Hancock: “Very Significant Flu Vaccine Drive This Winter!”
By Richie Allen | June 22, 2021
Yesterday, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that flu will come out of retirement this Winter. This morning the Health Secretary Matt Hancock said that plans are afoot for a “significant flu vaccination drive this Winter, to protect the NHS.”
Speaking to Times Radio Breakfast, Hancock said:
“We are worried about flu this winter because people’s natural immunity will be lower because we haven’t had any serious flu for 18 months now. We had a difficult winter in 2019, we didn’t have flu at all really this last winter because of the restrictions that were in place for Covid. So, it is something we are worried about.
We are are going to have a very significant flu vaccination drive this autumn – potentially at the same time you might get your Covid booster jab and your flu jab at the same time, we are testing whether that can be done.
We do need to make sure we protect the NHS this coming winter. We have got time to do the preparation for that now, though, and make sure we are as vaccinated as possible, because that is the way to keep people safe.”
Hancock may well go down as the greatest liar in all history. I wonder what do they have on him? Of course flu never disappeared. That’s a double whopper with cheese and bacon. Flu was simply rebranded Covid-19. That’s not to say that I am claiming that Covid-19 doesn’t exist. I’ve never said that. How could I know?
But flu doesn’t just disappear because of social distancing. A cough or a sneeze travels 25 feet remember. Masks are useless. Flu thrives when people stay inside for prolonged periods, in poorly ventilated homes. Those are facts. Flu never went away. People with flu were told that they had covid-19 after submitting themselves for a redundant PCR test.
Winter is going to be fun then. The pressure to take a flu jab and a covid booster will be immense. Will those who submit to the jabs have more freedom over the Winter months? Probably.
While appearing on SKY News this morning, Hancock repeated that vaccines are the only way back to freedom and the only way to protect the NHS. This morning, just as every other morning, the car park next to the vaccination centre in Salford is full.
I run past it every day. Each time I do, my heart sinks.
Canadian Health Officials Admit that Only Those Vaccinated for the Flu are Getting the Flu This Year
By Brian Shilhavy | Health Impact News | June 21, 2021
In a report published by CBC in Canada, government health officials are saying that they have not found a single case of seasonal flu this year.
Health officials in B.C. have not detected a single case of influenza circulating in the community since flu season began, continuing an “exceptional” nationwide trend even as the province sits in the thick of its regular flu season.
The B.C. Centre of Disease Control (BCCDC) confirmed the non-existent seasonal flu numbers to CBC News on Monday.
“It’s still a big goose egg in terms of influenza detection provincially. It’s really quite exceptional how low the influenza activity is,” said Dr. Danuta Skowronski, the lead for influenza and emerging respiratory virus monitoring at the BCCDC.
“I’ve been on the influenza beat for 20 years and I’ve never seen anything like this … and that’s not for lack of trying.”
But if you continue reading the article, you will see that they have actually tested some people positive for influenza via nasal swabs: those who were injected with the live-attenuated influenza vaccine.
The BCCDC has tested 30,000 samples for influenza this year. Only a dozen of those tests came back positive and all were linked to people who’d received a vaccine, which doesn’t count as community spread.
By comparison, the centre found 861 positive tests last year with roughly one-third of the testing.
B.C.’s experience is reflected across the country. A report from the Public Health Agency of Canada on Thursday said there hasn’t been enough influenza cases to even declare that the 2020-21 flu season has begun in Canada.
The 30,000 tests run for the flu this year is four times the average number of tests B.C. has done over the past five flu seasons. The dozen positive results were all connected to people who’d received the “live attenuated” flu vaccine, which is made from weakened influenza virus and delivered by nasal spray.
“It’s not unusual to pick up the vaccine virus in the nose swab,” Skowronski said. “What is unexpected is to find no influenza viruses otherwise at all in the province.” (Source.)
This is not a new phenomenon, of course. For years now there have been no cases of polio in most countries around the world, except among those who are vaccinated for polio. See:
I wondered if this phenomenon of zero flu cases was also being experienced in the U.S., so I did a search on the term “zero flu cases.” The result is in the graphic at the top of this article, which shows that many communities, hospitals, cities, and even states, are reporting the same thing as Canada.
The first 9 results found articles reporting zero cases of the flu this year, while the 10th result was a “fact checking” article stating that reports on Facebook stating that there were zero cases of flu this year were FALSE.
Of course the reason being given as to why the flu just all of a sudden disappeared is because of COVID-19 measures, which stopped the flu, but not COVID-19. Not even the experimental COVID-19 “vaccines” have stopped COVID-19, as the majority of people dying today with a COVID-19 diagnosis have been “fully vaccinated.”
And yet people in the public actually believe this explanation as to why the flu has suddenly disappeared??
Who are these people running these government health agencies and telling the public such bold-faced lies?
Scientists find most PCR test results don’t indicate infectious virus, question test’s status as “Gold Standard”
By Will Jones • Lockdown Sceptics • June 20, 2021
How often do we hear that the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test is the “gold standard” for detecting COVID-19 infection and thus for controlling and containing a COVID-19 epidemic? To question the accuracy of this test is supposedly part of the “misinformation” sceptics spread, which Ofcom, being guided by biased, Big Tech-funded, activist organisation Full Fact, aims to suppress.
In reality, serious questions about the proper use of PCR tests, particularly in mass screening programmes, have been asked since the technique was invented in 1985 and predate the Covid pandemic.
Since early 2020, there have been concerns that defining a “case” of COVID-19 merely in terms of a positive PCR test – with no consideration of clinical symptoms or the cycle threshold (Ct) of the test, which indicates the viral load of the patient – debases the concept of a clinical case and exaggerates the prevalence of the disease, fuelling alarm.
The issue was raised by Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina and colleagues in the Lancet in February 2021, where they concluded that the cycle thresholds in reported test data were such that only a quarter to a half of positive PCR tests were likely to indicate the presence of infectious COVID-19. The rest, they argued, were detecting post-infectious viral particles, meaning relying on PCR testing was overstating the number of infectious cases of COVID-19 by a factor of between two and four.
This conclusion has now been underlined in a research letter in the Journal of Infection by seven scientists from the Universities of Münster and Essen. After analysing the test results from a large laboratory in Münster that amounted to 80% of all Covid PCR tests in the Münster region during March to November 2020, they found that “more than half of individuals with positive PCR test results are unlikely to have been infectious”. They thus conclude: “RT-PCR test positivity should not be taken as an accurate measure of infectious SARS-CoV-2 incidence.”
They also note that asymptomatic positives have higher average Ct values than symptomatic positives, meaning lower viral load and so less likely to be infectious.
Asymptomatic individuals with positive RT-PCR test results have higher Ct values and a lower probability of being infectious than symptomatic individuals with positive results.
This isn’t to say that PCR tests are of no use in diagnosing COVID-19. PCR amplifies tiny amounts of genetic material until it can be detected, and can certainly be used to detect the presence of SARS-CoV-2. However, some doubt the validity of the PCR test protocols for COVID-19 and so question whether it is even detecting a real virus. However, since a large proportion of samples are currently being genetically sequenced to determine which variant they are, there can be no serious doubt that a real virus with known genetic structure is being detected in the tests.
When viral incidence is low or declining, that’s when the PCR test becomes much less reliable and tends greatly to overstate the prevalence of the disease (by two to four times, according to Michael Mina) and misdiagnoses people as being sick or infectious. When levels are surging and there is more infectious virus around it is much more likely to be accurate, at least in terms of indicating infectiousness, though questions about the proper use of the term “case” where no or mild symptoms are present remain.
Fear Is Contagious and Used to Control You
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | June 18, 2021
Governments are using fear to control and manipulate their citizens. That has now been admitted by members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior (SPI-B), a subcommittee that advises the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in the U.K. And they should know, because they advocated for it, and now say it was a regrettable mistake. As reported by The Telegraph, May 14, 2021:1
“Scientists on a committee that encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behavior during the COVID pandemic have admitted its work was ‘unethical’ and ‘totalitarian.’ Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior (SPI-B) expressed regret about the tactics in a new book about the role of psychology in the Government’s COVID-19 response.
SPI-B warned in March last year that ministers needed to increase ‘the perceived level of personal threat’ from COVID-19 because ‘a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened.’
Gavin Morgan, a psychologist on the team, said: ‘Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government. By nature I am an optimistic person, but all this has given me a more pessimistic view of people.’”
Psychological Warfare Is Real
The Telegraph quotes several of the SPI-B members, all of whom are also quoted in the newly released book, “A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” written by Laura Dodsworth:2
“One SPI-B scientist told Ms Dodsworth: ‘In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian.
The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment. Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared’ …
One warned that ‘people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise … We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in’ …
Another member of SPI-B said they were ‘stunned by the weaponization of behavioral psychology’ during the pandemic, and that ‘psychologists didn’t seem to notice when it stopped being altruistic and became manipulative. They have too much power and it intoxicates them.’
Steve Baker, the deputy chairman of the COVID Recovery Group of Tory MPs, said: ‘If it is true that the state took the decision to terrify the public to get compliance with rules, that raises extremely serious questions about the type of society we want to become. If we’re being really honest, do I fear that government policy today is playing into the roots of totalitarianism? Yes, of course it is.’”
The Manufacture of Fear
For nearly a year and a half, governments around the world, with few exceptions, have fed their citizens a steady diet of frightening news. For months on end, you couldn’t turn on the television without facing a tickertape detailing the number of hospitalizations and deaths.
Even when it became clear that people weren’t really dying in excessive numbers, the mainstream media fed us continuous updates on the growing number of “cases,” without ever putting such figures into context or explaining that the vast majority were false positives.
Information that would have balanced out the bad news — such as recovery rates and just how many so-called “cases” actually weren’t, because they never had a single symptom — were censored and suppressed.
They also refused to put any of the data into context, such as reviewing whether the death toll actually differed significantly from previous years. Instead, each new case was treated as an emergency and a sign of catastrophic doom.
Don’t Be Confused — Contradiction Is a Warfare Tactic
Aside from the barrage of bad-news-only data — which, by the way, was heavily manipulated in a variety of ways — fear and anxiety are also generated by keeping you confused. According to Dodsworth, giving out contradictory recommendations and vague instructions is being done intentionally, to keep you psychologically vulnerable.
“When you create a state of confusion, people become ever more reliant on the messaging. Instead of feeling confident about making decisions, they end up waiting for instructions from the Government,” she said in a May 20, 2021, interview on the Planet Normal podcast.3
An example provided by Dodsworth are the pandemic measures implemented over Christmas 2020:
“Family Christmases were on, then off, then back on, then off again. You have got someone tightening the screw, then loosening the screw, then tightening it again. It’s like a torture scenario.”
But that’s not all. As explained by psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin, by layering confusion and uncertainty on top of fear, you can bring an individual to a state in which they can no longer think rationally. Once driven into an illogical state, they are easily manipulated. I have no doubt driving people into a state where logic and reason no longer registers is the whole point behind much of the conflicting information we’re given.
The Fear Factory
In her book, Dodsworth details a number of branches of the British government that are using psychological warfare methods in their interaction with the public. In addition to the SPI-B, there’s the:4
•Behavioral Insights team, the so-called “nudge unit,” a semi-independent government body that applies “behavioral insights to inform policy, improve public services and deliver positive results for people and communities.”5 This team also advises foreign nations.
•Home Office’s Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU), which is part of the U.K.’s Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, advises front groups disguised as public “grassroots” organizations on how to “covertly engineer the thoughts of people.”
•Rapid Response Unit, launched in 2018, operates across the British Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister’s office (colloquially known as “Number 10” as in the physical address, 10 Downing Street in London) to “counter misinformation and disinformation.” They also work with the National Security Communications Team during crises to ensure “official information” gets maximum visibility.6
•Counter Disinformation Cell, which is part of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. Both monitor social media and combat “fake news” about science in general and COVID-19 in particular, with “fake news” being anything that contradicts the World Health Organization’s guidance.7
•Government Communications Headquarters (QCHQ), an intelligence and security organization that provides information to the U.K. government and the armed forces. According to Dodsworth, QCHQ personnel, and even members of the 77th Brigade, have been enlisted as so-called sockpuppets and trolls to combat anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown messaging on social media.
According to Dodsworth, there are many others. In her book, she claims at least 10 different government departments in the U.K. are working with “behavioral insights teams” to manipulate the public.
We’re Just Seeing It Now
Importantly, government’s reliance on behavioral psychology didn’t just happen as a result of the pandemic. These tactics have been used for years, for myriad PR purposes, and while the pandemic may be winding down, Dodsworth warns that more and more behavioral scientists are being hired:8
“It’s growing and growing. Right now, I feel we are in a maelstrom of nudge,” she says. “In the past, there have been calls to consult the public on the use of behavioral psychology, and those calls have come from the behavioral scientists themselves. And yet it hasn’t happened. We haven’t yet been consulted on the use of subconscious techniques which effectively strip away our choices …
I fervently hope this book [‘The State of Fear’] is actually going to inspire a much-needed conversation about the use of fear, not just in the epidemic, but the way we use behavioral psychology overall.
It’s not just a genie that has been let out the bottle. It’s like we’ve unleashed a Hydra and you can keep chopping its head off, but they keep employing more of these behavioral scientists throughout different government departments. It’s very much how the Government now does business. It’s the business of fear …
I think ultimately people don’t want to be manipulated. People don’t enjoy being hoodwinked and they don’t want to live in a state of fear. We maybe need to be a bit bolder about standing up more quickly when something is not right.”
Delete that Tweet! Twitter Censors Journalism
Intellectual conformity leads nowhere good
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | June 14, 2021
Two weeks ago, I blogged about a magazine article titled The Drug that Cracked Covid. It describes the bizarre reaction, on the part of health bureaucrats and journalists, to the news that Ivermectin is a pandemic game-changer.
On the one hand we have ICU doctors who’ve been toiling in the trenches, battling COVID for over a year. Based on firsthand experience and a mountain of research, they know this cheap, generic drug is highly effective. On the other hand, we have health bureaucrats who’ve never treated a single COVID patient, who haven’t worked a single shift in ICU during this pandemic, insisting Ivermectin should not be used as a COVID medicine.
But there’s a further component to this madness: Big Tech censorship. Tom Nelson lives in Minnesota and has a Masters of Science degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. He’s been an independent blogger since 2005, when he began commenting on the extinction status of a particular species of woodpecker. These days, he’s an active participant in the online climate debate.
Having joined Twitter in 2008, Nelson is now followed by 28.7 thousand people. But two weeks ago, he did something that put his Twitter account at risk – he talked about my blog post. Twitter says that quoting my summary and linking to my post violates its rules concerning “misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.”
Twitter, he was further advised, requires “the removal of content that may pose a risk to people’s health, including content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information.”
So an experienced journalist (moi, here in Canada), blogs about an article written by another experienced journalist (Michael Capuzzo, in the US). When Nelson tells the world about our work, Twitter locks his account – preventing him from tweeting, retweeting, or liking other people’s messages until he deletes the dangerous, forbidden, not-to-be-tolerated tweet.
But deletion wasn’t enough. Only after Nelson took this step, did a 12-hour countdown begin. In other words, Nelson spent 12+ hours in Twitter’s penalty box for tweeting about the work of professional journalists.
The next day Nelson quoted from, and linked to, the magazine article itself.
That resulted in a near immediate second suspension. In order to continue talking to his audience of more than 28 thousand people, Nelson was required to delete that tweet, as well – and to spend seven days in Twitter’s penalty box.
This is insane. Twitter has no business censoring journalists. It has no business taking sides in any debate about how best to treat any disease. But it is doing so. Ever more aggressively. And with absolute impunity.
In Nelson’s words: “I’m incredibly angry about this. I believe Twitter censorship of the Ivermectin discussion has already cost people their lives.”
Manufacturing (New Normal) “Reality”
By CJ Hopkins | The Consent Factory | June 20, 2021
The ultimate goal of every totalitarian system is to establish complete control over society and every individual within it in order to achieve ideological uniformity and eliminate any and all deviation from it. This goal can never be achieved, of course, but it is the raison d’être of all totalitarian systems, regardless of what forms they take and ideologies they espouse. You can dress totalitarianism up in Hugo Boss-designed Nazi uniforms, Mao suits, or medical-looking face masks, its core desire remains the same: to remake the world in its paranoid image … to replace reality with its own “reality.”
We are right in the middle of this process currently, which is why everything feels so batshit crazy. The global capitalist ruling classes are implementing a new official ideology, in other words, a new “reality.” That’s what an official ideology is. It’s more than just a set of beliefs. Anyone can have any beliefs they want. Your personal beliefs do not constitute “reality.” In order to make your beliefs “reality,” you need to have the power to impose them on society. You need the power of the police, the military, the media, scientific “experts,” academia, the culture industry, the entire ideology-manufacturing machine.
There is nothing subtle about this process. Decommissioning one “reality” and replacing it with another is a brutal business. Societies grow accustomed to their “realities.” We do not surrender them willingly or easily. Normally, what’s required to get us to do so is a crisis, a war, a state of emergency, or … you know, a deadly global pandemic.
During the changeover from the old “reality” to the new “reality,” the society is torn apart. The old “reality” is being disassembled and the new one has not yet taken its place. It feels like madness, and, in a way, it is. For a time, the society is split in two, as the two “realities” battle it out for dominance. “Reality” being what it is (i.e., monolithic), this is a fight to the death. In the end, only one “reality” can prevail.
This is the crucial period for the totalitarian movement. It needs to negate the old “reality” in order to implement the new one, and it cannot do that with reason and facts, so it has to do it with fear and brute force. It needs to terrorize the majority of society into a state of mindless mass hysteria that can be turned against those resisting the new “reality.” It is not a matter of persuading or convincing people to accept the new “reality.” It’s more like how you drive a herd of cattle. You scare them enough to get them moving, then you steer them wherever you want them to go. The cattle do not know or understand where they are going. They are simply reacting to a physical stimulus. Facts and reason have nothing to do with it.
And this is what has been so incredibly frustrating for those of us opposing the roll-out of the “New Normal,” whether debunking the official Covid-19 narrative, or “Russiagate,” or the “Storming of the US Capitol,” or any other element of the new official ideology. (And, yes, it is all one ideology, not “communism,” or “fascism,” or any other nostalgia, but the ideology of the system that actually rules us, supranational global capitalism. We’re living in the first truly global-hegemonic ideological system in human history. We have been for the last 30 years. If you are touchy about the term “global capitalism,” go ahead and call it “globalism,” or “crony capitalism,” or “corporatism,” or whatever other name you need to. Whatever you call it, it became the unrivaled globally-hegemonic ideological system when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s. Yes, there are pockets of internal resistance, but it has no external adversaries, so its progression toward a more openly totalitarian structure is logical and entirely predictable.)
Anyway, what has been so incredibly frustrating is that many of us have been operating under the illusion that we are engaged in a rational argument over facts (e.g., the facts of Russiagate, Literal-Hitlergate, 9/11, Saddam’s WMDs, Douma, the January 6 “insurrection,” the official Covid narrative, etc.) This is not at all what is happening. Facts mean absolutely nothing to the adherents of totalitarian systems.
You can show the New Normals the facts all you like. You can show them the fake photos of people dead in the streets in China in March of 2020. You can show them the fake projected death rates. You can explain how the fake PCR tests work, how healthy people were deemed medical “cases.” You can show them all the studies on the ineffectiveness of masks. You can explain the fake “hospitalization” and “death” figures, send them articles about the unused “emergency hospitals,” the unremarkable age-and-population-adjusted death rates, cite the survival rates for people under 70, the dangers and pointlessness of “vaccinating” children. None of this will make the slightest difference.
Or, if you’ve bought the Covid-19 narrative, but haven’t completely abandoned your critical faculties, you can do what Glenn Greenwald has been doing recently. You can demonstrate how the corporate media have intentionally lied, again and again, to whip up mass hysteria over “domestic terrorism.” You can show people videos of the “violent domestic terrorists” calmly walking into the Capitol Building in single file, like a high-school tour group, having been let in by members of Capitol Security. You can debunk the infamous “fire-extinguisher murder” of Brian Sicknik that never really happened. You can point out that the belief that a few hundred unarmed people running around in the Capitol qualifies as an “insurrection,” or an “attempted coup,” or “domestic terrorism,” is delusional to the point of being literally insane. This will also not make the slightest difference.
I could go on, and I’m sure I will as the “New Normal” ideology becomes our new “reality” over the course of the next several years. My point, at the moment, is … this isn’t an argument. The global-capitalist ruling classes, government leaders, the corporate media, and the New Normal masses they have instrumentalized are not debating with us. They know the facts. They know the facts contradict their narratives. They do not care. They do not have to. Because this isn’t about facts. It’s about power.
I’m not saying that facts don’t matter. Of course they matter. They matter to us. I’m saying, let’s recognize what this is. It isn’t a debate or a search for the truth. The New Normals are disassembling one “reality” and replacing it with a new “reality.” (Yes, I know that reality exists in some fundamental ontological sense, but that isn’t the “reality” I’m talking about here, so please do not send me angry emails railing against Foucault and postmodernism.)
The pressure to conform to the new “reality” is already intense and it’s going to get worse as vaccination passes, public mask-wearing, periodic lockdowns, etc., become normalized. Those who don’t conform will be systematically demonized, socially and/or professionally ostracized, segregated, and otherwise punished. Our opinions will be censored. We will be “canceled,” deplatformed, demonitized, and otherwise silenced. Our views will be labeled “potentially harmful.” We will be accused of spreading “misinformation,” of being “far-right extremists,” “racists,” “anti-Semites,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “anti-global-capitalist violent domestic terrorists,” or just garden variety “sexual harassers,” or whatever they believe will damage us the most.
This will happen in both the public and personal spheres. Not just governments, the media, and corporations, but your colleagues, friends, and family will do this. Strangers in shops and restaurants will do this. Most of them will not do it consciously. They will do it because your non-conformity represents an existential threat to them … a negation of their new “reality” and a reminder of the reality they surrendered in order to remain a “normal” person and avoid the punishments described above.
This is nothing new, of course. It is how “reality” is manufactured, not only in totalitarian systems, but in every organized social system. Those in power instrumentalize the masses to enforce conformity with their official ideology. Totalitarianism is just its most extreme and most dangerously paranoid and fanatical form.
So, sure, keep posting and sharing the facts, assuming you can get them past the censors, but let’s not kid ourselves about what we’re up against. We’re not going to wake the New Normals up with facts. If we could, we would have done so already. This is not a civilized debate about facts. This is a fight. Act accordingly.
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How Deadly is COVID? Real Science vs Media Hype
By Chris Lonsdale | 21st Century Wire | June 19, 2021
I tend to be very curious about the world. I always have been. It’s probably what brought me to Asia in the first place. I get especially curious when things don’t make sense, in which case I find myself drawn into exploring what might be really going on. So, in early 2020 when the panic about COVID-19 started to spread around the world, like most other people I accepted the logic that we needed to “flatten the curve” so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed.
After all, nobody really had enough information to know what was going on, or how serious this new disease might be. And reports from front-line medical staff about the symptoms being experienced by COVID-19 patients made for gruesome reading. At the beginning it made sense to be very careful.
But, as the months went on, it became increasingly difficult to match what was being reported in the media with what we could observe using our own senses. I knew of no-one who had died of COVID-19. No-one who had even gotten sick with COVID-19. There certainly weren’t any dead bodies piling up in the streets. This now makes sense because mortality data for Hong Kong, and other Asian countries where I also spend time, show that 2020 was a very normal year as far as overall mortality levels were concerned.
Globally it was a little different. Most of the people I connect with around the world also didn’t know anyone who had died of COVID. One neighbor knew someone (in Russia) who got very sick but then recovered. One person I follow on Twitter, who is in his 70’s, was put into intensive care for several weeks and a few other people I follow on twitter had a family member who got very sick or died. Clearly there was an issue, but the data coming in about the scope and severity did not mesh with what we were being told through the media.
Importantly, the predictive models coming out of Imperial College in the UK assumed that almost no-one was immune to COVID-19, that it was both incredibly infectious and very deadly for everybody, and that millions would die.
We must remember, of course, that the author of the Imperial College report, Neil Fergusson, has a history of extreme overestimations. In 2005 as just one example, Ferguson predicted that up to 150 million people could be killed from bird flu. In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.
Never mind Fergusson’s “checkered history”, immediately after the Fergusson models were published the media around the world began screaming that something like the “black death” was about to crush us, and that deaths from COVID-19 were mounting up at a terrifying rate. We were told that we had to be afraid …. Very afraid.
Counting COVID Deaths
While clearly something was going on, and there were people dying, more and more thoughtful and highly skilled people around the world began to wonder about the disconnect between the media hype and the reality on the ground. The big question was, how serious and deadly was this pandemic really?
About that time, I was reminded of a basic tenet of scientific research, which came in the form of an admonition that we should be wary of the distinction between “DYING OF” COVID-19, and “DYING WITH” COVID-19. This basically refers to the fact that one should NEVER equate correlation with causality.
You may have noticed that we are being reminded of this fact every day now, as the COVID vaccines get rolled out and there are many adverse reactions. We are told that, just because someone gets paralyzed, or has painful rashes over their entire body, or dies from blood clots within hours or days of being jabbed with the experimental “vaccines”, we absolutely should not assume that these “vaccines” actually CAUSED the injury or death. This is true. And for each of the deaths, an autopsy should be performed to identify the actual cause.
Yet, for some strange reason, this very same basic premise was, and is, totally ignored when it comes to COVID-19. From Day 1 of the pandemic, every death apparently associated with COVID-19 in some way was counted and reported as a death CAUSED BY COVID-19.
For instance, at a press conference given by the Director of the Illinois Department of Health in April 2020, when asked about the definition of a COVID-19 death, the answer was: “It means technically even if you died of a clear alternate cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it’s still listed as a COVID death. ” You can view the original news story here.
This same situation is mostly true around the world because every country is following guidelines coming from the WHO (World Health Organization). For example, the recommended death reporting form for COVID-19 from the WHO is structured in such a way that, if COVID-19 is written on the form even if there are other factors, then COVID-19 must be listed as the underlying cause of death.
The WHO guidelines state: “… in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case ….. A death due to COVID-19 may not be attributed to another disease (e.g. cancer).”
The WHO guidelines for death reporting involving COVID-19 can be found here.
Problems surrounding the sudden revision of death certificate protocols have been discussed by medical professionals throughout 2020, but this topic is treated as verboten in mainstream media and politics.
In practice this means that when people who were already on their deathbed die, they will be marked as a COVID-19 death based on an assumption (i.e. “probable” COVID-19) or a PCR test. So, unless there’s an autopsy, the public record shows COVID-19 as the cause of death.
When it comes to using the PCR test to determine cause of death, CDC (US Centers for Disease Control) guidance states: “The detection of viral RNA (i.e. PCR test) cannot demonstrate the presence of an infectious virus, or that 2019-nCoV is the causative agent of clinical symptoms.” (Source: https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download)
In other words: we simply cannot use a PCR test to determine that a death was caused by COVID-19, and yet this is what has been done routinely over the last 16 months.
There are also serious problems in the PCR test which I wrote about in a recent China Daily article.
From the above we can begin to understand a major issue. Because of the way COVID-19 deaths were (and are) being reported, if we did not dig deep into the data we would have no real idea of the scale of deaths actually caused directly and only by SARS-Cov-2, as opposed to the number of deaths that would have happened anyway where COVID-19 was somehow associated with a recorded death (which does not mean that COVID-19 actually caused the death).
So, let’s dig into the data. A simple first step is to simply look at the age distribution of people dying and having COVID-19 on their death certificate.
Today the average life expectancy in the UK is around 81 years of age. Did you know that the average age of death “involving COVID-19” in the UK was 82 years of age? In the US, 92.64% of COVID-19 linked deaths occurred in people 55 years old or older, with 80.73% being over 65. Read more here.
In Hong Kong, from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic until now, only 210 people have died with COVID-19 marked as the cause (based of course on the WHO guidelines mentioned above). The average age? 78.2 years. 28 of those deaths were in their 90’s and only 2 people just under 40 died with COVID-19 listed as the cause. According to data provided by the Hong Kong Department of Health, no-one younger than 38 has died either OF, or WITH, COVID-19 in Hong Kong. See the official figures here.
With this new understanding we now know that while COVID-19 is clearly dangerous for certain at-risk groups – almost exclusively elderly people – the danger level of the pandemic to society as a whole is substantially less than what we have been led to believe.
It’s also very useful to look at official data such as that regularly updated at the CDC. As of June 9, 2021, the CDC report that, in total, 586,659 people have died having COVID-19 listed as a cause or contributing cause of death in the US.
You probably do not know this, because the majority of the MSM will not have put this in front of you, but late in 2020 the CDC quietly changed the information on their website to start showing how many so-called COVID-19 deaths occurred for people who had serious co-morbidities. This is no trivial change in data reporting.
Note how in the CDC’s reporting, when you scroll down you see a table showing all the co-morbidities of the people who died with COVID-19 being listed as the cause of death:
The note associated with that table reads: “There were co-morbidities or other conditions listed on the death certificate for as many as 95% of all COVID-19 deaths. The other 5% of death certificates in which COVID-19 was the only condition listed was likely related to a lack of detail listed about other conditions present at the time of death”.
This means that at most only 29,332 people have died in the US with COVID-19 as the only known cause. However, the entire world continues to believe that all 586,659 “COVID-19 linked” deaths in the US were CAUSED BY COVID-19, simply as a result of how data was captured and entered into the public record, and how it was publicized by the media.
The Case of the Disappearing Flu
A slightly different way of understanding all this information is the fact that COVID-19 seems to have cured the flu, heart disease, cancer and a number of other serious conditions. Data comparing flu cases around the world have shown that the flu completely disappeared worldwide since the emergence of COVID-19.
Some medical pundits are claiming the flu has disappeared because of the effectiveness of masks and social distancing. But this has yet to be proven through any peer reviewed studies, and so it is still only a working theory at this point. This theory posits that it is because of the effectiveness of coronavirus measures; lockdowns, masks and social distancing – which somehow eliminated the flu. The theory is problematic as it doesn’t explain why these same measures did not stop COVID-19. In response, those defending the disappearing flu narrative will usually claim that COVID couldn’t be stopped because it is ‘much more transmissible.’ Hence, the disappearing flu story can then be used to validate the official consensus that SARS-Cov-2 is unlike any other virus seen before, and has special abilities which allowed it to traverse the globe and penetrate populations in a matter of weeks.
While the authors of the Scientific American paper state that “the public health measures taken to keep the coronavirus from spreading also stop the flu”, there is a much greater likelihood that influenza cases were simply being coded as COVID-19.
So, in summary, we can say that many but not all of the deaths labelled as being due to COVID-19 alone were quite likely due to other causes. Also, individuals with compromised immune systems were very vulnerable to the spike protein on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It is the spike protein which appears to be the toxin responsible for the COVID disease. In all of these cases, however, we cannot say how many of those deaths were actually caused BY COVID-19 alone without the autopsies that would be required to make such a judgement.
All we can say with certainty is that COVID-19 was correlated with these deaths.
The entire global media almost as a whole have ignored this distinction, along with other very important distinctions in this pandemic, and sold the story that all the deaths reported were CAUSED by COVID-19, and that we therefore had to be afraid. And, as we look around, we see the massive damage that this fear has created in our world.
Again we face the question, why was fake news spread around the world in this way by the mainstream media? Was it simply a matter of scientific illiteracy? Maybe it was simply laziness, or a lack of curiosity? Was it because “death sells”, and the more horrible the numbers the more viewers would be drawn into the drama and therefore build the ratings for the media? Or were other factors at play?
I will deal with issues such as these in future articles in this series.
In the meantime, given what the data now tells us, it is time to stop the panicking and let go of the fear.
***
Author Chris Lonsdale is a psychologist, linguist, educator, entrepreneur, dialogue facilitator and corporate advisor with over thirty years experience doing business in Asia. He is the creator of the Kungfu English mobile self-learning system, author of “The Third Ear” and “How to Learn Any Language in 6 Months” (in Chinese), and his TEDx talk on Language Learning is one of the top 10 TEDx videos of all time.
What I Know and Don’t Know about SARS-CoV-2 Virus
By Edward J Curtin | June 19, 2021
After fifteen months of assiduous reading, study, observation, and research, I have come to some conclusions about what is called COVID-19. I would like to emphasize that I have done this work obsessively since it seemed so important. I have consulted information and arguments across all media, corporate and alternative, academic, medical, books, etc. I have consulted with researchers around the world. I have read the websites of the CDC, the World Health Organization, and government and non-government health organizations. In other words, I have left no stone unturned, despite the overt or covert political leanings of the sources. I have done this as a sociologist and writer, not as a medical doctor, although many of my sources have been medical doctors and medical studies.
My succinct conclusions follow without links to sources since I am not trying to persuade anyone of anything but just stating for the public record what I have concluded. Life is short. I am going to say it now.
- I know that vast numbers of people have been hypnotized by fear, threats, and bribes to accept the corporate mainstream media’s version of COVID-19. I have concluded that many millions are moving in a trance state and do not know this. They have been induced into this state by a well-organized, very sophisticated propaganda campaign that has drawn on the human fear of death and disease. Those behind this have no doubt studied the high incidence of hypochondriasis in the general population and the fear of an invisible “virus” in societies where belief in God and the spiritual invisible has been replaced by faith in science. Knowing their audience well, they have concocted a campaign of fear and confusion to induce obedience.
- I do not know but suspect that those who have been so hypnotized tend to be mainly members of the middle to the upper classes, those who have invested so much belief in the system. This includes the highly schooled.
- I know that to lockdown hundreds of millions of healthy people, to insist they wear useless masks, to tell them to avoid human contacts, to destroy the economic lives of regular people have created vast suffering that was meant to teach people a lesson about who was in control and that they better revise their understanding of human relations to adjust to the new digital unreality that the producers of this masquerade are trying to put in place of flesh and blood, face to face human reality.
- I know that the PCR test invented by Kary Mullis cannot test for the alleged virus or any virus and therefore all the numbers of cases and deaths are based on nothing. They are conjured out of thin air in a massive act of magic. I know that the belief that it can so test began with the unscientific PCR Corona protocol created by Christian Drosten in Germany in January 2020 that became the standard method for testing for SARS-CoV-2 worldwide. I am sure this was preplanned and part of a high-level conspiracy. This protocol set the cycle threshold (amplification) at 45 which could only result in false positive results. These were then called cases: An act of fraud on a massive scale.
- I do not know if the alleged virus has ever been isolated in the sense of being purified or detached from everything else aside from being cultured in a lab. Therefore I do not know if the virus exists.
- I know that the experimental mRNA “vaccines” that are being pushed on everyone are not traditional vaccines but dangerous experiments whose long-term consequences are unknown. And I know that Moderna says its messenger RNA (mRNA) non-vaccine “vaccine” functions “like an operating system on a computer” and that Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, says that the lipid nanoparticles from the injections travel throughout the body and settle in large quantities in multiple organs where the spike protein, being biologically active, can cause massive damage and that the FDA has known this. Additionally, I know that tens of thousands of people have suffered adverse effects from these injections and many thousands have died from them and that these figures are greatly underestimated due to the reporting systems. I know that with this number of casualties in the past these experimental shots would have been stopped long ago or never started. That they have not, therefore, convinces me that a radically evil agenda is under way whose goal is harm not health because those in charge know what I know and much more.
- I do not know where this alleged virus originated, if it exists.
- I know that from the start of this crisis, there was a concerted effort across the world to deny access to proven effective treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, steroids, ivermectin in a planned effort to vaccinate as many people as possible. This alone reveals an agenda centered not on health but on getting as many people as possible to submit to being vaccinated and controlled. Social control is the name of this deadly game.
- I know that those pushing these vaccines – The World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, etc. – have a long history of wanting to drastically reduce the world’s population and that their promotion of eugenics under various names is very well known. I am convinced that the totally untested mRNA-type “gene therapy” is the key to their plan for population reduction.
- I do not know if they will succeed.
- I know they must be resisted.
- I do not know why so many good people cannot see through this evil. I can only attribute it to having been seduced by a massive hypnotic propaganda campaign that has appealed to their deepest fears and will result in those fears being realized because they thought they were free. It is a great tragedy.
- I know that all the statistics about cases and deaths “from” COVID-19 have been manipulated to create a fake pandemic. One of the most obvious proofs of this is the alleged disappearance of the flu and deaths from influenza. Only someone in a trance could fail to understand the absurd logic in the argument that this was the result of mask wearing when at the same time the air-born COVID-19 spread like wildfire until that stopped precipitously in January 2021 when a tiny number of people had been vaccinated.
- I know there has been barely any excess mortality throughout all this.
- I do not know where it will all end but hope against hope the growing opposition to this fraud will grow and defeat it despite the organized censorship that is underway against dissenting opinions. I know that when organized censorship on this scale takes place those behind it are afraid of the revelation of the truth. A simple understanding of history confirms this.
- I know that the temporary reprieve the authorities have granted to their subjects will be followed by further restrictions on fundamental freedoms, the corona virus lockdowns will likely return, “vaccine” boosters will be promoted, and the World Economic Forum’s push for a Great Reset with a Fourth Industrial Revolution will lead to the marriage of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, digital technology, and biology with the USA and other countries continuing to slip into a new form of fascist control unless people across the world stand up and resist in great numbers. I am heartened by signs that this resistance is growing.
- Finally, I know if the authoritarian forces win the immediate battle, someone will write a book with a title like that of Milton Mayer’s classic, They Thought They Were Free. It will be censored. Perhaps it will first be shared via samizdat. But in the end, after much suffering and death, the truth about this evil agenda will prevail and there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
- We are in a spiritual war for the soul of the world.
An Essential Journey
My experience of international travel in Covid times
By Joanna Sharp | OffGuardian | June 19, 2021
I had not planned to travel abroad this year, especially after the UK government’s announcement in early 2021 that foreign holidays were forbidden. Even heading towards the airport with an intent to go on a foreign holiday could result in a £5000 fine or imprisonment! Surreal.
Where we live in London under a flight path to Heathrow, we notice that although there are fewer flights, they have not ceased completely. So how do people travel? It’s not something I have thought about.
One day at the end of April I receive a message that my elderly father’s condition is critical. Within an hour I am looking at flights back home in Eastern Europe and checking the UK government travel ‘advice’ webpages.
I say ‘advice’ but that word belongs to the past. Today, ‘command’ might be more appropriate. According to the government, only “essential” international travel is permitted for named valid reasons; ‘medical and compassionate’ is the category which applies to me.
I wonder whose compassion this is a reference to: mine, for wanting to be with my sick father, or the government’s for including this as a possibility. Reassured that I can go, it is now a question of buying the plane tickets, checking in and packing, right? Not quite.
WADING THROUGH THE RED TAPE
Since holiday travel has effectively been banned, the government created intricate webpages full of information on what is and what is not allowed, where citizens cannot travel, and if they must, what documents they need to prepare. So complicated travel advice alone has become that the webpage now includes a step by step flowchart with endless links within each step to be followed.
Getting through this information would take at least a day. It’s like a cross between a maze and a vortex. I soon understand that I cannot buy my tickets until I have uploaded the right Covid related paperwork onto the airline website!
First, I need to fill a Declaration for International Travel (since the 17th May it is no longer required) which asks for personal details including my date of birth, passport number, home address and destination.
The key question is the reason for international travel – and in the actual online questions, the phrase is: ‘What is your excuse for travel?’ My excuse? What kind of language is that? Am I asking a teacher to let me leave the classroom? Am I asked to explain why I haven’t done my homework?
That really shocks me, although I have already noticed my own reaction to the very idea that I need permission to leave the country, as if I was back in Eastern Europe before 1989…I read the following declaration and tick the right box out of the given options.
I hereby declare that my reason for being outside my home to travel internationally is for:
– Work
– Volunteering
– Education
– Medical or compassionate reasons
– Funeral
– Ending a temporary visit (non-UK resident)
– Allowing access to parents with children who do not live in the same country
– Other reasonable excuse – please specify
Next, I am required to sign to ‘certify that the information I have provided is true. I understand that if I provide false or misleading information, I may be issued with a fixed penalty notice and/or a direction to return home or be arrested’.
So, by signing this, and I have no choice not to if I want to get my ticket, I have given the UK authorities permission to arrest of fine me should my excuse to travel turn out to be incorrect. What if my father is not that ill, then what?
But of course, that is not enough. I now need to provide evidence of my father’s illness. How do you do that when the whole of the world is still in lockdown; imagine having to get a doctor’s note on demand. I am still just trying to get a ticket.
I want to travel tomorrow morning, my sister-in-law tells me, Dad is given a couple of days. I ask my brother to send me an email confirming the family crisis, he does that within an hour. He is also trying to copy the notes from my father’s last doctor’s visit and the most recent diagnosis.
Then, still before I buy a return ticket, I need to get a kit of two Covid tests which I will need to take upon return to UK. Another link takes me on to a list of government-approved Covid test providers. A whole list of them, each can be accessed via a separate link. I try a few. They average around £200 each. The cheapest ones are £99 but are sold out.
Why can’t I see any free NHS ones? The ones given out like sweets in schools and local pharmacies? Why are these not available? Why could I not just pick a free one at the airport?
But of course, there is no to answer these questions, I am desperate to leave so agree to this, too. No test, no flight. So, I order one of these almost £200 test kits, get an email confirming the order, upload all the documents and finally I can complete the purchase of my tickets which, as usual, turn out not so low cost after all.
I check in. My boarding card (lucky I had just bought a printer the previous week) says at the top of the page ‘Covid Documentation Uploaded’. So, now I have the boarding card and a pile of printed pages which presumably I will need to show at UK border control in order to prove my excuse for leaving the country is legitimate.
Finally, I download and fill in the compulsory Passenger Locator Form for the destination country that will enable the system to track and trace me. It is nearly bedtime and I now need to pack.
ON THE GO
My husband drives me to Stansted in the middle of the night. An early morning flight, no public transport available but at least it’s quiet and there is no traffic. The airport is still closed; a group of families with young children are waiting for the door to open.
These are not holidaymakers breaking the law to get some forbidden fun. No idea where they are travelling but they look like they are going home somewhere south, southeast perhaps? Turkey, Bulgaria or Ukraine? No idea but they do look like part of the globalised chain of workforce escaping poverty and perhaps the lockdown has pushed them to return. Better to be jobless and poor in your own village. The weather tends to be better and the environment less hostile.
Finally, the doors open. I push the scarf up over my face, my hand clutching a plastic folder with a wad of documents allowing me to leave. It is quiet, no waiting. I go through security, passport control seems non-existent, shops still closed so nothing to stop for. I wonder at which point someone will ask me to see the papers. Ask me what my excuse for leaving is. Strangely, that never happens. I am almost disappointed. I spent about four hours sorting out all that paperwork the night before and now this is not even checked!
Immediately I catch myself: why am I disappointed? Because no one will give me the all-clear? Have I been conditioned to want to be waved through the green light already?
Perhaps that is how normalising oppression works. But of course, there is no need to check, the documents have been uploaded and recorded somewhere and someone now knows everything about me, my plans, my reason (“excuse”) for leaving the country. Or perhaps the intimate details of my family crisis; my father’s terminal illness and my attempt to get to him before it’s too late have now just been converted into big data slushing around the corpo-government’s control AI machine, and turned into useful predictions.
I guess this type of authoritarianism does not even need stern looks from border control officials, no need to divulge private dramas in public. Hours of stress of getting the documents turned into a discreet but vital small print on my boarding card; the only visible proof that my travel is acceptable to the corpo-state. It is all so neat, tidy, hi-tech and invisible that we can just pretend that all is just normal.
After all, the airport trimmings look all the same; with adverts, duty-free shopping, same old queues at departure gates and same safety drills on the plane, down to the irritating Ryanair voice thanking us for choosing to fly with them (no one chooses to fly with Ryanair, just like no one chooses to go to the dentist, you do it because you have to and you hope it won’t be too unpleasant).
We can pretend nothing has changed. Except the masks on faces, of course. Slow drinking and eating is my solution. During the flight many noses protrude against the regulations, of course. People do need to breathe.
We land on time. I send a message to my father, anxious, hoping he is still there. He is not responding. I am worried. From the tarmac I can see the arrivals hall is full. There is no way of entering so the crowd from my plane stops outside and waits in the drizzle. I wonder why that is. Is that Brexit or is it that people’s papers are now checked after all?
The queue moves very slowly, twenty minutes after landing I send my father another message saying that I’m still waiting for border control. I have no idea why this is so slow; each person seems to spend a good few minutes at the control desk. Finally, an hour and a half after landing I get into the taxi. As the driver pulls away, I notice a long queue of passengers outside the arrivals hall waiting to get a Covid test. I arrive home and find my father hanging on.
MY FATHER’S ILLNESS
There is a twist to this story. My father had been treated for cancer but has been still doing quite well and had been planning to spend the summer away from his flat, in the countryside. His sudden deterioration was unexpected for me but I have not had time to think of reasons. I only learnt of this yesterday. But now I am in the flat, taking my shoes off when my brother drops the bombshell: ‘you know, Dad took the vaccine’.
I am shocked. He told me he was not going to, because he found the registration process too difficult, so he decided to stop trying. I was relieved; I had been persuading him that he should not, that being immunocompromised, his system might not cope. I told him what I knew and what I worried about. My brother tells me another family member helped organize his jab and took him there. Jesus. But I am to pretend I don’t know about it; Dad asked my brother not to tell me.
So, I learn that the day after the Pfizer jab he started to feel weak, and within ten days he was prescribed blood thinning injections, a daily drip and he became bedbound. My brother has hired a hospital-style bed and an oxygen machine, set them up in father’s bedroom and organized a private nurse for daily visits. Dad had not wanted to go to hospital: he believed that hospitals were overrun by contagious Covid patients and that going to hospital would mean certain death under a ventilator.
Luckily (I never thought I would say this), unlike the UK, this ex-communist country never managed to build up its own national health service to a level able to deliver comprehensive care, so a secondary private sector filling the gaps exists and is not beyond the means of many people. So here he is, in his own bedroom and getting care at home.
He is happy to see me but asks me not to touch him. I feel sad, guessing he might worry I am bringing contagion. That hurts. I pretend I know nothing about the jab. Later, much later, I remember this moment and think that, he might have wanted to protect me. He knew the jab made him ill and he worried he was fighting vaccine induced-Covid and did not want to give it to me.
He never told me about the vaccine, I never told him I knew.
Sunset in Quaratine
QUARANTINE ONE: THE APP
The day after arriving I receive a text message telling me I am now under statute of law obliged to download a particular app and use it during my 10-day home quarantine. I start the download but can’t complete it. Something is stuck and I have no idea how to fix it. I try for a while and then abandon it. I spend most of the time caring for my father who now slips in and out of consciousness.
The next morning I get a phone call but it stops ringing before I have time to answer it. The following day the same happens. I realise this is the local track and trace. They ring but don’t wait for me to answer. Their call is logged, the box gets ticked but the robot or a human cannot be bothered to do the job properly. Actually, it must be a human as a robot would not give up. Good. The tyranny will fail due to human error or sheer laziness.
I don’t know what possessed me but somehow, I manage to complete installing the Quarantine App. The system springs into action. I get a message from the app that I must take a selfie within the next 30 minutes and submit it. I take a selfie from the app which gives me as many times as I like to choose the best shot. I choose the worst shot.
Of course, there is a way to cheat: after doing my selfie I could leave the phone at home and go out for a walk. Trouble is, the selfie demand comes at a different time each day, usually towards the end of the day. But I have no reason to go anywhere, really, I have come here to be with him, and his condition continues to be critical. And at some point, during this journey I decided that I would do everything by the book, just to see what the new normal travel feels and looks like, and what exactly they want us to experience.
Well, here I am, in a 10-day quarantine in a flat with my dying father. We are lucky. I have my brother to get the shopping in and kind neighbours ready to help. We are lucky my father is at home. What would be the point of coming here all this way, only to be stuck in quarantine if he was in a hospital with no visitors allowed? So, all in all, we are lucky.
DIFFICULT DAYS
Days go by, my father’s condition improves a little, I am his nurse, and of course I touch him – he stopped protesting as soon as he needed a glass of water; I continue to take my selfies. We talk, I read to him, feed him, then he sleeps. He dies two days after my quarantine ends. That is good timing.
There is a lot to do now, and I will not be breaking the law trying to organize the funeral… I remember my favourite literature lesson at school when we debated who was right: Creon or Antigone. Even then, I was in team Antigone.
A doctor arrives to certify death. She is nice and takes her time. Talks a little. Does not look like a corporate bot. She is sitting at a coffee table doing the paperwork. For the cause of death, she writes ‘Thrombosis’. I ponder for a bit and then hesitatingly say: ‘Did you know he was vaccinated?’.
Her face changes and she asks: ‘No, when?’ We tell her, ‘Four weeks ago, exactly’.
‘I am not allowed to say anything,’ she says, ‘but I can tell you I have seen a lot lately. A lot!’ We try to encourage her to talk more but she is cautious. I just ask her: ‘Why would a person on cancer treatment be given a vaccine? Surely that had not been done before?’ She looks at me and says: ‘Because they want to vaccinate us all.’ So, she knows.
This kind of conversation would have been typical in the days of strict communist authoritarianism before 1989. You never knew whom you could trust so you just dropped hints and checked for people’s response. In those days careless talk was dangerous, and I am too young to remember the worst times: the Stalinist years when children were encouraged to denounce their parents; many were imprisoned, tortured and killed.
Now the threat is only a loss of income and public humiliation and yet the new order based on lies, fraud and corrupt science is already in place. Everyone is just doing their job. A perfect example of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil in which those, following orders in this elaborate house of cards, often do not even know their active contribution to harm inflicted on others. They do not realise because they refuse to look and to know. They stopped taking responsibility for their individual part in the whole.
There is a small group of doctors in the country who are challenging the official narrative, attempt to offer treatment for Covid patients and warn against the untested ‘vaccines’, particularly now that governments want to jab children. Their voices are censored, the people get smeared, ridiculed and shamed by the professional licensing medical body. The modern-day governance in Western democracies!
TRAVELLING HOME
As the funeral preparations get underway, I need to organise my return travel. I check the UK government website again. Travelling from an ‘amber’ coded country, I must test negative for Covid within 72 hours prior to departure. Tricky when the flight is on Monday afternoon.
I start to search for UK government-approved tests available in the city. Only a handful provide the specified UK approved antigen test with results in English. They are also open only in the mornings so if I test on Friday morning, I might be testing a few hours too early to fit within the 72 hours.
After hours of online searching, I find one that looks almost right. I pay the equivalent of £35 online and am told to come on the day, without an appointment. The laboratory website provides useful advice, how to prepare for the test. I learn that I should not brush my teeth or use mouthwash on the morning of test. So now I know what to do.
I arrive at the testing centre early, having heard that queues can be quite long. It is, and it is in the street. The lab’s waiting room only allows three people at a time so the rest stand outside. After about an hour it is my turn. I am allowed inside the surgery.
On the right, by the door, a masked man sitting at a desk behind a glass screen is checking my name and the type of test I have purchased. Then, a young tall, man in full white hazmat suit, his face covered, and in protective glasses ushers me to sit on a chair and tip my head backwards.
This is my first Covid test ever and I am terrified. I have rehearsed telling them how sensitive my face feels and asking not to go deep but there is no eye contact, no talk trying to help me feel comfortable, no attempt to put me at ease. He just tells me to tip my head back far.
I just manage to ask him to go into the left nostril as my right one is not straight. He happily obliges and shoves the long stick into my nostril. As soon as the tip enters my nose I feel shock, a feeling of something unnatural, wrong and threatening happening. The area he just touched is too soft, sensitive and the sensation so unfamiliar I involuntarily, and to my own shock, find myself pushing the man’s arm away. He moves back and looks at me, his body language (there is no face available) disapproves of my behaviour.
I say, please don’t go that deep, you already have some but he insists, tells me not to defend myself and does it again. And again, that feeling that a part of me which is vulnerable and should not be touched, gets scraped. He gets his sample and nods for me to go. I am frozen in that chair, unable to move for what seems like a while. I have tears in my eyes, and I am alone with two hazmat wearing robots. No word is uttered as I leave.
I get my negative result within hours. I recover with an old friend. By then I have a splitting headache and my left nostril is moist with a slight leak. The headache lasts for a couple of days but the leak persists for at least ten.
I arrive at the airport early because I have difficulties completing the UK Passenger Locator Form which UK needs from all passengers. I pass through a manned gate with an automatic wrist temperature check. The airport is unusually quiet, and the staff help me identify the problem which stops me from completing the form. The reference number for the double Covid test needed for the Passenger Locator Form is wrong. I ring home and ask my husband to read the reference number off the Covid test kit. Surely it has arrived now. It hasn’t. It looks like the Day 2 and 8 Test I ordered has not been paid for.
I am told I need to buy a new kit if I want to get this flight. I do as I’m told. No form, no flight. I stand next to the luggage drop off counter feeling sweats, and with my hands shaking I battle the website on my phone. Again, all the ‘cheap’ ones are sold out and somehow, at the last minute I manage to make a purchase for £180, get an email, a reference number, complete the form and have my luggage accepted.
I hurry to my gate and make it just in time as passengers are starting to board. I slow down to join the Ryanair herd waiting on the tarmac for the aircraft to be processed before we are told we can travel.
The pavement is marked with lines at 2-meter intervals. Two men behind me are joking loudly that we must stand on the lines correctly, otherwise the virus will jump on us. I turn and smile (no mask, we are still outside) and make eye contact with the fellow humans.
QUARANTINE TWO: TRACK AND TRACE
Back home in London, the following day I get my first out of ten phone calls from Track and Trace. Each time a different voice reads the same script.
I am contacting you on behalf of the NHS Test and Trace as you have recently travelled into the UK from abroad. Are you happy to continue in English?”
No idea what would happen if I said ‘no’.
Before we proceed, I need to make you aware that this call will be recorded for training and quality improvement purposes and should just take a few minutes of your time. I can confirm I have completed the necessary data security training and all information you provide today will be stored securely. NHS Test and Trace may need to share your details with other organisations including the Home Office, and further information on data security and privacy can be found on http://www.gov.uk/coronavirus. Sharing information in the call today means you consent for it to be stored in the ways I have described. Are you happy to proceed with the call?”
I wish I could say, no, I am not. Once or twice I ask how long the data is going to be stored. The caller is not sure and advises me to find this out from the government website. The call proceeds with them checking my year of birth. Then they ask if I have opted into a ‘test to release’ – I frankly don’t even know it is my option, so I say ‘no’.
I later learn that the Test to Release scheme does not replace the compulsory Day 2 and 8 test. The ten-day quarantine can be shortened to 5 days by ‘opting into’ Test to Release for an additional £99. I realise they ask this question to advertise another product!
Can you confirm that you are quarantining at the address you provided on the passenger locator form and will continue to do so for ten days starting on the day after you arrive in the UK.”
So, again, I confirm, yes. What would happen if I said no?
As part of the Covid 19 response you are legally required to take the test on Day 2 and Day 8 and a failure to do so may result in prosecution.”
That answers my previous question…
Has your test arrived? And have you taken or do you intend to take your test?”
Yes.
Then I am asked if I got my test from the NHS or from a private provider. I am confused as I had no option to get an NHS test and I tell the caller. They seem happy with my answer and continue:
If your Day 2 test is positive confirming Covid 19, you do not need to take another test on Day 8.”
I think, on one occasion, I ask how I am expected to post the test if I am not allowed to leave the house. Of course, the assumption is there is someone else in the house, and if I still have difficulties, again, the go-to place is another NHS number. Amazing what they can do these days; they can even pick up your mail for you!
The call continues:
If you develop any of the three coronavirus symptoms which are: a new continuous cough, a high temperature, or a loss or change to your sense of taste or smell, please visit http://www.gov.uk/coronavirus for further advice. You should not go to the GP, hospital or a pharmacy. If you require medical advice, please ring the NHS on 111 or in an emergency dial 999”.
So here we have the admission of medical malpractice: if I fall ill, I must not seek help from NHS, not even by going to my local pharmacy. I must stay home without help, except of course, if I qualify for 999 ie, a ventilator…
The call continues:
I must advise you that if you test positive for coronavirus or are identified as a close contact of someone who has coronavirus you will be notified by NHS Test and Trace and may be contacted again. Is there anything you would like me to repeat?”
Of course, if someone I sat next to on the (half-empty) plane gets a positive result, my quarantine will stretch to a fortnight or longer! Each time, the call ends with a friendly, youthful, ‘have a great day’. All those who have called me are young voices, all kinds of accents, probably desperate for any job in the current climate. They are trained to stick to the script and any departure from it by my questions seems to trip them up.
And most of them probably think they are doing something socially useful and valuable.
THE QUARANTINE DIY TESTS
The one I have purchased in haste at the airport is a kit with two PCR tests to be administered at home on Day 2 and Day 8. The instructions tell me that the test is run at less than a 30-cycle value threshold.
The first thing to say about the swab is that it is long. It looks like a cotton bud used for everyday use, but on closer inspection it is different. The stick itself is about 12 cm long, that’s 6”, and designed to break off after the sample is collected and put into a small tube provided. The tip itself is 2 cm long, quite thin and covered in almost translucent spiky bristles protruding outwards. It looks a bit like a miniature harsh brush designed to scratch the delicate tissue inside the mouth and nose.
I am told to swab the back of the throat for 3-5 seconds over the posterior pharynx and tonsillar areas but to avoid tongue, teeth and the sides of the mouth. Then I am told to insert the same swab to each nostril about 2 cm deep and to rotate it for 3-5 seconds each time.
The form which I have to complete for each test is yet another mandated opportunity for the corpo-government to harvest my personal data, to store it for as long as it sees fit, yet, as is often the case in abusive relationships I have to (I repeat:) I have to give my consent for all this to happen, and even consent for my possible positive test result which may include my personal details: name, date of birth, gender, home address, telephone number, occupation, place of work, ethnicity and the fact that I have tested positive for Covid 19 to be communicated to Public Health England. Luckily, both of my test results are negative.
Eleven days after arrival in the UK my quarantine is officially over. It takes me a couple of days before I venture outside, I detect a bit of agoraphobia. In the last six weeks I spent twenty days in house arrest. They say it takes six weeks to develop a new habit.
POSTSCRIPTUM
I doubt very much I will travel internationally any time soon. Not planning to take the experimental Covid jab and so will not be enjoying the privilege of freedom promised to those with the vaccine passport. At the time of writing, it is no longer illegal to leave England but the elaborate hoops and the red tape remain and the government website reminds us that “to protect public health in the UK and the vaccine rollout, you should not travel to countries or territories on the red or amber lists”.
The ‘red and amber’ lists cover most countries of the world and returning from an amber list country will involve three or four tests which could come to £240-£340 per person plus the time spent completing all the online forms.
As to the red list countries; even a short spell there ends in an expensive £1750 per person prison-like stay at an airport hotel, as can be seen here.
So whilst not forbidden, even essential travel has been made into a series of expensive, degrading and time-consuming obstacles. Vaccine passports are being rolled out precisely to convince people they will magically bring freedom back to their lives. Do they not realise, that once they have their passports, the vaccine will need regular boosters?
Those still asleep; trusting the governments and the mainstream media think that easy travel is only temporarily put on hold but once the pandemic is ‘under control’, things will get back to the way they used to be. They do not realise the plan is to make travel an exclusive and rare event beyond reach of ordinary people.
This is done to us not just by the predatory elite class. Disappointingly, the pro-lockdown left continues to cheer these restrictions on and dismiss people’s desire and need to travel, as undeserved indulgence or middle-class privilege (interestingly, unrestricted travel around Europe was, until so recently, one of the main reasons for their fierce anti-Brexit position. What happened to their cherished principle of freedom of movement?). They could not be further from the truth.
They forget that, according to official migration data for the end of 2019, the UK is home to 6.2 million people – that is 9% of the total population – who have the nationality of a different country! And that data does not even include naturalised UK citizens like me, first-generation settled migrants who have close relatives all over the world and that unrestricted travel is an essential means to family life, something which is protected by Human Rights Act 1998.
The irony for those like myself, who grew up in communist Eastern Europe, is that freedom of movement, so taken for granted in the West, the right to travel and to have your own passport at home at all times is what we did not have then. The state set limits on where ‘citizens’, treated like its property, could travel.
For many who experienced those times, even as children, a return to state-mandated travel restrictions will feel like going back into tyranny.
As for my own journey: I will never forgive those responsible and all those lockdown fanatics for stealing my Dad’s, and so many other elderly people’s, last year by locking them up in the prison of fear and isolation, and then for pushing them to take the dangerous experimental jab which – for so many – was the last straw in their already weakened bodies.
India’s lockdown may already have killed more people than “Covid”, and it will only get worse.
By Chase Reed | OffGuardian | June 18, 2021
India has a total population of 1.39 billion people . That is 18 percent of the total world population. The median annual per capita income is $616 . Hundreds of millions of people in India survive with a hand to mouth existence.
They work and earn a couple of dollars, and eat once they have earned the money. India has little or no social welfare system. For many people, if they don’t work and earn, they don’t eat.
In 2020, India reported 148,738 deaths due to the coronavirus. That equates to 0.0001 percent of the population. The average death rate in India in 2020 was 7.25 in 1000 of the population.
That means over 10 million people died in India in 2020, and only 1.5% were coronavirus deaths.
And that is assuming that the 148,738 coronavirus deaths reported were actually caused by coronavirus. The WHO guidelines for reporting deaths do not make clear the difference between dying ‘from’ coronavirus, and dying ‘with’ coronavirus.
At the end of March 2020, the India Government took the drastic action of locking down the Indian economy due to the coronavirus pandemic. The government took decisions as to whom they considered an ‘essential worker’ and who was considered ‘non-essential’.
Unlike its Western Government counterparts, the Indian government did not hand out $600 monthly cheques for those that it had determined to be ‘non-essential’ and told to stay at home and not work. And the initial enforcement of the lockdowns was pretty draconian.
Early last April I received a desperate plea from an associate who lives in the slums in Mumbai. His house is 20 square metres, and he lives with 7 of his family members.
He messaged me to say that he was locked down at home with his family and that they had no food and were starving. Could I please send him some money? The next day he called me and said:
Sir, thank you for sending the money. I tried to go out yesterday to buy rations but the police beat me with a lathi and would not let me out of the slum. We now have money but I cannot get outside to buy food.”
I had to intervene and request a friend who had a journalist pass and was considered an ‘essential worker’ to go and buy food and take the food into the slum for him and his family so that they would not starve to death.
They were the lucky ones.
A survey was carried out of the urban poor by a company called IDinsight, a market research firm in the social sector in India. They reported that the respondents that they surveyed had an average weekly income of ₹6858 ($93.6) in March 2020 and ₹1929 ($26.3) in May 2020. That is a 72% reduction in income from a very low base. And the percentage of respondents that reported having no work went up from 7.3% in March to 23.6% in May.
Another research agency called Dalberg reported that the percentage of respondents with no work in May was 52%.
It is a real struggle to understand why the Indian government would shut down large parts of the Indian economy and put potentially hundreds of millions of poor people’s lives at risk of starvation by locking them in their houses because a tiny fraction of the population has caught a flu virus.
There is little or no data available on the numbers of people who have died from starvation. Although, a study was done two years ago which found over 450,000 children alone died as a result of malnutrition in 2017. Those numbers will only have gone up thanks to lockdown.
It is therefore anybody’s guess as to how many of the poor in India have died.
When the dust settles, I would expect that more people will die from starvation in India, than from the coronavirus in the whole world. And there is very little information being collected or reported on it.
The situation on the ground for food distribution in 2021 is reported to be worse than 2020. The Indian food distribution system of getting produce from farm to table is highly inefficient at its best. The lockdowns were reported locally to have amplified the inefficiencies in the food supply chain manyfold.
The issue of potential starvation could become an even greater issue in 2021 as the lockdowns continue. Without data on starvation, the stories remain anecdotal. I have a serious fear that when the coronavirus hysteria blows over, we will discover in its wake, a huge tragedy of mass starvation in India.
David Beasley, executive director of the UNs World Food Programme made a statement on global starvation in April 2021.
We were already calculating 135 million people around the world before COVID marching to the brink of starvation. And now, with the new analysis with COVID, we’re looking at 260 million people, and I’m not talking about hungry. I’m talking about marching toward starvation. And that is a catastrophe in itself.”
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