Is This Fraud Ever Going to End?
By Dr Vernon Coleman
I sometimes envy the zombies who believe that the only problem is an infection which causes a disease called covid-19.
They get up in the morning, check in the mirror to make sure they haven’t died in the night, munch their chocolate flavoured bran flakes, choose a mask that goes best with their chosen outfit for the day and venture out into the world a little nervous but confident that their government is doing its best to protect them in these tricky times.
As they go about their business they disinfect their hands at every possible opportunity, carefully obey the social distancing rules and wait impatiently for the vaccine.
In a way I occasionally envy them their ignorance. They are like not very bright goldfish swimming round and round in one of those glass bowls.
People sometimes refer to the ignorant as sheep but this isn’t fair.
I have kept sheep and they are far more intelligent than most people imagine. Hardly anyone has bothered to do any research because, like cows and pigs, sheep are just farm animals and farmers and vets don’t have much interest in studying animals whose destiny is to be slaughtered, chopped up and eaten.
For example, the books will tell you that sheep are colour blind. They aren’t.
I used to have a four wheel drive vehicle which was the same model as the vet’s. My car was blue and his was green. When the sheep saw my car coming they ran towards me because I always gave them biscuits. When they saw the vet coming they ran away because he always wanted to check their feet and they didn’t like that. I later tested with different coloured feed buckets and I can promise you that sheep are not colour blind. They are actually very bright animals – far more intelligent than Gates, Fauci or Whitty and invariably a darned site better conversationalists. And they are brave too. My sheep once frightened a dog so much that the dog’s owner begged me to call my sheep off his dog.
So, to me, the ignorant thickos who still believe the coronavirus is the new plague are zombies or collaborators.
The vigilance of the collaborators means that every trip to the shops has become something of an ordeal.
The staff in the supermarket are always fine and actually a few seem genuinely sympathetic. But there is invariably one customer who worships Bill Gates, probably has his picture above his bed, and who feels it is his duty to confront any intelligent people he sees with naked faces.
This morning I hadn’t got more than three feet into the supermarket when a pompous, sanctimonious mask-finder general, one of Commander Dick’s shame police, rushed up to my wife and rudely and aggressively demanded that she put on a mask. That’s Commander Dick of the Metropolitan police.
My wife was startled and upset and politely told him that she was exempt. He still scowled, and I thought he deserved more. And with my wife’s permission, I explained that it wasn’t really any of his business but that she’d had surgery for breast cancer and a month’s radiotherapy which has caused damage which makes breathing difficult. Thanks to the absurd coronavirus hoax, the hospital physiotherapy department is still closed so she is in pain most of the day. I wish someone would explain that to me, incidentally. My wife can have a tattoo, were she so inclined, or her hair done, but she cannot have physiotherapy because the physiotherapy department is still closed. I pointed out to the mask-wearing prefect that nurses at the hospital told her to remove her mask after she almost collapsed with palpitations caused by her condition.
You might have thought a human being would have been embarrassed. Not a bit of it. The Dick police specials are shameless. The cretin, utterly indifferent and uncaring, just shrugged and demanded to know why I wasn’t wearing a mask.
I always explain to the thickos that the mask they are wearing does absolutely no good, that mask wearing is dangerous, that they didn’t wear a mask last year so why are they wearing one this year and that covid-19 has killed fewer people than the flu.
I do this because I think these zombies need to be educated before they accost an elderly or frail person and cause serious upset.
Sadly, however, in my now generous experience the mask promoting lunatics always run away when you reply to their muttered, `where’s your mask?’ mantra. The collaborators compound their selfishness and their ignorance with good old-fashioned cowardice: without exception, they run away. Say something, anything, in reply and they scoot away back to the hole in the skirting board.
And that’s what happened with this coward. He ran off. All mouth but no guts.
`You are an idiot!’ I shouted at the retreating mask wearer.
Not witty, I admit, but adequate.
The collaborators will destroy our lives as well as their own unless they are brought to heel.
I had trouble in the bank, too. There was, inevitably, a lengthy queue outside which was fine because Bill Gates’s cloud of calcium carbonate hanging in the sky was keeping the sun at bay though I wonder how many people will freeze to death when the weather becomes a little chillier. All part of the Agenda 21 plan to get rid of the elderly and the frail.
Eventually, when I got a foot in the door, a girl whom I could identify as a staff member only because of her uniform, asked me where my mask was and wanted to know if I was exempt. I smiled and nodded and she offered to get me a lanyard with a label to hang around my neck to show that I was exempt. Since I don’t want a lanyard with a label any more than I want a mask I just smiled and said no thank you and explained that masks are entirely useless because viruses go straight through the material.
`I know,’ she said. `But wearing a mask gives people confidence.’
What madness. She knows that masks are useless but she thinks they give people confidence. Does she think all their customers are half-witted five-year-olds? The answer is obviously yes.
And talking of five-year-olds, when is someone going to start arresting parents who force small children to wear masks? In England, children under 11 are exempt from mask wearing. (Look at the Government website for the latest information because the rules change almost daily.) There is much talk of authorities taking children away from parents who disapprove of vaccination. I think they’ve got it the wrong way round. They should be taking children away from parents who force children to wear masks or let them get vaccinated.
Just before we left town, we saw a maskless man come out of the supermarket. Like conspirators we chatted for a few moments. He was quite awake and aware of the fraud being perpetrated upon us. He told us that he watched UK Column and the old man in a chair. He didn’t have the faintest idea the old man, without his chair, was standing just two feet away from him. We didn’t mention it.
You and I are involved in a war where we are not quite sure whom we are fighting or precisely what their final aims might be – other than the fact that we are destined to be drones, slaves, proles in a world run by a new self-appointed aristocracy.
The minute we think we have worked it out and know what the rules are they change the rules. It is a world which appears to have been designed by Lewis Carroll to make Franz Kafka feel comfortable.
The only stable currency is the lie.
It is no exaggeration to say that it is fair to assume that everything anyone in authority says will be a lie. They do it so naturally that I sometimes wonder if any of the politicians and their advisors realise just how much they are lying. Maybe it’s just like breathing. They do it without thinking.
I think we perhaps all misunderstand how vile politicians are. Auberon Waugh once said that the only thing that any of them is really interested in is the chance to make decisions and see them put into effect – to press a button and watch us all jump.
He was right, but the politicians have recently been joined by an army of advisors, hangers on and confidants who are also in it for the power, and who have very real views on how the world should be but who cannot be bothered to stand for election. The Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Gates, Soros and so on are all too arrogant to expose themselves to the ballot box and I suspect they all hold us in contempt.
It is often said that the truth will set us free but the one certainty these days is that long before we get there we will be disappointed, frustrated and not a little angry.
They say we must be prepared for a second wave.
A second wave of what?
Did we actually have a first wave? Covid-19 killed less people than the flu. What sort of wave is that? More of a ripple really.
How can there be a second wave without a first wave?
We could, I suppose, have a second ripple.
Take out the hundreds of thousands of old people who were murdered in care homes around the world, and the hundreds of thousands who were put down as dying of covid-19 but actually died of something else and the total number who have allegedly died of the coronavirus can hardly be called a wave. It certainly wasn’t much of a pandemic.
In England and Wales, the excess number of deaths has fallen below the five year average for the fifth week in a row. Moreover, the figures now show that more than 90% of covid-19 deaths occurred in people over 60, and 90% of those who died in hospital had existing health conditions before they got infected. In due course the real figures will be available and they will, I suspect, show that over 90% were in their 80s or older, and had two or three co-morbidities.
There are regions of England where I suspect that more people are dying from falling off horses than are dying from the coronavirus. Does that mean that we’ve having an epidemic of deaths caused by people falling off horses? In many parts of the world anything that actually kills people is a bigger threat than the coronavirus. Is rabies now a global pandemic? How about falling off mountains? I would bet that there have been more suicides, caused by fear and despair for the future than covid-19 deaths in some places in the last month.
Nothing much makes any sense any more, does it?
And yet, as hypnotherapist and author Colin Barron points out, many of the so-called experts on covid-19 don’t have any medical qualifications. Neil Ferguson is a mathematician and yet his predictions were used as the basis for the global lockdowns.
Everyone with a certificate in basic woodwork has suddenly become a medical expert.
The other day the Scottish Daily Mail printed a letter from someone called Professor Greg Philo of Glasgow University who warns `the fear is real and we need a strategy to eliminate the virus’.
So, what is Professor Philo’s medical speciality? Medicine? Surgery? Epidemiology? General Practice?
None of the above.
The only Professor Philo I could find is a professor of communications and social change.
And if you’ve got any idea what that means then you have my commiserations.
Why do such people assume the right to pontificate about whether or not a virus infection is a threat?
As Dr Barron says, there was a time when only taxi drivers were experts on everything. These days even professors of communications and social change want to share their conclusions about a complex piece of global manipulation.
We have reached the strange position where paranoia is no longer a medical condition. It is a rational state of mind. Governments have lied about lockdowns, they have lied about the number of deaths, they have lied about the need for masks and they have lied about social distancing. Trying to dismantle the lies and find the kernel of truth is like playing three dimensional chess and if that isn’t the most mixed up metaphor in history then I’ll try again another day.
I can’t remember the last time a politician said anything that bore even a faint relationship to the truth. You’d be mad not to assume that everything the dishonest, deceitful cynical politicians and the advisors say is a barefaced lie. We’re being ruled by crazed psychopaths who have somehow succeeded in encouraging the collaborators to believe that it is possible to remove all risk from human life.
Politicians and their advisors should be forced to wear logos on their suits to list their sponsors, allegiances and connections. They’d have so many advertising logos they would look like race car drivers. All BBC staff should have EU and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation logos on their clothing at all times. The Guardian too. Anyone with links to a drug company should be banned from any sort of public role. As I have shown in previous videos, the world’s drug companies are more dishonest and dishonourable than tobacco companies. We would be better off if the world were run by a cabal of Colombian drug barons than the pirate crew currently striving for global control.
Telling lies is the new normal in our world.
They say that wearing masks will provide protection. This isn’t true. What evidence there is shows that masks are entirely pointless and potentially dangerous. Only the clinically insane and people with IQs in single figures think masks are of any value whatsoever. Why don’t footballers have to wear masks when they’re playing? Because masks impede their breathing. Why do even politicians and government advisors agree that those with respiratory problems don’t have to wear masks? The answer is obvious – because masks impede breathing.
They say that it will be necessary to introduce more lockdowns to prevent more deaths. But even governments now admit that lockdowns cause more deaths than they prevent. So the only possible reason for having more lockdowns is to kill more people.
They say they need to introduce new laws to avoid a second wave of infections and deaths. The truth is that it was the last lot of laws – the social distancing, the lockdowns and the masks – which have caused the deaths. More laws will result in more deaths.
They say we have to close our borders to keep out the virus. This is bollocks. In March I suggested closing airports to control the infection rate. But airports were left open. Now that the death rate has collapsed they want to stop people travelling. They are desperate to stop anyone travelling or having a good time. They are deliberately creating fear to sustain their corrupt, satanic ideology.
They say that testing is showing up more cases. This is so deceitful it’s worthy of Bernie Madoff. The tests which are being used throw up so many false positives that they are about as much use as a castrated ram in a field full of sheep. And even the politicians and their advisors must realise that if you test ten times as many people then the chances are that you will find more people who have or have had the infection. Tracking and tracing is simply an infringement of our civil liberties. It is of no value whatsoever.
They say the only way we will ever get back to normal will be with a vaccine. This is the biggest lie of all. Worst of all, they say that the new vaccine will be safe. They cannot possibly know this. The dimmest, most stupid person you know can judge whether their new vaccine will be safe as well as they can.
Politicians, advisors, commentators and professors of golf course management claim that the world will not get back to normal until there is a vaccine available. There is of course, another unspoken option: that the majority will realise that the coronavirus scare is a hoax; a massive fraud deliberately arranged by people with malignant intentions.
And that’s what is going to happen.
I will leave you with a quote from the Robert Donat film version of the Count of Monte Cristo: `They call me mad because I tell the truth.’
What more can I say?
Vernon Coleman’s bestselling book about the coronavirus is called `Coming Apocalypse’. It is available on Amazon as a paperback and an eBook.
Copyright Vernon Coleman August 2020
Facebook Censors Mexican Cardinal for Denouncing ‘New World Order’
By Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D. | BREITBART | January 16, 2021
Facebook has censored a video of Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, archbishop emeritus of Guadalajara, for suggesting that globalist leaders are exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to bring about a new world order.
In place of the cardinal’s weekly video, Facebook exhibited a greyed-out screenshot emblazoned with the banner “False information.” Underneath, Facebook added, “This publication repeats information about COVID-19 that independent fact checkers deemed false.”
On its Facebook page, Semanario Arquidiocesano Guadalajara, an information service run by the Archdiocese of Guadalajara, posted the following screenshot on January 13, along with the text “Cardinal Juan Sandoval denounced the imposition of a new world order, hours later his video was censored”:
In the nine-and-a-half-minute January 12 video, bearing the title “Plot of a new world order,” the cardinal begins by saying, “Dear friends, this will go on for a long time.”
“This pandemic won’t end in a month or two months, perhaps not this year, perhaps not in three, four, five, six years,” he said. “That’s what these men want. It will be a long haul.”
“It’s a tough, difficult situation, the likes of which has not been seen in human history,” he said:
“Bill Gates is a prophet and foretells the future,” the cardinal noted wryly, “and not only did he predict the coming of the coronavirus, but has also warned of a possible future smallpox pandemic.”
During the pandemic, Cardinal Sandoval has criticized the shuttering of businesses and services as disproportionate measures to curb the spread of the virus.
“What they’re after is a world government, a new world order,” the cardinal asserts in the video.
“They want a single world government, a single army, a single currency, a single economy, and also a single religion — that will certainly not be the Christian religion,” he said. “It will be the religion of Mother Earth, in the name of humanity and universal brotherhood.”
“To this end, pandemics serve to weaken nations; they impoverish and indebt them, bringing down their economies,” Sandoval said. “They also weaken education, closing schools and replacing them with distance learning.”
“These pandemics also impede religious practice, as we saw all last year,” he said. “They close the churches, reduce the number of people who can worship.”
“But above all, they are creating fear, a terrible fear among the people,” he warned.
Is ivermectin effective against covid?
By Sebastian Rushworth M.D. | January 17, 2021
Over the last two months I’ve literally been bombarded by people asking me about my opinions on ivermectin as a treatment for covid, so I figured I’d better look in to it. Ivermectin is an anti-parasitic drug, used primarily to treat infections caused by parasitic worms. It was discovered in the 1970’s, and the researchers who discovered it were awarded the Nobel prize for their discovery in 2015.
The interest in ivermectin as a potential treatment for covid-19 is likely due to a study published way back in June of 2020, that showed a large reduction in SARS-CoV-2 in a cell culture after addition of ivermectin. If ivermectin were shown to be effective against Covid, that would be great, because it’s generic, cheap, safe, and widely available, so it would be easy to start treating people quickly. Unfortunately, that also means western pharmaceutical companies have zero interest in doing research on ivermectin, because there is no way to make a decent profit from it.
Who does have an interest? Poorer countries, that can’t afford expensive new drugs. That means the research on ivermectin as a treatment for covid has been pretty much entirely carried out outside the west.
I’ve managed to find four reasonably large randomized controlled trials looking at ivermectin for covid, and those are the trials we’re now going to discuss (I also found a fifth one, but it only enrolled 12 patients in each group, which to me is so small it’s not even worth looking at). Note that (as far as I’m aware) none of these studies has yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Personally, I don’t think peer-review is worth very much, so that doesn’t bother me at all, but it’s just something to be aware of.
The first trial was carried out in Bangladesh and completed in October. It included patients over the age of 18 with mild to moderate covid confirmed with PCR. Patients with severe covid were excluded from the study. According to the researchers the study was double-blind and placebo-controlled, although it is unclear from the study protocol whether the control group actually received a placebo, and what the placebo consisted of.
The intervention group received a single 12 mg dose of ivermectin plus 100 mg of doxycycline twice a day for five days (doxycycline is an antibiotic). Thus this wasn’t really a trial of ivermectin, it was a trial of ivermectin + doxycycline.
A total of 400 people were recruited in to the trial, and they were divided evenly between the intervention group and the control group. The average age of the participants was 40 years. The primary end point for the study was recovery within seven days, which the researchers defined as follows: absence of a fever for at least three days, significant improvement in respiratory symptoms, significant improvement on lung imaging, absence of complications requiring hospitalization, and an oxygen saturation above 93% .
This is a problematic end point, because a couple of the things in that list are not very specific, which leaves it up to the researchers to decide whether someone has recovered within seven days or not. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a problem if we could be 100% confident that there was complete blinding of the participants and the researchers, but based on the information provided I’m not even remotely certain that that was the case. And if there wasn’t blinding, then the researchers could easily have manipulated the results to make them appear more impressive.
Ok, let’s get to the results.
In the group treated with ivermectin + doxycycline, 61% had recovered within 7 days, and in the control group, 44% had recovered within 7 days. The difference was statistically significant (p-value <0,03).
At the two week mark after recruitment in to the study, participants had a second PCR test performed. In the group receiving ivermectin + doxycycline, 8% had a positive PCR test at two weeks. In the control group, 20% had a positive PCR test. Again, the result was statistically significant, in fact highly so (p-value <0,001).
Three people died in the control group, compared with zero people in the treatment group. However the result was not statistically significant (which of course doesn’t mean that there isn’t a difference – even if there is a real difference in mortality, this study simply was not large enough to be able to detect it).
So, what can we conclude?
This study suggests that ivermectin + doxycycline can shorten symptom duration, and also decreases viral load. If the results are real, the effect is actually pretty impressive. However, it is not clear from the published data that the study really was effectively blinded, and that means we can’t be very confident that the results are real. Additionally, it is unfortunate that the researchers chose to combine two separate drugs in one study, because it muddies the waters and makes it impossible to know whether it was the ivermectin or the doxycycline that was producing a benefit. Let’s move on to the next trial.
This was an open-label trial (i.e. both the researchers and the patients knew who was in which group) involving 140 patients, and the results were posted on MedRxiv in October 2020. As with the previous study, the treatment being tested was ivermectin plus doxycycline. The study was carried out in Iraq.
In order to be included in the study, patients had to have confirmed covid (based on a combination of symptoms, radiology, and PCR). All levels of severity of disease were admitted in to the study. Those with mild symptoms had to have been symptomatic for three days or less, while those with severe symptoms had to have had severe symptoms for at most two days, and those with critical symptoms had to have had critical symptoms for at most one day. The researchers motivate this somewhat weird set of inclusion criteria by saying that they wanted to see how effective ivermectin plus doxycycline is at the earliest stage of each phase of the disease.
Patients were randomized to either 200 ug/kg of ivermectin per day (roughly 14 mg per day for an average 70 kg person) for two days, and 100 mg of doxycycline twice a day for five to ten days. Unfortunately the researchers decided to break randomization because they felt it would be “unethical” to put people with critical illness in to the control group (personally I think it’s unethical to break randomization, because the results become less scientifically valid and thereby less useful to all the other millions of patients around the world). So all participants with critical covid recruited in to the study ended up in the ivermectin + doxycycline group. In the end there were 48 people with mild to moderate disease in each group. In the ivermectin + doxycycline group there were 11 people with severe disease and 11 people with critical disease, while in the control group there were 22 people with severe disease and no people with critical disease.
So, technically, this study wasn’t actually randomized at all. However, the fact that everyone with critical illness was placed in the treatment group should make the treatment look worse, not better, so if there is a positive effect of treatment in spite of that, then it’s likely bigger than this study shows.
The average age of the patients was 50 years in the treatment group and 47 years in the control group. Among those with mild to moderate disease, symptoms had started a median of three days earlier, while those with severe disease had first become symptomatic seven days earlier, and those with critical disease had started having symptoms nine days earlier.
The primary end point was time to recovery. This is very problematic in an unblinded study, because “time to recovery” is quite subjective, and it is very easy for the researchers to manipulate the results in whatever direction they want. Anyway, let’s look at the results.
The average time to recovery was eleven days in the group treated with ivermectin plus doxycycline, and 18 days in the control group. The result was highly statistically significant (p-value < 0,0001). That would mean that ivermectin and doxycycline together shorten the time to recovery by almost 40% in relative terms! If the study had been double-blind, and it was very clear exactly what the criteria for “recovery” were, that would be a very impressive result, especially considering that the people in the treatment group were on average sicker to start. However, since neither of those things are true, the result is highly questionable.
Two people died in the ivermectin + doxycycline group, compared with six people in the control group. This also seems impressive, but again, the study isn’t statistically powered to show an effect on mortality.
So overall so far we have two studies that suggest that the combination of ivermectin and doxycycline can be beneficial when used to treat patients with covid-19. However, both studies have flawed methodologies that make the results suspect. And if there is a real benefit, then we still don’t know whether to attribute that benefit to ivermectin or to doxycycline, or to some combination of the two. Let’s move on.
Next up we have a trial that went up on MedRxiv at the beginning of January 2021. The study was carried out in Nigeria. It was double-blind, which is good, but unfortunately it was very small. 62 patients were included in total, and randomized to three different treatment arms, so there were only around 20 patients per group.
Participants were included in the study if they had a positive PCR test. There was apparently no requirement that they have any symptoms. Obviously, this is a problem, since we know that the risk of a false positive result rises enormously when asymptomatic people are being tested. Funnily enough, even though they included asymptomatic people, they excluded people with severe covid, so this was really a trial of people with mild to non-existent disease. Why they tested people without symptoms is unclear, and why they then went even further and decided to try treating asymptomatic people with drugs is even less clear.
After inclusion in the study, participants were randomized to one of three treatments. The first group received a 6 mg dose of ivermectin which was repeated every 48 hours. The second group received a 12 mg dose of ivermectin, also repeated every 48 hours. The third group was the “control” group, but for some reason the researchers opted to give the “control” group lopinavir/ritonavir rather than a placebo. No explanation is offered for this strange decision. Since the control group was given an active drug rather than a placebo, we can’t say for certain whether the ivermectin is helping the patients, even if there is a positive treatment effect. It’s equally possible that the lopinavir/ritonavir is hurting the patients.
The participants were re-tested with PCR at four days, seven days, ten days, and 14 days, and this was used as the basis to determine how successful the different treatment arms were. PCR-positivity isn’t even a remotely patient-oriented outcome, so as with so much else to do with this study, this is problematic. Anyway, let’s take a quick look at the results and then move on to the next study.
On average it took nine days for participants in the control group to become PCR negative, six days for participants in the low dose ivermectin group, and five days in the high dose ivermectin group. If the two ivermectin groups are combined, the average time to PCR negativity becomes five days, and the reduction compared with the control group is four days (42% relative risk reduction), which is statistically significant (p-value 0,007). There were no deaths in any of the groups treated, which isn’t really surprising since it was a small study and many of the participants were completely asymptomatic to begin with.
So, what can we say about this study?
Not much. The number of participants is tiny, the control group isn’t a real control group, and the results are based entirely on the flawed PCR-test, not on any real reduction in symptoms or in any other outcome that actually matters in any way. The results are somewhat promising, but that’s really all we can say.
Ok, let’s get to the final study.
Like the previous study, this was posted on MedRxiv in early January 2021. It was double-blind, and it was carried out in India. In order to be included in the study, potential participants had to be over the age of 18 and have mild to moderate covid, with the diagnosis confirmed by PCR.
I’m not sure why these studies keep focusing on people with mild disease, since it’s more important to find an effective treatment for severe disease. I guess it stems mainly from a hypothesis that ivermectin is unlikely to be effective if given later in the disease course. But we still need to know whether it’s a good idea to give it to people with severe disease, so it’s unfortunate that this group was excluded in three out of the four studies.
A total of 115 people were recruited in to the study. The average age of the patients was 53 years. Half received 12 mg of ivermectin on the first and second day after inclusion in the study, while the other half received an identical placebo pill (ivermectin has a long half-life in the body, which is why it’s generally enough to just give one or two doses and then stop).
The primary end point chosen for the study was whether or not participants had a positive PCR-test at six days after inclusion in the study. Just as in the previous study, the researchers have chosen a totally meaningless end point, that tells us nothing about whether the drug in any way actually helps patients. Luckily, they did actually measure some other things too, that actually do matter, like length of hospital stay, ICU admission, and death.
So, what happened?
At the six day time point, 68% in the control group still had a positive covid PCR, compared with 76% in the ivermectin group. So the control group seemed to do better than the ivermectin group according to the irrelevant metric chosen by the researchers. However, this difference wasn’t even close to being statistically significant (p-value 0,35). Let’s look instead at some metrics that actually do matter.
In terms of symptoms, 84% in the ivermectin group were symptom free by day six, compared with 90% in the control group. So again, the control group seemed to do better than the ivermectin group. However, again, this result was not statistically significant (p-value 0,36).
If we look at invasive ventilation and mortality however, we do see an apparent benefit in the group treated with ivermectin. Five people in the control group ended up receiving invasive ventilation, compared with only one person in the ivermectin group. Four people died in the placebo group, compared with zero in the ivermectin group. So in terms of the more serious end points, that actually matter to patients, ivermectin seems to be better than placebo. However, as with all three previous studies, this study was far too small to say whether that difference was really due to ivermectin or just due to chance.
So, the final study gives a weirdly mixed message. In terms of PCR-positivity and likelihood of being symptom free at six days, the placebo seemed to be better, but in terms of invasive ventilation and death, ivermectin seemed to be better. However, none of the differences were statistically significant and could easily just be due to chance. So, overall, the final study is not able to show any benefit to treating patients with ivermectin.
Ok, let’s wrap up. Three of the four trials did produce some signal of benefit. However, all four trials had major flaws, and two of the trials that did find a benefit were also giving doxycycline, which makes it impossible to disentangle whether the potential benefit was coming from ivermectin or doxycycline. But these trials were all small, so it’s perfectly possible that there is a benefit but that the trials were just too small to detect it. What we really need now is a big, high quality, double-blind, randomized controlled trial of ivermectin as a treatment covid.
However, lacking that, we can try to put the results from these four trials together in to a little meta-analysis of our own, just for fun, to try to compensate for the fact that these studies were small, and therefore not really statistically powered to find anything but the biggest effects imaginable. When we do that, this is what we get:
I’m sure you’re all as nerdy as me, and love looking at forest plots. What this one shows is a 78% reduction in the relative risk of dying of covid, if you get treated with ivermectin!
The result is statistically significant (p-value 0,01). If the result is real, that is pretty damn amazing. That would mean that four out of five covid deaths could be avoided if everyone was treated with ivermectin (potentially together with doxycycline), a dirt cheap generic drug that’s been around for decades, and which we know is safe. It blows all the currently approved drugs for covid out of the water in terms of effect size.
There is of course, as always, a risk of publication bias. In other words, there might be more studies of ivermectin out there that haven’t had their results published, because they were less impressive. So let’s have a quick peek over at clinicaltrials.gov, and see if there is anything suspicious going on.
There are currently five trials of ivermectin for covid listed as completed at clinicaltrials.gov, but for which results haven’t yet been published. However, four out of those five were completed less than two months ago, and one was completed three months ago, so most likely they just haven’t gotten around to posting their results yet. So the risk of publication bias seems to be relatively low. It will be interesting to see what those studies show, when they do get published.
Do I think the huge reduction in mortality is real? I think it’s very possible. These were after all randomized controlled trials, so the risk of confounding factors is low (with the exception of doxycycline, which could be responsible for some or even all of the beneficial effect seen). And, as mentioned, the risk of publication bias appears to be pretty low. And the outcome for which there is a big effect size is mortality, which is a hard outcome that is hard for researchers to manipulate.
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
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Trans agenda is ‘normalization of sadism’ – US author
RT | September 23, 2026
The US Democratic Party has embraced a transgender agenda that amounts to “the normalization of sadism,” author A.J. Rice has said, warning that radical trans policies would return if the party is allowed to regain power.
Speaking to RT’s America First host Scotty Nell Hughes about his new book, ‘The Curse of the Bearded Lady: How the Trans Mafia Whacked American Sanity’, Rice argued that activists have gained significant influence in schools, medicine, and corporate America while people who questioned the agenda have faced pressure to stay silent.
The author described the “trans mafia” as the sprawling network of people and institutions that have helped the movement gain influence. He singled out parts of academia, wealthy backers, and corporations, and stated that providers of transition-related treatment also have a financial incentive to keep young people in their care indefinitely.
Rice argued that the consequences of these policies ultimately fall on children who are being drawn toward gender-affirming medical treatments and on girls who are expected to share locker rooms or compete in sports with biological males.
He noted that while voters rejected the Democrats’ approach to gender in 2024, the party, which has been “captured by madness,” has since only doubled down and is seeking what is effectively “the normalization of sadism.” … Full article
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- The Palestinian-American Residents of This West Bank Town Are Wondering: Where Is Trump?
- Gaza desperately needs tents, wheelchairs, fuel… and everything else (Israel blocks it all) – Daily Update
- Israeli Attacks in Gaza Kill at Least Seven Palestinians Over Three Days, including Woman and Child
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
