WHO’s Chief Scientist Served with Legal Notice for Disinformation and Suppression of Evidence
By Colin Todhunter | OffGuardian | June 9, 2021
On 25 May 2021, the Indian Bar Association (IBA) served a 51-page legal notice on Dr Soumya Swaminathan, the Chief Scientist at the World Health Organisation (WHO), for:
[H]er act of spreading disinformation and misguiding the people of India, in order to fulfil her agenda.”
The Mumbai-based IBA is an association of lawyers who strive to bring transparency and accountability to the Indian justice system. It is actively involved in the dissemination of legal knowledge and provides guidance and support to advocates and ordinary people in their fight for justice.
The legal notice says Dr Swaminathan has been:
Running a disinformation campaign against Ivermectin by deliberate suppression of effectiveness of drug Ivermectin as prophylaxis and for treatment of COVID-19, despite the existence of large amounts of clinical data compiled and presented by esteemed, highly qualified, experienced medical doctors and scientists,”
And:
Issuing statements in social media and mainstream media, thereby influencing the public against the use of Ivermectin and attacking the credibility of acclaimed bodies/institutes like ICMR and AIIMS, Delhi, which have included ‘Ivermectin’ in the ‘National Guidelines for COVID-19 management’.”
The IBA states that legal action is being taken against Dr Swaminathan in order to stop her from causing further damage to the lives of citizens of India.
Dr Soumya Swaminathan, WHO Chief Scientist
The notice is based on the research and clinical trials carried out by the ‘Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance’ (FLCCC) and the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD) Panel. These organisations have presented an enormous amount of data that strengthen the case for recommending Ivermectin for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.
The IBA says that Dr Swaminathan has ignored these studies and reports and has deliberately suppressed the data regarding the effectiveness of Ivermectin, with an intent to dissuade the people of India from using it.
However, two key medical bodies, the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Delhi, have refused to accept her stand and have retained the recommendation for Ivermectin, under a ‘May Do’ category, for patients with mild symptoms and those in home isolation, as stated in ‘The National Guidelines for COVID-19 management’.
It is interesting to note that the content of several web links to news articles and reports included in the notice served upon Dr Swaminathan, which was visible before issuing the notice, has either been removed or deleted.
It seems that the vaccine manufacturers and many governments are desperate to protect their pro-vaccine agenda and will attempt to censor information and news regarding the efficacy of Ivermectin.
The legal notice can be read in full on the website of the India Bar Association.
Support for Lockdowns: A ‘Bootleggers and Baptists’ Phenomenon
By David McGrogan | AIER | June 8, 2021
One of the most striking characteristics of ‘lockdownism’ – though one which, seen in the cold light of day, is hardly surprising – is that support for it has been generated through confluences of interests. The most obvious example of this is the way in which the aims of public health bodies (preventing excess deaths) have aligned so closely with those of certain big, incumbent market actors, such as supermarkets, social media giants, and online marketplaces (that is, profit). Lockdowns appear to suit those with self-consciously virtuous motives; they also very often suit those who want to make money. When people stay at home, they stop the virus spreading – but they also spend more time online, buy more from online stores, and rely on big ‘essential’ supermarkets rather than small, independent ‘mom and pop’ nonessential retail.
In light of this, are we at all surprised that it is very often the big social media firms, streaming services and the like that have been most strongly in favor of restrictions? There is nothing conspiratorial about this, nor probably even anything intentional. It is just the straightforward application of one of the most fundamental lessons of classical economics: incentives matter, and the incentives of these actors just tend to point in the same direction. It’s not that these businesses consciously support lockdowns due to a naked profit motive, in other words; it’s simply that their incentives to reject lockdownism are not strong, or are lacking entirely, because their interests are not in conflict with it.
One of the most important, helpful, but least well-systematized concepts in the study of regulation is the ‘bootleggers and Baptists’ phenomenon, coined by Bruce Yandle. Yandle observed that political activism in favour of the prohibition of alcohol sales and Sunday closing laws in the US was often a combination of high and low motives. Baptists are in favor of restricting the selling of alcohol because it is ‘good for society.’ Bootleggers are in favor of it because, for their purposes, the less alcohol that is lawfully available the better. The two groups do not conspire with one another, openly or otherwise. But the alignment of their interests is a kind of pincer movement which regulators find difficult to resist.
Bootleggers’ and Baptists’ coalitions, then, are circumstantial alignments between virtue and the profit motive. And they are everywhere in public life. To pick just one example, the Scottish and UK governments increasingly regulate the consumption of alcohol and sugar, through a variety of price floors, mandatory packaging requirements, and surcharges. These measures satisfy public health advocates, whose motives are pure (if probably misguided). But they also satisfy big incumbents, who can usually swallow increased costs much more readily than smaller operators, and who are adept at finding ways to sell smaller portions of familiar brands for the same price. Is there a conspiracy taking place? No: it’s just that incumbents are not strongly incentivized to lobby against the measures in question, because those measures are not actually very harmful to them.
The alignment of interests between public health advocates and certain market actors during the Covid period is, then, readily conceptualized in bootlegger-and-Baptist terms. It isn’t that there is any conniving or ‘backstairs intrigue’ going on. It’s simply that public health advice has gone strongly in one direction, and there has been no real incentive for certain sections of the corporate world to push back against it – rather the opposite.
This is not an entirely novel observation, and will have been evident to many observers. What has been less well-noticed is that there is something of a psychological bootlegger-and-Baptist phenomenon taking place within individuals’ minds as well – and that this has been particularly important in building support for lockdowns among the professional classes.
This was brought home to me early on in the pandemic, when an acquaintance sent me an email proclaiming how important the stay-at-home message was, but also saying that he regretted the fact that, having recently bought a new house, he was (I quote directly) ‘too busy to enjoy lockdown.’ This person’s rather blithe allusion that lockdown was something one should be enjoying was strikingly indicative, I thought, of the general mood among professional people that I knew. And indeed this was hardly the only person who, accidentally or openly, admitted to me that they rather liked the prospect of being shut at home. (I am sure that most readers of this post will have noticed the same phenomenon.) Many people seem to have relished the opportunity to get lots more work done. Others have found the release from stressful commuting or other commitments blissful. Being able to work from home, and often having quite nice homes, a lot of professional people have felt that lockdown gave them a better work-life balance. In other words, lockdown simply wasn’t a great hardship for a certain chunk of the population – and in fact came as something of a blessing.
This is not to suggest for a moment that support for lockdowns has been selfish, of course. Far from it. Rather, it is simply to observe that there has, again, been a strong confluence of interests – except here it is within the individual mind. I do not doubt that people have generally felt that all the restrictions they have been subjected to have been morally right (the ‘Baptist’ motive). But it is also true that they have had self-interested reasons for finding that the measures have not been all that bad of an idea, as well (the inner ‘bootlegger’).
It is the combination of the bootleggers and the Baptists working in tandem that is so effective, in Yandle’s sketch, and the same is true within us, as well. Our internal respective bootlegger, and Baptist, impulses are strong in their own right, and if they had been at odds during the pandemic, they would have tended to cancel each other out and there may have been more of a pushback against the restrictions. But because they have been working together, they are very powerful. This goes a long way toward explaining the behavior of white collar professionals during the pandemic: they have been acting out of a genuine sense of virtue, but they have also done rather well out of doing so, at least in the short term. It’s not one or the other, and high and low motives are not mutually exclusive – it’s both in combination that does the trick.
David McGrogan is Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. Before entering academia, he lived and worked in Japan for the best part of a decade. His research focuses on human rights law and the law of contract, in respect of both of which he tends to adopt a classical liberal perspective.
Is there a Problem with the Lopez-Medina, Colombia-based Study Implicating Ivermectin?
Major Pharma Companies Including Merck Funding the Trial Site during the Study
By Michael B. Goodkin MD, FACC | TrialSite News | June 9, 2021
Although a great majority of ivermectin-based studies have indicated real promise, one particular study conducted by a small trial site in Colombia received unprecedented media attention when the study results indicated negligible impact. What hasn’t been disclosed by media is the seriously questionable pharmaceutical industry support of this one trial site. During the study, a handful of some of the largest drug companies in the world gave this site money. What’s not clear is why this occurred and whether the funds are correlated to some nefarious agenda. This author suggests that the publisher should have scrutinized this industry funding perhaps more carefully.
On March 4th, 2021, an article appeared in JAMA titled, “Effect of Ivermectin On Time To Resolution of Symptoms Among Adults With Mild COVID.” It concluded, “The findings do not support the use of ivermectin for treatment of mild COVID-19, although larger trials may be needed to understand the effects of ivermectin on other clinically relevant outcomes.”
Dr. Eduardo Lopez-Medina et al. from Cali, Colombia, randomized 400 mildly ill patients, averaging 37 years old, to ivermectin 0.3 mg/kg or placebo. The time to resolution for ivermectin-treated patients was 10 days and placebo patients 12 days, which was not statistically significant.
Much has been written about the methodologic problems of the study but few read to the bottom of the article to see this:
Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Dr. López-Medina reported receiving grants from Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, and Janssen as well as personal fees from Sanofi Pasteur during the conduct of the study. Dr. Oñate reported receiving grants from Janssen and personal fees from Merck Sharp & Dohme and Gilead outside the submitted work. Dr. Torres reported receiving nonfinancial support from Tecnoquímicas unrelated to this project during the conduct of the study. No other disclosures were reported.
Considerable press outlets noted this study, we suspect due to the fact that the ivermectin results were negligible, but none of the media addressed the possibility of conflict with industry.
Absolutely nothing has been written about the fact that the study was sponsored by Centro de Estudios en Infectogía Pediatrica and the authors were paid by 3 drug companies making COVID vaccines–Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, and Janssen– and two making COVID therapeutics–Gilead and Merck.
We have some questions about this. Why did the authors disclose that they were receiving industry sponsor funds during the conduct of the study? Were these funds to actually direct the ivermectin study? That would most certainly be a conflict of interest material.
Merck’s expressed their intent on competing against the ivermectin generic approach. Why would this company be funding this small trial site operation in Colombia?
How could JAMA even think about publishing an article sponsored by 5 drug companies centering on a study targeting a generic competitor? Any layperson seeing this could think that this was highly suspect.
The potential conflict of interest was so severe that no journal should have published it.
Why would anyone do this study?
Was there a pressing need to know if 37-year-old patients got better sooner with ivermectin than placebo? There were a lot of resources put into this study. The only possible reason to do the study was for drug companies to have a vehicle to publish negative data about ivermectin. Is there anyone who believes the study was sponsored to add to the scientific knowledge about ivermectin for the treatment of COVID?
On February 4th, 2021, Merck, who had the original patent on ivermectin, put out a statement regarding ivermectin for COVID:
• No scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from pre-clinical studies;
• No meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease; and
• A concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.
If Merck believed these statements to be true, why would they feel the need to go public with them?
Merck’s vaccine had failed. Merck had bought a company, Oncoimmune, for $425 million and gotten $356 million from HHS in taxpayer money to develop a therapeutic agent, CD24c. They had a material conflict of interest. Later, the European Medicines Agency and World Health Organization both quoted Merck’s statement while ignoring the conflict of interest and science in recommending against the use of ivermectin for COVID, other than for research. Were they influenced by Merck? CD24c was dropped, and Merck has oral antiviral molnupiravir in a phase II-III trial. Why would Merck sponsor a trial of ivermectin?
Why would JAMA publish an article showing that young patients who are expected to recover quickly don’t get better much more quickly with ivermectin?
This article did not warrant publication in JAMA. The only possible reason to publish it was to present false, negative information about ivermectin to readers.
Why was the age of the patients not mentioned in the key findings or conclusions?
The age of the patients made the article irrelevant. It could not have been an accident that the age was not mentioned in the key findings and conclusions. That would never happen at JAMA. The authors anticipated that many readers would miss the age of the patients and conclude that ivermectin is ineffective in early COVID. Dr. Adfarsh Bhimraj at Cleveland Clinic who heads the committee writing COVID recommendations for the Infectious Disease Association of America spoke with Helio Medical News on ivermectin. He had a similar observation in the Washington Post.
“This was a well-done, but small trial in patients with mild or moderate disease,” Bhimraj said. He suggested that this is a negative study for a non-mortality outcome, but because the numbers were small, it might not have produced a statistically significant difference in effect size. The evidence is not enough to warrant a recommendation for the use of ivermectin. Other US experts who commented on the article have failed to notice the age of the patients and drug company sponsorship. It has crossed few American physicians’ minds that JAMA could be corrupted and knowingly publish a study with deceptive results in order to help drug companies.
Was the data fraudulent?
If the purpose of the article was to make it appear that ivermectin was ineffective in mild COVID, there is no reason to believe the data was real. There is no published randomized data for comparison. In the Dominican Republic, Dr. Jose Natalio Redondo reported that in 1300 patients with all degrees of illness, the length of illness went from 21 days to 10 days with ivermectin treatment.
Was JAMA aware that there was concern they had been corrupted and the article unreliable?
Sixteen members of the AMA Board of Directors were emailed that it appeared that JAMA had been infiltrated and the article fraudulent on March 10th, 2021. Eleven JAMA editorial board members were emailed about it April 12th. And one was spoken to. The same email was sent to executive editor Dr. Phil Fontanarosa April 13th. This reply was sent:
“Your message was brought to my attention.
I will look into these issues as outlined in your letter.
Please bear with me, as this will take some time, given the number of issues and the complexity of the concerns you raise, as well as other urgent issues and priorities we are addressing right now.”
As of 6/8/21, the article has been read online 759,000 times. How many of those readers concluded that ivermectin is ineffective for mild COVID and, as a result, did not prescribe it for their patients? To put things in perspective, Uttar Pradesh, India, with 210 million people, started ivermectin in August. By December, their mortality rate was 0.26 per 100,000. In the US, in December, it was 11 times higher at 2.8 per 100,000. Admissions in Mexico are down 75% due to ivermectin.
The JAMA article of 3/4/21 was a cleverly devised drug company creation designed to create the false impression that ivermectin was ineffective in mild COVID by claiming it didn’t shorten the duration of illness significantly. They knew people would miss the age of the patients and not read to the bottom of the article to see that it was sponsored by 5 drug company competitors. They knew people would leap to the conclusion that ivermectin was completely ineffective for COVID, not realizing that the article could not address its effects on hospitalization and death. An infectious disease doctor friend sent it to me as proof that ivermectin does not work. Drug companies would not have gone to these lengths if they did not fear ivermectin as a competitor.
JAMA reviewers could not possibly have missed the obvious conflict of interest. It was obviously their intention to spread misinformation. Leaving out the age of the patients was intentional to make readers think it was ineffective in everyone. The article has not only led to patient care being adversely affected but the article has been widely quoted as evidence against the use of ivermectin. WHO says it is the number one article in support of its position.
Doctors should contact JAMA to understand what is going on with the investigation. JAMA should report on their findings as they committed to this author to undertake an investigation.
Is this why the MSM don’t mention Sweden any more?
By Kathy Gyngell | The Conservative Woman | June 8, 2021
WHATEVER happened in Sweden with its policy of no masks and no lockdowns ?
In his latest brilliant video, Ivor Cummins invites us to see. Succinct and logical as ever, it is another must-watch. After making a statement about the official and therefore uncensorable data his analysis draws on – all the links to his evidence are provided – he asks the simple question: Who got the science correct? Ferguson and his big outfit at Imperial College, massively funded by Gates and Big Pharma interests? Or Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, who said he could be judged around this time in 2021? The answer is Sweden, which followed the World Health Organisation’s 2019 pandemic guidelines that Britain threw in the bin.
Cummins goes on to show the real-world risk of death from Covid to be extremely small for those with PCR positive tests and infinitesimal for the rest. Taking Ireland as an example, he shows there is no evidence of excess deaths for the year 2020 and that Covid deaths simply make up a chunk of the normal deaths that would be expected anyway.
You can watch the video here.
The source article for the Sweden Data: https://shahar-26393.medium.com/not-a…
Critiquing Nature and the Lancet over their disinformation, but making huge material omissions while doing so. Who is Ian Birrell?
By Meryl Nass, M.D. | June 8, 2021
Below are excerpts from a very interesting Unherd article by Ian Birrell, who previously wrote about the lab leak hypothesis when it was very difficult to get anything published on it. Birrell’s reportage is good, as far as it goes. But he lets Fauci, Farra and Collins off the hook. He ponders whether Chinese money influenced the “debt-ridden” Nature publishing company. It surely could have.
But one should also be asking, why is the (formerly?) world’s top science magazine, Nature, the most important journal in the world in which to publish science, debt-ridden in the first place?
And Birrell deftly avoided the more obvious conclusion that if Farrar, Fauci and Collins initiated the Nature Medicine paper to produce faulty scientific arguments against a lab leak, wouldn’t they have been the ones to place it in Nature Medicine, not China?
Birrell did something else strange. He notes that Farrar directed him to the Nature Medicine paper as the scientific basis for the natural origin claim. But he fails to mention that the Fauci emails now show that Farrar was involved in crafting that paper, and involved his employee Josie Golding, who also signed the Daszac-written March 7 Lancet Correspondence, in its crafting. Though not a coauthor, she was quoted in the press release the Scripps Institute issued about the paper. From the Fauci emails, we now know that Kristian Andersen, the first author, emailed Fauci, Farrar and Collins to thank them for their “advice and leadership” on the paper.
Thus this otherwise interesting article is a limited hangout. While criticizing Nature Medicine and the Lancet, and attempting to grab the high road, Ian Birrell reveals himself to be a purveyor of slanted news.
There are two other interesting things about Ian Birrell. He produced one of the earliest mainstrem articles on the lab hypothesis with Alina Chan, back in February. In hindsight, were they being set up then as trusted sources if the lab hypothesis gained prominence?
But who is Ian Birrell? His earlier claim to fame was as a speechwriter for David Cameron. Everyone knows what that means. He was a professional crafter of lying narratives. This Unherd article is designed to blame China and misdirect away from the role of the US and UK’s top science funders: Fauci, Jeremy Farrar and Francis Collins.
https://unherd.com/2021/06/beijings-useful-idiots/
Nature Medicine, its sister publication, was also home for the second key commentary that set the tone in the scientific community after Daszak’s outing in The Lancet. “The proximal origin of Sars-CoV-2″ bluntly concluded that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. Critics pointed out it was questionable to claim there was any “evidence” proving that Sars-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus. Others noted that the statement mentions the mysterious furin cleavage site — which Nikolai Petrovksy drew attention to as allowing the spike protein to bind effectively to cells in human tissues yet which is not found in the most closely-related coronaviruses — but downplays its potential significance. The statement suggests “it is likely that Sars-CoV-2-like viruses with partial or full polybasic cleavage sites will be discovered in other species”. This has not happened so far.
This document — whose five signatories include one expert who was handed China’s top award for foreign scientists after nearly 20 years work there, and another who is a “guest professor” for the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention — has been accessed 5.4 million times and cited almost 1,500 times in other papers. It is so influential that when I emailed Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and one of The Lancet signatories, to see if his stance remained the same, he pointed me to this paper that he called “the most important research on the genomic epidemiology of the origins of this virus”.
The lead author was Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at Scripps Research Institute in California who has been a very active voice on social media condemning the lab leak theory and confronting its proponents. Yet the recent release of emails to Anthony Fauci exposed that Andersen had previously admitted to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director that the virus had unusual features that “(potentially) look engineered” and which are “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory”. He claimed last week the discussion was “clear example of the scientific process” but as another top scientist said to me: “What a smoking gun!”. Now Anderson’s twitter account has suddenly disappeared…
[According to Rutgers professor Richard Ebright,] “Nature and The Lancet played important roles in enabling, encouraging, and enforcing the false narrative that science evidence indicates Sars-CoV-2 had a natural-spillover origin points and the false narrative that this was the scientific consensus”.
Or as another well-placed observer put it: “The game seems to be for Nature and The Lancet to rush non-peer revised correspondences to set the tone and then delay critical papers and responses.”
But why would they do this? This is where things become even murkier. Allegations swirl that it was not down to editorial misjudgement, but something more sinister: a desire to appease China for commercial reasons…
We Should Welcome the Lab Leak Theory, Argues Biologist
By Noah Carl • Lockdown Sceptics • June 8, 2021
At the start of the pandemic, many of us were puzzled as to why the lab leak hypothesis was considered “racist” but the wet market hypothesis was not. Both theories said the pandemic began in China, and both implied that some Chinese people had acted carelessly. (In reality, of course, neither theory is “racist”.)
The most likely reason why the lab leak theory came to be seen as “racist” is that this was convenient for several key organisations, who wanted to avoid any suggestion that they might have helped to cause the pandemic. These organisations include the Chinese Communist Party, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the National Institutes of Health, and EcoHealth Alliance.
The fact that President Trump endorsed the lab leak theory also played a role, of course. Left-wing media outlets in the US have a habit of assuming that, if Trump says something, then it must – almost by definition – be racist.
In a recent article for UnHerd, the biologist Bret Weinstein argues that we should actually welcome the lab leak theory. This is because, if it turns out to be true, we know how to prevent future pandemics of this kind. Simple: ban the research until we can figure out how to do it safely. (Or at the very least: ramp up lab security.)
However, if the zoonotic spillover theory is correct, then “it’s only a matter of time before something like this happens again. And again. And again.” As Weinstein notes, “The straightforward lesson of the pandemic would be to simply face up to the clear risk of studying dangerous, novel infectious agents in the lab.”
He goes on to argue that, if the virus did escape from a lab, then one of the pandemic’s ultimate causes is the distorted incentives that led scientists to undertake such dangerous research in the first place. According to Weinstein:
… the scientific method has been hijacked by a competition over who can tell the most beguiling stories. Scientists have become salesmen, pitching serious problems that they and their research just so happen to be perfectly positioned to solve. The fittest in this game are not the most accurate, but the most stirring. And what could be more stirring than a story in which bat caves are ticking pandemic time-bombs from which only the boldest and brightest gene experts can save us?
Weinstein’s article contains a lot of interesting details, and is worth reading in full.
Why I spoke out against lockdowns
Martin Kulldorff on the necessity of challenging the Covid consensus
Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University.
By Martin Kulldorff | spiked | June 4, 2021
I had no choice but to speak out against lockdowns. As a public-health scientist with decades of experience working on infectious-disease outbreaks, I couldn’t stay silent. Not when basic principles of public health are thrown out of the window. Not when the working class is thrown under the bus. Not when lockdown opponents were thrown to the wolves. There was never a scientific consensus for lockdowns. That balloon had to be popped.
Two key Covid facts were quickly obvious to me. First, with the early outbreaks in Italy and Iran, this was a severe pandemic that would eventually spread to the rest of the world, resulting in many deaths. That made me nervous. Second, based on the data from Wuhan, in China, there was a dramatic difference in mortality by age, with over a thousand-fold difference between the young and the old. That was a huge relief. I am a single father with a teenager and five-year-old twins. Like most parents, I care more about my children than myself. Unlike the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, children had much less to fear from Covid than from annual influenza or traffic accidents. They could get on with life unharmed — or so I thought.
For society at large, the conclusion was obvious. We had to protect older, high-risk people while younger low-risk adults kept society moving.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, schools closed while nursing homes went unprotected. Why? It made no sense. So, I picked up a pen. To my surprise, I could not interest any US media in my thoughts, despite my knowledge and experience with infectious-disease outbreaks. I had more success in my native Sweden, with op-eds in the major daily newspapers, and, eventually, a piece in spiked. Other like-minded scientists faced similar hurdles.
Instead of understanding the pandemic, we were encouraged to fear it. Instead of life, we got lockdowns and death. We got delayed cancer diagnoses, worse cardiovascular-disease outcomes, deteriorating mental health, and a lot more collateral public-health damage from lockdown. Children, the elderly and the working class were the hardest hit by what can only be described as the biggest public-health fiasco in history.
Throughout the 2020 spring wave, Sweden kept daycare and schools open for every one of its 1.8million children aged between one and 15. And it did so without subjecting them to testing, masks, physical barriers or social distancing. This policy led to precisely zero Covid deaths in that age group, while teachers had a Covid risk similar to the average of other professions. The Swedish Public Health Agency reported these facts in mid-June, but in the US lockdown proponents still pushed for school closures.
In July, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article on ‘reopening primary schools during the pandemic’. Shockingly, it did not even mention the evidence from the only major Western country that kept schools open throughout the pandemic. That is like evaluating a new drug while ignoring data from the placebo control group.
With difficulty publishing, I decided to use my mostly dormant Twitter account to get the word out. I searched for tweets about schools and replied with a link to the Swedish study. A few of these replies were retweeted, which gave the Swedish data some attention. It also led to an invitation to write for the Spectator. In August, I finally broke into the US media with a CNN op-ed against school closures. I know Spanish, so I wrote a piece for CNN-Español. CNN-English was not interested.
Something was clearly amiss with the media. Among infectious-disease epidemiology colleagues that I know, most favour focused protection of high-risk groups instead of lockdowns, but the media made it sound like there was a scientific consensus for general lockdowns.
In September, I met Jeffrey Tucker at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), an organisation I had never heard of before the pandemic. To help the media gain a better understanding of the pandemic, we decided to invite journalists to meet with infectious-disease epidemiologists in Great Barrington, New England, to conduct more in-depth interviews. I invited two scientists to join me, Sunetra Gupta from the University of Oxford, one of the world’s pre-eminent infectious-disease epidemiologists, and Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University, an expert on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations. To the surprise of AIER, the three of us also decided to write a declaration arguing for focused protection instead of lockdowns. We called it the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD).
Opposition to lockdowns had been deemed unscientific. When scientists spoke out against lockdowns, they were ignored, considered a fringe voice, or accused of not having proper credentials. We thought it would be hard to ignore something authored by three senior infectious-disease epidemiologists from what were three respectable universities. We were right. All hell broke loose. That was good.
Some colleagues threw epithets at us like ‘crazy’, ‘exorcist’, ‘mass murderer’ or ‘Trumpian’. Some accused us of taking a stand for money, though nobody paid us a penny. Why such a vicious response? The declaration was in line with the many pandemic preparedness plans produced years earlier, but that was the crux. With no good public-health arguments against focused protection, they had to resort to mischaracterisation and slander, or else admit they had made a terrible, deadly mistake in their support of lockdowns.
Some lockdown proponents accused us of raising a strawman, as lockdowns had worked and were no longer needed. Just a few weeks later, the same critics lauded the reimposition of lockdowns during the very predictable second wave. We were told that we had not specified how to protect the old, even though we had described ideas in detail on our website and in op-eds. We were accused of advocating a ‘let it rip’ strategy, even though focused protection is its very opposite. Ironically, lockdowns are a dragged-out form of a let-it-rip strategy, in which each age group is infected in the same proportion as a let-it-rip strategy.
When writing the declaration, we knew we were exposing ourselves to attacks. That can be scary, but as Rosa Parks said: ‘I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.’ Also, I did not take the journalistic and academic attacks personally, however vile – and most came from people I had never even heard of before. The attacks were not primarily addressed at us anyhow. We had already spoken out and would continue to do so. Their main purpose was to discourage other scientists from speaking out.
In my twenties, I risked my life in Guatemala working for a human-rights organisation called Peace Brigades International. We protected farmers, unionised workers, students, religious organisations, women’s groups and human-rights defenders who were threatened, murdered, and disappeared by military death squads. While the courageous Guatemalans I worked with faced much more danger, the death squads did once throw a hand grenade into our house. If I could do that work then, why should I not now take much smaller risks for people here at home? When I was falsely accused of being a Koch-funded right-winger, I just shrugged – typical behaviour by both establishment servants and armchair revolutionaries.
After the Great Barrington Declaration, there was no longer a lack of media attention on focused protection as an alternative to lockdowns. On the contrary, requests came from across the globe. I noticed an interesting contrast. In the US and UK, media outlets were either friendly with softball questions or hostile with trick questions and ad hominem attacks. Journalists in most other countries asked hard but relevant and fair questions, exploring and critically examining the Great Barrington Declaration. I think that is how journalism should be done.
While most governments continued with their failed lockdown policies, things have moved in the right direction. More and more schools have reopened, and Florida rejected lockdowns in favour of focused protection, partly based on our advice, without the negative consequences that the lockdowners predicted.
With the lockdown failures increasingly clear, attacks and censorship have increased rather than decreased: Google-owned YouTube censored a video from a roundtable with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, where my colleagues and I stated that children do not need to wear masks; Facebook closed the GBD account when we posted a pro-vaccine message arguing that older people should be prioritised for vaccination; Twitter censored a post when I said that children and those already infected do not need to be vaccinated; and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) removed me from a vaccine-safety working group when I argued that the Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine should not be withheld from older Americans.
Twitter even locked my account for writing that:
‘Naively fooled to think that masks would protect them, some older high-risk people did not socially distance properly, and some died from Covid because of it. Tragic. Public-health officials/scientists must always be honest with the public.’
This increased pressure may seem counterintuitive, but it is not. Had we been wrong, our scientific colleagues might have taken pity on us and the media would have gone back to ignoring us. Being correct means that we embarrassed some immensely powerful people in politics, journalism, big tech and science. They are never going to forgive us.
That is not what matters, though. The pandemic has been a great tragedy. A 79-year-old friend of mine died from Covid, and a few months later his wife died from cancer that was not detected in time to initiate treatment. While deaths are inevitable during a pandemic, the naive but mistaken belief that lockdowns would protect the old meant that governments did not implement many standard focused-protection measures. The dragged-out pandemic made it harder for older people to protect themselves. With a focused-protection strategy, my friend and his wife might be alive today, together with countless other people around the world.
Ultimately, lockdowns protected young low-risk professionals working from home – journalists, lawyers, scientists, and bankers – on the backs of children, the working class and the poor. In the US, lockdowns are the biggest assault on workers since segregation and the Vietnam War. Except for war, there are few government actions during my life that have imposed more suffering and injustice on such a large scale.
As an infectious-disease epidemiologist, I had no choice. I had to speak up. If not, why be a scientist? Many others who bravely spoke could comfortably have stayed silent. If they had, more schools would still be closed, and the collateral public-health damage would have been greater. I am aware of many fantastic people fighting against these ineffective and damaging lockdowns, writing articles, posting on social media, making videos, talking to friends, speaking up at school board meetings, and protesting in the streets. If you are one of them, it has truly been an honour to work with you on this effort together. I hope that we will one day meet in person and then, let’s dance together. Danser encore!
The Global Race Towards Full Vaccination
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | June 1, 2021
Scientists initially estimated that 60 to 70 percent of a population would have to acquire resistance to Covid-19 in order for herd immunity to take effect, a threshold that has been revised upwards since the start of the year with 80 to 85 percent quoted in some cases.
Despite the ever-higher immunity threshold discussed by scientists, Israel’s Covid-19 case count started to tumble when 40 percent of its population received at least one jab and now 59.3 percent of its inhabitants are fully vaccinated. The country’s reproduction rate has been around 0.5 in recent weeks and it appears to be on track to emerge from the pandemic, suggesting that initial herd immunity estimates carried some accuracy.
With 45.4 percent of its inhabitants fully vaccinated, Bahrain comes second on the list.
In the United States, 40.2 percent of people have been fully vaccinated (though do not forget that almost half of unvaccinated Americans have natural immunity from prior infection).
In this case, full vaccination refers to all doses prescribed by the vaccination protocol with data only available for countries reporting the breakdown of their doses.
As Scott Morefield wrote recently, Blue-state lockdown-lovers drunk on their own power like Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer who insist on a 70 percent vaccination rate in order to ease up on mandates and restrictions are ignoring the science completely in order to hold their people hostage to an unobtainable, unnecessary goal.
Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital debunked the desire among some health officials, sometimes referred to as “zero COVID,” that COVID-19 can be eradicated completely.
Well, unfortunately, we have this perception now that’s being created by some public health leaders that we need to reach total eradication. We’re not gonna get to total absolute risk elimination. That is a false goal and quite honestly it’s being used now to manipulate the public. We heard today again from our public health leaders that if we get to 70% vaccination, then we can start seeing restrictions removed. That’s dishonest. Most of the country is at herd immunity.
Other parts will get there later this month. San Francisco had 12 cases yesterday, most asymptomatic. What do you call that? I call that herd immunity. And I think what’s happening is our public health leaders are dismissing natural immunity from prior infection, which changes the path to get to more population immunity. It invokes mandates, it means kids may have to get it and it demonizes those that are hesitant rather than respecting their decision.
Indeed, you don’t have to have a medical degree to know that the formula for herd immunity has always been vaccinated plus natural immunity.
Meryl Nass on anti-vaccine petition to FDA
Listen HERE
Kevin Barrett | May 31, 2021
Meryl Nass, MD discusses her and RFK Jr.’s new Children’s Health Defense petition to the FDA to withdraw COVID vaccines from the market. CHD reports:
“On May 16, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Meryl Nass, MD, on behalf of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), took a landmark step in the COVID crisis that has irrevocably changed billions of lives around the globe by filing a Citizen Petition with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to withdraw COVID-19 vaccines from the market…
“Specifically, the petition calls upon the FDA to:
- Revoke the Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for COVID vaccines
- Refrain from licensing COVID vaccines
- Disallow the participation of minors in COVID vaccine trials
- Immediately revoke all EUAs permitting vaccination of minors
- Revoke its tacit approval of pregnant women receiving COVID vaccines
- Immediately amend its existing guidance for the use of chloroquine drugs, ivermectin, and any other safe and effective drugs against COVID.”
Evidence for the effectiveness of COVID-19 treatments can be found at c19study.com .
At the end of the show, Meryl Nass expresses her concern that the suppression of COVID treatments, in conjunction with the mass vaccination program and draconian censorship, raises a disturbing question: Is there some ulterior and perhaps sinister motive driving this seemingly irrational policy?
Wellcome Trust director Jeremy Farrar and his co-conspirators Peter Horby and Rick Bright
With a Vietnam connection
By Meryl Nass, MD | June 6, 2021
Before Sir Dr. Jeremy Farrar got the plum job of CEO of the wealthiest foundation in the UK and one of the wealthiest in the world, he did research for Oxford University in Vietnam for 18 years. It seems curious how one job led to the other. Will (like Las Vegas) what happened in Vietnam stay in Vietnam? Or will internet sleuths tell us how Farrar was groomed for his current role?
Vietnam is a country where two other co-conspirators on the hydroxychloroquine suppression worked, too. All 3 had something to do with vaccine trials there. Hmmm.
When Dr. Martin Landray approached Jeremy Farrar about starting a large multicenter clinical trial in the UK, Farrar told him to talk to Horby. He did, and Horby and Landray became the Principal Investigators for the trial. Landray was not in on the scheme to overdose patients with hydroxychloroquine. Because when he was interviewed by France Soir, an online newspaper, he made several mistakes discussing the dose of hydroxychloroquine used. He simply had no idea about the overdoses. (France Soir knew.) Landray had been too busy to look up the dose, apparently, that he was responsible for giving to 1600 human guinea pigs.
Dr. Horby then attempted to give Landray cover in some tweets I read last May or June. I think Horby knew what was going on. Horby claimed France Soir did not transcribe what Landray said accurately. But France Soir had the recording, so that excuse didn’t fly. I blogged about this at the time.
Neither Landray nor Horby has so much as apologized for using borderline fatal doses in their subjects. Were the subjects’ families ever told? Probably not.
When the news about the Recovery trial’s fatal doses came out (I learned it from others on twitter) the hydroxychloroquine arm of the trial stopped, and the principal investigators said the drug didn’t work. They acknowledged that there were about 10-20% more deaths in the hydroxychloroquine arm than in the placebo (“usual care,” a.k.a. no drug treatment arm) but have never acknowledged any mistakes or wrongdoing. Using the published Recovery trial statistics, there were about 60 excess deaths over placebo in the HCQ arm (of 400 total) that we can say were likely secondary to an HCQ overdose.
Peter Horby, also a physician and one of the two Principal Investigators of the Recovery Trial, in which 1600 subjects got poisonous doses of hydroxychloroquine and which Farrar supposedly helped found, worked in Vietnam and overlapped with Farrar. They had to have known the proper dose of antimalarial drugs, since they would have been treating malaria patients (Farrar was an infectious disease doctor), and it is likely they may have used the drugs for themselves. Or they may have used mefloquine, another antimalarial with anti-Covid effects, which was also being suppressed but got no press last year.
The third interesting Vietnam connection is Richard Bright, PhD, the head of BARDA who worked with FDA to use the Emergency Use Authorization for donated Covid drugs in the National Strategic Stockpile to interfere with doctors’ use of the chloroquine drugs for patients. He made the mistake of bragging about this after Trump fired him, pretending that he had saved the country from a dangerous drug that Trump had wanted used. Having worked in Vietnam, and probably therefore being very familar with antimalarials; overlapping his time in Vietnam with Horby and Farrar in our cast of characters; and had the job of doling out $1.5 billion per year as head of BARDA. I am convinced Bright is a co-conspirator to suppress the chloroquine drugs. It is of great interest that Collins, Fauci, Farrar and Bright were all given the responsiblity to dole out large pots of money to others. Rita Colwell, too, the former Director of the National Science Foundation who signed the Lancet letter, had had large amounts of money to distribute.
What is BARDA? It is a federal agency within DHHS:
“The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) provides an integrated, systematic approach to the development of the necessary vaccines, drugs, therapies, and diagnostic tools for public health medical emergencies such as chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) accidents, incidents and attacks; pandemic influenza (PI), and emerging infectious diseases (EID).
Together with its industry partners, BARDA promotes the advanced development of medical countermeasures to protect Americans and respond to 21st century health security threats.”
Here is what Sir Jeremy Farrar said about testing new drugs at the onset of the Covid pandemic.
“… Investing now, at scale, at risk and as a collective global effort is vital if we are to change the course of this epidemic. We welcome others to join us in this effort.” – Dr. Jeremy Farrar, Director of Wellcome
And so the Covid Therapeutics Accelerator was begun, with core funding from:
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundationm (BMGF), Wellcome Trust, and Mastercard.
All 3 play important roles in the shaping of Covid. Mastercard used it to push for digital money, since handling money exposes you to the virus. BMGF and Wellcome used their research funding to suppress useful drugs and prolong the pandemic, while using the opportunity to test new drugs and new drug platforms, like mRNA.
The website is hosted by the BMGF. While this organization did fund some hydroxychloroquine trials, if memory serves, at least 2 were shut down before completion, including one at the University of Washington, which is practically a subsidiary of the BMGF. The Henry Ford hospital trial, which showed great benefit from hydroxychloroquine, never got any traction, though the doctors involved tried hard to be heard. The MORU COPCOV trial was held up by the UK authorities soon after it began, on the basis of the danger of hydroxychloroquine, even though only tiny prophylactic doses were being used. By then, apparently, the plan was to shut down the cheap old drugs. Or perhaps the trials were set up under Wellcome and BMGF’s initiative so their management and/or findings could be controlled.
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From the Archives
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
A while ago, I received an email from a friend who asked:
How can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong about [global warming] (if your [skeptical] premise is correct). I don’t think it could be a conspiracy, or incompetence. … Has there ever been another case when so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?
The answer to the second part of my friend’s question—“Has there ever been another case where so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?”—is easy. Yes, there are many such cases, both within and outside climate science. In fact, the graveyard of science is littered with the bones of theories that were once thought “certain” (e.g., that the continents can’t “drift,” that Newton’s laws were immutable, and hundreds if not thousands of others).
Science progresses by the overturning of theories once thought “certain.” … continue
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- Zelensky’s favorite drone company at center of Ukrainian corruption alert
- The Broken Contract
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- Amid ceasefire violations and genocide, Israel commits piracy – Daily Update
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- The Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza — A cry at sea to the world’s dormant conscience
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- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
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- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
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