must be forced upon intellectually vacuous masses whom, left to their own devices, would inevitably self-immolate.
Scientists reached new heights in the ivory tower when they warned us that man’s evil nature had left previous generations protected only by the horrific death equation of Mutually Assured Destruction. Setting aside the obvious complicity of scientists in the creation of nuclear weapons, trusting science over many decades has simply led to a new formulation of that Faustian bargain – Mutually Assured Corruption.
A Study In Scarlet
Before heading down the long and winding road, it’s important to explain what zoonosis is and why Fauci’s denial of basic facts simply kicks the accountability can down the road. Should we really be surprised that Dr. Fauci is ‘confused’ by the definition of “Gain if Function?” After all, not that long ago, he also ridiculed the idea that the virus could’ve come from a lab before finally admitting that it was a statistical possibility.
Zoonosis in the context of viral emergence doesn’t mean a virus originally sprung from nature – all viruses do. It means that the jump from animals to humans happened in the wild, as the result of a fortuitous combination of mutations that allow a virus to survive the switch. If human intervention artificially encouraged the process of adaptation by experimentation, or simply by virtue of bringing a virus to a lab and increasing the odds of such exposure, then the origin of a viral pandemic is a lab.
What’s sickening about his tortured twisting of language is that Fauci knows this better than almost anyone; thus his lies aren’t borne of ignorance. What he’s done is use his scientific gravitas to pretend that observers’ understanding of literal definitions is flawed because we are too ignorant to appreciate the complexity of the issues. The truth, however, is that our generation’s most prominent infectious disease expert is gaslighting the citizens of the country he swore an oath to protect [one could also use the term epistemic injustice ].
The National Institutes for Health (NIH) is exceptionally keen on the study of “Long Covid.” The federal agency recently allocated over $1 billion in funding for this purpose, and NIH Director Francis Collins has made the claimed ailment a recurring subject of his press commentary over the last year. The Department of Health and Human Services similarly signaled that it intends to classify “Long Covid” as a recognized disability for government funding and classification purposes.
So what is Long Covid, and why is it drawing so much attention and funding out of the federal government? As with any respiratory illness, Covid-19 does appear to have long-term sufferers who do not follow the normal recovery pattern and continue to demonstrate symptoms for weeks or months after an infection. At the same time however, the push to make “Long Covid” a distinctive medical classification unto itself appears to be a political phenomenon, wrapped up in clear signs of pseudoscience and linked back to a fringe “alternative wellness” blog that originally coined the term in March 2020.
A recent study published in the Lancet-owned journal EClinicalMedicine purported to document over 200 symptoms of Long Covid, ranging from fairly common Covid-19 ailments such as fatigue, cough, or long-term loss of smell to an eclectic assortment of problems such as hallucination, brain fog, tearfulness, insomnia, and mood anxiety. Media reports breathlessly repeated these findings to press the urgency of funding for Long Covid research, while also hyping the syndrome as a further justification for alarmism in justifying lockdowns and similar measures. After all, if Long Covid afflicts a sizable subset of Covid patients – as some claim – and can strike young people who are at a much lower mortality risk from the virus itself, then perhaps more restrictive measures are warranted on the general population – or so the argument goes.
Many lockdown advocates have seized onto the Long Covid narrative, incorporating it into their defenses of the draconian non-pharmaceutical interventions they have advocated over the last year and a half. The CovidFAQ website – a UK-based project set up by “neoliberal” activist Sam Bowman and British MP Neil O’Brien – invokes the threat of Long Covid in its attacks the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), arguing that the hypothesized syndrome undermines evidence that the virus is substantially less-severe among younger demographics. Several pro-lockdown scientists and epidemiologists issued coordinated statements attacking the GBD in October 2020 for “ignor[ing] the emerging burdens of long COVID.” These statements are usually offered as declarative assessments, treating Long Covid as an established medical fact.
With billion-dollar budgets and the prospect of additional sweeping policy measures at stake, it only makes sense to ask if the science behind Long Covid is sound. There is no doubt that some Covid-19 victims have symptoms that linger for weeks or months beyond the typical recovery, although that is true of many diseases. Whether it has 200 plus symptoms is another story – and a closer look reveals an alarming amount of outright quackery is currently shaping the scientific and media discourse around Long Covid.
The problem arises from the amorphous definition of the phrase “Long Covid” itself. Far from a careful clinical diagnosis, Long Covid has become a catch-all term for any extended medical ailment, real or imagined, attributed to the effects of the Covid-19 virus. An alarming amount of alleged data about the phenomenon traces back to a single source called the “Body Politic Wellness Collective” – an alternative medicine blog with dubious scientific credentials. To quote one recent study of the term’s origins, “the emergence and recognition of Long COVID as a potentially major public health problem is largely due to advocacy groups such as the Body Politic COVID-19 Support Group, and Patient Led Research For COVID-19” – the latter an affiliated survey administrator that, according to its own website, was “born out of the Body Politic Slack support group.”
The same Body Politic group frequently appears in an already large and growing literature on “Long Covid” in other scientific journals. In September 2020, NIH Director Collins devoted his personal column on the agency’s website to touting the group. He later credited their work when launching the aforementioned $1 billion research initiative. In July 2021, Body Politic reappeared at the center of the aforementionedEClinicalMedicine study along with a spinoff organization called the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. The two groups administered the survey behind the claim that Long Covid carries over 200 symptoms.
Before we get into the survey itself, it’s useful to take a closer look at the Body Politic group. TheWall Street Journal recently ran a lengthy expose of the organization by Jeremy Devine, an Ontario-based psychiatrist. Devine found that the group’s initiatives sprang to life at the outset of the pandemic in March 2020. They first coined the Long Covid moniker around this time, promoting it in a flurry of media appearances. In early April, the New York Times ran an op-Ed by Body Politic’s co-founder calling attention to the syndrome and recounting her own experience as a “long hauler” (which, at the time, consisted of experiencing symptoms for about three weeks after testing positive).
As Devine documented in the WSJ, the Body Politic group’s approach to scientific survey design appeared highly unorthodox. It frequently relied on self-reported descriptions of Long Covid symptoms, instead of independent medical verification. It also had a habit of diagnosing people with Long Covid even after they tested negative for Covid-19 itself. A March 2021 report by Adam Gaffney for StatNews called attention to similar problems with Body Politic’s research design. “[A]t least some people who identify themselves as having long Covid appear never to have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus,” Gaffney noted. They were nonetheless touted by the media as case studies in the alleged syndrome.
A closer look at the Body Politic group itself raises several red flags about their scientific qualifications. The group’s executive board boasts few, if any, actual medical practitioners or scientific experts. Instead we find an eclectic assortment of political activists, musicians, poets, and journalists, many of whom share common interests in “alternative medicine.” Body Politic’s Treasurer and principle support group organizer describes herself as a “practicing Spiritual Medium” who specializes in detecting “invisible illness.” The website’s Vice President is a “social & racial justice activist,” and its Secretary is an “aspiring sex coach.” Other affiliates include a self-described “socialist poet,” multiple “social justice activists,” and people who describe their careers as operating at the intersection between art and natural wellness. The group’s website and social media accounts frequently invoke political terminology from the critical theory literature. They describe themselves as “a queer feminist wellness collective and a space for inclusivity, accessibility, and crucial discussions about the very real connection between wellness, politics, and personal identity.” Their values statement espouses “patient-led” research to “democratize” medicine – descriptions that appear to forgo traditional scientific methods of testing and verification in favor of placing heavier reliance on patient testimonials and personal experience.
While the group’s activism alone does not disqualify their commentary, the unconventional qualifications of its leadership should raise suspicion about their claimed expertise on Long Covid. When NIH Director Collins personally promotes Body Politic’s work, he is creating a false sense of scientific credibility around their work. Few who read Collins’s statements are aware that the group he praises as “citizen scientists” might be better characterized as an odd assortment of psychic healers, magic crystal gurus, and alternative medicine activists. As a leading public health official, Collins’s many endorsements of this quackery border on irresponsible.
Turning to Body Politic’s survey projects, we quickly find that skepticism of their credibility is warranted. The group’s survey design specifically eschews requiring a positive Covid-19 test or antibody test to confirm that their respondents actually had the disease. “[W]e do not believe people’s experiences with COVID-19 symptoms should be discounted because they did not receive a positive test result,” states one justification for this unconventional data collection procedure. To qualify as a sufferer of Long Covid, it seems, a person needs only to claim that he or she suffers from Long Covid. Lived experience of the disease trumps any requirement of scientific verification.
The prevalence of unverified and untested Covid claimants being classified nonetheless as Long Covid sufferers is stunning. In the WSJ, Devine reports the numbers from the group’s first survey, administered through their website in 2020: “Nearly half (47.8%)” of Body Politic’s survey respondents “never had testing and 27.5% tested negative for Covid-19. Body Politic publicized the results of a larger, second survey in December 2020. Of the 3,762 respondents, a mere 600, or 15.9%, had tested positive for the virus at any time.” As Gaffney notes in StatNews, this practice raises the distinct possibility that survey respondents are misattributing other chronic symptoms to the virus.
Their new study in the Lancet’s journal EClinical Medicine does not offer much hope that Body Politic has improved its survey design. Its authors state that “We analyzed responses from 3762 participants with confirmed (diagnostic/antibody positive; 1020) or suspected (diagnostic/antibody negative or untested; 2742) COVID-19, from 56 countries.” Unconfirmed Covid patients with self-reported Long Covid symptoms outnumber confirmed Covid patients by almost 2.7 to 1. To their credit, the group discloses the lack of PCR or antibody testing confirmation among the majority of their respondents. The extremely high rates of unconfirmed cases, however, are more than sufficient to cast doubt upon their claims to have identified over 200 separate Long Covid symptoms.
The survey’s design also appears to self-select for people who are inclined to claim Long Covid symptoms, whether valid or not. According to the paper, the survey consisted of 257 questions, took almost 70 minutes on average to complete, allowed participants to revisit their answers for up to 30 days, and was primarily marketed to readers of the Body Politic group’s various blogs and Slack channels. This design practically ensures that the majority of the people who received and completed the survey were drawn from a readership that already gravitates towards the group’s political messaging and medical eccentricities.
Imagine if a survey on diet products collected its sample entirely from the mailing list of Gwyneth Paltrow’s “Goop” store. And imagine if the CDC decided to use that survey as a basis for a billion dollar program to revise its food nutrition guidelines, claiming that it is a representative study of the average American’s diet. Because that’s essentially what NIH Director Francis Collins has done with Body Politic’s surveys when justifying his current research initiative into Long Covid before the public.
With most Long Covid research at the moment, self-diagnosis by amateur groups appears to have supplanted scientific rigor in driving the NIH’s research priorities. Even minimal scrutiny should cast doubt upon the Body Politic group’s deficit of scientific credentials and surplus of outright “alternative medicine” quackery. Yet in January 2021 the New York Times heavily leaned on testimonials from Body Politic’s resident psychics and alternative wellness healers in a feature story on so-called Long Covid, aiming to demonstrate the scientific validity of the diagnosis.
So did an August 2020 piece in the Atlantic that is widely credited with popularizing the concept. Indeed, the New York Times has turned its opinion page over to Body Politic writers on multiple occasions over the last year, giving them free rein to promote unscientific claims about the concept. Simply scanning over mainstream media coverage of “Long Covid” in the last year reveals that Body Politic-affiliated activists with dubious scientific credentials have become go-to “experts” on the subject. Here they are being interviewed in Vox, in the Guardian, in theWashington Post, on NPR, in Buzzfeed, and on MSNBC.
In calling attention to Body Politic’s influence over shaping the Long Covid narrative, I do not question the possibility that some of the organization’s activists may exhibit genuine long-term Covid-related symptoms, even if they are not a distinct classification unto itself. But scientific assessment of their claims remains woefully inadequate relative to the authority that the media has bestowed upon them. In this sense, much of the Long Covid literature bears striking resemblance to other claimed chronic illnesses that have less-than-robust scientific grounding (for example, consider the difference between Celiac disease – a rare but severe dietary illness involving gluten – and the mid-2010s “gluten sensitivity” craze, which mixed together real and imagined but also self-diagnosed symptoms, fad dietary practices, and dubious scientific attestation)
Despite their scientific shortcomings, Body Politic’s own surveys have found a welcome audience among many academics who should know better. Even leading medical journals now regularly tout Body Politic’s dubious survey results as if they are scientific fact.
Last fall, the BMJ published an article on “Long Covid” from a team of scientists led by Oxford’s Trisha Greenhalgh, an outspoken pro-lockdown regular on the BBC and other UK media circuits. Greenhalgh’s team estimated that perhaps as many as 10% of people infected with Covid develop “Long Covid” symptoms – a number that has since become a standard estimate for Long Covid risks.
Their empirical “evidence” for Greenhalgh’s claim, in turn, derives primarily from Body Politic’s “patient-led survey” of alleged Long Covid sufferers – the same survey where half or more of respondents never even had a confirmed Covid diagnosis. This was no accidental reliance on a substandard source, deriving from insufficient scrutiny of the survey’s methods. Greenhalgh credited the Body Politic group by name on Twitter for inspiring their paper, endorsing the “lived experience” of their “patient-led research.” Echoing the Body Politic survey, Greenhalgh and her co-authors further embrace the proposition “that a positive test for covid-19 is not a prerequisite for diagnosis” for Long Covid. It’s apparently sufficient to simply believe that you had a prior bout with Covid, and attribute your claimed long-term symptoms to the same.
Not surprisingly, Long Covid has become a favored fallback argument among lockdowner epidemiologists to argue for prolonged restrictions. Duke University’s Gavin Yamey has made a name for himself by credulously circulating conspiracy theories about the Great Barrington Declaration by blogger Nafeez Ahmed. Sure enough, he’s also a Long Covid activist, promoting Greenhalgh’s study as well as an assortment of news articles that blur the lines between legitimate reporting of long-term symptoms and quackery.
Although Body Politic is far from the only group advocating for Long Covid research funding, their high-profile promotion by the NIH, by leading news outlets, and by medical journals suggests a similar phenomenon to the pattern seen among other lockdown advocates in allegedly-mainstream epidemiology. We’re witnessing a full-scale breakdown of the screening mechanisms that normally steer scientific discourse away from fringe and conspiracist viewpoints – provided that those viewpoints may be used to advance the alarmist ideologies that have emerged around Covid policy over the last year. The doors have, sadly, been thrown wide open to psychic healing and alternative wellness gibberish. Lockdowner scientists have, in turn, given these suspect claims and defective survey designs a welcome home in the most prestigious institutions of journalism, government, and the ivory tower.
Phillip W. Magness is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He holds a PhD and MPP from George Mason University’s School of Public Policy, and a BA from the University of St. Thomas (Houston).
Prior to joining AIER, Dr. Magness spent over a decade teaching public policy, economics, and international trade at institutions including American University, George Mason University, and Berry College.
In an exclusive in today’s Telegraph, journalists Laura Donnelly and Harry Yorke claim that more than half of covid hospitalisations are patients who tested positive AFTER they were admitted to hospital with something else.
This means that vast numbers of people are being labelled as hospitalised by covid when in reality they were admitted to hospital for something else and covid was only picked up during routine testing.
This is fraud. The government has always known this, yet it claimed that the NHS was under enormous pressure from covid-19 cases and imposed draconian and devastating lockdowns.
According to The Telegraph :
Experts said it meant the national statistics, published daily on the government website and frequently referred to by ministers, may far overstate the levels of pressures on the NHS.
The leaked data – covering all NHS trusts in England – show that, as of last Thursday, just 44 per cent of patients classed as being hospitalised with Covid had tested positive by the time they were admitted.
The majority of cases were not detected until patients underwent standard Covid tests, carried out on everyone admitted to hospital for any reason.
Overall, 56 per cent of Covid hospitalisations fell into this category, the data, seen by The Telegraph, show.
The Telegraph article goes on to make a crucial point. At no time was there any attempt to distinguish between those admitted with severe illness, later found to be caused by covid and those in hospital for different reasons who might otherwise never have known that they had picked it up.
Simply stated, when someone came in with heart palpitations or symptoms of stroke, they were given a PCR test. The test has been thoroughly discredited as it returns a high rate of false positives.
When the stroke or heart attack patient then tested positive for covid they were listed as a covid hospitalisation. This is breathtakingly corrupt. This wasn’t bad policy or mismanagement. They knew what they were doing. They’re still doing it.
Greg Clark, the chairman of the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee said that he would be writing to the Health Secretary, asking him to publish the breakdown on a regular basis following The Telegraph’s article. Clark said:
“If hospitalisations from Covid are a key determinant of how concerned we should be, and how quickly restrictions should be lifted, it’s important that the data is not presented in a way that could lead to the wrong conclusions being drawn.
While some of these people may be being admitted due to Covid, we currently do not know how many. And for those who are not, there is a big distinction between people who are admitted because of Covid and those who are in for something else but have Covid in such a mild form that it was not the cause of their hospitalisation.”
For 16 months, this government has been telling us that the NHS was overwhelmed by covid-19. They were lying. We knew they were lying. Now there is irrefutable proof.
The lies were used to justify tyrannical lockdowns that have done immeasurable damage to people’s health and wellbeing. What happens next? I don’t know. This is an example of outstanding journalism by Donnelly and Yorke.
It’s now over to SKY, BBC, ITV and Channel 4. It’s in their hands. It is their duty to put The Telegraph’s findings to government ministers and SAGE scientists and relentlessly pursue the truth.
I doubt these professors have anything to fear from a food tax
By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | November 19, 2016
A group of researchers in Oxford University, England have suggested that imposing a massive tax on carbon intensive foods – specifically protein rich foods like meat and dairy – could help combat climate change. […]
This proposal, from a group of people who have probably never missed a meal in their lives, is totally obscene. High income countries often have a lot of poor people who would be hard hit by increases in the price of food.
Needlessly exacerbating the risk poor people don’t get enough to eat, especially children and pregnant mothers, who are especially vulnerable to adverse health impacts from lack of protein in their diet – if this ghastly proposal is ever implemented, future generations will look upon it as a crime against humanity. – Read full article
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