Did President Trump Promote a Killer Drug by Taking Hydroxychloroquine?
By Peter R. Breggin, MD and Ginger Breggin
Since May 18, 2020, President Trump has been accused of killing people by major media for announcing that he has been taking hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for two weeks to prevent the occurrence of COVID-19. Even the usually calm Neil Cavuto on Fox News accused the president of killing people by promoting the medication: “It will kill you. I cannot stress this enough. It will kill you.” Fortunately, the thoughtful Fox News doctor, Marc Siegel, afterward supported the President’s use of the drug and affirmed that it saved the life of his 96-year-old father. Today, May 19, 2020 shortly after 4 pm in Washington DC, Trump explained on television he and his doctor made the decision because he had been in close contact with two people who tested positive for the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2.
Worldwide Use of HCQ
Has Trump gone overboard, taking hydroxychloroquine, and promoting it? Hydroxychloroquine is the most widely used drug worldwide to treat COVID-19 with many doctors reporting it is the best drug available. A March 27, 2020 worldwide survey headlined, “Doctors Rate Hydroxychloroquine Most Effective Therapy for Coronavirus Infection.” India found hydroxychloroquine so essential to saving the lives of its citizens that for a time it stopped exporting it and more recently has been sending it to Africa in the “war against the coronavirus.”
The US lags behind many other nations in using HCQ because of the politically-driven negative PR in this country, but its use remains extensive. Reuters reported, “Doctors and pharmacists from more than half a dozen large healthcare systems in New York, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Ohio, Washington and California told Reuters they are routinely using hydroxychloroquine on patients hospitalized with COVID-19.”
A So-Called VA Study Claims that HCQ Kills
A negative study using Veterans Administration data is being used by many, including Neil Cavuto on the air, to prove that hydroxychloroquine kills people. We published a report and a video showing that the study was extremely biased, poorly done, and pure junk. Furthermore, despite the study’s poorly presented data, our reanalysis showed that the combination of hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin was saving many lives because, when given to the sickest patients of all, the death rate dropped to that of the healthiest patients.
A day or two after our analysis of the so-called VA study, the Secretary of the VA, Robert Wilkie, made the TV rounds, rejecting the study, and pointing out the data had been obtained and used by people unaffiliated with the VA. He endorsed HCQ, stating the VA was using it effectively to treat COVID-19. Today, after the President made his remarks, the VA Secretary stated on TV that men like himself who had been in the military frequently used the medication and that on any given day the VA dispenses 42,000 doses.
The FDA’s Political Intervention
The FDA is no watchdog; it is the lapdog of the pharmaceutical industry. In its negative pronouncement about the cheap, inexpensive and widely used drug, hydroxychloroquine, the FDA presented only hearsay evidence of reports of cardiac problems for which it gave not a single citation or piece of evidence. Meanwhile, the FDA has long been critical of using its reporting system to draw conclusions of the kind it drew against hydroxychloroquine. Since it made no reports available, the FDA clearly did not want scrutiny of the supposedly alarming data. They wanted us to run scared without providing particulars.
The Safety of HCQ
In my many decades of experience reviewing drug side effects, hydroxychloroquine is one of the safest drugs I have evaluated. The drug has been FDA approved for 65 years, so its safety profile is well-known. The FDA-approved Full Prescribing Information has no black box warning about lethal risks as many other drugs do, including many psychiatric drugs.
Hydroxychloroquine is on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines. It has been known for decades as being among the safest and most effective medicines needed in any health system. Almost all problems are with larger or more long-term amounts than used to treat the current epidemic. Deaths are extremely rare, and the WHO states the following,
“Despite hundreds of millions of doses administered in the treatment of malaria, there have been no reports of sudden unexplained death associated with quinine, chloroquine or amodiaquine, although each drug causes QT/QTc interval prolongation.”
The cardiac issue, QT interval prolongation that everyone warns about, is extraordinarily common—found in 247 other drugs including many commonly used psychiatric drugs. Many US doctors who use it for various FDA approved purposes—for malaria, for lupus, for rheumatoid arthritis—have announced publicly that they have never seen a death from it over many years.
Trump’s Drug Vs. Fauci’s Drug
Anthony Fauci, Director of NIH’s Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has led the criticism of Trump’s enthusiasm for hydroxychloroquine.
How safe is Fauci’s drug remdesivir? Remdesivir had to be stopped from being used in its Ebola trial. Compared to other antiviral drugs in the same study, it had an excessive mortality rate. A recent controlled clinical trial for remdesivir, published in Lancet, showed it had no good effects and that 5% of the people became much worse when taking it. Fauci meanwhile has never released adverse event data from his recent trial, an enormous issue that most readers will be learning for the first time in this report. We have previously discussed these findings in a reported titled “Fauci’s Remdesivir: Inadequate to Treat COVID-19 and Potentially Lethal.” Our report and PDFs of the published clinical trials can be found on our Coronavirus Resource Center on http://www.breggin.com.
Right now, hydroxychloroquine is the best drug available for treating COVID-19 and its safety profile is remarkably good. Compared to it, Fauci’s remdesivir is a potentially deadly, highly experimental, unproven drug. So who is killing people, Trump by promoting a drug commonly used worldwide for treating COVID-19 with a good safety profile, or Fauci promoting remdesivir which remains experimental, has potentially lethal adverse effects, and whose safety profile in the recently aborted NIH trial has never been released by Fauci?
“I Am Open”: 50,000 Italian Restaurant Owners Plan to Ignore Lockdown
Huge act of civil disobedience plans to conduct business as usual inspite of “anti-Covid” measures
OffGuardian | January 15, 2021
Today – Friday 15th January – over 50,000 restaurants are planning to open, an act of mass civil disobedience against “anti-Covid” lockdown measures which have massively hurt the restaurant business, especially small family-owned businesses.
Spreading through social media under the hashtag #IoOpro (“I am opening”), the movement is largest country-wide act of civil disobedience since lockdowns began.
Italain opposition MP Vittorio Sgarbi has backed the movement, saying in an interview:
Open up, & don’t worry, in the end we will make them eat their fines”.
Italy’s government is already facing internal conflict and crisis, an early election is a possibility.
A similar movement already started in Mexico on January 12th, when hundreds of restaurant owners gathered to protest the lockdowns.
The “I am Open” protest is spreading across Europe as well, with variants already taking hold in German-speaking Switzerland (#Wirmachenauf) and Poland (#OtwieraMY).
It’s good to be reminded that, no matter how much it looks like the new normal is spreading unopposed, it’s not. People all over the world are resisting where they can. That’s what “Covid Positive” is all about.
To follow the progress of this movement we recommended following Robin Monotti and the It’s Time to Rise accounts on twitter and other platforms.
New Jersey government drains gym’s bank account over Covid-19 rule-breaking, despite ongoing legal appeal
RT | January 15, 2021
The owners of Atilis Gym in Bellmawr, New Jersey had their bank account unexpectedly drained even while pursuing their legal appeals against a growing stack of fines levied by the state for alleged violation of Covid-19 rules.
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy “took it upon himself to empty our bank account entirely, to the tune of $165,000,” gym owner Ian Smith claimed in a Wednesday Instagram post. The confiscation took place “without warning, and without permission” despite both parties being eight months into a bitter legal battle over state Covid-19 restrictions – including a lawsuit against the governor, he added.
The gym owner accused the governor “and his cronies” of “effectively and intentionally interfering with our right to council [sic]” in a Twitter post, noting that the sum taken represented “100% of [the gym’s] legal defense money.”
In addition to several charges filed against Atilis Gym in July, when its owners were arrested for defying a court order to shut down their business, the gym has been hit with additional fines of $15,497.76 since November for every day it remains open to its members without enforcing a mask mandate.
However, the owners have appealed all financial judgments against their establishment. Smith pointed out that he has challenged not only the daily fines, but some “eighty municipal and criminal charges against us; ongoing litigation in the case of the revocation of our business license without due process; and the unconstitutional health department shut-down that was placed upon us in the first place.”
When Murphy ordered the state’s gyms to close back in March, Smith and his business partner Frank Trumbetti took their case to court, arguing they should be permitted to stay open as long as they maintained strict sanitary and social distancing protocols. The pair sued both Murphy and state health commissioner Judith Persichilli, vowing that “no governor, or no government official, will ever wield [such excessive] powers ever again.”
Smith personally served Murphy with a recall petition at his office in December in an effort to force the Democrat out of office.
The gym has not been charging members to work out since April, and all of the money in the account came from donations and apparel sales, according to Smith’s Instagram post. He added that the gym has seen 105,000 visitors since the pandemic began and not a single reported case of Covid-19.
While New Jersey has since permitted gyms to open, provided they follow the state’s Covid-19 regulations, Atilis does not require its patrons to wear masks while exercising.
Smith took his story national on Thursday with an interview by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who marveled that the gym owners were “being punished for trying to keep people healthy and trim in the middle of a pandemic that kills people who are overweight and out of shape.”
A spokesman for the New Jersey attorney general’s office subsequently claimed the gym owners had lied about the state “seiz[ing] their bank account funds” in the amount of $173,000. Smith had initially tweeted $173,613.60 had been taken from his account before revising the amount to $165,000 in his Instagram video.
“The State has obtained judgments against the owners, and intends to collect on them” in the amount of $134,463.08, the spokesman explained to Fox News, arguing that the $165,000 in “frozen” assets had been seized as the result of a bank levy in the course of the enforcement of a judicial order against the gym owners.
Presumably hoping to avoid government seizure of future legal assistance donations, Smith told Carlson that contributions would be immediately converted to cash going forward.
Gyms have become hotspots of local resistance to Covid-19 regulations, in part due to the prominence of obesity as a risk factor for the disease. A group of New York gyms filed a class action lawsuit against Governor Andrew Cuomo in July, and Orchard Park gym owner Robbie Dinero won his own case against the state government after a State Supreme Court judge affirmed New York’s order to close down gyms was “arbitrary and capricious” last month.
New Jersey has thus far endured the highest Covid-19 death rate in the US, with New York having the second-highest rate.
However, the majority of deaths in both states took place in nursing homes, which were required by the states’ governors to accept patients believed to be infected with Covid-19.
Peer Reviewed Study Shows COVID Lockdowns Have No Benefits Compared to Voluntary Measures
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | January 15, 2021
A new peer reviewed study by Stanford researchers has found that mandatory lockdowns do not provide more benefits to stopping the spread of COVID-19 than voluntary measures such as social distancing.
The study compared countries that had imposed mandatory lockdowns, such as England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the U.S., to those that had relied on the public to follow voluntary measures, such as Sweden and South Korea.
The researchers subtracted “the sum of non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) effects and epidemic dynamics in countries that did not enact more restrictive non-pharmaceutical interventions (mrNPIs) from the sum of NPI effects and epidemic dynamics in countries that did.”
After analyzing the data, the researchers found “no clear, significant beneficial effect of [more restrictive measures] on case growth in any country.”
The authors added that they “do not question the role of all public health interventions,” but insisted that stay at home orders and business closures had no additional impacting on lowering the spread of the virus.
The study adds to the weight of evidence that clearly indicates lockdowns are totally pointless and only create further misery and death.
According to Professor Philip Thomas of Bristol University, the UK lockdown will end up costing 500,000 lives due to the health impact of the economic recession it will cause.
Untold numbers of people will also die from having their urgent treatments delayed as well as avoiding hospitals.
According to research published by Imperial College London and Johns Hopkins University, around 1.4 million people globally will also die from untreated TB infections.
Last September, Germany’s Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, Gerd Muller, warned that lockdown measures throughout the globe will end up killing more people than the coronavirus itself.
A Pandemic Reading List for Left, Right, and Libertarians
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | American Institute for Economic Research | January 14, 2021
Daily the news is pouring in: SARS-CoV-2 behaves like a textbook respiratory virus in its vectors of transmission and its conferring immunity. It is not and never was a strange and unfamiliar pathogenic meteor hitting the earth warranting panic to the point of shutting down the normal course of life.
The policy response should have followed the proven path of the past: vulnerable people protecting themselves while non-vulnerable populations go about life as normal with an expectation of exposure. This was the settled presumption of public health. This is what the Great Barrington Declaration said and it is what Public Health England is saying now.
Why did all this happen? Did sizable parts of the world fail to pay attention in 9th grade biology class when the subjects of viruses and immunity were discussed? For that matter, is this stuff not taught anymore?
I’m just not sure what accounts for this sudden loss of knowledge. I do know that people who specialize in political economy were blindsided last March with the policy response to pandemic. Nothing like widespread lockdowns had ever been attempted in the US, which accounts for why so little has actually been written about it. The result was that many intellectuals – on all sides! – found themselves unprepared. Subjects like cell biology and infectious disease are not topics usually examined by economists and philosophers, so many people decided to say nothing at all, thereby granting the lockdowners a free hand that dominated public discussion.
I had been variously writing on the topic of pandemic policy responses since 2006, but beyond the general conviction that government would only make things worse, I too was unprepared to deal with the specifics concerning viruses and their mitigation. Is it really true that closing restaurants and churches makes a contribution to stopping disease spread? Is forcing people apart actually a sound response to the presence of a pathogen? Is there no other path to minimizing the social harm of a virus other than waiting for a vaccine? For that matter, can a virus really be stopped?
Answering these questions takes more than political or ideological conviction. It requires at least some knowledge of cell biology, pathogens, pandemic history, public health practices, and immunological history. I scrambled to get up to speed so that I could understand more thoroughly and write in a more compelling way.
Mostly this consisted of reading as many medical studies on Covid as possible, in addition to listening to endless hours of talks online by specialists. That was essential. Even so, what I really needed was to embed myself in the bigger topic more deeply.
The books below provided me the most help on this intellectual journey.
The History of Public Health, by Paul Rosen. This fascinating treatise was first published in 1958 and reissued in 1993 with new material. It is a wonderful introduction to the whole concept of public health and how it evolved through the centuries. A major theme of the book is how poor understanding of disease dominated public health from the ancient world through the 19th century. Ignorance and fear led to a run-from-the-miasma mentality. Once the science of cell biology improved, so too did public health.
The last bout of medieval-style brutality toward disease was in 1918, after which public health got very very serious and swore that nothing like that would happen again. The turning point occurred when it became clear that large-scale collective efforts to beat back and hide from pathogens were futile and tremendously harmful. Instead, disease is something to be managed by doctors and their patients. The job of public health became to focus on clean sanitation and water and otherwise give a message of calm, and clear recommendations to people in light of medical resources.
The hardest challenge for public health was to get common people to understand the scalability of their own immune systems, so that people would stop fearing exposure as such but rather embrace evolutionary reality. After World War II, this became a major feature of public education.
Rosen further emphasizes how modern public health differs from ancient and medieval theory in that it is never about chasing away a single pathogen. Rather, public health must consider all aspects of health including economic and mental health. So panicking by running away from a germ is completely contrary to modern public health, to say nothing of lockdowns, which have zero to do with health.
One thing that slightly bothers is Rosen’s tendency to attribute all improvement in health to science and better policies. He has a whole chapter on the strange disappearance of a vast number of diseases after WWI. He thinks it is due to better sanitation and so on, which is undoubtedly true in part. But even while reading, I couldn’t shake Sunetra Gupta’s point that trade and migration vastly improved immune systems. It was a natural process of tossing off naive systems for exposed systems that made the largest contribution to longer lives and better health.
Molecular & Cell Biology For Dummies, by Rene Fester Kratz. This quick Kindle download provides an accurate look at the core of the topic at hand while minimizing the amount of technical and medical razzle-dazzle you would otherwise face with a first-year textbook from medical school. Not having an extensive background in this topic myself, I not only found the book fascinating; I was amazed that I found it fascinating! The human immune system shares features with any complex evolved system: as a reader you cannot help but be in awe of its workings and interactions with the world. In a year in which the lockdowners tried to pretend as if the immune is nonoperational without a vaccine, this introduction to disease basics is an outstanding corrective.
Smallpox: The Death of a Disease: The Inside Story of Eradicating a Worldwide Killer, by Donald A. Henderson. This is a spectacular history of one of the greatest triumphs in modern medicine. It is also beautifully written. Inoculation against smallpox has been around since the 18th century, and the vaccine since the late 19th century. The real challenges that met the eradicators – the author himself among the most famous and dedicated of them all – was about production, distribution, and administration. Here was what requires decades of work, and Henderson chronicles the litany of difficulties he faced around the world. I think of this book often these days given the completely predictable chaos of Covid vaccine distribution in 2021.
The Plague, by Albert Camus. This short but powerful book, written about the author’s own quarantine and published in 1947, is a work of fiction that speaks to the terrifying reality of lockdowns in the midst of a plague – the sort of plague that takes people down ferociously and brutally. He captures perfectly how the fear of sickness and death taps into a primal instinct and causes first denial and then panic. He speaks profoundly to the loss of direction and purpose in the midst of lockdown, the isolation and psychological damage that being cut off from the normal flow of life brings about. And he speaks to the loss of control felt both by citizens and officials when confronted with a mysterious pathogen, and just how disorienting it is to discover that the disease is smarter and more powerful than any of us.
Coronavirus and Economic Crisis, edited by Peter C. Earle. I am listing this one not because I have several essays in it, but rather because this book compiles some of the best research and writing from the early months of the pandemic lockdown. It is filled with white-hot passion and tremendous erudition. It also provides proof that what many of our writers predicted came true: tremendous social, cultural, and economic damage. We were warned at the time that we were acting too soon in publishing this, and it is true that AIER was just about first out the door with a book on the topic. But it turned out to serve as a great inspiration to others, and gave the principles that guided the opposition to lockdowns for the rest of the year. In the meantime, AIER released three additional books on the topic in addition to my own book Liberty or Lockdown.
Pandemic responses will continue to serve as a convenient rationale for government interventions in the future. Anyone who has a concern for human liberty and prosperity should be armed with intellectual ammunition to combat this huge increase in government power. We need more than ideological instincts here; to fully understand, we need to be aware of the sciences of infectious disease and the discipline of public health.
At this point, ignorance threatens everything we hold dear. We owe the cause of freedom some effort on our part to read up, learn, and be prepared for the long battle ahead.
Alert: the operation to squash protests in America – PART ONE
By Jon Rappoport | January 14, 2021
The Department of Justice has announced it’s mounting a full-scale operation to arrest and charge people who broke into the Capitol on January 6.
There will be a wide-ranging menu of charges, starting with criminal trespass, and moving all the way to weapons possession, theft of National Security data, assault, and sedition.
The DOJ list of charges is meant to impress the American people.
Of course, an impressive DOJ list could have been leveled against thousands of people who participated in Antifa/BLM-led burning, looting, theft, and assault across the US over the past six months.
But that didn’t happen.
Those violent riots were a form of “insurrection,” but the label was never applied.
And Big Tech never considered banning social media users who planned and supported the riots.
From here on out, people will need to announce quite specifically what they’re protesting against. I’m talking, of course, about protests against the brutal COVID lockdowns.
Because you can be sure the government/media complex will paint such people with the “Capitol-break-in” brush. That’s part of this operation to squash dissent.
On a related note, social media are censoring users, and news media are censoring their own talent, if the issue of the stolen election continues to be raised. However, there is no expiration date on accusations of vote fraud.
Remember, after Trump won the 2016 election, Democrats spent the next three years claiming he didn’t win, but instead was part of a Russian conspiracy that handed him the presidency. Who was censored for saying THAT?
Back to the protests: As I’ve mentioned in prior articles, equating distinct events, and thus turning them into “the same event,” is part and parcel of mind control.
A hundred bereft business owners, who have been driven into bankruptcy by the COVID lockdowns, gathering near a governor’s office to protest, will be equated with “crazy dangerous Trumpers who believe the election was stolen.”
This is no accident. It’s standard operating procedure in the world of intelligence-agency campaigns.
If the CIA wants to maintain a foreign dictator in office, because he makes favorable deals with mega-corporations to loot and plunder his country, they’ll spread vast disinformation about the rebels who want free elections:
“The rebel force threatening to unseat the president is led by the cult of child-killers who have been ravaging families in the countryside…”
Closer to home, imagine something like this: “The group called Citizens for a Free Nation, who showed up at the governors’ mansion last week to protest COVID safety measures, is largely composed of unhinged anti-vaxxers and Trump supporters, some of whom may have attended the January 6 rally at the Capitol, which resulted in an act of insurrection. Police and FBI are investigating…”
Behind it all? A determination to suppress resistance to the COVID lockdowns, aka mass imprisonments.
The Police State knows the months of lockdowns and economic destruction have driven more and more people to the wall. The US population is a dry tinder forest in a season of high heat and no rain.
Controlling the population is a major problem. So those who stand up and visibly break out of jail have to be made into despicable illustrations of Something Else.
What label is at hand? By mere coincidence: INSURRECTIONISTS, “who broke into the Capitol on January 6, the day that will live in infamy.”
That label can now be applied anywhere. It’s a major item on the game board of intelligence-agency operations. When dissenting heads pop up, paint them with it.
Nevertheless, protests are still legal and legitimate. People who run them need to articulate what they’re about, over and over, in very clear fashion.
Americans, who’ve lived with more freedom and security than people in other parts of the world, tend to think their government, when it muscles in, signifies The End and Total Defeat.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Freedom never dies.
It is an eternal quality.
Climate alarmism has become a growth industry and the pandemic is making things worse
By Frank Furedi | RT | January 13, 2021
Covid-19 has provided a window of opportunity for professional doom-mongers to spread fear by linking the virus to climate change and overpopulation. But we shouldn’t pay attention to their alarmist predictions for the planet.
Another day and another climate alarmist report that warns that human extinction is imminent. A study titled ‘Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future’ declares that the planet is confronted with a “ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate disruption upheavals.”
Why am I not surprised by yet another scenario outlining a ghastly future of mass extinction? We live in a world where we are constantly fed a diet of climate alarmism through the media.
Advocates of ‘the end of the world is nigh’ attribute virtually every threat facing society to global warming. Large-scale forest fires, floods, global terrorism, mass migration, xenophobia and mental health issues are just some of the problems that have been blamed on it.
Not surprisingly, the outbreak of coronavirus provided an opportunity to link global warming to it. The Harvard School of Public Health declared: “We don’t have direct evidence that climate change is influencing the spread of Covid-19.” However, the absence of evidence did not prevent it from stating that “we do know that climate change alters how we relate to other species on Earth and that matters to our health and our risk for infections.”
And just in case you missed the message, it stated, “As the planet heats up, animals big and small, on land and in the sea, are headed to the poles to get out of the heat. That means animals are coming into contact with other animals they normally wouldn’t, and that creates an opportunity for pathogens to get into new hosts.”
Despite the lack of evidence, you are left in no doubt that man-made climate change and the pandemic are closely connected.
As I read the report ‘Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future’, I breathed a sigh of relief. For I discovered that one of its authors is the veteran professional doom-monger Paul Ehrlich. In his 1968 book, ‘The Population Bomb’, Ehrlich predicted an imminent population explosion leading to hundreds of millions of people starving to death. Like other scaremongers, he is not deterred by getting it totally wrong. He continues to ply his trade. Although he admitted that he got the timing wrong, he still stands by his original prophecy of doom.
What motivates Ehrlich and many of his climate-alarmist colleagues is their hatred of humanity. In the past, their misanthropy – dislike of humankind – was communicated in the language of population control. Today, their message is advanced through scaring people about planetary extinction, which they attribute to overpopulation.
For the population control lobby, human life has little meaning. Their scaremongering about ‘too many people’ is often based on a genuine dislike of people – especially those who are not like them. Paul Ehrlich personifies the misanthrope. His classic scaremongering text, ‘The Population Bomb’, reveals the author’s feelings towards his fellow human beings. Ehrlich’s account of an evening out on the town with his wife and daughter in Delhi helps explain his fear of ‘too many people’.
“The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. As we moved slowly, through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our hotel? All three of us were frankly, frightened… since that night I’ve known the feel of overpopulation.”
Those who are frightened by “people, people, people, people” find it difficult to endow human life with meaning. Uncontained by compassion and sentimentality for their fellow human beings, they regard life as cheap and as having no more value than other species. In this vein, the deep ecologist platform written by Arne Næss
and George Sessions in 1984 stated that a “substantial decrease” in human population is needed for the flourishing of non-human-life.
‘Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future’ also advocates fewer people as the solution to climate change.
Unfortunately, those who are frightened by “people, people, people, people” are winning the battle of ideas. They have managed to endow the term “human impact” with negative connotations. According to their play book, human impact is a negative and destructive force plaguing the planet.
Yet history shows that on balance, humanity has played a constructive role in transforming the world. People are not the problem, but the solution to the challenges that lie ahead. Regaining confidence in our humanity is the precondition for securing a better future.
Ehrlich’s prediction in 1968 turned out to be wrong and I am confident that his speculation about a “ghastly future” will also turn out to be just that – speculation.
Frank Furedi is an author and social commentator. He is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Author of How Fear Works: The Culture of Fear in the 21st Century. Follow him on Twitter @Furedibyte
CONFIRMED: Britain Will Issue VACCINE PASSPORTS
By Steve Watson | Summit News | January 12, 2021
Despite previous government denials that there are any plans to roll out COVID vaccine passports, reports have confirmed that every person vaccinated in two select areas of Britain will be offered exactly that as a ‘trial’ being rolled out with immediate effect.
The London Telegraph reports that biometrics firm iProov and cybersecurity firm Mvine have developed the vaccine passports, which will be optionally provided as an app on phones of those vaccinated.
The government will conduct the rollout in two local authorities, and monitor its application until March.
The report notes that the government has ploughed £75,000 into the trial already, which is claimed to be a way of monitoring who has had the vaccine.
Frank Joshi, director and founder of Mvine noted that while the project started as just a way of keeping a record of COVID tests, extra funding was pumped into it in order to turn it into a vaccine passport scheme.
“Originally we started off with this need to prove whether you’ve had an antibody test, but it can be equally used to demonstrate whether you’ve been vaccinated,” Joshi said, according to the report.
Andrew Bud, chief executive of the other company involved, iProov, said that the system will be integrated with the National Health Service, and could easily be rolled out to everyone in the country.
“We’re talking about a piece of remarkable technology that can be brought to bear and can be readily integrated with the NHS,” he said.
The development appears to be separate from the government contracts given to two other firms to develop COIVD ‘freedom passports’, which we reported on several weeks ago.
Last month, Britain’s vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi announced that the government had no plans to introduce immunity passports en mass, or place restrictions on those who do not take the jab.
This latest revelation puts Zahawi’s already dubious claim into serious doubt.
We also previously reported, back in November, on the UK government’s active plans to develop a QR code system to use as an ‘immunity passport’.
The report, stemming from sources close to the government, noted that “Those who refuse to get the Covid-19 jab would likely be refused entry to venues, as part of the same proposals.”
Other reports have suggested that an app already used prominently in the UK by people to book doctor and hospital appointments could implement a vaccination status section that will show whether a person has taken the coronavirus jab or not, and that businesses may use it to refuse entry to those who have not.
The spectre of so called ‘immunity passports’ is looming globally.
Yesterday it was revealed that Denmark is the latest country to announce that it is rolling out a ‘Covid passport’, to allow those who have taken the vaccine to engage in society without any restrictions.
Recently, the government in Ontario, Canada admitted that it is exploring ‘immunity passports’ in conjunction with restrictions on travel and access to social venues for the unvaccinated.
Last month, Israel announced that citizens who get the COVID-19 vaccine will be given ‘green passports’ that will enable them to attend venues and eat at restaurants.
A litany of other government and travel industry figures in both the US, Britain and beyond have suggested that ‘COVID passports’ are coming in order for ‘life to get back to normal’.
Sam Grant, campaign manager at the civili liberties advocacy group Liberty has warned that “any form of immunity passport risks creating a two-tier system in which some of us have access to freedoms and support while others are shut out.”
“These systems could result in people who don’t have immunity potentially being blocked from essential public services, work or housing – with the most marginalised among us hardest hit,” Grant further warned.
“This has wider implications too because any form of immunity passport could pave the way for a full ID system – an idea which has repeatedly been rejected as incompatible with building a rights-respecting society,” Grant further urged.
UK Government Hires Men to Stand in Public with TV on Head for Pandemic Propaganda
Britain’s bizarre ‘Robocop-like’ walking propaganda digital billboards (Image Credit: Gomo Digital)
21st Century News Wire | January 12, 2021
In one of the most desperate and bizarre moves yet, a local government in the UK has begun recruiting men to walking the streets with TVs strapped over their heads, supposedly to help police during a highly unpopular lockdown.
Bradford Council in Yorkshire announced their new ‘iWalkers’ scheme, where local council staff and volunteers are deployed onto the streets with a 19 inch screen weighing 18 lbs, mounted on their shoulders.
According to reports, the program ran for two days before it began to go horribly wrong. The government scheme was so ridiculous, residents thought it might have been satire at first, or a prank, not believing that the local government had lost the plot to such a degree. When they realized the plan was actually a real government initiative, the public backlash was severe, and so embarrassed council officials panicked and removed their Facebook post detailing their ‘exciting new program.’
A number of outrageous comments, both in person and online, were hurled at the walking Robocop-like human propaganda digital billboards
These real-life Teletubies were supposed to be walking the city and town streets, wearing masks, while their TV’s would be pushing out government propaganda on COVID, designed by a government behavioural insights team and applied behavioural psychologists – to nudge residents into tighter lockdown compliance, and to keep the public abreast of minute-to-minute ever-changing “coronavirus rules and restrictions.”
According to reports, the cost of Bradford’s COVID Teletubies is being paid for through Government funding of “Covid-19 communications.”
Local government officials denied they had deleted their new initiative because of public embarrassment, and instead claimed that it was suddenly taken down because of public comments that supposedly “crossed the line into abuse of people who are working hard to help residents and workers in Bradford District stay safe and stop the spread of the virus.”
The incident comes at a bad time for local councils who have recently decreed that they will be squeezing the working class even more by raising their council taxes (aka poll tax) – all of this amid a steep economic depression instigated by the reactionary COVID lockdown policies of the UK government.
Government officials tried to justify the expensive theme park-style stunt by saying that, “There are still many key workers in the city who may wish to get some information on testing where testing sites are close by and it’s really important that we have people out on the streets who can provide this.”
The Orwellian saga continues…
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Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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