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Revisiting the Greatest Covid Lie of All …

Covid is a ‘top killer of children’

BY BILL RICE, JR. | AUGUST 22, 2023

I read today that a new RSV  vaccine has just been approved by the FDA for expectant mothers. I know from previous articles I’ve written that an RSV vaccine for children is also on the fast track to get on the all-important childhood immunization schedule.

I’m sure we’ll all read about how RSV is one of the greatest killers of children … and thus we have yet another vaccine that’s a Godsend. (The above-linked Wall Street Journal story tells us approximately 300 children under the age of 5 die from RSV each year).

Who knows if this data is true or not?

Speaking for myself, I haven’t forgotten how the Covid vaccine was pushed with the the extremely-dubious assertion that Covid was one of the “Top 8” killers of children.

I knew that statement was brazen disinformation because I’d researched actual children’s mortality from Covid while writing this story for uncoverDC.com.

In this article, I simply highlighted the key findings from the “most comprehensive” study of its kind on Covid mortality among children. The study, produced by a team of prestigious academics in the UK, found that only 25 children in the entire UK died “from” Covid in the fist year of the pandemic.

However, the headline that should have gone viral to parents across the world is that only six “healthy” children in the entire UK died “from” Covid.

Today, I’m going to revisit the findings of that study as this might cause a few mothers to question the pronouncements of our so-called public health experts, none of whom have seen a vaccine they don’t want every child to get, regardless of how unnecessary or what the long-term negative health effects might be.

The study’s key information and findings …

Approximately 12 million children (age 0 to 17) live in the UK.

The UK researchers were able to look at hospital diagnostic codes and find out how many children died “from” or “with” Covid in the first 12 months of the pandemic.

Here’s what study authors found and reported (CYP = “Children and Young Persons.”)

N = 61 – UK children who died in the first 12 months of the pandemic after testing positive via a PCR test.

Significantly, researchers subtracted 36 “Covid deaths” from this figure because they found these children actually died from some other cause. Language from the study:

“This is the first study to differentiate between CYP who have died of SARS-CoV-2 infection rather than died with a positive SARS-CoV-2 test as a coincidental finding. Our result is 60% lower than the figures derived from positive tests thereby markedly reducing the estimated number of CYP who are potentially at risk of death during this pandemic.

N = 25 – UK children who actually died “from” Covid in the first 12 months of the pandemic.

But researchers looked even harder and found that 19 of these 25 Covid victims suffered from severe “life-limiting” medical conditions.

N = 19 = Children who died from Covid but had other major medical issues.

Subtracting the deaths of children who suffered from serious co-morbid conditions left researchers with …

N = 6 – “Healthy” children in the UK who died from Covid in the fist 12 months of the pandemic.

I made some additional assumptions/extrapolations …

To be very conservative, I assumed that 500,000 children (approximately 4 percent of the UK’s children) do suffer from serious “life-limiting” medical conditions (the real percentage is no doubt lower than 1 percent).

This would give us  …

N = 11.5 million –  Approximate number of “healthy” children in the UK.

We can now calculate the mortality risk for healthy children in the UK.

Covid Mortality Math: Six (6) Covid deaths divided by 11.5 million “healthy” children = Covid mortality of 0.000052 percent.

According to this extremely thorough (albeit ignored) study, the odds a healthy UK child would die from Covid in the first 12 months of the pandemic were 1-in-1.92 million. (Math: 11.5 million healthy children/6 Covid deaths).

I decided to do some politically-incorrect analysis …

To wander into politically incorrect territory, one can also calculate mortality risk by the race of children.

For some (undeniable) reason, Covid kills a much higher percentage of Blacks and Hispanics. This is true with children and adults.

Here’s a story from April 2020 that proves that the disproportionate deaths among African Americans was already known (even though the authors of this article suggest that the CDC was already covering up these racial statistics).

The authors of the UK study also point out the racial differences in mortality rates:

“CYP >10 years, of Asian and Black ethnic backgrounds, and with co-morbidities were over-represented compared to other children.

The authors also stressed that the absolute numbers of minority children who died from Covid was also minute. Still, the figures are strikingly minute for white children.

From further extrapolations, I concluded that only two, perhaps three, healthy white children in the entire United Kingdom died “from” Covid in the first 12 months of the pandemic.

Since there are more than 10 million healthy white children in the UK, I concluded the chance a healthy white child would die from Covid were approximately 1-in-5 million. As a percentage, this mortality risk is 0.00002. (One has to go out to the fifth decimal point to find a “risk” that is not zero.)

Why I did this research …

One reason I embarked on this research is that I was simply trying to ascertain accurate Covid information to inform any decision I made on whether my two young children should get the Covid vaccine.

I was doing my own research and did not automatically trust the proclamations of the CDC or the pediatrician groups. I know I’m not supposed to question my betters (the experts), but I did it anyway because my own children’s lives might be at stake.

I happen to be Caucasian, just like my two children. Thankfully our children are healthy and do not suffer from some terrible “life-limiting” medical condition.

Again, I was simply looking to find the mortality risk of my own two children if they didn’t get this “vaccine.” Thanks to this bold study, I found the answer I was seeking.

The data shows that my children might indeed die from Covid … but if they did they would be the one person in a cohort of 4,999,999 children who did.

To provide a little context, the odds a random person would get struck by lightning in a given year are about 1-in-750,000. The odds I might hit the lottery jackpot in neighboring Georgia are probably 1-in-3-million.

Anyway, you won’t be surprised to learn that I chose to not get my children vaccinated.

For me, becoming an “anti-vaxxer” was a no-brainer especially when I know the odds my children might contract potentially fatal myocarditis (or other serious vaccine injuries) might be as low as 1-in-3,000 (perhaps lower).

(The headline from the above-linked article notes that cases of myocarditis from vaccines are “rare” in children.  If “rare” = a “1-in-3,000 risk,” how should one label a “1-in-5-million” risk?)

Even today, I occasionally read that the risks to children from Covid is “rare” or “small” or not as high as for, say, very old people or the morbidly obese.

But that’s poor word-smithing – intentionally so in my opinion.

When the risk of death for the largest population of children in America is 1-in-5 million, maybe journalists should consider more accurate risk modifiers, such as:

“virtually non-existent” … “almost unheard of” … “the rarest of anomalies” … “certainly nothing for parents to worry about” …. “for all practical purposes … zero.”

Anyway, when I kept reading that Covid was the “Top 8” killer of children in America, my go-to thought was, “That’s what they say.”

I guess the same pediatrician groups and the UK’s version of the CDC were spreading the same fear-mongering COVID disinformation as in America.

I’m sure Catherine, Princess of Wales was worried to death about getting her children vaccinated because she knew that Covid was one of the “top 8 killers of children in the UK.”

It probably never occurred to the princess to ask, “six deaths is enough to make the Top 8?” (Actually, I’d bet 100 pounds Princess Kate, just like 99 percent of UK mothers, never saw this study.)

I’m tempted to finish this column by saying, “none of this matters.” The narrative – as bogus as it was – worked as intended. Hundreds of millions of parents rushed out to get children vaccines they didn’t need.

But the thing is … the truth should matter.

August 26, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

NEW VARIANTS TRIGGER CALLS FOR RETURN TO LOCKDOWNS

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | August 24, 2023

Mass media is calling for the reinstitution of COVID restrictions due to new variants, with no conversation about the efficacy or the harm they’ve caused. Jefferey Jaxen connects all the dots, which appears to be pointing to a Pandemic 2.0.

August 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

The Royal Society Lockdown Report Authors Understand That by Ignoring the High Quality Evidence they Reach the Politically Acceptable Conclusion

BY DR CARL HENEGHAN AND DR TOM JEFFERSON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 25, 2023

This week saw the publication of a suite of systematic reviews by the Royal Society (RS) on the effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions in the pandemic.

Politico headlined with ‘Top review says Covid lockdowns and masks worked, period’. The Guardian led with ‘Lockdowns and face masks “unequivocally” cut the spread of Covid, report finds’, and the i newspaper stated: ‘Masks and social distancing did reduce Covid infections, new report shows, proving lockdown sceptics wrong.’

So there you have it, a slam dunk, sceptics, you were all wrong. You should have masked up and stayed in lockdown.

Even more so when you listen to the Chair of the report’s group, Mark Walport, who said: “There is sufficient evidence to conclude that early, stringent implementation of packages of complementary NPIs was unequivocally effective in limiting SARS-CoV-2 infections.”

Four systematic reviews informed the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions in the Covid pandemic. However, here is some of what these reviews report.

A systematic review on environmental control measures:

Many of these studies were assessed to have critical risk of bias in at least one domain, largely due to confounding factors that could have affected the measured outcomes. As a result, there is low confidence in the findings.

Testing, contact tracing and isolation interventions among the general population on reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2:

One study, an RCT, showed that daily testing of contacts could be a viable strategy to replace lengthy quarantine of contacts. Based on the scarcity of robust empirical evidence, we were not able to draw any firm quantitative conclusions about the quantitative impact of TTI interventions in different epidemic contexts.

Effectiveness of face masks for reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2:

We analysed 35 studies in community settings (three RCTs and 32 observational) and 40 in healthcare settings (one RCT and 39 observational). Ninety-one percent of observational studies were at ‘critical’ risk of bias (ROB) in at least one domain, often failing to separate the effects of masks from concurrent interventions.

Effectiveness of international border control measures during the COVID-19 pandemic:

There is little evidence that most travel restrictions, including border closure and those implemented to stop the introduction of new variants of concern, were particularly effective.

The report makes the same errors that the UKHSA and Public Health England did. They ignored the critical biases and the confounders when drawing conclusions. Some of the comments misunderstand the evidence required for making healthcare decisions.

Chris Dye, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, who led the review on masks for the Royal Society, said if they had only looked at randomised controlled trials, they would have come to the same conclusion as the Cochrane review. However, the researchers behind the paper released Thursday chose to analyse a larger body of studies and found strong evidence that masks work.

So, if we ignore high-quality evidence, we arrive at the conclusion we want – they fully understand the politics. Low-quality evidence means the estimated effect will differ substantially from the actual effect – we’ve known this for quite some time, and it is fundamental to the delivery of evidence-based interventions. An approach that uses low-quality evidence shouldn’t inform healthcare, and it doesn’t. That’s why we have NICE, which uses the best available evidence to develop recommendations that guide health, public health and social care decisions.

Did the reviewers, for instance, ask if there was a protocol for any of these studies – something we have previously pointed out. There were none, despite protocols being essential for robust research.

There is something we do agree with in the report, that the “future assessments should also consider the costs as well as the benefits of NPIs, in terms of their impacts on livelihoods, economies, education, social cohesion, physical and mental wellbeing, and potentially other aspects”. However this report looked at none of that.  The single focus on one outcome, ignoring harms, further hinders informed decision-making.

The RS report wants us to believe that RCTs are impossible during a pandemic: “While RCTs should not be discounted, it is highly likely that most information in a future pandemic will continue to be observational.”

Yet the pandemic has re-emphasised the importance of high-quality randomised clinical trials and highlighted the need for preparation, coordination and collaboration.

The Royal Society review shows that some academics are losing their ability to think critically. Instead of retrofitting evidence to preconceived conclusions, it would be much better to report the uncertainties and set out those questions that need addressing. Refusal to acknowledge uncertainties does a disservice to society and undermines public trust in research.

Staying at home decreases your risk of all sorts of hazards – in the short term, you won’t get run over and you’ll reduce the risk of an infection or an accident. But what matters is the costs of what happens when you reemerge.

August 25, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Biden Probe Censored Findings of Intelligence Agency Scientists That Covid was Likely Made in Lab

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 25, 2023

U.S. President Joe Biden’s 90-day probe into the origins of COVID-19 censored the input of intelligence agency scientists who concluded the virus was most likely genetically engineered. Sky News Australia‘s Sharri Markson has the story.

In May 2021, President Biden tasked the Intelligence Community with providing an assessment into how the pandemic began after reports, first published by Sky News, that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been hospitalised with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019 in the suspected first cluster of the pandemic.

When the report was published it concluded that most intelligence agencies assessed the virus, even if it had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was natural rather than manipulated in a laboratory.

Sky News can reveal that this was not the assessment made by the four groups within the intelligence agencies that actually engaged in scientific analysis, who concurred that there was either a highly likely or reasonable chance the virus was genetically engineered.

Scientists at the Defence Intelligence Agency’s National Centre for Medical Intelligence (DIA NCMI) had conducted rigorous research on the genomic sequence of the virus and firmly concluded that it was, most likely, a laboratory construct.

In a world exclusive, Sky News can for the first time reveal their story, their research and their discoveries about SARS-CoV-2.

They had been working with the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction unit, until the co-operation between the two agencies was blocked, with a director at the Defence Intelligence Agency claiming the FBI was “off the reservation” on the topic of the origins of COVID-19.

Well-placed sources familiar with the work that unfolded inside the intelligence agency and their interactions with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for the 90-day probe spoke to Sky News for this investigation.

Their internal research at the Pentagon-based agency led to a finding that was described internally as a “smoking gun”.

One of the scientists discovered that the size and location of a fragment of COVID-19 resembled the same fragment in Wuhan Institute of Virology research from more than a decade earlier, in 2008. It was the same technique that the WIV had used in grant applications to make chimeric viruses.

“This paper is the smoking gun of everything. When the team reviewed this data, they thought ‘This is created in the lab. It’s a reverse genetics construct,” a source said.

But their input into the 90-day origins probe was censored.

Sources close to the inquiry estimated about 90% of the DIA NCMI edits were deleted, censored or simply weren’t included.

A longer article in the Australian has further details.

They [NCMI scientists Robert Greg Cutlip, Jean-Paul Chretien and John Hardham] wrote an unclassified working paper, dated May 26th 2020, titled ‘Critical Analysis of Anderson et al. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2′. Their paper was circulated within the NCMI and among multiple scientists within the intelligence community. It was also intended for wider publication, so that the public could have a greater understanding of the new virus sweeping the globe. But it was never allowed to be disseminated more broadly, in yet another cover-up of scientists who questioned the natural origins narrative perpetuated by senior officials.

The report was scathing of the Proximal Origin authors’ claim that COVID-19 had a natural origin.

“We consider the evidence they present and find that it does not prove that the virus arose naturally. In fact, the features of SARS-CoV-2 noted by Anderson et al. are consistent with another scenario: that SARS-CoV-2 was developed in a laboratory, by methods that leading coronavirus researchers commonly use to investigate how the viruses infect cells and cause disease, assess the potential for animal coronaviruses to jump to humans, and develop drugs and vaccines.”

While Kristian Anderson and the other authors that the “high-affinity binding ofthe SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2”, Chretien, Cutlip and Hardham disagreed.

“This is not a scientific argument but rather an assumption of intent and methodology for a hypothesised scientist,” they wrote.

“Instead of aiming to design a virus that binds with high affinity to ACE2, a researcher may have chosen to investigate, empirically, the effect of one or more receptor binding domain variants on receptor binding or infectivity.

“In fact, leading coronavirus research laboratories have been doing this for years to study the potential for bat coronaviruses to infect humans.”

The paper then provides examples of where these experiments happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“In the context of this research, SARS-CoV-2 could have been synthesised by combining a backbone from a coronavirus similar to RaTG13 with the receptor binding domain of a coronavirus similar to the one recently isolated from pangolins. Such research might have aimed to investigate pangolins as possible intermediate hosts for bat coronaviruses potentially pathogenic for humans, and would have been consistent with the longstanding line of investigations described above.”

Chretien, Cutlip and Hardham also disagreed with Anderson et al.’s argument that there was no known progenitor virus that could have led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2.

“However, the absence of a publication does not mean that the research was not done,” they wrote. Perhaps the experiments were aborted or not reported because of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak? Perhaps the results were never intended for publication?

“In a recent example of delayed publication from the COVID-19 pandemic, WIV researchers first reported RaTG13 in January 2020, but later stated that they had discovered the virus in 2013. The possibility of the SARS-CoV-2 furin site arising during passage in thelaboratory cannot be dismissed.”

The esteemed authors go on to say that “laboratories also have directly inserted furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses”.

They cite several examples including the Shi Zhengli gain-of-function experiment with the University of North Carolina.

Their paper concludes that the Proximal Origin authors’ arguments “are based not on scientific analysis, but on unwarranted assumptions”.

“A long line of research shows that leading coronavirus laboratories do not work as described in the laboratory-origin scenario Anderson et al. consider and dismiss. SARS-CoV-2 – a bat coronavirus with pangolin coronavirus receptor binding domain – is consistent with the chimeric constructs these laboratories have developed and studied for more than a decade.

“We highlight the features of SARS-CoV-2, noted by Anderson et al,. are consistent with longstanding and ongoing laboratory experiments; the evidence Anderson et al. present does not lessen the plausibility of laboratory origin.”

Following this the group continued to work on the virus.

By June 2020, their genomic analysis of amino acids and nucleotides was producing fairly conclusive findings that COVID-19 was genetically engineered.

While their recommendations and working products are highly technical, there are four main reasons for why they found that SARS-CoV-2 was most likely genetically engineered.

They thought perhaps the backbone was related to the virus miners in Mojiang, China, caught in 2012 and had been modified.

Then came the discovery that was described internally as the smoking gun. The majority of the SARS-CoV-2 virus genome is similar to bat coronaviruses. However, a small region of the spike gene, encoding the spike protein’s receptor binding domain (RBD), is identical to that of the pangolin coronavirus MP789.

Hardham reported to NCMI that the size and location of the pangolin fragment in SARS-CoV-2 was similar to the same RBD fragment described in one of Wuhan institute’s previous research publications.

In a 2008 paper by Shi Zhengli and Ren Wuze, the Wuhan researchers identified the minimal cassette that would be necessary to change the binding to different host ACE2 receptors – this refers to how the virus crosses from species to species.

Once the Wuhan researchers identified the minimal RBD cassette, they proposed using this same technique in their future work – including in grant proposals sent to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

This same technique (minimal cassette) is found in SARS-CoV-2.

They also found scientific papers in which Shi Zhengli, who had worked at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, described working with furin cleavage sites in the precise location where they appeared in SARS-CoV-2. “Shi helped research furin cleavage sites in the Netherlands laboratory that are very similar to SARS-CoV-2,” sources close to the inquiry told the Australian.

“This paper is the smoking gun of everything. Figure 7 is literally the description of the pangolin RBD insert. When the team reviewed this data, they thought ‘This is created in the lab. It’s a reverse genetics construct.’ They identified the minimal cassette required to change the host range.”

The NCMI researchers shared their findings among scientific elements of the intelligence community, and their colleagues concurred.

Over the next year, their work and analysis continued, drawing in and involving other scientists from separate units, including the Institute for Advanced Technologies in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Their findings were shared and discussed with scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the CIA, the FBI’s weapons of mass destruction unit and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

The Australian understands that the scientists generally concurred that the virus was most likely genetically engineered.

“We briefed everyone on these findings. We were in alignment,” sources close to the inquiry said. “All four of the scientific groups concurred it was not a natural virus.”

But, on July 7th 2021, the group was blocked from sharing other findings with the FBI.

A director at NCMI is understood to have instructed them: “You may not speak with the FBI WMD anymore. They are off the reservation on this.”

The reports in Sky News Australia and the Australian are worth reading in full.

It’s worth wondering why these stunning scientific conclusions from within the U.S. intelligence community – which are at odds with the official statements from U.S. intelligence officials throughout the pandemic – are being released now. This must have been authorised, and Markson’s source, as before, is likely to be Robert Kadlec, the U.S. biodefence chief who has always pushed the lab leak theory, though appears to have been overruled on this for much of the pandemic. Why this is all being aired now is not entirely clear, though it is clear that Biden is being blamed for the censorship and cover-up, despite the fact that it pre-dated his presidency. Are the intelligence agencies turning on Biden?

The 2008 “smoking gun” paper for a WIV origin is intriguing, though the basic issue with a WIV origin remains: if Shi Zhengli realised it was from her lab, why did she publish a paper in mid-January 2020 comparing SARS-CoV-2 to RaTG13 and stating the former did not appear to have emerged naturally from the latter, casting immediate suspicion over her lab’s research? Perhaps she was just trying to show that similar viruses exist in the wild. But then there’s the question of why China spent weeks not taking any measures against the spread if it secretly knew or suspected it was an escaped experimental virus engineered to be more contagious. Conversely, there’s the weird foreknowledge of U.S. intelligence, sources from which claimed to be following the outbreak in China in mid-November 2019, before it was detectable.

While there is clearly a renewed push from elements within U.S. intelligence on the lab leak theory, questions remain.

August 25, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Fauci, the Covid Fairy

Bitchute

August 25, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Kaiser Family Foundation Finds Many Believe COVID-19 Mass Vaccination Responsible for Sudden Deaths

Poll Statistics Reveal America Waking Up to Immunization Debacle

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | August 23, 2023

The Kaiser Family Foundation is a pro-vaccine organization that has an biased polling system aimed at showing satisfaction and benefit of mass vaccination among other family issues. The May 23 through June 12, 2023 poll reveals some shocking new data. A substantial minority of Americans believe the COVID-19 vaccines have caused great harm. Here are the results.

As you can see it is roughly a third of Americans are awake and understand the COVID-19 vaccines have failed, cause great harm, and pose a giant safety risk to Americans. It is also interesting to note a quarter of respondents have been awakened to the link between childhood hyper vaccination and autism spectrum disorder. I wonder what the actual sentiment is on vaccines if Kaiser had asked the questions in a more unbiased manner and did not load up their survey with charged words such as “false” and “misinformation”.

August 24, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Those Doctors Calling for Spreaders of Covid Misinformation to be Punished Should be Careful What they Wish For

Many of their Claims – that the Vaccinated Couldn’t Infect Others, For Instance – Turned Out to be False

BY NIGEL WILSON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 24, 2023

The Journal of the American Medical Association recently published a review of alleged ‘misinformation’ about COVID-19 that physicians were responsible for, either on social media and in other news sources.

In the paper, the corresponding author, Dr. Sarah L. Goff, MD PhD, defined misinformation. She surveyed social media platforms and news sources for anything written by other physicians that fits her selected examples of both. She then proposes that physicians guilty of writing what she judges to be misinformation should be “regulated and disciplined”.

Dr. Goff and her co-authors define misinformation as “false, inaccurate or misleading information according to the best evidence available at the time” and disinformation as “having an intentionally malicious purpose”.

Dr. Goff states: “We conservatively classified inaccurate information as misinformation rather than disinformation because the intent of the propagator cannot be objectively assessed.”

Dr. Goff identified four major themes of alleged misinformation. These included: (1) vaccines were unsafe and/or ineffective; (2) masks and/or social distancing did not decrease risk for contracting COVID-19; (3) other medications for prevention or treatment were effective despite not having completed clinical trials or having been FDA approved, and (4) other misinformation.

Dr. Goff includes a brief discussion of vaccine safety and effectiveness and mask effectiveness, but does not attempt to undertake a full review of the published evidence in these areas. Instead, she seems to assume that her readers will agree that any suggestion that vaccines or masks were ineffective or unsafe are self-evidently false.

Dr. Goff states that the American Medical Association has called for disciplinary action for physicians propagating COVID-19 misinformation. She laments the fact that “few physicians appear to have faced disciplinary action” for alleged sins against Covid orthodoxy.

I am not an expert in analysis of published medical research. I don’t work in a School of Public Health like Dr. Goff. I have worked as a licensed physician in England for over 40 years as a family doctor and an occupational physician and I have over 40 years’ experience reading the medical peer review literature. I retired from full time medical practice in 2017. I have a reasonable understanding of English, maths, logic and critical thinking. I don’t pretend to have read all the published research on masks or vaccinations. However, I continue to read leading medical journals on a regular basis.

I understand the concept of truth and how hard it is to establish an absolute truth in science. I understand the enlightenment principles that any ideas can be discussed, that nobody has a veto on ideas and that it is important to doubt and test all of our ideas continually. There is no indication from her writing that Dr. Goff understands how important it is to doubt, question and test the effectiveness and safety of interventions such as vaccines and masks.

From my reading of the peer review literature, for illustration purposes, I identified the following four publications as examples of publications which should raise concerns and questions about COVID-19 vaccines and masks.

In 2019, the World Health Organisation (WHO) published a report entitled ‘Non-pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza’. The WHO concluded: “There are a number of high-quality randomised controlled trials demonstrating that personal measures (e.g. hand hygiene and face masks) have at best a small effect on transmission.”

In February 2023 a Cochrane review into the effectiveness of masks concluded: “Compared with wearing no mask in the community studies only, wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness/Covid-like illness.”

study from the Department of Infectious Diseases in Cleveland, Ohio, in December 2022 found that “the bivalent COVID-19 vaccine only offered modest effectiveness”.

study from the University of Queensland in September 2022 concluded: “Never in vaccine history have 57 leading scientists and policy experts released a report questioning the safety and efficacy of a vaccine. They not only questioned the safety of the current COVID-19 injections but were calling for an immediate end to all vaccination. Many doctors and scientists around the world have voiced similar misgivings and warned of consequences due to long-term side effects.”

These four publications are examples which give us a legitimate reason to question the use of masks and the Covid vaccines and to look further for evidence. Are we not allowed to raise questions about these issues without being threatened with disciplinary procedures? Not to ask any questions would be lacking in curiosity in the extreme, especially for practising physicians concerned about the safety of their patients and the integrity of their advice. These publications do not prove anything conclusively, but they should not be ignored. Expressing doubt and asking questions about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and masks is not false, inaccurate or misleading, to use the definition adopted by Dr. Goff. If questions arise in my mind, why don’t similar questions arise in the minds of Dr. Goff and her co-authors? How did Dr. Goff reach such a degree of certainty about the effectiveness of masks and vaccines against COVID-19 that she can classify any statement to the contrary as misinformation worthy of disciplining a colleague? Why does she conclude that a colleague who disagrees with her does not have the right to be heard? Why would she seek to silence those who disagree with her?

Inaccurate information which is not deliberately intended to deceive is simply inaccurate. In science and medicine there are many inaccurate statements made in good faith by researchers who are presenting their data or their theories as accurately and honestly as possible. It is important that all theories and all research data can be published, even when the data or the theory are wrong. Disciplinary action for any statement which turns out to be inaccurate or false would surely suppress a large proportion of all scientific and medical discourse. Is this what Dr. Goff wants?

It could be argued that the examples of misinformation used by Dr. Goff are themselves misinformation. To suggest that anyone who states that the Covid vaccines were unsafe and/or ineffective is guilty of misinformation is to ignore significant evidence which raises questions about the vaccines. To suggest that anyone who states that masks did not decrease risk for contracting COVID-19 is guilty of misinformation is also to ignore evidence to support this view. It could be argued that Dr. Goff is using false, inaccurate or misleading examples of misinformation in her study in order to suppress dissenting views.

Dr. Goff appears to have very little humility. She does not appear to be in any doubt that she and her co-authors are infallible in relation to masks and vaccines. She seems to think she is the ultimate arbiter of truth, and that she is immune from being regulated or disciplined for her views in the way she promotes for others. I would not propose disciplining or applying regulatory sanctions to Dr. Goff or her colleagues if her publication includes false, inaccurate or misleading statements. Instead, I would propose respectful dialogue with her to debate her proposal, offering arguments to the contrary with a view to educating her and myself.

In England, medical doctors are obliged to respect colleagues’ skills and contributions, and to treat colleagues fairly. We must create a working environment in which it is safe to ask questions and raise concerns. I believe in these principles. Failure to adhere to these standards can lead to disciplinary action against medical doctors. I understand that similar professional obligations apply to medical doctors in the United States. Dr. Goff does not appear to respect the skills and contributions of colleagues who disagree with her. She seems to be promoting a working environment in which it is not safe for those who disagree with whatever the orthodoxy within the medical profession is at any one time to ask questions and raise concerns. Does she not realise that this may make it unsafe for her to raise concerns and ask questions in due course?

Dr. Goff acknowledges in her final sentence that “a coordinated response by federal and state governments and the profession that takes free speech carefully into account is needed”. This tiny nod towards free speech is somewhat undermined by her attempts to censor her colleagues’ right to disagree with her. Free speech is nothing if it is not accorded to those with whom we disagree.

Frederick Douglass, the American social reformer said: “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.” If Dr. Goff persuades those in power to regulate or discipline those who disagree with her, then their right to free speech is violated and our right to hear them is violated. Does Dr. Goff not have a glimmer of doubt about her omniscience? Does she not think there is even a faint possibility that physicians who disagree with her might have something useful to say?

Why do some physicians think that the best response when another physician disagrees with them is to censor their colleague? How could any physicians achieve such unshakeable certainty in their own omniscience? When did they forget the fundamental principles of the enlightenment, that all ideas can be discussed and that nobody has a veto on any ideas? How did the principles of treating colleagues with respect and upholding the free speech of those with whom we disagree become so degraded?

Dr. Goff and her co-authors should be careful what they wish for. They seek to discipline colleagues for daring to disagree with their orthodoxy. If they succeed, the cancel police may be coming for them next.

Dr. Nigel Wilson MRCGP FFOM is a retired consultant occupational physician.

August 24, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

German Judge Gets Probation Sentence For Allowing Kids to go Maskless

After his house was raided in 2021

NAKED EMPEROR | AUGUST 23, 2023

Christiaan Dettmar, a family judge from the Weimar District Court in Germany recently faced the Erfurt Regional Court for his stance against the unnecessary imposition of mask mandates on children. In April 2021, going against the grain, he ruled that children at two Weimar schools should not be burdened with wearing Covid masks in class, defying the restrictive guidelines set by the Thuringian Ministry of Education.

However, in a move reflective of the bureaucratic stranglehold on such decisions, higher courts dismissed his ruling, claiming it unauthorised. The Thuringian Higher Regional Court stated that the family judge did not possess the jurisdiction on this matter, a viewpoint also echoed by the Federal Court of Justice. They insisted that only administrative courts should handle state orders regarding corona protection measures.

At the time (in April 2021), Dettmar had his office, private residence and car searched after he ruled that children should not be wearing masks. He also had his phone confiscated after his decision which embarrassed the government.

His decision to end mask mandates was made after hearing evidence from Professor Kappstein on the lack of benefit of wearing masks and observing distance rules for the children and third parties. Kappstein said that after evaluating all the international data on the subject of masks, the effectiveness of masks for healthy people in public is not supported by scientific evidence.

Dettmar concluded that not only are masks useless but they are also dangerous.

The compulsion imposed on school children to wear masks and to keep their distance from each other and from third persons harms the children physically, psychologically, educationally and in their psychosocial development, without being counterbalanced by more than at best marginal benefit to the children themselves or to third persons. Schools do not play a significant role in the “pandemic”.

The PCR tests and rapid tests used are in principle not suitable on their own to detect an “infection” with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This is already clear from the Robert Koch Institute’s own calculations, as explained in the expert reports. According to RKI calculations, as expert Prof. Dr. Kuhbandner explains, the probability of actually being infected when receiving a positive result in mass testing with rapid tests, regardless of symptoms, is only two per cent at an incidence of 50 (test specificity 80%, test sensitivity 98%). This would mean that for every two true-positive rapid test results, there would be 98 false-positive rapid test results, all of which would then have to be retested with a PCR test.

A (regular) compulsion to mass-test asymptomatic people, i.e. healthy people, for which there is no medical indication, cannot be imposed because it is disproportionate to the effect that can be achieved. At the same time, the regular compulsion to take the test puts the children under psychological pressure, because in this way their ability to attend school is constantly put to the test.

In the recent trial against Judge Dettmar, although the prosecution demanded a hefty three-year prison term, the defence, representing the concerns and wishes of countless parents and citizens, argued for acquittal. The presiding judge at the Erfurt Regional Court noted that the Weimar judge’s decision emanated from his personal views.

After originally being sentenced to two years in prison, the court has now suspended the sentence on probation.

However, it is still possible that Dettmar may lose his office and pension as a result of the conviction.

Throughout the proceedings, the courtroom was electric with tension and support. Spectators broke into spontaneous applause in favour of Dettmar. This would have continued except the judge threatened to throw them out. The prosecution’s attempt to paint the judge’s intentions as malicious was met with scepticism. They claimed that he intentionally set up a child protection procedure against the mask mandate, misrepresenting it as a statement against government measures. Their evidence, mainly based on emails and chat messages, was tenuous at best.

The defence, however, passionately highlighted the judge’s genuine concern for the well-being of children. They asserted that the case was merely an attempt to suppress and penalise differing opinions in a society where free thought should be celebrated.

Reiterating his unwavering stand, Dettmar confirmed he would make the same decision again. The subsequent lifting of school mask mandates by German states in April 2022 only reinforces the argument that such restrictions should never have been in force in the first place.

August 23, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

The American Board of Internal Medicine’s Longstanding War On Doctors Is Escalating

The ABIM’s history proves their present actions are political/financial and not scientific. They are making examples of us “dissenters” to scare the rest of the country’s docs to keep quiet.

BY PIERRE KORY, MD, MPA | AUGUST 23, 2023

The unholy alliance of industry captured high-impact medical journals, federal public health agencies, professional societies (ABIM, AMA, APHa etc), and most importantly, the state medical licensing boards directed by the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) are still going hard after us “dissenting” doctors. You know, those of us that very publicly called out the unscientific policies implemented by corrupted policymakers in a directed pursuit of profits and power. Their actions trying to silence us (and to scare other doctors from speaking out) are escalating.

Recently, what I call the “misinformation committee” of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) voted to strip Professor Paul Marik and myself of our Board certifications. To best understand why they would do this, I think it is important to review what the ABIM is, how it operates, and then detail their absurd attempt to paint us as misinformationists by using disinformation.

Let’s trace my current relationship with the ABIM to today:

At the end of my training, I became Board Certified by the ABIM in three specialties (Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Diseases, and Critical Care Medicine).

What is the ABIM? Well, from this devastating article by Kurt Eichenwald, an accomplished corporate investigative journalist who did a devastating takedown of the ABIM and its officers in a Newsweek piece in 2015:

The ABIM is a purported nonprofit that certifies new physicians as meeting standards of practice. Beginning in the early 1990s, the ABIM ordered certified doctors to be recertified, again and again. Without the ABIM seal of approval, lots of internists and subspecialists can’t get jobs and can’t admit patients to hospitals. So by taking advantage of that monopolistic power, the ABIM has forced hundreds of thousands of physicians to follow recertification processes that doctors complain cost them tons of money (paid to the ABIM), require tons of time (taken from families and medical practices) and accomplish nothing.

In many doctor’s opinion, this cash grab of the ABIM by selling “certifications” is a corrupt farce. There is no evidence that certifying doctors in this highly costly way does anything to improve the quality of care delivered. The ABIM has not only refused to produce data showing the program improves patient care but also hasn’t conducted any studies on that matter. In fact, the ABIM and its related organizations are:

harming American medicine and diminishing the quality of scientific research, pushing physicians to close practices rather than wasting time on expensive and frustrating busywork, and forcing specialists to play a game of medical trivial pursuit. (Even Baron has admitted that he was tested for recertification on topics he never used in his practice.)

But it sure does generate cash for ABIM executives. Note that Board Certification used to simply be a sort of “honor” denoting that the member passed a more rigorous examination in their specialty. That “honor” comes at a price though:

Since I am (was?) Board certified in 3 specialties, lets do some math as this is what it costs me to re-certify every ten years:

$1,430 for Internal Medicine

$2,325 for Pulmonary Diseases

$2,325 for Critical Care Medicine

But wait, we are not done yet. These bastards were not making enough money with once-every-ten-year recertification exam fees, so they invented a new program of annual busywork education requirements which they called Maintenance of Certification (MOC) which costs you $220 every year for every certification (plus late fees if you forget). To wit, I went into my patient portal and discovered. I owe them $480 for each of my certifications!

And get this – that money essentially goes to ABIM executive salaries and pensions and other dubious private investments as described by Eichenwald where he details the insane lengths the ABIM goes to “hide” the compensation and pension data on its executives. What is worse is that ABIM certification has now been made a requirement of employment as a faculty member of academic medical centers and hospitals and is also a requirement to be on many insurance company panels (these actions further strengthen the control of doctor behavior).

Doctors have started publicly slamming the group in industry publications. “ABIM is imposing on us an onerous and ill-conceived tool, one that most physicians agree is irrelevant,” Dr. Karmela Chan wrote in Internal Medicine News. “I am glad this conversation is happening, because, frankly, the process was enough to make me want to quit being a doctor.” Further, in a recent poll of 2,211 physicians conducted on a doctors-only website called Sermo, 97 percent of the respondents criticized recertification.

Richard J. Baron, the ABIM CEO that sent letters threatening decertification to me and Paul, makes close to a million dollars a year, however that data is almost impossible to find due to the ABIM’s multiple attempts to obscure it as well as its spokespeople avoiding answering any inquiries on the topic. Here is a summary of Eichenwalds findings on the ABIM:

  • In 2015, they were 5 months late in filing their publicly available financial report with the IRS (that several journalists were very interested in).
  • The report is full of obfuscations and anomalies of reporting of not only the actual money earned by the executives, and particularly Baron, but his financial conflicts of interest are even better hidden.
  • A big percentage of the ABIM’s millions was in the form of cash to one former employee.
  • The ABIM in 2013 had 57 million against liabilities of 105 million – while Baron was going around saying that its assets are three times its liabilities (this was a 100% lie. When I get to the ABIM’s response to our defense letter, remember that what liars do is.. lie).
  • It lost $4.8 million on $55.5 million in revenues, no small feat and almost entirely due to a bloated payroll.
  • It also claims it spends no money on lobbying while it spent between 100K to 160K annually to lobby Congress on Medicare and Medicaid (another lie).
  • The data on top officers compensation is so obscured and fragmented, Eichenwald reported that he had found it much easier to discover executive compensation at Enron, Worldcom and Adelphia – all famous for lying on tax filings. Again no small feat (to be one of the top corporate liars in the U.S).
  • Officers “double dip” – former CEO Christine Cassel got $741K from ABIM and $247K from the ABIM “Foundation” (slush fund for ABIM officials) and also got $219K in “other compensation” – totaling $1.2 million for one year. (Nice gig if you can get it).
  • But wait, we are not done. Cassel also got $504K in “deferred compensation” for a total of $1.71 million more that year (six times the median compensation for similar sized non-profits). Six times.

Then there is this doozy of an article which came out this week in The Defender by Children’s Health Defense, detailing the ABIM CEO Richard Baron’s conflicts of interest:

Some of the most disturbing reveals:

“The head of a national medical organization who publicly called for doctors to lose their licenses unless they supported government narratives on COVID-19 treatments and vaccines concealed his relationship with a public relations firm whose client list also included Pfizer, Moderna and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Dr. Richard Baron, president and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) is a client of Weber Shandwick, investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker reported on Wednesday.

Note that I went after Weber Shandwick in my book, “The War on Ivermectin” where I argue (without proof, although I believe that is coming because I know of a subpoena coming their way) that they created and launched the “Horse Dewormer PR campaign,” highlights of which was the famous FDA tweet and absurd Rolling Stone article:

In late 2021, Baron publicly pushed for doctors who spread “misinformation” about COVID-19 and the vaccines to lose their license and certification.

Last year, Baron partnered with Weber Shandwick to propose a South by Southwest (SXSW) panel titled “When Doctors Prescribe Misinformation.” The proposal was subsequently accepted and the panel took place at SXSW in Austin, Texas, on March 13.

According to Thacker, “Weber Shandwick’s panel featuring Dr. Baron has been widely promoted by the PR firm’s employees,” including Sarah Mahoney, executive vice president, Healthcare Communications, Strategy & Planning for Weber Shandwick, who in a LinkedIn post, wrote she “can’t think of a more important topic right now.”

Although to the unawake the following may seem normal public health practice, but to those of us fighting agency capture by Big Pharma, it is absurd:

The CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) in September 2020 awarded Weber a $50 million contract “to promote the vaccination of children, pregnant women and those at risk for flu and increase the general acceptance and use of vaccines,” according to the PR firm’s website.

Thacker said he believes much of what is labeled “misinformation” in medicine and academic research “is really just corporate PR,” and that “Congress needs to take a harder look at funding for ‘misinformation research.’

Speaking of taking a harder look at where the funding is coming from for “misinformation research” and the ABIM, it turns out that.. we can’t. Why? Check out this tweet showing a clause inserted into the ABIM’s by-laws in 1998:

But wait, it gets better, like way better. Also in their by-laws:

Information that is disclosed will be kept confidential except to the:

    • President and Chair of the Board;
    • The chairs of the relevant Subspecialty Boards, Test-Writing Committees, and other Committees of the Board, members who serve on the relevant Boards and Committees, and staff working with the respective committees;
    • The Conflict of Interest Committee members and Conflict of Interest Committee staff,

except as required for the purposes of continuing medical education.

So, basically, they can take money from any corporate entity and do not have to disclose it to anyone. Again, nice gig if you can get it.

Back to the ABIM’s history: One of Eichenwalds more disturbing observations about the behavior of the ABIM:

I can attest to the ABIM’s pomposity. Starting with my first story about the ABIM, the organization usually has refused to acknowledge I even asked a question. The only other group to do that in my 30-year journalism career was a company that processed payments for child pornography websites. Plus, when I reported on the uprising by doctors, the ABIM ignored the facts and instead investigated me.

Now lets fast forward to Covid. On July 29, 2021, the FSMB (this entity controls the state medical licensing boards, not the ABIM – at least on paper) issued a policy statement that “Physicians who generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation are risking disciplinary action by state medical boards, including the suspension or revocation of their medical license.”

What is interesting is how fast and how rigidly the ABIM followed the FSMB’s lead and enacted their own misinformation policy despite the fact that, as my colleague Meryl Nass has pointed out:

“suddenly claiming that using licensed drugs for COVID, criticizing federal policies for COVID or criticizing the value of COVID vaccines is unprofessional” gives the specialty board the right to revoke a certification—well, that was never part of its contract with me. So pulling my certification for issues that were never specified in the original contract is breach of contract.

I think it would only be a breach if contracts, like our Constitution and the practice of medical ethics, were still “a thing.”

The ABIM apparently liked the FSMB’s “misinformation policy” idea to attack dissenting doctors so much (or were told to like it) that 2 months later, they, along with their colleagues at the American Board of Pediatrics and the American Board of Family Medicine, issued a statement supporting the FSMB’s position, saying, “We all look to board certified physicians to provide outstanding care and guidance; providing misinformation about a lethal disease is unethical, unprofessional and dangerous.” (note that they seem particularly focused on Covid misinformation and not any other disease model or therapeutics. Do you think it could be because Covid vaccines and therapeutics opened immensely profitable markets to Pharma overnight?).

Again from Meryl Nass (please subscribe to her Substack):

Furthermore, the processes the ABIM is using, as described by CEO Richard Baron, MD in his podcast with the New England Journal of Medicine are procedurally unfair. Dr. Baron earns $1 million/year to threaten doctors for a crime that does not exist. Baron, notably, refused to specify where the line was between misinformation and genuine disagreement in that podcast, though he seems to have no difficulty at all drawing the line when it comes to licensees who speak publicly about how to manage COVID. In a truly Orwellian effort, the ABIM and the ABIM Foundation have dedicated the year to ‘building trust’ in medicine.”

In what I suspect was the ABIM’s first enforcement of their shiny new policy, they go after Peter McCullough, Paul Marik, and myself on the same day (May 26, 2022) with a letter quoting numerous public statements we made, implying that we needed to defend the substance of such statements with supporting data or risk losing our certifications.

“Game on” I thought, looking forward to the exercise of “debating” scientific data with the ABIM. However, our FLCCC lawyer, Alan Dumoff pointed out that the ABIM’s policy and procedures state that the process of accusing a member of misinformation requires that they first provide evidence to us that what we said was inaccurate. So, we wrote back, pointing out to the ABIM their brazen “error” (yeah right) in not complying with their own policy and procedures.

“Nonsense” they wrote back (in short). Their logic was truly shocking – they say that the fact they provided the substance and references to my public statements means they did their duty (rather than their providing references that would refute my statements which is what their policy states they need to do).

You can read their brazen, illegitimate, dismissive response here:

This letter above demonstrates the unchecked power they have – they alone determine whether they are following their own policy which they so clearly were not. What did I say about liars before?

Anyway, rebut them we did. We wrote a 76 page treatise with 175 references, 11 exhibits, and 22,000 words, marshaling and weaving numerous data sources to support all our public statements that they had a problem with. May it enter the historical record here (I think you Covid vaccine and ivermectin data geeks will find the letter impressive).

We sent that letter over 6 months ago… and finally got an answer a few weeks ago. To understand the misinformation committee’s response, note this statement from an editorial written by Baron where he tries to give examples of misinformation:

A whole range of statements with which many — or even most —physicians might disagree would therefore not trigger our disciplinary process. On the other hand, when someone certified by the ABIM says something like “the origin of all coronary heart disease is a clearly reversible arterial scurvy” or “children can’t spread Covid” or “vaccines don’t prevent Covid deaths or hospitalizations,” we are not dealing with valid professional disagreement; we are dealing with wrong answers.

That last sentence is critical as Baron literally is saying that the ABIM gets to determine what is a valid professional disagreement versus a “wrong answer.” Good to know, especially in regards to the fact that the narrative that “vaccines prevent Covid deaths or hospitalizations” was strongly refuted in our initial response letter.

This issue about drawing a line between misinformation and genuine disagreement is a critical one. From our letter of appeal written by our lawyer Alan Dumoff:

Threshold Issue: What Standard Distinguishes Legitimate Differences of Professional Opinion and Misinformation

We disagree with the Committee’ s interpretation of the data, which we address below, but the initial question is by what standard the American Board of Internal Medicine (“ABIM” or “Board”) evaluates evidence to determine that disagreement with consensus generally, and regarding controversial matters around COVID-19 policy specifically, rise to the level of actionable misinformation. The Board’s policy recognizes the right to legitimate debate, which requires it not merely show evidence supporting a consensus view but that it demonstrate that these professional disagreements are not legitimate but outright misinformation.

If not grounded in an articulated standard, at the very least, the Board must demonstrate that the views at issue are false by citing the fallacies in the actual substance of the evidence provided, not simply by critiquing a few isolated studies divorced from the totality of evidenceResting solely upon citations to mainstream publications while substantially avoiding the evidence in our Submission, and our detailed critiques of these publications does not provide a basis for the Board to take action against my clients.

A diplomate’s medical positions must be plainly erroneous to merit sanction. Departure from consensus is hardly unusual and by itself insufficient. While the Sanctions Notice gives the appearance of having done so, the Committee did not directly engage the numerous imperfections in the mainstream approach Drs. Kory and Marik’s have pointed to in substantial detail. The Committee has not engaged the evidence submitted and demonstrated it is illegitimate, only that it departs from the consensus, that is insufficient to support a sanction.

The point is that the ABIM appears absurdly obsessed with getting doctors to spout only consensus opinions. This is literally unprecedented in science. From Michael Chrichton the author:

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.

I love that last line so much it bears repeating, “If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”

Now, let’s look at their response to our 76 page letter teeming with supportive data for our statements. Can read their letter in its entirety here but I thought I would just pull the most illustrative sections:

… the CCC (i.e. misinformation committee) concluded that your statements about the purported dangers of, or lack of justification for, COVID-19 vaccines are false and inaccurate because they, too, are not supported by factual, scientifically grounded, and consensus driven scientific evidence. In fact, the overwhelming body of factual, scientifically grounded, and consensus-driven evidence – at and since the time you made those statements – shows that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective for children and for adults

I have heard of the term “evidence-based medicine (EBM)” which is what I practice, but not “consensus driven science” (completely new invention – pernicious indeed. I Actually adhere to the original definition and conceptual framework envisioned by the founders of evidence based medicine which was incredibly well detailed in a by my friend “A Midwestern Doctor” in his brilliant recent post “What Happens To Doctors Who Innovate”.

Anyway, they then listed a few published, peer-reviewed papers supporting their point, blissfully un-acknowledging of the fact that the high-impact journals have been systematically censoring pretty much all negative analyses of the vaccine campaign’s impacts while publishing nothing but positive reports with cherry-picked and/or fraudulent data – so there is no way for the truth about vaccines to win in scientific debates my friends.

The high-impact journal censoring of adverse vaccine data is identical to their censoring of dozens of positive trials of ivermectin, something I extensively detail in the chapter called “The Journal Rejections of Positive Ivermectin Studies” in my book.

It gets even better – they next argue against my claims of lack of safety of the vaccines by, get this, referencing proclamations by the WHO and CDC. They ignore all the immense data to the contrary that I submitted while of course being willfully oblivious to the fact that the CDC and WHO are fully Pharma captured agencies:

Moreover, the vaccine safety data overwhelmingly (overwhelmingly?) contradicts your statements about vaccine risks. See, e.g., Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Safety of COVID-19 Vaccines,” https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/safety-of-vaccines.html (updated March 7, 2023) (reporting that “Adverse Events (Serious Safety Problems) Are Rare,” and that “[t]he benefits of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh the known and potential risks”); World Health Organization, “Safety of COVID-19 Vaccines,” https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/safety-of-covid-19-vaccines (March 31, 2021) (stating that “[b]illions of people have been safely vaccinated against COVID-19,” that “mRNA vaccines [for COVID-19] have been rigorously assessed for safety, and clinical trials have shown that they provide a long-lasting immune response”).

The paragraph above should enter the historical record… somewhere. That will NOT age well. The only thing more absurd to contemplate is whether they know they are lying in their letter or if they are simply referencing propaganda that they themselves swallowed whole? In a way, the former might be more acceptable to me at this point.

Their opinion on how I got ivermectin wrong was similarly brazen – they ignored all the meta-analyses (historically considered the strongest form of data, a fact they seem to have willfully avoided) in favor of listing a handful of trials where ivermectin was supposedly found ineffective, relying mostly on citing “the Big 6” (what I named the chapter describing the fraud behind the 6 largest, Pharma-conflicted and most publicized trials on ivermectin). This was 100% unsurprising.

Check it out:

First, the CCC concluded that your statements about the safety and efficacy of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as treatments for COVID-19 are false and inaccurate because they are not supported by factual, scientifically grounded, and consensus driven scientific evidence (there it is again).

Susanna Naggie, M.D., M.H.S., et al., “Effect of Ivermectin vs Placebo on Time to Sustained Recovery in Outpatients With Mild to Moderate COVID-19,” 328 JAMA 1721 (2022), https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2115869 (finding in a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study with 1,800 participants that “[a]mong outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19, treatment with ivermectin, compared with placebo, did not significantly improve time to recovery,” and that “[t]hese findings do not support the use of ivermectin in patients with mild to moderate COVID-19”);

I laughed out loud when they led their argument with the Naggie trial funded by the NIH as it contained the most brazen fraud of the Big 6 Pharma Ivermectin trials. All you need to know about the trial is that they moved the primary comparison endpoint of the trial.. in the middle of the trial. They moved the main comparison from symptoms at Day 14 to Day 28. Note that changing endpoints in the middle of a trial is a supposed never event. Except the same trick was pulled in the Remdesivir trial.

Anyway, in a presentation by Naggie, in this secondary endpoint, you can see that ivermectin was superior at Day 14 to a high degree of Bayesian “statistical significance” but the “statistical significance” was not reached at Day 28 (I use quotes around statistical significance because it is an erroneous concept when doing Bayesian statistics but that is what they did anyway when they pre-specified a threshold of above 0.95 as “significant”). Can anyone tell me why they moved the endpoint to Day 28 in the middle of the trial:

With this brazen maneuver (and many others) it allowed Naggie et al to publish this conclusion: “these findings do not support the use of ivermectin in patients with mild to moderate COVID-19.” Not-so-fun fact: Naggie also sat on the NIH covid treatment guidelines committee where she voted to not recommend ivermectin right before she and her University received tens of millions.. to study ivermectin in Covid. You want more? She also owns stock in a competitor to ivermectin (monoclonal antibodies for Omicron) and has received money from numerous other Big Pharma companies including Gilead. Lets get back to the letter…

Rather, the CCC seeks to accomplish precisely what you assert ABIM should be doing: seeking to “further the professional integrity of medicine by encouraging evidence-based debate” (emphasis added).

Indeed, as set forth in ABIM’s False or Inaccurate Medical Information policy, physicians have an ethical and professional responsibility to provide factual, scientifically grounded, and consensus driven scientific evidence (there it is again). As discussed above, by touting the effectiveness of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as COVID-19 treatments and casting doubt on the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines with such seemingly authoritative statements, you have made statements that are inimical to ABIM’s ethics and professionalism standards for board certification.

In light of all the evidence and circumstances, the CCC determined to recommend that your board certification be revoked. 

There is only one silver lining here. One – the impending loss of my certifications does not affect me materially because I have a private fee-based practice due to my need for complete autonomy and lack of restrictions in empirically treating the vaccine injured with various repurposed and alternative therapeutics. I thus cannot and will not accept insurance, and secondly, my academic career is over – no longer will I ever enter back into the system of medicine.

About the only opportunity this whole attack has created is one where I get to defend myself on appeal in a debate with three academic white coats of their choosing. Bring. It. On.

Although the outcome of the debate is assuredly pre-determined, I know it will satisfy a deep yearning many of us dissidents have had for going on 3 years now – to debate someone, anyone, anywhere. Crush them with data. Make ‘em look silly although I will be the only one who knows it happened. It will let me vent my disgust at how they have widely disseminated corrupted scientific evidence and policies while simultaneously ignoring the clinical observations and expertise of frontline doctors who have treated thousands of actual Covid patients.

I will then toss in a little lecture about how RCT’s have long ceased to be a credible means of proving anything in science given that in modern medicine only “Big RCT’s” count and that all “Big RCT’s” require such massive funding that the bias of the funders outweighs any objectivity such trials can profess to attain. I will also remind them that throughout modern medical history, the findings of RCT’s and retrospective observational trials are identical, yet academia has been taught to systematically ignore observational trials. Reason: only massively funded entities can conduct a “Big RCT” while any committed clinician willing to give up nights and weekends can conduct an observational trial. Pharma cannot allow research to be conducted that they have no control over – so they took over the journals and medical school curriculums which now literally teach that observational controlled trials can only be considered “hypothesis generating” and thus their results should not be acted on. Nonsense.

I will also remind them that they are violating international law and human, civil, and political rights as argued by Meryl Nass in another of her excellent posts regarding her own persecution by her state licensing Board:

International law is on our side. A total of 172 countries are parties to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:

According to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19,

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

According to the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

“Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.”

And the Nebraska Attorney General protected doctors and pharmacists in Nebraska from their Boards, explicitly allowing them to prescribe HCQ and IVM. His opinion is a tour de force, which goes into detail about why the CDC, FDA and NIH guidelines are contradictory, unscientific and should not be followed. It should be cited in every case.

I also plan on reminding them that the FDA got its ass handed to them in court last week during a hearing of Paul Marik, Mary Tally Bowden and Robert Apter’s suit against the FDA. From an Epoch Times article on the hearing:

“FDA explicitly recognizes that doctors do have the authority to prescribe ivermectin to treat COVID,” Ashley Cheung Honold, a Department of Justice lawyer representing the FDA, said during oral arguments on Aug. 8 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.

The statements “don’t prohibit doctors from prescribing ivermectin to treat COVID or for any other purpose” Ms. Honold said.

“FDA is clearly acknowledging that doctors have the authority to prescribe human ivermectin to treat COVID. So they are not interfering with the authority of doctors to prescribe drugs or to practice medicine,” she said.

So, if the FDA recognizes we have the authority to prescribe ivermectin, then assuredly we are allowed to have the opinion that it is a valid therapy. However, the ABIM will not allow an ABIM certified physician to publicly express this opinion or recommend this practice. Maybe the ABIM should have a little chat with the FDA?

The nonsense doesn’t end with the ABIM, as they are only one prong of this campaign. How is this for some comic relief, published last week in one of the top journals in the world where they found that almost all the Covid misinformation in the U.S on social media can be traced to 52 doctors.

I was honored to discover that yours truly made the list! In their quoted examples of misinformation in Table 4, I have taken the liberty of owning up to the posts attributed to me, all of which I stand by to this day:

I think I will finish with this excerpt from a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed touching on the Missouri vs. Biden case where the administration is being sued for its systematic censoring of U.S citizens on social media by every intelligence and health agency in our Federal government :

This is where the decision of U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty sheds light. His detailed recounting shows a Washington energetic in protecting Americans from Covid opinions, expertise and claims that conflicted with its own, at a time when it served politicians to show they were trying to save Americans from encountering a virus that couldn’t be avoided. When government has a message to deliver, especially when the political stakes are high, it won’t be content just to push its own message, it will try to silence othersFighting back will always be necessary. The only surprise in our age is how thoroughly the “liberal” position has become the pro-censorship position (that last line is a doozy).

August 23, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Thought Police

The Center For Countering Digital Hate

BY DAVID MARKS | AUGUST 17, 2023

The assembling of a compelling and fair response to an infectious viral outbreak is an immense challenge. Ideally, unbiased experts without conflicts of interest develop a survey of potentially effective remedies. The team includes seasoned pathologists, broad-thinking social psychologists, experienced epidemiologists, holistic dieticians, and veteran practitioners of complementary and indigenous medicine.

Imagine a broadly trusted, well-meaning group gathering knowledge, and through consensus, generating recommendations and medical guidelines designed to have the greatest impact towards minimizing suffering. In making the best efforts to evaluate solutions and means of relief, they never lose sight of weighing risks versus benefits.

This did not happen. During the recent pandemic, all of those who considered or attempted to approach the crisis without the blessings of authorities were summarily belittled, repressed, and disgraced.

Many voices of reason were confounded by the enigmatic organization, the Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). Their duplicitous activities were neither creative nor supportive, and simply aimed at destroying those who refused to agree with dogmatic mandates and protocols generated by the pharmaceutical industry.

At the peak of CCDH’s influence, they released a malicious piece of propaganda, called The Disinformation Dozen. The document was a frontal, full-scale attack on those who questioned the viability and motives of the mainstream response to the pandemic. This manifesto was conceived as a distractive and deceptive instrument — disseminated among the willing world press corps. Not only was the news media compromised by their funders, but they were also hungry for a scapegoat and eager to enthusiastically repeat easily drawn, though suspect conclusions.

The CCDH’s overt purpose was to stop any alternative thinking about how to respond to a viral outbreak. Their offense against those who failed to accept vaccines as a panacea presents a telling window into the boldness of authoritarian bullying over the last three years.

The Missouri v. Biden lawsuit alleges that the White House pressured social media to close accounts of pandemic policy dissenters. During discovery, Eric Waldo, the Senior Advisor to the Surgeon General admitted CCDH briefed their office before they pressured Facebook for more censorship.

Most recently CCDH has come under increased scrutiny with a lawsuit by Twitter claiming they are masquerading as a legitimate research firm and that they illegally obtained data to use it in a scare campaign to deter advertisers from the platform.

Concurrently, the publications and damage done by Imran Ahmed, the chief executive officer of CCDH, and his collaborators, are being examined by the House Judiciary Committee. The ongoing investigation into government censorship of alternative viewpoints during the pandemic has determined that CCDH’s activities are of interest. Ahmed was notified that he must supply all documents related to CCDH and its relationship with the federal government and social media companies.

CCDH purports to be a non-profit organization without political affiliation or funding, protecting the public from dangerous misinformation. As they face increasing scrutiny and pressure, a thorough examination of their origins and tactics reveals the mechanics of an organization whose mission is to censor enemies of the state and the pharmaceutical industry.

On The Attack

As the COVID crisis escalated, Ahmed assembled a primary list of competitors to Big Pharma; disparaging those who simply questioned a single prescribed solution. Without presenting evidence, The Disinformation Dozen claimed twelve individuals held the primary responsibility for vaccine hesitancy and thousands of deaths. While leaping to these conclusions, Ahmed also surmised that the motivation of anyone who expressed opinions that did not conform with industry and government — was financial. The report insists that sources of alternative information must be de-funded and de-platformed.

CCDH’s The Disinformation Dozen was preceded and followed by lesser-know reports and op-eds, including; The Anti-Vax Playbookthe Anti-Vax IndustrySubstack & Anti-Vax NewslettersPandemic Profiteers, and How to Deal With Coronavirus Misinformation. This assembly of outright propaganda had a single intent: ending any dissent to unswerving allegiance to vaccine therapy.

Incredibly, there are no details in all of these publications that informs or assures the public about vaccine safety and effectiveness. What the CCDH reports all have in common is the assumption that vaccines are Big Pharma’s gift to mankind and that all other responses to infectious disease are heresy and worthy of scorn and condemnation. These assaults on dissenters are filled with strongly worded guidance, both for individuals and governments, urging people to resist and disregard those who dare counter the pharmaceutical narrative. Strikingly, the reports show complete indifference to free speech, lateral thinking, and medical autonomy.

CCDH leadership’s lack of qualifications in public health and epidemiology is indicative that their intentions and strategy are other than altruistic. Despite his organization’s goal to identify and counter digital hate, Imran Ahmed’s résumé reveals no recognition of medical or humanitarian ethics.

Not surprisingly, Ahmed has a history of blindly supporting Big Pharma’s dictates concerning the viability and safety of vaccines. For years, he and his associates have specialized in attacking anyone who doesn’t follow the narrow guidelines of pharmaceutical industry preferences.

Ahmed is not medically qualified and shows no understanding of healthcare. However, he has been a political operative and has worked behind the scenes for power brokers at the highest level.

Profiles In Deception

Of particular interest is a telling British political scandal dubbed, Brickgate. Ahmed had been working for MP Hilary Benn, another pharma cheerleader. During the brief challenge in 2016 to the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbin, he became the communications director for Angela Eagle, an MP who was one of two possible replacements for Corbin. Ahmed was the point man on an allegation that a brick was thrown through a window in Eagle’s office, with the implication that she was being threatened by her political opponents. The UK press promoted the story, reporting on Ahmed’s accusations and outrage.

The facts proved otherwise. The window turned out to be in a shared stairwell and broken from the inside. A brick was never found, and a police inquiry determined it was very unlikely a hostile act. Whereas Ahmed undoubtedly knew these details, he attempted to portray a different story to gain political points for his boss.

This seemingly minor tale illustrates that the noble role Ahmed presents currently was preceded by his willingness to do whatever it takes to serve his masters. It also confirms that his work has been other than in the service of revealing truth.

Ahmed’s shadowy background and relationships with politicians, including his co-founder of CCDHMorgan McSweeney, certainly do not qualify him to judge anyone’s ethical standards.

Within a few years of Brickgate, Ahmed followed his political godfather, McSweeney, in further machinations toward engineering the agenda of Labour Party leadership. Ahmed took the helm of CCDH, and McSweeney remains integral to the senior staff of MP Keir Starmer. He is a serving member of the vaccine-friendly Trilateral Commission, the current head of the Labour Party, and a likely future UK Prime Minister. Starmer was an early proponent of the COVID vaccine and has a close relationship with Lexington Communications, a lobbying firm that represents Pfizer. With the strong support of Starmer, the United Kingdom was the first country to release the Pfizer COVID vaccine. Even as it was rolled out, he pressed for government repression in a joint effort with CCDH, harassing those who dared to question vaccine safety and effectiveness.

Most of Ahmed’s cohorts all have common interests that have little to do with well-being.

Board Member and MP Damian Collins is another pro-Pharma devotee. Pfizer’s main UK plant was in Kent — Collin’s home district — and he was a strong proponent of the early release of their COVID vaccine. He is also directly associated with the military intelligence group, Integrity Initiative, and a member of the Henry Jackson Society, a secretive association that has connections with the CIA.

The fabric of CCDH’s personnel is embroidered with intelligence community assets. There is no better example of this than Ahmed’s communications director, Lindsay Moran, a self-declared former CIA operative, with experience in consulting for mainstream media. Her previous employment does not make her a criminal, though it does bring further into question the intent and operations of CCDH.

Considering Imran Ahmed’s credentials, known associates, and the profile of other CCDH figures, it can be asserted that there is more to the organization than its stated purpose. At a minimum, this background brings into serious doubt Ahmed’s ability to inform and advise the public in an unbiased manner.

Without awareness or mention of his political affiliations, Ahmed has been relied on for stories and quoted by many news outlets, who present CCDH as a pristine source of factual information.

In one glowing personal profile, his work is described in an article from 2021 on the Global Citizen website. Avoiding questions about his past work, Ahmed’s views are swallowed whole by the authors and repeated gleefully, including the outrageous claim that almost all COVID deaths are among the unvaccinated. The most telling information in the entire piece is at the end: This series was made possible with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

It is important to evaluate this hagiographic portrait and consider that it is presented by Global Citizen, an international non-profit that does not hide ecstatic support of vaccination. According to its website, the organization’s central pursuit is raising and directing funds toward global poverty and health. Global Citizen sponsored a spectacular fundraising concert in 2021 called VAX Live — where among the luminaries who appeared among performers was President Biden, who described the crisis as a pandemic of the unvaccinated; perhaps the best advertising the pharmaceutical industry ever had. The concert successfully promoted and procured COVID-19 vaccines with funds raised by the event.

The Money Trail

Global Citizen has intimate relationships with the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the World Health Organization. These partners share a common interest in vaccine advancement and have gained undue influence over governments and the press. As political leadership floundered in the face of the building healthcare scare, these unelected power brokers stepped in to persuade the world that vaccination was the only remedy to consider.

CCDH insists that it does not take money from partisan organizations or receive government funds, however, this is difficult to confirm when they refuse to reveal all details of its funding. The world of non-profits has numerous routes for financing to be directed in ways to avoid scrutiny.

Some of the not-for-profit organizations that are partners with CCDH claim to have high-minded goals, yet support an organization that betrays indifference to freedom of expression. The Institute For Strategic Dialogue facilitates and defends CCDH in contrast to its stated mission:

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) is an independent, non-profit organisation dedicated to safeguarding human rights and reversing the rising tide of polarisation, extremism and disinformation worldwide.

ISD structure and membership betray a different agenda. Attacking those with dissenting opinions who question mainstream corporate concerns is a cause of the polarized environment that they claim to safeguard.

Evidence points to well-endowed philanthropic organizations with ties to the pharmaceutical industry propping up CCDH and their hostile scheming. Support also includes money funneled through the shady world of PR agencies that are paid millions by Big Pharma to promote their interests. The Paris-based, Publicis Groupe, has directed such resources, admitting to relationships with fact-checkers that support their client’s positions. CCDH and a similar entity, Newsguard, both depend on minimal scrutiny of the structure and motivation for their financing. The perception of these non-profits would change dramatically if the public realized how their presentations are influenced by money.

Although financing has yet to be tracked, there are signals that point to a possible Bill Gates — CCDH relationship. Ahmed instinctively and repeatedly protects Gates and consistently attacks those who question his motivation for supporting vaccination.

In the Anti-Vaxx Playbook, Ahmed claims Gates is attacked symbolically within a word slaw that sidesteps the powerful influence of the Gates Foundation:

Anti-vaccine campaigners have collaborated with alternative health entrepreneurs and conspiracists to ensure that global health philanthropist Bill Gates has become a symbolic figure that represents all of their attacks on the trustworthiness of vaccine advocates.

These attacks are not aimed at influencing the ongoing debate over a Covid vaccine, in which the role of Bill Gates takes a back seat to more practical issues. The real utility of this campaign of vilification is to create a symbol and associated memes that aid the communication of interrelated beliefs about Covid, vaccines and conspiracies.

Bill Gates has come to represent a complex of anti-vaxxer talking points and conspiracy theories. Virtually every element of the on line anti-vaxx movement has found ways of featuring him in their narratives, in a variety of contexts and tones.

This description is a conspicuous attempt to deflect well-deserved attention from Bill Gates, claiming so-called anti-vaxxers are simply mentioning his name as a talking point.

Contrary to where Ahmed would direct us, an examination of Gates is central to understanding how philanthropy, corporate influence, and profiteering form government policies. Attempts at blurring the role of Gates and his foundation as they support vaccines and COVID response policies reveal CCDH’s loyalty to protecting the milieu of its political and financial benefactors.

The philanthropic and corporate worlds’ support and reliance on CCDH is at the nucleus of this deceptive contrivance, enhancing the facade that protects CCDH from scrutiny.

There are a wide variety of theories about why this shaping of public perception is so important. One consequence is obvious; the fraud increases the amount of profits for the pharmaceutical industry and the billionaires who support vaccine sales. Financing organizations like CCDH is a necessity in the general plan to minimize public doubt about an immensely lucrative product.

CCDH is paid to manipulate sentiment without substantiation. It remains stunningly apparent that no supporting details, scientific reports, or verifiable sources of facts appear in any CCDH reports. They merely use the premise that vaccination is the only trustworthy solution for infectious diseases — to vilify their targets.

Defending The Indefensible

The repercussions of the antics of the pharmaceutical-philanthropic consortium are exhibited in this sordid tale. Yet the damning revelations about Imran Ahmed and CCDH are unreported as yet by a press corps that trusts and mimics a political hack.

There remains a wholesale and uncritical acceptance of CCDH while its ability to present an objective assessment of any medical or healthcare opinion is demonstrably biased. Their mission has no basis in exposing the truth, yet nodding promoters still acquiesce to their alleged veracity.

The growing evidence of connections between individuals and entities that promote vaccines and so-called fact-checkers underlines the degradation of news gathering and reporting. The willingness of the news media to accept and disseminate CCDH disinformation without scrutiny reveals these dynamics and the dangerous trend toward authoritarian censorship.

As CCDH faces legal consequences for its negligence and a congressional inquiry into its relationship with the government, the organization continues to manipulate the truth with deceptive lies. They must rely on the press and the public to remain blind to their duplicity.

As a response to the Twitter (X) lawsuit, in an open letter signed by its supporters, CCDH dares to invoke a threat to their rights to free speech;

We view these efforts as a threat to the right to the freedom of expression, resulting in a dangerous chilling effect on civil society, experts, and advocates – and ultimately the public, which deserves to know how X and similar platforms are spreading hate and disinformation.

The appeal ends with desperate phraseology that reflects the height of hypocrisy:

The misuse of the legal system and other forms of intimidation against researchers, experts, and advocates who seek to hold social media companies accountable is an attack of the right to freedom of expression and access to information and must cease. The bullying of those seeking to speak truth to power cannot be tolerated.

Indeed.

In attempting to defend themselves, these words further betray CCDH’s hypocrisy. And the list of those signing on to this rebuttal only indicates how deeply compromised the corporate world has become in pretending to have noble exploits.

It is most important to view the activities of CCDH from the broadest historical perspective.

Their censorship efforts are at the epicenter of an open collaboration between corrupt industrialists and compromised politicians; repressive methodology with hostile tactics display the apparatus and consequences of merging the corporate world with the government.

August 23, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

If I Interviewed Trump About Covid…

By Debbie Lerman | Brownstone Institute | August 22, 2023

It’s too late to propose questions to Tucker Carlson for his interview with Donald Trump, scheduled to air on Wednesday, August 23, 2023, because that interview has already been recorded.

In a fantasy world, here’s what I wish Carlson would ask:

  • Before Covid, your Presidency was going pretty well. You had a good shot at winning another term. Would you agree that the pandemic pretty much reversed that?
  • Actually, it wasn’t just the pandemic. It was your government’s response to the pandemic. The Democrats won by claiming you had botched the whole thing. They said hundreds of thousands of people died because you didn’t lock down soon enough and refused to wear a mask. They said the US should have behaved more like China than like Sweden. Do you agree?
  • A lot of Republicans now think you should have run the pandemic more like DeSantis did in Florida (even though they might not have said it at the time). It seems to me that before March 10th, 2020, you were planning to run it that way. And you were listening to your public health advisors from the CDC and NIH. Is that correct?
  • What was shocking to me was when you seemed to pivot 180 degrees in just a few days, from saying that it would not be worse than a bad flu season, to announcing that we would throw everything we had at it, locking down the whole country, and investing trillions of dollars in keeping the economy shut down. It was especially surprising that you agreed to the economic shutdown. What made you change your mind?
  • I’m going to be more specific on this, because a lot of information has come out suggesting that you changed your mind because your National Security Council, and related military and intelligence operatives, told you the virus was a potential bioweapon that leaked from a Chinese lab. Is that what you were told? Did they tell you millions of people would die and you would be responsible, if you didn’t follow their plan?
  • In a Time Magazine article you were quoted saying “I can’t tell you that” when you were asked about why you thought the virus came from a lab in Wuhan. You said “I’m not allowed to tell you that.” Who was not allowing you to speak openly about the possibility that it was a lab leak? Can you speak about it openly now?
  • Can you tell me who made the decision in the middle of March to invoke the Stafford Act in all 50 states at the same time (which had never been done before), and to put FEMA in charge as the Lead Federal Agency for pandemic response, when FEMA had no warning and no experience in this area at all? Who decided to remove HHS from the role of Lead Federal Agency, which it was supposed to have according to every single pandemic planning document before Covid? Did you make those decisions or did the NSC or other military or intelligence advisors tell you to take those steps?
  • When you brought Scott Atlas in, he advised you to open the country back up immediately. It seems like you really wanted someone in the White House with an opinion that was different from the one you were hearing in favor of lockdowns. But, for some reason, there was enormous resistance to bringing any experts in. There was even supposed to be a meeting at the end of March (long before Atlas arrived) with top epidemiologists that mysteriously got canceled. Why did you have so little control over who advised you about the pandemic? Why didn’t you follow the advice of Scott Atlas if, as he reported in his book, you pretty much agreed with him that the lockdowns were disastrous?
  • Most people think Fauci was in charge of the pandemic response. But in his book, Dr. Atlas reports that you said the main problem wasn’t Fauci, it was Deborah Birx. Is that because Birx was in charge of coordinating the NSC/DHS response, and Fauci was just a front to make it seem like a public health response?
  • A few months into the lockdowns, you sounded as if you had lost control of the situation, like in the tweet from May 18th 2020 when you wrote in all caps: REOPEN OUR COUNTRY! You’d think if anyone could have ended the lockdowns, it would have been the President. But you seemed to feel helpless to reverse what was happening. Is that because there had been a sort of silent coup of the NSC and Department and Homeland Security?
  • If the answers to all the previous questions are classified, that would confirm that the response to Covid involved secret machinations of national security entities. Can you at least confirm that much?
  • Some have suggested that the entire Covid response was launched as a way to make you look bad and make sure you did not get a second term. Do you agree? If so, who do you think was behind that plan?
  • Were you aware of the massive censorship and propaganda that were happening to make people accept the lockdowns and vaccines? Do you feel like you were part of that campaign to convince people? Or do you feel like you were somehow forced to participate in it?
  • Were you in touch with leaders of other allied countries to coordinate the response to the pandemic? It’s pretty astonishing how all our closest allies ended up doing exactly the same thing at the same time. If you were not the one who was coordinating with foreign leaders, were you aware of that type of coordination going on – especially with the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Germany, and other European allies?

And, of course, the most important question of all: Would you ever do such a thing again?

August 23, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

The Questions Crying Out for Answers

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | August 22, 2023

The conspiracy of silence is obvious. Both political parties like it. The media likes it too because it was a main participant. Academia is compromised as much as the social media companies. Government bureaucrats want the entire fiasco to be a thing of the past, except to the extent it can serve as a template for the future. That leaves only independent voices to raise ever louder questions of the entire establishment.

We are of course speaking about the calamity commonly called Covid that robbed us all of liberty and rights, and kicked off this national and global crisis. All the major national problems the US faces today – inflation, learning loss, ill-health, cultural confusion, demographic disruption, professional instability, tech censorship, widespread substance abuse, and the loss of all trust in the commanding heights including the whole of government and every connected institution – trace to the lockdowns that began that fateful day of March 16, 2020 (oddly, the day following the Ides of March, when Caesar was killed).

It was a decision for the ages. Shouldn’t we know more about what led to it and why all of this happened? The person who wants all questions to go away the most is the person who hopes to reinhabit the White House, namely Donald Trump. Whether or not you support his return to power, the reality is that he presided over the largest and fastest loss of liberty in the history of this country.

No other president can compare, not Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Carter, or Obama. His administration, particularly in the last year, embarked on a new age of censorship, administrative state control over all our lives, astonishing levels of spending and redistribution, and massive invasion of our communities and homes. It attacked small business on a scale we’ve never seen, and seriously compromised even our basic rights to associate. The Biden administration was more of the same with new mandates.

Incredibly, Trump has somehow avoided questions about this. His supporters don’t want it discussed. This is likely why he is skipping the debate: fear that DeSantis will call him out. Neither do his opponents on the Democratic side want this discussed because they fully approve of what he did. His opponents in the primary are compromised too, particularly Mike Pence who led the charge within the Trump administration for lockdowns, mass purchases of PPE from China, nationwide distribution and deployment of killer ventilators, and being the biggest champion of Fauci/Birx, which we know because he wrote this in his book.

There are a whole host of questions about those fateful days leading to lockdowns. We are not getting answers because no one is asking the questions. All the people who are in a position to end the silence have a strong interest in perpetuating it for as long as possible, in hopes that mass amnesia takes hold and grants them all amnesty. Fauci is the model here: in his deposition in Missouri v. Biden, he testified that he could hardly remember anything. His hope is that everyone else will follow.

We have a small window in which to get answers during the primary season. Perhaps there will be a breakout at some point. There simply must be. Until there is some honesty and truth about what happened and why, we risk perpetuating all the crises of our times. And let’s be clear: there is not one credible study from anywhere in the world that demonstrates that lockdowns, and everything associated with them, were worth the astronomical cost. Indeed, every bit of evidence shows that the entire Covid response was a disaster. It will be repeated if there is no accountability and radical reform.

We know about the “germ games” of Event 201 and Crimson Contagion. The plans for locking down were already in the works. Covid was the excuse but did they seriously believe that this was the killer bioweapon for which they had prepared? We have documented proof that everyone knew that this virus was not massively deadly. We knew this from January 2020. If that wasn’t enough, we have data from the Diamond Princess that suggested that the infection fatality rate was nowhere near the 3-4 percent that the World Health Organization predicted.

What unleashed all this mania to end liberty as we know it? Tucker Carlson visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago on March 7, 2020. His message to Trump was to take the coronavirus seriously because it could be a bioweapon export from China. Tucker had heard this from a trusted source within the intelligence community whom he has yet to name. Tucker has since said that he very much regrets his role.

Trump listened and yet seemed unpersuaded. On March 9th, Trump tweeted out his intuition that this bug was flu-like and did not require extraordinary efforts by government. Two days later, however, Trump evidently changed his mind. “I am fully prepared to use the full power of the Federal Government to deal with our current challenge of the CoronaVirus,” he wrote in a complete about-face.

Whatever changed his mind likely happened on March 10, 2020. What was that? To whom did he speak and what did they say? By chance, was he told that this was indeed a bioweapon from China and yet the pharmaceutical companies were working on the antidote and all he needed to do was lock down until it arrived and then he could be the hero? Was that his thinking?

If that was not his thinking, what precisely did he hope to achieve by locking down the entire country by executive edict? How did he imagine that he was personally going to stop the spread of a virus in the US that was already everywhere on both coasts and likely had been for the prior six months? Did it ever occur to him to call up some independent experts on infectious disease? If not, why not?

Two days later, he ordered a stop to all flights to and from Europe, the UK, and Australia. He announced this in a televised address that evening. When he was giving this address – which looked like a hostage video – did it ever occur to Trump that he was embarking on an exercise of government power never before seen? Millions of families and travel plans were shredded and panic ensued throughout the world. What led him to believe that it was within his legal rights as president to do that?

On March 13, Trump’s own Health and Human Services issued a document on the pandemic plans. It was marked confidential but came to be released months later. Incredibly, this policy document not only declared a national emergency but made it very clear that the rule-making power for pandemic management would rest with the National Security Council. That’s the intelligence community. The public health agencies of the CDC and NIH were reduced in power to deal with implementation and operations but they were not in charge.

Did Trump know what was happening around him? Did anyone come to him and tell him of this large document, which, to this day, is the only blueprint we have for what government was trying to do with its Covid response? Had he ever seen this before publishing? If so, did it not strike him as odd that the National Security Council would be given primacy over the public health agencies themselves?

That weekend, March 14-15, 2020, every report we have says that Trump huddled in the White House with son-in-law Jared Kushner, two of Jared’s college buddies, Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Mike Pence. Whom else did he consult on this weekend? At this point, national security had already been given primacy in policy, so surely the military and intelligence community were represented at the White House. Who and what did they say?

According to Kushner, the decisive voice in putting together the lockdown plans was Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb, who had previously headed Trump’s own FDA. He is said to have been on the phone with Trump. According to Kushner, Gottlieb told him: “They should go a little bit further than you are comfortable with… When you feel like you are doing more than you should, that is a sign that you are doing them right.”

How much did Gottlieb’s opinion matter to Trump and did Trump ever consider perhaps that Gottlieb, as the voice of Pfizer, might have had a conflict of interest? What else does Trump remember about this weekend?

All of this really matters because on Monday, March 16, Trump held a national press conference together with Fauci and Birx. At this event, they handed out a PDF to the press which in turn was issued to every public health agency in the country. It read in part: “Bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”

That sounds like a federal edict to close churches, schools, and essentially put the entire country under house arrest. Indeed, the restrictions on human association also pertained to houses, which in many states were restricted in the number of people who could gather inside them. Only one state, South Dakota, refused to go along.

During the press conference, Trump waffled a bit on whether he was shutting everything down but Fauci stepped in to clarify that, yes, the Trump administration was in fact shutting down the whole country, Bill of Rights be damned. 

At the very moment when Fauci was reading these sentences from the microphone, Trump was standing to his side but was suddenly distracted by someone or something in the audience. He waved and smiled, almost as if he either did not want to hear what Fauci was saying or did not care. To whom was he waving and why?

Did Trump even know about the edict that was being issued that day, that he was effectively using his power as president to close churches and impose universal quarantine on the population? If so, how was this consistent with his promise to make America great again?

The next day, the Trump team got busy on hospital protocols, which amounted to the mass production and distribution of ventilators plus giving out the deadly drug Remdesivir. Who was it that told Trump that intubating people was the best way to deal with this virus? Why did they believe that, given that people who are intubated are very likely to die either from the procedure or the secondary bacterial infection that likely followed?

Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to force companies to make more ventilators, which they did. Today these are mostly scrap metal, of course, and most hospitals and doctors abandoned the practice once it became clear that it was killing thousands. Why did Trump seize on this whole idea to begin with? Who was advising him and why did it not occur to him to call any one of thousands of people with hands-on specializations in respiratory viruses for a second opinion?

As late as April 30, 2020, Trump was still pushing lockdowns as the solution. He even criticized Sweden for not locking down. As the summer approached and many people violated lockdown orders to protest the George Floyd killing, it seems like Trump began to wonder if he had been hoodwinked.

If Fauci and Birx tricked him into wrecking his presidency and the country, why not just admit that? If he swears that he was right to greenlight lockdowns, why should voters trust that he would not do it again? What does he believe the limits to government power are?

Even as late as July 20, 2020, Trump was still claiming that he would “defeat” the virus, this time with facemasks. “It is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance,” he wrote.

Moving to the fall, Trump wisely allowed himself to be schooled in medical realities by Scott Atlas, who arrived at the White House to talk some sense into the crazy people who were running the show. Trump seems to have been convinced. But meanwhile, the whole country was in ruins with millions of businesses closed, the kids not in school, and the whole population in a state of trauma at the loss of liberty.

There were two months remaining before the November 2020 election. During his campaign stops, he dropped the lockdowns, called for openings, but largely left the subject off the stump speech entirely, as if nothing had ever happened. Going into the election, Covid was largely off the agenda but for the media and Democrats who urged further lockdowns, which they implemented once in power.

Trump should explain what was going through his head during these months. Did he know what was actually going on in the country, how many businesses had been boarded up, how many kids denied in-person education, how many churches were closed, how many families had been broken up with travel restrictions? Further, did he worry that his spending and money-printing policies, plus trillions in stimulus payments, would fuel inflation after he left office?

We still cannot get a fix on how it came to be that the shots were widely mandated on people who never needed them. Nor is there an honest discussion of the resulting job losses, injuries, and deaths that resulted. Did these mandates come about simply because too many Americans thought better than allowing a stranger to inject them with a mystery potion ginned up in a lab and deployed ten times faster than any vaccine in history? Was there an industrial interest in forcing compliance? If so, that’s next-level corruption.

As for masking that all science knew for certain would be ineffective for stopping the spread of a respiratory pathogen, were they merely symbols imposed to scare the public? This is truly dystopian.

This is just the start of the unanswered questions. The Norfolk Group has raised many more.

Some independent journalists with access to the candidates, and this includes even Biden but certainly also every Republican who expects to earn votes, must get up to speed on the details of this calamity. It is simply unthinkable that this country, born of the ideal of freedom, would have undergone a quiet coup against liberty and the Constitution, and yet there be no serious discussion of what happened, much less reform efforts to restore what we lost.

All of this is more important than January 6, election doubting, or tribal partisan bickering. As curious as these topics are, they are distractions from that which should interest us all: the status of freedom in America and the enforcement of the Bill of Rights. Every day, the censorship continues and every day the plots against the common good are ongoing. The kids are suffering as never before. The economic crisis still surrounds us and can get much worse. All the agencies that did this enjoy more funding than ever before.

We are supposed to live in an age of information. It takes herculean efforts to bring about silence on the most important questions of our time. But thus far, all the major institutions are managing to pull it off. This cannot be allowed to continue.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

August 23, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment