Fear of a Microbial Planet
BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | APRIL 13, 2023
Fear of a Microbial Planet, by Dr. Steve Templeton, is a wonderfully accessible book on the Covid era now published by Brownstone institute, offers desperately needed clarity and science on the organization and management of individual social life in the presence of pathogenic infection. It can be read as a definitive answer to expert arrogance, political overreach, and population panic.
For three years following the arrival of the virus that causes Covid, the dominant response from governments and the public has been to be afraid and stay far away through any means possible. This has further mutated into a population-wide germophobia that is actually being promoted by elite opinion.
Steve Templeton, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute and Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine – Terre Haute, argues that this response is primitive, unscientific, and ultimately contrary to individual and public health. The most unhealthy populations are those which preserve immunological naivete in the presence of a virus that is otherwise going to circulate widely.
Dr. Templeton’s story is both scientific and highly personal, taking the reader through the basics of immune response and public health even while relaying his personal frustrations with trying to talk sense to others in senseless times.
If a public health response is like an immune response, then consider this book as immunization against germophobia, politicized science, a self-defeating safety culture, and misplaced faith in experts. Dr. Templeton is our guide to helping us gain a new and more robust understanding of the relationship between the microbial kingdom and our own lives.
The pandemic forecasts in the United States were very grim. Experts were predicting that 60-70 percent of the population would ultimately be infected resulting in over 1.5 million deaths in just a few months. People on social media were in an absolute panic. Stories about empty shelves and runs on toilet paper were everywhere. Those who tried to refute these doomsday predictions were shouted down and eventually silenced.
And yet, the science on the virus was very clear. Disease severity was age-stratified. Extreme measures would not drive it away and would cause a tremendous amount of collateral damage. Even if the worse-case scenarios were true, it was extremely important that we take measures based on evidence.
But eventually, the cry to “do something” became overwhelming, and the costs no longer mattered. Trying to calm people with wisdom about infectious disease became nearly pointless. Germophobia swept through society and political culture.
Hardly anyone wanted to hear the truth that microbes are everywhere, and they cannot be avoided. There are an estimated 6×10^30 bacterial cells on Earth at any given time. By any standard, this is a huge amount of biomass, second only to plants, and exceeding that of all animals by more than 30-fold.
To live at peace with the microbial kingdom requires trained immune systems, as George Carlin said years ago. That means exposure and the protection of normal social functioning even under pandemic conditions with a new virus.
Many books have been and will be written about pandemic response mistakes, and that’s a good thing. There can’t possibly be enough reflection on what went wrong, otherwise we will be doomed to follow the same path, or an even worse one, next time. This book argues that the safety-at-all-costs culture will continue to result in counterproductive policies until it is challenged at its root.
How did people in our communities and around the world get to the point of hysteria over a pandemic with a clear age-stratified and comorbidity-amplified mortality? Why were young and healthy people with very little risk for disease and death treated as if they were a grave danger to others?
It was always pointless to try to stop much less eradicate this virus. We’ve evolved with pathogens and need to learn to live with them without imposing mass psychological, social, economic, and public-health damage.
Everyone who panicked to the point of meltdown needs this book as a corrective. And even if you did not, everyone knows someone who did, public-health officials above all else.
“They deliberately gave the unvaccinated a lower standard of care” – An honest doctor speaks out
This is an important testimony to add to the historical record
Forgotten Side of Medicine | April 12, 2023
I am a physician who stood against the false narratives swirling around Covid and, for a time, it seemed like I lost.
Before Covid became a public reality, I was working as a successful trauma surgeon and surgical ICU physician in the hospital that had the first diagnosed Covid case in America. I was working as one of the more senior surgeons of a team of 12 surgeons. The hospital and medical community had already been struggling prior to Covid with various departures from reality with narratives including ‘racism everywhere’ and ‘diversity as long as it supports deviancy’, but it wasn’t appearing to dramatically affect patient care.
In 2018-2019, I stumbled onto a fraud scheme perpetrated by some of the administrative doctors in our hospital that did cause patient harm, so I reported our hospital administration for fraud. I similarly observed and discovered other connected issues that caused patient harm by various other providers that I tried to bring to light in our hospital. I was ‘rewarded’ with 12 complaints filed against me over a two week period, in retaliation. These complaints accused me of breaches of almost every aspect of professional behavior and ethics. They followed one of the administrators sending out an email asking her colleagues to “get rid of Dr. Miller”. None of these allegations stood (they were all false to begin with), and I continued to do my job to the best of my abilities in this hostile situation, but it became increasingly difficult. Eventually, every single complaint was dismissed as unsubstantiated.
Then, through February and March of 2020, our hospital had a large number of Covid patients including a real upsurge of many sick patients in early March. A couple of weeks later, it hit the news, but only after the virus had passed its inflection point in our hospital and after our healthcare system was not in any threat of having inadequate resources. Things then went completely mad with hype and fear – again, this was after the real infectious surge was passed.
Suddenly, our hospital outcomes and quality data became hidden and opaque to us. Prior to this, almost all data were openly shared and discussed in quality assurance meetings. The hospital forced upon us a narrative that was pure lunacy and contrary to all available observations and previously available data. A chilling example is the following.
I was working a shift in the ICU in late April 2020 and had basically nothing to do because greater than half our beds were empty. We were ‘low censusing’ any nurses willing to go home because there were so few sick patients. I was having a cup of coffee, chatting with the staff and another ICU physician, who was in leadership, when the daily newspaper was delivered. Prior to the paper being delivered, we were all relaxed, jocular and noting how little work we all had. The other ICU physician picked up the local paper where the main headline said, “Local ICU Overwhelmed”. The article was referencing our ICU, as we were the only hospital in the county. He looked at me, started sweating, panicked and said, “What are we going to do? We may not be able to handle this!” I replied with, “Pour another cup of coffee and laugh at the morons writing the paper.” He became visibly distressed and left to call the hospital administration about the situation, who confirmed they were complicit with the newspaper article. This colleague was one of the medical directors of our ICU. Our hospital and ICU were not overfull at the peak number of infections in March 2020. In fact, the ICU was never overfull, even after the horrible protocols that hurt so many patients were established. I knew we were in serious trouble as a medical community when clinical leaders started believing the words in a newspaper and hospital administrators more than their own eyes and experience.
Then, I watched as every policy, practice and quality metric that makes a trauma and surgical programme have good patient outcomes was undermined or abandoned by my colleagues and hospital administration. I filed countless complaints to our quality department for disgusting breaches of care that were now becoming commonplace. I could not turn my back on my oaths taken to advocate for patients. Between mid-2020 and 2021, following a leak of information from the opaque administration, I learned that our unanticipated morbidity and mortality numbers had more than doubled for indexed trauma patients. It was horribly demoralising to watch.
After the vaccine was rolled out in late 2020, it became a functional mandate in the broader community, and then definitively mandated by the late summer of 2021. The medical community in the county I was working in (Snohomish, Washington State) started refusing to care for unvaccinated patients except in the hospital setting. I couldn’t believe that patients were banned from accessing basic primary care at first, but then I spoke to a man at my church who was denied both refills of his diabetic medications and treatment for a sinus infection by his primary care provider, all because of his Covid vaccination status. This was so inconceivable that I still didn’t believe it. Even when patients did make it to the hospital, I learned that the physicians and staff in the emergency room were directed to provide a lower tier of medicine to this group of patients. It was less than acceptable, and worse, less dignified, than the care given to any other patients pre- and post- Covid. I had to verify with physician leaders that they approved of this inhumanity. I found out that all the major healthcare systems in the county had agreed to this action, and drove the creation of the policies that demanded physicians act in direct opposition to their oaths. After discovering this, I departed from the medical community in spirit.
Working with my pastor, we turned our church into a free clinic to care for those ostracised from society. I obtained independent malpractice insurance and we started seeing patients. People were desperate. We didn’t advertise, but there were so many people seeking basic healthcare that we struggled to see everyone. I did my best to see people in their time of need, but it was hard. I was still working in my full-time hospital position. I just didn’t have enough hours in the day. Most of the people I cared for were seen at the church – they were met with maskless smiles, prayer, support and free medical care. Sometimes, people would be waiting in my driveway for me when I arrived home in the early morning after a night shift or late at night after I finished a day shift. What became obvious as the most important thing about our clinic is that our patients needed to be treated as valuable people created in God’s image.
Prior to this experience, I was a seasoned (and hardened) subspecialist with the best reputation one could hope for in the hospitals I worked in. When other doctors, health executives, nurses and local politicians or their families had surgical problems, I was often the one asked to deliver their care even if I wasn’t scheduled to be working. After our health care system abandoned the oaths we took as physicians, I had an identity crisis and pivoted to putting more efforts into the free clinic, caring for the dispossessed patients.
Eventually, my work at the free clinic treating unvaccinated patients became known, and the hospital administration learned of it. Subsequently, the real pressure against me started. The hospital responded by opening an investigation of me on synthesised charges of ‘micro-aggression’. There ended up being two separate and independent investigations (one by the hospital, one by my physician group leadership who were working in tandem with the hospital) into my conduct. My colleagues, who months earlier asked for my help and guidance about both professional and personal matters, would no longer return my calls, text messages or emails, or speak to me in public, for fear of being labelled as affiliated with me while in my state of political disfavour. The investigations themselves and the repercussions to my reputation were the punishment. I was treated as guilty, even when proven innocent, by the hospital administration and my colleagues. The investigations eventually exonerated me, my behaviour and my healthcare delivery, but left open the possibility for immediate suspension or termination if I committed a ‘micro-aggression’ in the future. Obviously, this was a no-win scenario for me since micro-aggressions are subjective, undefinable, unprovable and therefore indefensible. I refused to continue working without an independent mediator, so the hospital gladly paid out my contract instead of mediation and restoration.
Separately during this time I was reported to the State Medical Board by an outpatient pharmacist for prescribing a two-week course of fluvoxamine (an anti-depressant) to help a patient recovering after Covid. This prescription had been banned by the Washington State Medical Association as a treatment for Covid or its repercussions. Incidentally, the patient had a positive response and near complete recovery from her illness, but the pharmacist and WSMA didn’t seem to care about that data point and were apparently just offended that I violated their protocol.
By March and April of 2022, multiple other clinics in the county began to accept care for most patients, regardless of vaccination status, and so we wound down the free clinic at my church, transitioning people’s care to physicians in established practices who would now agree to deliver appropriate care. As I had been reported to the state (although no formal charges were brought) and I was being pushed out of hospital medicine for practising ethical medicine, I knew it was time to leave Washington State. The message to me was clear: if I stayed, I would have formal investigations that would prohibit me from obtaining a medical licence in another state. My livelihood would be stripped away. So, we sold our homes and boats, liquidated our assets and moved to South Florida in May 2022. I was, and am, bitter at the medical establishment that committed these crimes, so I planned to retire at age 50 with the move and have nothing further to do with the establishment.
However, after the hurricane came through Florida in the fall of 2022, I started doing volunteer work for hurricane victims. This included some medical relief work. I realised there is still good that can be done in medicine, that people need healthcare providers, and that by nature, I am a healer.
So, in February of 2023, I returned to practising medicine and started working as a primary care physician at a holistic clinic where no patient is turned away. I discovered that I enjoy being a family physician, too. I lost my prestigious career and my social position, but I did not lose my ethics or integrity. I did not violate my oaths of practice. So, ultimately, I have won. And I’m happy.
COVID deaths up 39% after vaccines rolled out in Ontario Canada
Weren’t the vaccines supposed to REDUCE deaths from COVID? Oddly, there was no press coverage on this.
By Steve Kirsch | April 7, 2023
Executive summary
The official government numbers show COVID deaths are up in Ontario by nearly 40% since the vaccines rolled out and hospitalizations due to COVID are up by 31%!
Both hospitalization and deaths from COVID were up dramatically.
You can see it yourself (see the red box below):
Deaths went from 5,485 in 2021 to 7,625 in 2022.
Could that be statistical noise? Not likely. Sigma is 74 so it’s a 29-sigma increase. In other words, this increase in death didn’t happen by chance; something caused it.
The data from the Ontario website
We know the vax makes you more likely to get COVID. If you had 3 shots, the Cleveland Clinic study showed you are about 2.5X more likely to get COVID. So that big spike in cases in 2022 is totally expected: it was our own doing. The more people who got COVID, the more people who died from COVID.
You’re less likely to die from a COVID case in 2022 than in 2021 because the variant is less deadly, not because the vaccine worked.
Cases
Hospitalizations
Deaths
Possible explanations
Was this because the virus was more deadly in 2022? I don’t think so.
Let’s look the world’s least vaccinated countries: Yemen, Haiti, and PNG. As you can see, deaths are way down in 2022 because the variants are less lethal:
These numbers show that the “it would have been worse if people weren’t vaccinated” excuse won’t hold any water.
Furthermore, we know the vaccines are super deadly. Consider the following recent post which is based on CDC data:
If it wasn’t the vaccine that caused this dramatic rise, what caused it?
Also, even the US data shows a decrease in 2022 vs. 2021, so it’s hard for Ontario to argue that the virus was more deadly in 2022:
This visualization was done on the CDC website on the Weekly Provisional Counts of Deaths page
So there is no rock they can hide under.
Of course, this is embarrassing for the narrative which is why nobody is talking about it.
Even Professor David Fisman is silent about the report. I reached out to him for an explanation and he ignored it, exactly as expected.
This is why there is no press coverage of this: because the numbers are inexplicable if the vaccine worked.
I just thought you’d like to know.
Summary
It’s unfortunate that the mainstream press isn’t covering this.
I can’t figure out why. The press is supposed to report this and get comments from both sides. Instead, they ignore the story.
A nearly 40% increase in COVID deaths and the mainstream press ignores the story!?! WTF is going on here?
But I thought people would want to know the truth.
Half of ‘Long Covid’ Sufferers Have Never Had Covid, Says New Study
BY IAN MACLEOD | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | APRIL 3, 2023
The battle of ideas around Covid has few clashes as hotly contested as Long Covid. Alarmists have hyped the frequency and severity with which infection causes long-term damage. Sceptics see no reason for panic. A new study helps to settle at least part of this debate.
The paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s (JAMA) Network Open looked at “post–COVID-19 condition (PCC) in young people after mild acute infection” to find how common it was and to find risk factors. Participants were aged between 12 and 25.
The authors offer this straightforward conclusion: “PCC was not associated with biological markers specific to viral infection.” That is, participants were equally likely to suffer from ‘Long Covid’, whether or not they had suffered from acute COVID-19.
The researchers concluded that Long Covid is predicted by “initial symptom severity” and, intriguingly, “psychosocial factors”.
The full article is available on JAMA Network Open.
The main results from the present study were: (1) the prevalence of PCC six months after acute COVID-19 was approximately 50%, but was equally high in a control group of comparable SARS-CoV-2-negative individuals; (2) acute COVID-19 was not an independent risk factor for PCC; (3) the severity of clinical symptoms at baseline, irrespective of SARS-CoV-2 status, was the main risk factor of persistent symptoms six months later.
Symptom prevalence data are consistent with other controlled studies of young people after acute COVID-19 reporting a high symptom load, with only subtle differences between individuals testing positive and negative for SARS-CoV-2. Correspondingly, a large population-based study found no associations between most persistent symptoms attributed to COVID-19 and serological evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection. …
These findings suggest that persistent symptoms in this age group are related to factors other than SARS-CoV-2 infection, and therefore question the usefulness of the WHO case definition of PCC.
Worth reading in full.
Highly Vaccinated COVID ‘Success’ New Zealand Sees Huge Increase in Death Rates
Concerning increase in mortality in New Zealand
By Ian Miller | Unmasked | April 7, 2023
COVID has unfortunately created any number of repetitive stories.
Jurisdiction imposes mask mandates, population complies, masks prove ineffective, media claims masks didn’t work because of lack of compliance.
Another example would be when countries with extraordinary compliance, such as Singapore or South Korea, would see increases ignored entirely, or blamed on the population not wearing masks of a correct level of quality.
Yet as a general rule, the most consistently predictable repetitive storyline has been the media and expert community declaring that a country was a pandemic success, only for their results to dramatically change in a relatively short period of time.
This was the case with the Czech Republic, with Australia, with Taiwan and many other locations.
Even within the United States adjustments showed that states like California – heralded as pandemic winners – actually had significantly worse results than previously realized.
But few places on earth have been as heavily praised as New Zealand.
Their science-following leadership was repeatedly hailed, honored, and praised for their effective communication, endless lockdowns, tyrannical response to protests, and prolific commitment to mandates.
All of the above, combined with their strict border controls, should have meant that New Zealand would avoid the significant increase in negative outcomes seen in other parts of the world.
At least, that’s what the media and activist public health authorities claimed would happen.
The reality is far more complicated.
Throughout 2020 and into 2021, New Zealand saw very little COVID transmission.
Unsurprisingly, the BBC praised the country for their efforts, explaining in detail how the country had become “COVID free.”
Jacinda Arden, now former prime minister, was once so completely committed to maintaining an illusion of infallibility that she claimed that the only source of accurate information available to the public was the government.
Of course, Arden then made the provably inaccurate claim that those who were vaccinated would net get sick and would not die.
The ridiculous over-confidence in the proclamations of public health authorities led to Arden convincing New Zealanders that strict mandates and interventions could stop the spread of the virus.
As winter and new variants arrived in 2021, Arden and local leaders predictably enforced increasingly strict measures. Mask mandates, lockdowns and “red traffic light” policies include vaccine passports.
Surprise. None of it worked.
After several months of completely unchecked spread, even the country’s cumulative metrics, once seemingly so impressive, exploded in dramatic fashion.
Consistently and exceptionally high mask wearing rates were also entirely ineffective.
And yet defenders of New Zealand’s authoritarian policies still believed that the country’s strategy was warranted, for one specific reason.
They had delayed the spread of the virus until the COVID vaccines became widely available.
In theory, that was supposed to prevent a substantial increase in deaths, especially considering their extraordinary rate of uptake.
That didn’t work either.
While these rates were generally lower after adjusting for population than many other countries, they still represented an obvious, significant surge compared to previous time periods.
But COVID related deaths only tell a part of the story, often influenced by attribution methodology and testing.
In theory, New Zealand’s exceptional vaccination rate and consistently high mask compliance should have meant that all cause mortality would also remain low.
So did it?
Fortunately, thanks to the New Zealand government’s own data, we now have an answer. And just as the country’s failure to stop omicron, it presents another contradiction to the endless media praise.
Despite the exceptionally high vaccination rate, despite their exceptionally high booster rate, despite vaccine passports, strict lockdowns, “red traffic light” policies and border controls, the pandemic came for New Zealand as well.
The government’s own data shows that all cause deaths in New Zealand jumped significantly in 2022, to the highest level in recorded data.
The country universally praised for their dedication to following The Science™, whose leadership told the public that following her dictates would keep them safe, stop the spread and control outcomes, has seen a record level of all cause mortality.
Exactly the same as other countries who were criticized for their supposedly less effective response.
Even after adjusting for population, the scale of the surge in 2022 is exceptional.
In fact, it represents an over 17% increase from 2020.
Not to mention that the one year increase, over 10%, represented the largest single year increase in New Zealand since the 1918 flu.
So why didn’t their policies prevent this? Why didn’t waiting for widespread vaccination to open up prevent this?
The New Zealand government themselves blame COVID for at least a portion of the increase. So why were so many people dying of COVID given the country’s exceptional vaccination and booster uptake and masking?
After all, ~95% of the population over 12 had been fully vaccinated by the middle of 2022, with over 90% fully vaccinated by early 2022. Similarly, adult booster rates were nearly 80% by early in 2022.
Why didn’t it work?!
Some may try to claim that their results would have been worse had they not had such policies.
But countries like Sweden thoroughly debunk that theory. Sweden had one of the least restrictive responses anywhere on earth, yet their results were among the best in their region.
Even throughout 2022, excess deaths remained low.
So why did New Zealand fail?
Compared to other countries, New Zealand’s cumulative COVID mortality rate still remains low. But the all cause mortality tells a different story.
Their strict policies and delayed opening were supposed to prevent this exact situation from occurring. All because the government put their faith in experts.
The experts mistakenly believed that vaccinations would prevent virtually all deaths, as Jacinda “we are your sole source of truth” Arden explained.
Obviously that was not the case.
It’s not clear what percentage of the excess mortality rate came from vaccinated people. But even more importantly, the majority of the increase was entirely unrelated to COVID.
Nearly 6,000 more people died in 2022 than did in 2020, despite a relatively small population increase. Yet the government says just 2,400 were associated with COVID.
So what caused the other 3,600 unexpected deaths?
In raw numbers, nearly 7,500 more people died in 2022 than in 2016. Accounting for population increases, that meant virtually 100 more people per 100,000 died in 2022 than in 2016.
What happened?
Whatever it was, it’s almost certainly related to New Zealand’s mistaken assumptions. Ancillary lockdown-related causes, missed health screenings, side effects — any or all of it could have contributed to the dramatic increase.
And all of it was because the government mistakenly proclaimed that they could control COVID. Instead, they delayed the inevitable.
Governments have many lessons to learn from the pandemic, but the first should be to never, ever, put blind faith in “experts.”
All too often they’re flying blind themselves.
Why was Covid so deadly for African Leaders?
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | April 5, 2023
Could Covid have been used as an excuse to bump off political rivals in third world countries? Or perhaps they were removed by foreign powers looking for regime change. For example in March 2020, 12 Iranian politicians and officials died from Covid including a member of the clerical body that appoints the supreme leader, Ayatollah Hashem Bathayi Golpayegni. Admittedly, Golpayegni was 78 but Ali Reza Zali, who was leading the campaign against the Covid outbreak, acknowledged that many of those who died were otherwise healthy.
The British Medical Journal (BMJ) produced a short analysis in 2021 looking at why so many African leaders died of COVID-19. They estimated that the average minister was a 60.5 year old male and that the fatality rate in the general population for this demographic was 0.17%. However, amongst worldwide ministers and heads of states this figure was 0.6% which was heavily skewed by Africa with a fatality rate of 1.33%.
Why, when Africa was barely affected by Covid, were African leaders and ministers disproportionality killed by the disease?
The BMJ found that between 6 February 2020 and 6 February 2021, Covid claimed the lives of 24 national ministers and heads of states around the world. For some reason this didn’t include the Iranian deaths above but putting that aside, 17 of those 24 deaths occurred in Africa.
There was nothing special or different about the demographic of African ministers, “if anything, the African leaders who succumbed to COVID-19 were slightly younger than their seven counterparts on other continents”.
Five suggestions were given as to why the death rate could be so much higher.
- More comorbidities. However, no evidence of this was uncovered;
- Poor healthcare. You would think of all the people in Africa, the leaders of the nation would have access to the best healthcare around;
- General mortality in Africa was higher than reported. This was challenged by the WHO;
- African ministers work environments are busier and, therefore, they are more prone to the circulation of the virus. Even the BMJ say this is a weak hypothesis;
- 50% of the African deaths occurred in Southern Africa and the majority after the more transmissible ‘South African’ variant was reported.
Or was it something else?
John Magufuli
Not included in the report, due to it happening at the time it was published, was the death of another African leader, John Magufuli. Magufuli was president of Tanzania and died in March 2021, aged 61.
The Tanzanian leader had gone missing for two weeks before his death was announced even though the Prime Minister, Kassim Majaliwa, had insisted that the president was “healthy and working hard”. The media speculated that he was in hospital with Covid but when the vice-president, Samia Suluhu announced his death, she said he had died of heart failure.
From the very start, Mr. Magufuli had been a Covid sceptic. The Guardian’s obituary even called him “Tanzania’s Covid-denying president”. He had said how well Tanzania’s economy would do because they weren’t locking down and causing huge harm.
Just over two weeks before his disappearance, the Guardian published an opinion piece titled “It’s time for Africa to rein in Tanzania’s anti-vaxxer president.” The article was sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation.
Mr. Magufuli, who had trained as a Chemistry teacher, first saw through the Covid scam when he realised the false positives produced by PCR tests. He sampled a goat, sheep and even a pawpaw fruit, assigned them human names and ages, sent them off for analysis and all came back with a positive Covid test result.
As a result, the president said “There is something happening. I said before we should not accept that every aid is meant to be good for this nation”. At the time of his death, only 21 Tanzanians had died and the president said the country was “Covid-free”. However, the country had stopped testing and recording deaths as ‘with Covid’ so we can’t be sure if this was correct or not.
Masks were laughed at and the government’s advice was to “improve personal hygiene, wash hands with running water and soap, use handkerchiefs, herbal steam, exercise, eat nutritious food, drink plenty of water, and [use] natural remedies that our nation is endowed with”. Whilst in the West, we were told to stop exercising and sit indoors worrying.
The Tanzanian president had also refused to buy “dangerous” foreign vaccines, instead choosing “herbal remedies”. However, even though Western media said this “herbal remedy” lacked scientific evidence, it was in fact made from Artemisia, a plant from Madagascar, shown to fight SARS-CoV-2.
Artemisia is used against malaria and has shown anti-inflammatory effects, including inhibition of interleukin-6 that plays a key role in the development of severe COVID-19. Furthermore, it has been shown to inhibit the viruses invasion and replication, as well as reducing oxidative stress and inflammation and mitigating lung damage. The plant also contains zinc, gallium and selenium, as well as having an antiviral effect.
The week before the president disappeared, ten prominent Tanzanians, including the former Bank of Tanzania Governor, all died from suspected Covid. This led to the WHO calling upon Tanzania to take “robust action”. The president suggested citizens should wear masks but reiterated that the country would not impose a lockdown.
After Magufuli’s death, his vice-president took over the presidency and reversed all his Covid policies.
A million doses of Johnson & Johnson vaccine were ordered and a vaccination drive was put in place. A Covid task force was setup, masks had to be worn and lockdowns were enacted.
Pierre Nkurunziza – President of Burundi
President Nkurunziza died unexpectedly, after a short stay in hospital, aged 55 in June 2020. Again, it was suspected that he had Covid but the official reason given for his death was a heart attack.
A month earlier in May 2020, the president had refused to introduce any social distancing or lockdown rules. After the WHO questioned the country’s Covid statistics, Burundi expelled WHO’s coronavirus team and declared them persona non grata for interfering with pandemic management.
On 30th June, new president Evariste Ndayishimiye announced that Covid was Burundi’s biggest enemy and to fight it required “strict compliance with the barrier measures that the Ministry of Health will now display everywhere across the country”.
Malawi
In April 2020, the high court in Malawi stopped the government from implementing a national lockdown. This had been initiated by a civil society group which challenged president Peter Mutharika who wanted a lockdown to save 50,000 Malawian lives. To date 2,686 Malawians have died with Covid.
However, in January 2021, a number of government ministers died including Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Lingson Belekanyama; Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Information, Ernest Kantcheche; Transport Minister, Sidik Mia and Foreign Minister, Sibusiso Moyo (the former army general who ousted Mugabe).
Subsequently, the president used these deaths to stress the importance of new restrictions.
Other deaths
As well as the deaths above, which highlight how Covid deaths were used to change Covid policies in their respective countries, other Covid deaths included:
- Ambrose Dlamini, Prime Minister of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland);
- Christian Myekeni Ntshangase, Minister of Public Service in Eswatini;
- Makhosi Vilakait, Minister in Eswatini;
- Mahmoud Jibril, former Libyan Prime Minister and part of rebel government that overthrew Gaddafi;
- Pierre Buyoya, former Burundi president who died in Paris and had just been sentenced to life imprisonment in Burundi over the assassination of his successor, Melchior Ndadye;
- Khalif Mumin Tohow, Justice Minister of Somalia. This was the second Covid death in Somalia;
- Sekou Kourouma, Chief of Staff to Guinean President Alpha Conde;
- Amadou Salif Kebe, Head of Guinea’s electoral commission;
- Victor Traore, Director of Guinea’s Interpol bureau;
- Abba Kyari, Chief of Staff to the President of Nigeria Muhammadu Buhari;
- Mohamed Ben Omar, founder of the Nigerien Social Democratic Party which allied with the President of Nigeria’s party;
- Mahamane Jean Padonou, 2016 Nigerian presidential candidate and special advisor to President Issoufou;
- Ismail Gamadiid, Minister of Climate Change in Somalia;
- Perrance Shiri, part of the Cabinet of Zimbabwe and cousin of Mugabe;
- Ellen Gwaradzimba, Minister of State in Zimbabwe;
- Sibusiso Moyo, Minister of Foreign Affairs in Zimbabwe, noted for announcing the ousting of Mugabe;
- Joel Biggie Matiza, Minister in Zimbabwe and on the US sanctions list;
- Jackson Mthembu, Minister in South Africa. A medical helicopter transporting his doctor crashed, killing all 5 on board, the same day Mthembu died;
- Abdoul Aziz Mbaye, founding member of Senegal’s ruling party;
- Hasan al-Lawzi, Minister of Information in Yemen.
The list could go on and on.
I’m not saying that any of these people were taken out by the WHO or some international organisation that wanted lockdowns or to sell more vaccines. But what I am saying is that, in less transparent countries, Covid provided the perfect cover to get rid of a political opponent or undergo some type of regime or agenda change.
We have seen in the West how politicised the pandemic became and how politicians used the situation to their advantage as much as possible. Unfortunately for many of those Western politicians, killing people you don’t agree with is a little bit harder and more likely to get you put behind bars.
But in many third world countries, including the ones listed above in Africa, this happens a lot. And normally papers such as the Guardian would be rightly outraged. They would claim a coup had taken place or a political assassination.
However, many of the people who would normally be reporting and getting outraged about these deaths joined the cult of Covid. Suddenly, instead of investigating what happened, the political victor only had to write “maybe died of Covid” and Western media just reported “So sad, Covid is so terrible, if only they had been vaccinated”.
I’m sure some of the aforementioned deaths were due to some respiratory virus but maybe now that some ‘journalists’ are coming out of their Covid-induced reporting comas, they will start investigating whether all these politicians really died from Covid or were politically assassinated. The fact that African leaders were almost 8 times more likely to die from Covid than the general population might give them a clue.
Autopsy Studies of COVID-19 Illness Rule Out Extensive Myocarditis
Systematic Review of 50 Studies with 548 Hearts Does not Find Heart Inflammation as Significant Contributor to Death
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | March 28, 2023
From the original Baric study demonstrating beta-coronavirus loading in laboratory models can cause myocarditis to the first year of the COVID-19 crisis there has been a concern that SARS-CoV-2 infection in humans could cause heart inflammation. Epidemiologic studies relying on ICD codes triggered by routine cardiac troponin testing and or results implied that hospitalized patients were developing myocarditis with the respiratory illness. None of these studies were confirmed with clinical adjudication or autopsy. In 2020 the NCAA Big Ten athletic conference, US Military, and many other organizations screened for myocarditis on clinical grounds—handful of cases were found without any reported hospitalizations or deaths. Tuvali, et al from Israel, demonstrated that myocarditis in 2020 was not any more common that the low levels of baseline myocarditis from parvovirus, giant cell, and other conditions.
Almamlouk et al performed a systematic review of 50 autopsy studies and 548 hearts of patients who died of or with COVID-19. Usual post-mortem findings of tissue edema and necrosis were reported commonly. About two thirds of hearts had SARS-CoV-2 found in the tissue. However, none of the hearts had extensive myocarditis as the cause of death.
Almamlouk R, Kashour T, Obeidat S, Bois MC, Maleszewski JJ, Omrani OA, Tleyjeh R, Berbari E, Chakhachiro Z, Zein-Sabatto B, Gerberi D, Tleyjeh IM; Cardiac Autopsy in COVID-19 Study Group; Paniz Mondolfi AE, Finn AV, Duarte-Neto AN, Rapkiewicz AV, Frustaci A, Keresztesi AA, Hanley B, Märkl B, Lardi C, Bryce C, Lindner D, Aguiar D, Westermann D, Stroberg E, Duval EJ, Youd E, Bulfamante GP, Salmon I, Auer J, Maleszewski JJ, Hirschbühl K, Absil L, Barton LM, Ferraz da Silva LF, Moore L, Dolhnikoff M, Lammens M, Bois MC, Osborn M, Remmelink M, Nascimento Saldiva PH, Jorens PG, Craver R, Aparecida de Almeida Monteiro R, Scendoni R, Mukhopadhyay S, Suzuki T, Mauad T, Fracasso T, Grimes Z. COVID-19-Associated cardiac pathology at the postmortem evaluation: a collaborative systematic review. Clin Microbiol Infect. 2022 Aug;28(8):1066-1075. doi: 10.1016/j.cmi.2022.03.021. Epub 2022 Mar 23. PMID: 35339672; PMCID: PMC8941843.
In summary, this review should be the nail in the coffin in ruling out COVID-19 illness as a cause of fatal myocarditis. Despite the virus being found in heart tissue, it was not causing significant inflammation. The explosion of fatal myocarditis by report of unexplained cardiac arrest, adjudication, and at necropsy must have another explanation than SARS-CoV-2 infection. The only new proven cause of heart damage in human populations is COVID-19 vaccination. Vaccines used in America (Pfizer, Moderna, Janssen, Novavax) have been demonstrated to cause myocarditis as published in the peer-reviewed literature.
These observations call for immediate access to the CDC COVID-19 vaccine administration database for physicians and other providers who are managing the burgeoning caseload of myocarditis. This will be the only way the epidemiology of COVID-19 vaccine induced myocarditis can be studied and patient outcomes can be improved.
RFK, Jr. and CHD Sue Biden, Fauci for Alleged Censorship
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | March 28, 2023
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Children’s Health Defense (CHD) on Friday filed a class action lawsuit against President Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top administration officials and federal agencies, alleging they “waged a systematic, concerted campaign” to compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech.
Kennedy, CHD and Connie Sampognaro filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, Monroe Division, on behalf of all the more than 80% of Americans who access news from online news aggregators and social media companies, principally Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
The plaintiffs allege top-ranking government officials, along with an “ever-growing army of federal officers, at every level of the government” from the White House to the FBI, the CIA and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to lesser-well-known federal agencies of inducing those companies:
“to stifle viewpoints that the government disfavors, to suppress facts that the government does not want the public to hear, and to silence specific speakers — in every case critics of federal policy — whom the government has targeted by name.”
Kennedy, chairman and chief litigation counsel of CHD, said American Democracy itself is at stake in this case:
“U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said, ‘Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.’ It also violates the Constitution.
“The collaboration between the White House and health and intelligence agency bureaucrats to silence criticism of presidential policies is an assault on the most fundamental foundation stone of American Democracy.”
The lawsuit’s argument rests on the Norwood Principle, an “axiomatic,” or self-evident, principle of constitutional law that says the government “may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”
According to the plaintiffs, the U.S. government used the social media companies as a proxy to illegally censor free speech.
The complaint cites the now-weekly, ongoing disclosures of secret communications between social media companies and federal officials — in the “Twitter files,” other lawsuits and news reports — which revealed threats by Biden and other top officials against social media companies if they failed to aggressively censor.
The suit points to examples where the censorship campaign allegedly trampled First Amendment freedoms, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story, the COVID-19 Wuhan lab-leak theory and the suppression of facts and opinions about the COVID-19 vaccines.
The plaintiffs do not seek financial damages. Instead, they seek a declaration that these practices by federal agents violate the First Amendment and a nationwide injunction against the federal government’s effort to censor constitutionally protected online speech.
The complaint points to a Supreme Court decision that said social media platforms are “the modern public square” and argues that all Americans who access news online have a First Amendment right against censorship of protected speech in that public square.
Jed Rubenfeld, one of the attorneys arguing the case filed Friday, explained why the lawsuit was filed as a class action:
“Social media platforms are the modern public square. For years, the government has been pressuring, promoting, and inducing the companies that control that square to impose the same kind of censorship that the First Amendment prohibits.
“This lawsuit challenges that censorship campaign, and we hope to bring it to an end. The real victim is the public, which is why we’ve brought this suit as a class action on behalf of everyone who accesses news from social media.”
According to the complaint, when the administration violates the First Amendment of an entire class of people, the judiciary must step in to protect American’s constitutional rights:
“Apart from the Judiciary, no branch of our Government, and no other institution, can stop the current Administration’s systematic efforts to suppress speech through the conduit of social-media companies.
“Congress can’t, the Executive won’t, and States lack the power to do so. The fate of American free speech, as it has so often before, lies once again in the hands of the courts.”
The lawsuit also names Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Commerce, DHS, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and other individuals and agencies — 106 defendants in total.
‘The largest federally sanctioned censorship operation’ ever seen
According to the lawsuit, efforts by federal officials to induce social media platforms to censor speech began in 2020 with the suppression of the COVID-19 lab leak theory and reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Once President Biden took office in January 2021, senior White House officials reported the Biden team began “direct engagement” with social media companies to “clamp down” on speech the White House disfavored, which officials called “misinformation.”
Revelations would later prove the administration was asking social media companies to suppress not only putatively false speech but also speech it knew to be “wholly accurate” along with expressions of opinion.
This practice, it alleges, spread from the administration and through the entire government, becoming “a government-wide campaign to achieve through the intermediation of social media companies exactly the kind of content-based and viewpoint-based censorship of dissident political speech that the First Amendment prohibits.”
Similar allegations about this massive federal censorship campaign also so were alleged by the plaintiffs in the Missouri. v. Biden case, but this case introduces many new allegations.
Some, but not all, examples of government-coordinated suppression of free speech on social media cited in the complaint include the following:
- Substantial evidence of coordinated efforts by Fauci and others to suppress the lab-leak theory, which remains plausible and supported by evidence.
- Extensive email communication between Fauci and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, demonstrating Facebook and other social media companies adopted policies that identified any claims about the lab-leak hypothesis to be “false” and “debunked.”
- Facebook’s admission that its censorship of COVID-19-related speech, on supposed grounds of falsity, is based on what “public health experts have advised us.”
- Public statements by Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story as a result of communications from the FBI.
- Extensive public commentary by FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan about his work with social media companies and CISA to discuss suppression of election-related speech on social media.
- “Twitter files” documents on Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
- “Twitter files” documents demonstrating weekly meetings between agents from the FBI’s 80-agent social media task force and Twitter to discuss content suppression along with direct payments from the FBI to Twitter for compliance with requests.
- CISA’s work with the Center for Internet Security, a third-party group, to flag content, including particular individuals, for censorship on social media.
- “Twitter files” evidence about the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a vast network of high-level interactions with the federal government and social media platforms — which included proposals, ultimately adopted, for the U.S. government to establish its own “disinformation” board. One free-speech advocate described the EIP as “the largest federally-sanctioned censorship operation” he had ever seen.
- Documents demonstrating after the election, the EIP was transformed into the “Virality Project,” which was dedicated to “take action even against ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’ and ‘true posts which could fuel hesitancy.’”
- Threats by congressional representatives, senators and Biden to break up Big Tech if they did not improve censorship practices.
- Census Bureau documents describing work by its “Trust & Safety” team with social media platforms to “counter false information.”
- “Twitter files” documents, news reports, and documents received through Freedom of Information Act requests that demonstrated myriad, consistent communications with Facebook, Twitter and Google (YouTube) and numerous Biden administration officials named as defendants in the lawsuit including Murthy, former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, officials from the CDC, DHS, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, CISA, the U.S. State Department, the White House — including White House Counsel — and other agencies about how to take action against “misinformation” related to COVID-19.
This last set of communications included action against the so-called “Disinformation Dozen,” which includes Kennedy. According to the complaint, “Facebook itself has stated that the infamous ‘disinformation dozen’ claim has no factual support.”
Kennedy tweeted some of the evidence that the White House directly censored him.
The complaint alleges that the collusion between the administration, federal agencies and social media companies to suppress constitutionally protected free speech now also extends beyond the election and COVID-19-related commentary to include suppression of speech on topics such as climate change, “clean energy,” “gendered disinformation,” pro-life pregnancy resource centers and other topics.
It also alleges, based on research from the Media Research Center that identified hundreds of instances of censored critiques of Biden, that social media companies “have achieved astonishing success in muzzling public criticism of Joe Biden.”
It argues that the defendants’ power over social media gives them a “historically unprecedented power over public discourse in America — a power to control what hundreds of millions of people in this county can say, see, and hear.”
CHD President Mary Holland, who also serves as CHD general counsel, told The Defender :
“If Government can censor its critics, there is no atrocity it cannot commit. The public has been deprived of truthful, life-and-death information over the last three years. This lawsuit aims to have government censorship end, as it must, because it is unlawful under our constitution.”
The lawsuit asks the court to permanently enjoin them from, “taking any steps to demand, urge, pressure, or otherwise induce any social-media platform to censor, suppress, de-platform, suspend, shadow-ban, de-boost, restrict access to constitutionally protected speech, or take any other adverse action against any speaker, protected content or viewpoint expressed on social media.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
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From the Archives
Fact File : Civilian Internment 1939 – 1945
BBC – Compiled in 2003
Internment of civilian nationals belonging to opposing sides was carried out in varying degrees by all belligerent powers in World War Two. It was also the fate of those servicemen who found themselves in a neutral country.
At the outbreak of war there were around 80,000 potential enemy aliens in Britain who, it was feared, could be spies, or willing to assist Britain’s enemies in the event of an invasion. All Germans and Austrians over the age of 16 were called before special tribunals and were divided into one of three groups… continue
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