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How Did All The Madness Happen?

In retrospect, it was surprisingly easy. Here are some of the key features that explain what happened to our world.

By Bill Rice, Jr. | February 25, 2023

For almost three years I’ve been researching Covid topics. Based on this deep dive, I feel qualified to offer opinions on the question of how all the events of the last three years actually materialized.

Stated differently, how did all of this madness actually happen?

I quickly identified several big themes or pivotal events that help explain how so many nonsensical and harmful policies became a reality.

Readers can identify other features that that were important in getting us to where we are today. As always, feedback is appreciated and welcome.

Note: “They” = public health officials, establishment authority figures and leaders, myriad vested interests who were all “on the same page” when it comes to Covid policies and narratives.

My partial list:

They sold fear … hard, incessantly, shamelessly, brazenly, unapologetically.

In short, hyper fear of a novel (and “deadly”) virus was THE prerequisite for everything that followed. So how was this mass fear/panic actually produced?

The groundwork must have begun many months and years before the “Wuhan outbreak.”

Multiple “table top” exercises (like Event 201) were conducted to lay the groundwork for what would follow.

All the key “stakeholders” were recruited to participate in these events, often organized by groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Politicians, bureaucrats, key media members, physicians, scientists, and representatives of all they key agencies and key organizations were recruited and then participated in these exercises.

Main-Takeaway: Advance “buy in” had already been achieved regarding the key premises of these table-top planning exercises. An event like Covid-19 had already been predicted and this was the blueprint for dealing with this … if you were going to be a part of the enlightened group that was going to help save the world.

Significantly, no participants ever questioned any of the assumptions built-in to these exercises and when Covid was announced nobody wanted to challenge any of the responses.

Appeals to authority, groupthink, wanting to support the “current thing” (to protect your status and career advancement opportunities) helped ensure that no significant dissenting voices would come forward to thwart or block the agreed-upon course of action.

Logistical and legislative actions had already been implemented to ensure nothing or no one could block the response.  “Emergency orders” of bureaucrats trumped the need for legislative votes, which were not even required to implement policies that turned the world upside down.

It now seems that the Department of Defense played a larger role (than most realized) in making the key decisions.

Still, Fauci, Birx (a former military doctor), and Collins played a large role in orchestrating policy and getting the president to go along with their recommendations.

At some point, China’s response – locking down parts of their country – was endorsed as the bold and effective solution that should be used everywhere. The outbreak in northern Italy helped create more fear.

“There’s still time to stop the spread”

I’ve written many articles about “early spread.” However, one of the key planks explaining how what happened in America actually happened was the wide-spread belief that “late spread” of this virus was occurring. 

That is, the virus had not yet spread through America (and other countries) and thus it was wise and proactive to implement draconian lockdowns and non-pharmaceutical interventions to slow or stop the spread of the virus. The public was told that that they could “flatten the curve” with just two weeks of inconvenience.

Significantly, nobody in official capacity or the mainstream press ever questioned whether the virus may have already spread throughout much of the country or the world (even though case of Influenza like Illness were rampant in many sections of the country/world).

Getting physicians groups on board was key …

Organizers of the response, per their table top exercises and research, knew that physicians were among the “most trusted” people in the world. Officials quickly got all the leading medical associations to sign off on the grave threat.

Once the physicians groups were on board, the guidance or marketing became “listen to your physicians.”

The vast majority of leading scientists also quickly came on board … perhaps because they knew going against Anthony Fauci would jeopardize their future research grants.

No one in the mainstream press ever questioned the doomsday scenarios and indeed actively promoted the “this-must-be-done” narrative.

Censorship and cancellation of dissenting voices slowly and then rapidly became a priority. All social media, Big Tech companies and legacy media companies implemented “misinformation” guidelines that had rarely if ever been utilized.

Seeding, funding and establishing “misinformation” experts had actually begun months or years earlier. Almost all at once, these disinformation gurus sprung into action, further muzzling any significant “push back” against the authorized narrative.

The Ivy League (of course) led the way …

I think a key event, rarely mentioned or remembered, was the decision of the Ivy League to cancel its conference basketball tournament in early March. The Ivy League is supposedly a repository of the brightest minds in the world. Once the Ivy League did this, the NBA and other organizations (The PGA cancelled a big golf tournament after one round) quickly followed. The dominoes started to fall and the momentum was set in motion.

Lesson: Be wary of the actions of the Ivy League or elite colleges.

The federal government actually could not compel any citizen, state or city to comply with its “guidance” but this didn’t matter as governors and mayors almost all at once implemented their own, more specific, lockdown orders. Or: They simply followed the federal “guidance.”

In retrospect, it’s quite fascinating that almost 100 percent of state and local officials “signed off” on such draconian mandates. It’s also worth noting that Gov. Ron DeSantis, the one prominent politician who did challenge the narrative, became a political superstar almost overnight.

Spreading the money …

To make it more likely that hospitals and medical clinics signed off on the various treatment guidelines and protocols, the federal government came up with numerous financial incentives (payouts) to get the hospitals and doctors to go along with their program. So hospitals received extra money for treating a Covid patients or if someone was placed on a ventilator.

Congress enacted emergency funding to mollify many groups that might otherwise have suffered economic damages. New money was printed out of thin air. State governments were compensated for implementing the federal program.

Media organizations began to receive advertising funding for promoting Covid safety and, later promoting the vaccines.

Mandatory masking was ordered, which further promoted the requisite fear of the virus.

All big companies signed off on the proposals even while many of their smaller competitors were put out of business, which was fine with the big guys.

Somehow the churches put up no resistance. No meaningful organization put up any resistance.

Psychology truisms were important ….

How did the organizers get virtually 100-percent compliance from all key stakeholders? The answer is found in psychological and sociological reasons: Nobody in a “leadership” role wanted to be a contrarian as this would be dangerous to their careers.

“We are all in this together” was the implied or explicit message. This was a great event in history (like fighting WWII) and the only way to defeat the “enemy” (the virus) was for all citizens to act together … and do what the experts said must be done. In other words, comply.

The fear was ramped up to a new level thanks to 40 to 45-cycle PCR tests suddenly flooding the market (as well as mandatory testing).

The media daily reported “new cases” and “new deaths,” most of which probably weren’t caused by this novel coronavirus.

It was rarely if ever mentioned that the average age of death of a Covid victim was around 82 – which is at or beyond the average life expectancy.

Anyone who questioned the narrative was met with a rejoinder that “XXX,000” people have already died. Unspoken was the fact very few people personally knew one person under the age of 60 who had died, and these official deaths “from” Covid were massively inflated.

In late March 2020 through April 2020 massive spikes of deaths in certain cities like New York City, New Orleans and Detroit received massive media coverage.

Receiving virtually no media attention was the hundreds of other hospitals that were almost ghost towns.

The lockdowns lasted many months (even years) in some states … not “two weeks.”

Nobody questioned why the check-out girls at the “essential” super markets were not becoming casualties of Covid even though they came in close contact with hundreds of customers every day and touched every item the customer had put in their buggies.

Setting everyone up for ‘the most important thing’ – the vaccines 

At some point, the narrative (pushed by the experts) became that the only thing that would stop or end this pandemic was mass vaccination … so people just had to hold on until Pfizer and Moderna saved the world and ended the pandemic.

The vaccines arrived in “warp speed” and the world got a non-stop dose of this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” stories.

People were fired for not getting vaccinated or pressured into getting vaccinated (although after the non-stop fear campaign, 75 percent of the country was rushing to their pharmacy to get their shots). Plus, all the medical experts recommended this and everyone trusted their doctors.

At some point, officials no longer needed to pressure the public into “fighting Covid.” Citizens took up the charge themselves. America became an “us against them” society – and the skeptics were the mangy dog “thems.”

When people continued to get sick or infected after vaccination, the narrative became the shots lowered the likelihood you’d have a “severe case.”

The fact the vaccines did not work as advertised actually didn’t damper enthusiasm for the vaccines at all. The Covid vaccines became the only product in world history that was a colossal bust – but still generated record sales and demand.

A spike in “all-cause” deaths began days, weeks or months after the roll-out of the vaccines, but these spikes in deaths were either not reported or were blamed on Covid. Never mentioned was that the vaccines were supposed to make Covid deaths an impossibility.

The “narrative” that the vaccines were “safe and effective” – probably repeated a billion times – was never challenged by anyone in official capacity. In many states and cities, the lockdowns and restrictions were never challenged.

In Conclusion …

In a nutshell, Project Massive Fear worked. 

All the key stakeholders “bought in.” Even if some people eventually realized some of the narratives may have been dubious or false, they’d already risked their reputations and careers by zealously pushing or endorsing these narratives … so they weren’t going to suddenly admit they might have been wrong.

In retrospect, how “they” made all the madness happen was surprisingly easy.

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

Remdesivir Victims Grab Medical Centres By The Throat

New lawsuits have been filed against an array of Community Medical Centres in California over their covid care protocol…

By JJ Starky | The Stark Naked Brief | November 16, 2022

Gilead’s Remdesivir is a drug that has received a lot of criticism, and rightly so.

Prior to the pandemic, the World Health Organisation rejected its use due to poor trial studies abroad. NIAID-sponsored trials had likewise documented troubling issues. Reported adverse events were significant:

In short, a plethora of studies indicated it had potentially bizarre and fatal effects depending on the patient’s health. Patients who had a multi-organ impairment, for example, exhibited detrimental impacts on their renal function after the drug was administered. The FDA, nonetheless, granted its use under Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) when a study showed it reduced COVID hospitalisation duration by 4 days.

From that point on, Remdesivir became part of every COVID-19 protocol across the country. Reports from 2020 have since revealed that if a vulnerable patient (aged 65 and over) came into a medical centre and tested positive, Remdesivir was the treatment most likely to be offered. That patient would then be placed or declared in the ICU as an inpatient.

Here is where the story turns very sinister.

According to local sources in California, hospitals that took on inpatient complex cases could charge up to 144x more than an outpatient case. As soon as they treated these patients within their facilities, they could apply for reimbursement from Medicare. In other words, there was a clear financial incentive for hospitals to “over-treat” patients to maximise profits.

With these reports now circulating, 14 Californian residents living in the Fresno area have filed lawsuits against various medical centres. These include Community Regional Medical Center, Clovis Community Medical Center, and St. Agnes Medical Center.

One plaintiff’s claim about a medical centre’s covid protocol is particularly reprehensible:

“A patient comes to the hospital often for problem unrelated to COVID-19. They are told they have COVID-19 or ‘COVID pneumonia’. They are immediately separated from their loved ones, and usually declared to be in ICU, even though they are often just placed in room. They are told that the deadly Remdesivir is the only available and safe treatment. They are usually told that if they leave the Hospital against ‘medical advice’ they will void their insurance. They are placed on BiPap machine at high rate, making it difficult for them to breathe. Their hands are often tied down so they can‘t take the BiPap machine off their face. After their hands are tied down, and sometimes before, [a] psychiatrist comes to the room and determines that they are ‘agitated.’ This results in the protocol patient being placed on morphine or something similar. Sedating the patient makes it more difficult for them to communicate and more difficult for them to fight the effects of Remdesivir especially as it relates to their ability to breathe….”

All the lawsuits are being funded by the Arizona-based medical advocacy nonprofit Truth For Health Foundation. The organisation is run by Elizabeth Lee Vliet MD. Currently, the three aforementioned lawsuits will return to court for case management in January.

Note: These claims do not concern ‘End-Of-Life Care Protocols’. They concern COVID care protocols in general. We’ve seen similar claims made in the UK regarding Midazolam but again this concerned ‘End-Of-Life’ care. These lawsuits could well lift the thickly-blackened veil (for the wider masses) on the medical industry’s capacity to treat patients like cattle.

February 23, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Finally’ The Lancet Acknowledges Natural Immunity Superior to mRNA COVID Vaccines

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | February 17, 2023

Immunity acquired from past COVID-19 infection provides strong, lasting protection against severe outcomes from the illness at a level “as high if not higher” than that provided by mRNA vaccines, according to a study published Thursday in The Lancet.

Researchers conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of 65 studies worldwide, providing overwhelming evidence to support what many scientists, doctors and studies have said since early in the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The Lancet is finally acknowledging what doctors and scientists have been gaslit for saying for years — that natural immunity provides superior protection to experimental vaccines,” said Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman and chief litigation counsel for Children’s Health Defense.

“Only the tsunami of propaganda and censorship from the pharma/government biosecurity cartel and the controlled media persuaded the public that Pfizer and Moderna were better at protecting the human immune system than God and evolution,” he added.

The study found that immunity acquired from infection was often far more robust and consistently waned more slowly than the immunity from two doses of an mRNA vaccine.

The researchers found that natural immunity was at least 88.9% effective against severe disease, hospitalization and death for all COVID-19 variants 10 months after infection.

It also provided 78.6% protection against reinfection for all variants except omicron BA.1, for which protection was 45.3%.

At an October 2022 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meeting, the CDC presented data showing that vaccine-acquired immunity after two or three injections dropped to zero six months after injection, and then became negative.

The Lancet study stated that “although protection from reinfection from all variants wanes over time, our analysis of the available data suggests that the level of protection afforded by previous infection is at least as high, if not higher than that provided by two-dose vaccination using high-quality mRNA vaccines (Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech).”

The study was funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Authors included Dr. Christopher Murray, director of The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the Gates-funded institute that was “largely responsible for the notoriously exaggerated mortality calculations that overestimated COVID deaths by 20-fold at the COVID pandemic’s outset,” according to Kennedy.

The authors argued, based on their findings, that natural immunity should be recognized along with vaccines when authorities are considering restricting travel, access to venues and work based on immunization status.

Commenting on these conclusions, Dr. Meryl Nass, internist and epidemiologist, said:

“While framing this as an acknowledgment that natural immunity confers protection, what it is also doing is providing tacit agreement that government-imposed policies restricting travel are acceptable. It furthermore provides tacit approval of vaccine passports.”

The ‘cartel’s’ war on natural immunity

In October 2020, The Lancet published an article — “Scientific consensus on the COVID-19 pandemic: we need to act now” — by authors including CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, which was widely covered in the mainstream press. They stated that “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection” and that “the consequence of waning immunity would present a risk to vulnerable populations for the indefinite future.”

But in November 2021, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request forced the CDC to admit that it didn’t even collect data on natural immunity.

Then, in January 2022, the CDC was compelled to revise its position on natural immunity, acknowledging in a report that natural immunity against COVID-19 was at least three times as effective as vaccination at preventing people from becoming infected with the Delta variant.

The pharmaceutical companies were also aware of the benefits of naturally acquired immunity, although they suppressed that information, documents revealed.

In October 2021, Project Veritas exposed three Pfizer officials saying that antibodies lead to equal if not better protection against the virus compared to the vaccine, The Defender reported.

Later, in April 2022, Pfizer documents held by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and released under court order confirmed Pfizer knew natural immunity was as effective as the company’s COVID-19 vaccine at preventing severe illness, journalist Kim Iversen reported.

Most recently, the Twitter files revealed that a Pfizer board member who used to head the FDA lobbied Twitter to take action against a post accurately pointing out that natural immunity is superior to COVID-19 vaccination, The Epoch Times reported.

FOIA requests also revealed that Dr. Anthony Fauci and his boss, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, colluded to suppress the Great Barrington Declaration, which argues that natural immunity plays an important role in mitigating public harm from COVID-19, The Defender reported.

The vaccines are failing, which means we need more vaccines

Media that reported on the study, including NBCABC and U.S. News & World Report, continue to advocate for vaccination as the more important way to protect against severe disease and death from COVID-19.

This is despite the fact that even vaccine advocates Bill Gates and Fauci admitted that COVID-19 vaccines perform poorly.

In a paper published last month in Cell Host and Microbe, Fauci and his co-authors confirmed that the predominantly mucosal respiratory viruses, including influenza, coronaviruses, respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, and common colds “have not to date been effectively controlled by licensed or experimental vaccines.”

They concluded, “Durably protective vaccines against non-systemic mucosal respiratory viruses with high mortality rates have thus far eluded vaccine development efforts.”

Nass said that while it is quite significant for The Lancet to publish these findings about natural immunity, the authors’ framing, like the admissions by Gates and Fauci, “is intended to quietly, without apology, veer away from current COVID vaccines, while implying that more money is needed to develop new types of vaccines. No one made any mistakes. No one accepts any blame. Chris Murray never erred with his outlandish estimates. No, just send money and let us do the science.”


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.

February 18, 2023 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Major German Newspaper Reports Pfizer-BioNTech Fraud

eugyppius: a plague chronicle | February 18, 2023

Pfizer enrolled 44,000 people across 270 clinical sites in the phase 3 clinical trials for the Pfizer/BioNTech Comirnaty vaccine. The largest of these sites by far was number 1231 in Buenos Aires, under the direction of the pediatric infectious diseases specialist Fernando Polack. The Argentine operation appears to have been plagued by substantial irregularities and is the subject of an ongoing inquiry by the Argentinian parliament.

Yesterday, Welt reporter Elke Bodderas published a report shedding further light on what appear to be systematic efforts to cover up or reclassify adverse events among trial participants.

The centrepiece of their reporting is patient number 12312982, a 36 year-old Buenos Aires resident named Augusto Roux, who participated in the vaccine arm of the trial and experienced significant adverse reactions following both doses of the vaccine. His most severe symptoms followed the second jab; they included shortness of breath, nausea, fever and darkened urine, and required hospitalisation. Throughout both sets of reactions, he tested negative for Covid. A trial doctor judged his symptoms very likely to be an adverse reaction to vaccination, and there are compelling reasons to think he suffered pericarditis. Roux promptly dropped out of the trial, and his lawyers succeeded in gaining access to internal Pfizer records his case. These reveal that Buenos Aires researchers recorded Roux as testing positive for Covid following dose 1, despite multiple negative PCR tests. To cover for his September hospitalisation, meanwhile, they listed him as suffering from a “severe anxiety attack.”

Welt finds other irregularities in data from the the Argentine clinical site as well. Following the first dose at the end of August, they removed 53 trial participants; internal documents give nothing but vague, contradictory excuses for the purge. Following the second dose, Buenos Aires researchers removed a further 200 participants – two-thirds of all removals across the entire trial.

Irregularities appear to extend beyond the shady Buenos Aires operation. As a friend notes on Twitter, the fact that there were more deaths in the vaccine than the placebo arm of the Pfizer trial has always been considered an awkward coincidence by the fact checkers. Upon closer examination, though, it begins to look like deaths from severe vaccine injuries were actually what put the vaccine arm over the top:

[Pharmacology expert and head of the “Data Based Medicine” network and the vaccine injury support organisation React-19] David Healy has … questions about the trial beyond the Augusto Roux case and other events at Buenos Aires. He wonders about a total of 21 vaccine group deaths that are said to be “not due to vaccination.” In at least two of these deaths, this conclusion doesn’t seem to be fully justified. WELT has documents showing that patient No. 11621327 was found dead in his home three days after the second dose, apparently a stroke. Patient No. 11521497 died 20 days after vaccination, diagnosed with cardiac arrest. “According to the current understandings, these two cases would be attributed to vaccination,” says Berlin-based pharmaceutical specialist Susanne Wagner, “especially since the US health authority CDC is currently investigating strokes in vaccinated people and it is known that blood clots can trigger sudden deaths following vaccination.”

In response to Welt inquiries, Pfizer responded that “Regulatory authorities around the world have approved our Covid-19 vaccine. These approvals are based on a robust and independent assessment of the scientific data on quality, safety, and efficacy, including the phase 3 clinical trial.” Thomas Mertens, head of the German vaccine regulator STIKO, demanded clarification from Pfizer, while the Berlin Charité immunologist Andreas Radbruch suggested the pharmaceutical should be sanctioned to preserve faith in vaccination and trust in regulators.

I doubt very much that will happen.

February 18, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Mainstream Media Continues To Push False ‘COVID Heart’ Narrative To Explain Excess Deaths

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | February 17, 2023

CBS joins the chorus of mainstream media outlets promoting the false narrative that covid is the cause of a sharp increase in excess heart failure deaths around the world. The concept of “covid heart” has been thoroughly debunked by multiple studies, yet the lie continues to persist because of media disinformation.

An early report that set in motion fears of a Covid-heart disease connection was published in JAMA Cardiology on July 27, 2020. German researchers claimed that 78% of recently recovered Covid-19 patients had “abnormal” signs on their cardiac magnetic resonance scans and 60% showed signs of inflamed heart muscle, a condition known as myocarditis. Those astonishing numbers were covered in nearly 400 news outlets. The report has so far been viewed more than 900,000 times — a rarity for academic papers.

Soon after its publication, however, the paper was criticized for statistical and methodologic errors. It eventually underwent a long but much quieter correction that indicated that many of the abnormalities were only marginally more common among those recovering from Covid-19 than among similar control individuals who had not had Covid-19.

The assertion of the existence of covid heart serves a useful purpose, however, as it conveniently helps to distract from the very real threat of myocarditis caused by mRNA vaccines.  Studies show a direct connection between covid vaccination, boosters, and risk of heart failure, specifically in younger people. The corporate media continues to ignore these studies in favor of the covid heart claim.

The CBS report presents a correlation as proof of causation: The explosion in heart failure happened in parallel with the pandemic, therefore, they say it “must be covid” that is causing the damage. But there was one other event that also happened in parallel with the heart failure spike – The introduction of experimental mRNA vaccines which have never been used before.

In reality, there is no evidence of a significant increase in risk of heart problems from contraction of covid, and there are no studies yet that use unvaccinated people as a control group to determine if vaccines help or hurt a patient’s chances. Medical officials simply assume that the deaths of younger people are due to them being “less likely” to have been vaccinated. The complete absence of objective scientific analysis has contributed to a lack of understanding surrounding covid risks versus vaccine risks. Mainstream outlets have consistently proven they are only interested in repeating establishment positions and protecting the status quo.

Why don’t medical authorities use unvaccinated people as a control group for their observations? Why do they continue to promote assumptions rather than definitive evidence?  One can only theorize, but this behavior suggests a desire to hide certain findings and mislead the public rather than uncover the facts.

 

February 18, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , | Leave a comment

Critics of failed COVID policies call for pandemic reckoning

By Daniel Nuccio | Washington Examiner | February 15, 2023

Eight leading critics of the United States’s COVID-19 response have called for an investigation of the many failures of policy architects and key decision makers —  at institutions ranging from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration to universities and hospitals — over their repeated mishandling of the pandemic.

Given the immense harm inflicted on our society by the follies of a ruling class and their expert advisers who never failed to make a wrong decision when presented with the opportunity, as well as the fact that lives are still being destroyed by their lingering policies, we can only hope this blueprint does not go ignored.

Dubbing themselves the “Norfolk Group,” the association of scholars includes such prominent names as Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya, Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, UCSF physician Tracy Beth Høeg, Johns Hopkins University surgeon Marty Makary, and Indiana University School of Medicine immunologist Steven Templeton.

According to the Norfolk Group’s website, although initially organized by the Brownstone Institute in May 2022, the eight members of the group have since worked free from outside influence to draft the 80-page document they published earlier this year, “Questions for a COVID-19 Commission.”

Presented as a series of summaries and questions pertaining to key elements of U.S. COVID policy, the document, in effect, lays out a thorough indictment of the consistent incompetence of our ruling class while also raising concerns over the possible influence on policy by special interests such as teachers unions and drug companies.

Regarding natural immunity, the authors ask, “Why did the CDC downplay infection-acquired immunity, despite robust evidence for it?”

In respect to school closures, they ask, “Why were schools and universities closed despite early evidence about the enormous age-gradient in COVID-19 mortality … and early evidence that school closures would cause enormous collateral damage to the education and mental health of children and young adults?”

On that matter, they also wonder, “Why did the CDC incorporate policy language proposed by leaders of teachers unions on the scientific and public health aspects of school reopening without soliciting expertise of outside scientists in public health, infectious diseases, or other related fields?”

When discussing lockdowns, they inquire, “Why was so much influence on public health policy accorded to Drs. [Francis] Collins and [Anthony] Fauci? They control the largest source of infectious disease research funding in the world. How many infectious disease scientists, who should have been strong voices during the pandemic, kept quiet for fear of losing the research funding on which their livelihood depends?”

In their section on epidemiologic modeling, they demand, “Why did world leaders overly rely on models that made unverified assumptions about the pandemic’s trajectory rather than trying to verify these assumptions and their implications?”

When addressing COVID-19 vaccines, they raise questions such as, “Why did many organizations continue with mandates through summer and fall of 2021, despite data demonstrating both waning efficacy of symptomatic infection and reduced long term ability to curb viral spread?”

Regarding masks, they state, “Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the evidence that masks did little if anything to stop the spread of respiratory viruses was uncontroversial,” before summarizing a few studies demonstrating this and asking the obvious: “[W]hy did public health officials and agencies promote the idea that masks would be effective against SARS-CoV2?”

In its entirety, the Norfolk Group’s “Questions for a COVID-19 Commission” serves as a blueprint for the kind of investigation our country needs. Just don’t expect the Biden administration to do anything about it.

Daniel Nuccio holds master’s degrees in both psychology and biology. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in biology at Northern Illinois University studying host-microbe relationships. He is also a regular contributor to The College Fix where he writes about COVID, mental health, and other topics.

February 16, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

I Was on the NHS Covid Frontline But Quit When I Saw the Harm We Were Doing

BY DR. EASHWARRAN KOHILATHAS | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | FEBRUARY 14, 2023

In late 2019 and early 2020, I was asked to work on the front line in an emergency department to help with the ‘war effort’. We had no idea what was going on, apart from a few videos of the Chinese suddenly collapsing due to this new contagion. We were waiting for it to hit the U.K.

It hit, I saw what it did to people, they became unwell, x-ray x-ray x-ray, PPE, barriers, red lights, code words, panic, panic. Our world changed overnight, and my world changed especially. One minute we were told not to wear masks, the next moment it was made mandatory etc.

At this point, my sole focus was to protect myself and my family, so I began studying in order to do so successfully. I read papers during my breaks and at night before work. I reflected on what I saw at work and made a mental note of the real-life evidence.

The emergency department warped as time went on; I saw a lot of errors and mismanagement of resources. Patient care was being delayed, which led to staff burnout and medical errors. I could see that if this went on, people would needlessly die.

I knew something had to change. So in efforts to bring about some change, I wrote a book outlining how Toyota’s lean manufacturing methods could aid in improving patient safety as well as reducing costs in emergency departments. The book was called Saving A&E The Toyota Way. While researching for it, I learned a lot about healthcare infrastructure, artificial intelligence and preventative medicine. I knew what the national health situation was like; I knew we had to change as a species.

I presented that book to my hospital; my consultants liked it, but as an academic piece. That was not my intention, but hey ho, life goes on. There were more pressing matters at hand.

As the pandemic was progressing, I continued to research, write blogs and share what I saw. And I saw a lot of unscientific rubbish, unethical practices and poor care. The research papers said one thing, and yet we were doing something completely different. I knew very early on that not everyone needed to be jabbed. Something seemed fishy.

I worked in the emergency department and then paediatrics during the second peak. There was one child admitted due to COVID-19 who was later discharged. The ward was largely empty. And yet many doctors online were saying that COVID-19 was extremely dangerous to children. Nonsense.

Something was off: doctors weren’t being doctors, autopsies weren’t being done, the medical field was ignoring anyone who didn’t have COVID-19, and yet staff were doing TikTok dances. They asked me to join. I refused.

While all this was happening, I lost my grandma. The doctors didn’t want to see her in her home; her infection got bad; she didn’t want to go to the hospital; she became septic; she had to go in. I visited her after my shifts and fed her during my breaks.

I got the bad news from a doctor on the night she died. I asked the doctor if we could see her as a family, and he approved. We saw her one after the other, in tears and trying not to wake the other patients. Midway through, a matron I used to work with told us we couldn’t see her due to hospital policy and warned us that if we carried on she would call security on us. I told her we had approval already. She didn’t care. I saw evil in her eyes.

I asked her why she became a nurse. It was surely to treat and help people with compassion. She didn’t budge.  I said, “Go ahead and call security then.”

Thank God, we had enough time for our family to all say their goodbyes. I made sure I was the last one. I knew and saw that many others weren’t as lucky as I was. Many had to FaceTime their dying family members. We were treated so badly and healthcare professionals encouraged it. I also knew the evils that lurked inside mankind that day.

During paediatrics I asked my colleagues about masks and jabs. Why did we only allow one parent to see their newborn child while wearing a mask, whereas we could all snuggle up together in the staff room maskless? I’d get responses that sounded like parrots. “It’s the rules”; “Policy”; “To stop infection”; “We just have to do it”. No science. No debate. No conversation. No brain.

I later worked in a children’s psychiatric ward, and what I witnessed was truly backward. Many children, many of whom wanted to commit suicide, were placed in solitary confinement so that useless PCR swabs could be taken. Two would need to be done, and the nurses would sometimes forget to do these. I actually had to make them a table so they would remember. Children were required to be swabbed, but staff members who would go wherever they pleased over the weekend were not.

I told my seniors that none of this made sense and that children did not suffer with COVID-19, but they just told me it was policy. The hospital trust actually recruited people to make sure staff were changing into scrubs before work too. The worst of it was when we had a ward round on one occasion. In psychiatry, the patient would sit in the room with the rest of the staff. This particular time my consultant found out that the young person who was in the room with us wasn’t swabbed. After the patient had left, she made us all stay in the room and asked us to lock the door and find ways to disinfect the room. She was seriously considering bleaching all surfaces. In disbelief, I asked her if we had to all strip down naked and shower together too. I had work to do, so I left.

The mental health of children and adults during lockdown was the lowest I’ve ever seen it in my career. Children were arriving with life disruption-related issues such as trauma, abuse, etc. all related to lockdowns.

My next job was in general practice. I was working towards becoming a GP. I enjoyed understanding and caring for all sorts of patients. I’m a generalist at heart. However, this transition marked another difficult time for me.

On the last day of hospital medicine and just before the first day of GP work, a close work colleague of mine went to play football, collapsed and never woke up. Deep down, I knew what had caused this. I knew the link between mRNA technology and myocarditis early on.

I cried finding this information out. I cried in front of my mother for the first time in my adult life. I’m in fact tearing up typing this. My friend was killed.

I went to his parents’ house to give my condolences. His parents were there, broken. He recently proposed to his fiancée. She was there too, broken. We viewed his funeral via Zoom.

There’s a spot in the park I dip into regularly while looking up at the leaves. I am reminded of him when I do this. I am reminded of how lucky I am to be alive. Deep down, I was terrified about what this meant for people around the world.

Time went on, and I worked in general practice. There was discussion about making vaccinations mandatory for all healthcare workers. I knew this was not only unscientific and unethical, but murderous. Yet my colleagues didn’t seem to care. They were safe, I guess.

Regardless, I could not do anything about it, so I plodded along. I never stopped reading papers, writing, tweeting and sharing information. I saw patients; I saw jab-related side effects, missed periods, new-onset whole-body inflammation, hair loss, etc. I saw cognitive dissonance too.

All of a sudden, one day, my practice asked me for my full jab status. This puzzled me because the managers knew I had to be jabbed with everything else in order to work in all the other specialties. I knew they wanted to know only one result. Whether or not I had taken the COVID-19.

I didn’t lie. I told them the truth. The next day, in a panic, they asked me to stop seeing patients face-to-face. They had made a team decision as a team, without me, that I was no longer able to see patients. They felt that I was a threat to them and that I would scare them away.

I have never had COVID-19. I worked on my health and immunity every day, and I purposely breathed in the virus in the emergency department to stimulate T cells. I knew jabs increased one’s risk of infection and showed them evidence. I was the least risky person in the practice and I knew it.

They didn’t care. They didn’t care about evidence. They didn’t care about ethics, about immunity, about anything. I shrugged this off and called patients instead. I was ostracised at work and many colleagues acted coldly towards me. I was alone, but not lonely; I knew I had evidence on my side.

Many doctors had to take sick leave from work multiple times due to COVID-19. I had meetings discussing my jab status. A doctor with myocarditis on long-term meds post-jab urged me to get the shot. One said I was “too principled”, It was surreal.

They admitted it was all politics. I asked them why they didn’t read papers? I asked them about T cells. Silence.

I have wanted to become a doctor since the age of six. I love biology and enjoy helping people using my knowledge. But I understood that I was working in an environment that was harming people. I had many sleepless nights thinking about leaving.

One morning, after parking my car at work, I felt a warmth around my head. It had no words, but if it did, it told me that everything would be okay. As soon as I had that experience, my decision was made, and I felt light; a colossal weight had been lifted.

I asked to quit, and a few meetings later (carried out to make sure I wasn’t crazy), I left healthcare and then deregistered myself from the medical register. I wanted to be totally free. I needed to be.

The flat my girlfriend and I were planning to buy fell through. I was in financial turmoil. My mother cried for weeks. I was lost, but I was free. I wasn’t part of the killing system.

I did what I only knew – I began writing. I started a Patreon and am grateful for those who did and continue to contribute to that. But it wasn’t enough. I ended up being on the dole for just less than a year. The guy I had to call every two weeks was surprised I was once a doctor.

I began learning and researching everything I could to help people who had been jabbed. I knew what was going on and I didn’t want another pandemic to happen. I wanted to save as many lives as possible.

I would take my bike, cycle across the park to my local library, and work feverishly every day till close. Around this time, I was permanently suspended on Twitter for stating facts.

I see this as a blessing now, as it made me work even harder to produce something that could never be banned. A book. I worked and researched to make sure I got this book out before 2023.

I was blessed around this time to come into contact with Alex Mitchell. He introduced me to other people injured by the shots. I was determined to make sure their voices got heard. I included their stories in the book.

During this time, on my walks, I had many insights and extraordinary experiences that many people may not believe or might dismiss as crazy. I saw light, and I ended my fears.

Before the new year, I released my book, Calling Out The Shots. It goes through what genetic agents are, what they do to our bodies, how we can improve our immunity, ways we may mitigate jab damage and what we need to do as a society to heal.

The book marks my first gift to the world. I am working on many more and other projects. I will fight for humanity until my final breath.

Dr. Eashwarran Kohilathas is a medical doctor, qualified personal trainer and author who aims to help people achieve physiological, psychological and spiritual freedom. This article first appeared as a Twitter thread.

February 16, 2023 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Deaths in the pandemic

The iatrogenesis hypothesis

By Norman Fenton and Martin Neil | Where are the numbers? | February 14, 2023

It has long been hypothesised that deadly health policies were a major factor in the wave of deaths attributed to covid in the Spring of 2020. This is also referred to as the iatrogenesis hypothesis.

Jonathan Engler looked at what had happened in Lombardy, Italy and concluded that many of the “deaths which occurred in the aftermath of the cataclysmic changes to the delivery of healthcare — especially of the frail and elderly — might have been caused by policy, rather than virus.” Anna Farrow made a similar convincing case that this happened in Canada while @NellyTells reports it was happening in Spain. Likewise, there has been a long-term concern that excessive use of Midazolam was a contributing factor in the UK and the Daily Mail newspaper reported on it as long ago as July 2020.

NG163 Death Protocol

More detailed evidence to support the iatrogenesis hypothesis for the UK (and elsewhere) has been provided in twitter threads by Jikkyleaks and this recent thread is particularly revealing… continue

February 16, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Wartime Parallels: Iraq and Covid

By Ramesh Thakur | Brownstone Institute | February 15, 2023

At the time of the Iraq war, I was a senior UN official yet publicly critical of the drive to war before and during the war, including in the pages of the esteemed International Herald Tribune. (The demise of that paper was a sad loss to the world of high quality international journalism.)

The resort to emotional blackmail by the warmongers, where critics of the impending war were tarred for standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Butcher of Baghdad, was instructive. Of course, very soon “We, the critics” were amply vindicated.

The whole episode left me with two conclusions. First, the resort to emotional arguments and moral blackmail generally implies that they have little reasoned argument and evidence to support their case and are deflecting to bluster instead. Second, whenever we are presented with excitable exclamation marks (Saddam Hussein already has weapons of mass destruction (WMD)! He can hit us with WMD in just 45 minutes! Coronavirus could be more cataclysmic than the Spanish flu! The sky is falling!), it is a very good idea to substitute sceptical question marks instead:

  • Why would Saddam do that?
  • Where is your evidence?
  • What is your end goal?
  • Are the proposed means proportionate to that goal?
  • What will be the human and economic cost?
  • How long will this take?
  • Will you recognize success?
  • What is your exit strategy?
  • What are the checks against mission creep?

Instead of such healthy scepticism to force a dose of reality and calm down the agitated excitement, the coronavirus panic has also shown a remarkable triumph of the Henny Penny (or Chicken Little) tunnel vision. Thinking back to that as the coronavirus madness took hold of the world in 2020, I was surprised at how close the fit was to the Iraq war analogy once I thought the whole thing through. The lockdown, mask and vaccine mandates in particular revealed seven disturbing echoes of the 2003 Iraq War syndrome.

The first parallel is with respect to threat inflation. In the “Foreword” to the “dodgy dossier” of September 2002, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote: Saddam Hussein’s “military planning allows for some of the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them.” This turned out to be disinformation that was vital to rally the party, Parliament and the nation behind the decision to go to war.

British intelligence services had informed Blair in April 2002 (a year before the war) that Saddam Hussein had no nuclear weapons and any other WMD would be “very, very small.” The Chilcot Inquiry was told a decade later that Blair accepted this but converted to George W. Bush’s way of thinking after a subsequent visit to the US president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Similarly, to gain public backing for the degree of state intrusion into peoples’ private lives and control over nations’ economic activities without precedent even in wartime, the immediacy, gravity and magnitude of the coronavirus threat had to be made apocalyptic.

SARS-CoV-2 is not remotely as lethal as the Spanish flu of 1918–19 that killed the fit and young as virulently as the elderly and infirm. It infected 500 million people (one third of the world’s population) and killed 50 million, equivalent to around 250 million dead today. Our health systems are infinitely better than a century ago. Yet authorities did not close down whole societies and economies in 1918. In other deadly pandemic episodes also we suffered but endured.

To overcome these hesitations of history and experience, the threat from SARS-CoV-2 had to be inflated beyond all previous calamities in order to panic countries into drastic action. This was successfully done by Neil Ferguson’s catastrophist Imperial College London model of 16 March 2020 that is by now widely discredited. It deserves to acquire a notoriety equivalent to Iraq’s dodgy dossier and Ferguson’s mortality estimates should be judged to be the equivalent of Blair’s 45 minutes to Saddam’s WMD.

The second echo comes from the thinness of evidence. The infamous Downing Street Memorandum of 23 July 2002 made it clear that the US administration was determined to go to war and military action was inevitable. For their part, however, British officials did not believe there was sufficient legal justification: there was no recent evidence of Iraqi complicity with international terrorism, Saddam’s WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran, and he was not a threat to his neighbours. It was necessary to create the conditions that would make an invasion legal, hence “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” and the US “had already begun ‘spikes of activity’ to put pressure on the regime.”

With Covid-19, similarly, instead of evidence-based policy, many governments resorted to policy-based evidence to justify lockdowns, masks and vaccines.

The third similarity is in the denigration of critics who had the temerity to query the evidence. Those who questioned the lack of evidence to invade Iraq were demonized as apologists for the Butcher of Baghdad. Those who asked for evidence to justify the biggest expansion of state power in Western political history were shamed as wanting to kill granny. Most recently we learnt of how a unit of British intelligence kept tabs on the writings of journalists like Toby Young and Peter Hitchens because of their critical stance on government policies.

The fourth parallel is in the dismissal of collateral harm as exaggerated, speculative, without evidence, motivated, etc. Yet evidence continues to mount on the many different pathways through which the Grim Reaper claims his growing mass of victims from the panicked responses to Covid.

The fifth echo is in the lack of a clear exit strategy. Instead of a quick victory in Iraq followed by consolidated democratic regimes in a stable region and an orderly withdrawal, the US found itself stuck in a quagmire and eventually went back home an exhausted and vanquished conqueror. Almost all lockdown governments are now struggling with public justifications to declare victory and lift the lockdown. Modellers still want none of it and the apocalyptic warnings keep coming back, despite mounting evidence of a policy-invariant gradual decline in the spike in cases and deaths around the world. Covid is now endemic. The cognitive dissonance in Covid policy has been starkly evident in the continuation of the travel ban on unvaccinated visitors to the US well after authorities had been compelled to concede vaccines had no appreciable impact on infection and transmission.

Another resemblance is mission creep. One big reason for the self-created exit trap is that the original mission of flattening the curve so the health system could cope with a slowed spread of the virus, steadily morphed into the more ambitious but impossible mission of eliminating the virus. Or, to change metaphors, the goalposts didn’t just keep shifting. They were dug out and replanted in an entirely new paddock in an altogether different location.

Seventh and finally, like the US media in 2003, most mainstream media commentators across the democratic West abandoned critical inquisitiveness in 2020 to become cheerleaders for the “war on corona.” Except the censorship and suppression of dissenting voices seems to have been far, far worse in the last three years than was the case in 2003, with possibly illegal collusion between governments and Big Tech.

Ramesh Thakur, a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.

February 15, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

WHO Abandons Covid Origins Investigation, Saying China Isn’t Cooperating. But What About America?

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | FEBRUARY 14, 2023

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has quietly abandoned its investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing ongoing challenges over attempts to conduct crucial studies in China. Nature has the story.

Researchers say they are disappointed that the investigation isn’t going ahead, because understanding how the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 first infected people is important for preventing future outbreaks. But without access to China, there is little that the WHO can do to advance the studies, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. “Their hands are really tied.”

In January 2021, an international team of experts convened by the WHO travelled to Wuhan, China, where the virus that causes COVID-19 was first detected. Together with Chinese researchers, the team reviewed evidence on when and how the virus might have emerged, as part of phase one. The team released a report in March that year outlining four possible scenarios, the most likely being that SARS-CoV-2 spread from bats to people, possibly through an intermediate species. Phase one was designed to lay the groundwork for a second phase of in-depth studies to pin down exactly what happened in China and elsewhere.

But two years since that high-profile trip, the WHO has abandoned its phase-two plans. “There is no phase two,” Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, told Nature. The WHO planned for work to be done in phases, she said, but “that plan has changed”. “The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins,” she said.

Researchers are undertaking some work to pin down a timeline of the virus’s initial spread. This includes efforts to trap bats in regions bordering China in search of viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2; experimental studies to help narrow down which animals are susceptible to the virus and could be hosts; and testing of archived wastewater and blood samples collected around the world in late 2019 and early 2020. But researchers say that too much time has passed to gather some of the data needed to pinpoint where the virus originated.

Many researchers aren’t surprised the WHO’s plans have been thwarted. In early 2020, members of then US president Donald Trump’s administration made unsubstantiated claims that the virus had originated in a Chinese laboratory, and US intelligence officials later said they had begun investigations. The city of Wuhan is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a high-security lab that works on coronaviruses. Chinese officials questioned whether the virus originated inside the country’s borders.

In the midst of simmering hostility between the two superpowers, WHO member states requested in May 2020 that the agency put together a science-led effort to identify how the pandemic started. Although China agreed to the mission, tensions were high by the time the WHO group left for Wuhan, and engagement with China quickly unravelled after the group returned.

In its March 2021 report, the team concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus accidentally escaped from a laboratory. But the inclusion of the lab-incident scenario in the final report was a key point of contention for Chinese researchers and officials, says Dominic Dwyer, a virologist at New South Wales Health Pathology in Sydney, who was a member of the WHO team.

That July, the WHO sent a circular to member states outlining how it planned to advance origins studies. Proposed steps included assessing wild-animal markets in and around Wuhan and the farms that supplied those markets, as well as audits of labs in the area where the first cases were identified.

But Chinese officials rejected the WHO’s plans, taking particular issue with the proposal to investigate lab breaches. Zhao Lijian, the spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, said the WHO proposal was not agreed by all member states, and that the second phase should not focus on pathways the mission report had already deemed extremely unlikely.

The Nature report adds that outside the formal WHO process some studies have gone ahead. In May 2022, researchers in China published the results of an analysis of donor blood supplied to the Wuhan Blood Centre before December 2019. After screening more than 88,000 samples collected between September 1st and December 31st 2019, they did not find any SARS-CoV-2-blocking antibodies in the samples (though did find some non-neutralising antibodies, which they imply are false positives due to cross-reaction or other issues). A second study, by the Chinese CDC in February 2022, looked at samples collected at the Huanan wet market in January and February 2020 and found evidence of the virus among humans but not among animals, confirming the early outbreak but casting doubt on the idea of a zoonotic spillover event at the market.

We may not be inclined to believe these Chinese findings. But we should note that they are more than the U.S. has managed to put out in the same period. The U.S. published one study of archived Red Cross blood in November 2020, which found 39 antibody-positive serum samples (2%) collected December 13th-16th 2019 in California, Washington and Oregon. No further studies of early spread in America have appeared. On this evidence, of course, the virus is more likely to have been circulating in the U.S. than Wuhan during autumn 2019. Certainly, the Wuhan data may not be trustworthy, or the U.S. data may be mistaken. But clearly there is good reason to look into what was going on in America as well as China. Note that we still don’t have a single wastewater study from the U.S. to give an indication of when in 2019 the virus may have begun circulating in different parts of the country (to be fair, we also don’t have any wastewater studies from China). A wastewater study from Brazil turned positive as of November 27th 2019, suggesting extensive community spread in the Americas during that month.

We also still have no idea what U.S. scientists were working on in relation to SARS-like viruses at the onset of the pandemic. Yet we know that in collaborative coronavirus projects with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the genetic engineering of the virus was typically stated to be done in the U.S., not China. We also know that Jeffrey Sachs disbanded the Covid origins taskforce which formed part of the Lancet Covid commission he was chairing because he perceived severe conflicts of interest and a basic lack of cooperation from U.S. scientists.

Concerns about a U.S. cover-up are growing. The latest senior figure to call for an investigation into the role of the U.S. in the origin of the virus is Matt Pottinger, the Deputy National Security Adviser at the start of the pandemic, who recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “China hasn’t been the only problem”.

In the early days of the pandemic, a small group of Western virologists came together to consider the pandemic’s origin. Emails that eventually came to light revealed their plan to push the public conversation away from the lab-accident hypothesis and toward the natural-origins explanation. In a now infamous February 2020 letter in the Lancet, and in an equally problematic letter in Nature Medicine the next month, some of these scientists labelled any questions about a possible lab origin as “conspiracy theories”, even though they lacked evidence to dismiss the lab-leak hypothesis.

But in September 2021, a leaked Defense Department document revealed that some of the same scientists had worked together, along with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, on a 2018 proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Their project? Genetically engineering rare gain-of-function features, called furin cleavage sites, into SARS-like viruses in their possession.

To its credit, DARPA didn’t fund that research, but it was highly significant — or spectacularly coincidental — that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, containing this precise feature never-before-seen in any SARS-like virus, began infecting people in Wuhan the next year. Scientists who had called the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy had failed to disclose that the lethal virus sweeping the world was eerily similar to the one they had wanted to create.

China’s systematic efforts to block meaningful investigation doesn’t mean that the U.S. should throw up its arms. In fact, both the Trump and Biden administrations have taken action to dig further. The Trump administration began asking questions internally. Early in his tenure, President Biden also authorised a limited, 90-day review of this issue by America’s intelligence agencies. It’s fair to say that both administrations did something and that neither has done enough.

Earlier this year, an international group of scientists and former national security officials — including us — signed an open letter detailing some of the failures of scientific journals and news organisations and calling for greater accountability. What we now need are bipartisan, evidence-based hearings asking the toughest questions about the pandemic’s origins. Congress must carefully look at China’s transgressions as well as our own shortcomings.

The obfuscation by the Chinese is obviously very poor form and only increases suspicions they are hiding something. However, what the Nature report – and the WHO, based on that report – fail to acknowledge is that we don’t need Chinese cooperation to investigate what U.S. scientists and officials can tell us about the origin of the virus and early spread in America. Investigating this properly should have begun long ago, and even now it is not too late. The politicians need to compel the scientists and officials to reveal what they know.

February 14, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Long on Covid, terrifyingly short on reason

By Niall McCrae | TCW Defending Freedom | February 14, 2023

As far as the mainstream media goes, the vaccine-injured are unicorns. Their symptoms are delusional or fabricated for ‘anti-vax’ activism. But the real fantasy is in the purported ‘miracle of science’ of the vaccine – novel mRNA technology that is proving to be anything but safe and effective. Any medical treatment has risks as well as benefits, which should have been properly assessed in clinical trials before mass vaccination began.

So strong is faith in heroic medicine that many recipients cannot begin to connect their subsequent maladies to the jabs. A classic of the genre is the latest column by Scottish journalist Emma Cowing in the Daily Mail. ‘A miserable way to find you CAN’T avoid Covid’ is the title of Cowing’s account of catching Covid-19 for the first time.

‘Aware I had recently been in the company of someone who had ended up with Covid, I decided to take a test, and watched with horror as that treacherous first line turned red . . . It wasn’t the first time I had been in contact with people who had tested positive, and yet each time I had got away scot free. I might have known that such pride comes before two lines on a plastic test kit.’

The lateral flow test taken by Cowing is as dubious as the concept of asymptomatic transmission, or indeed of the virus itself. Was there really a coronavirus with the same symptoms and mortality rate of influenza, which almost completely replaced influenza in the last three years? Despite such similarities, the approach taken to Covid-19 was unprecedented: lockdown, school closure, masks and universal vaccination, all pushed by propagandised fear. Just as Dr Mike Yeadon detailed at TCW’s Celebration of Dissent last Thursday. Cowing however believes that we let our guard down too early: ‘The truth is, we have all got pretty complacent. Just a fortnight ago I was in London, and, despite travelling everywhere by Tube, didn’t even think to wear a mask. I think nothing of hugging friends, or sitting in meetings with doors closed and no windows open.’

It’s always a trip to London, isn’t it? City of the medieval Great Plague, and now the Great Unwashed on public transport. As a journalist, Cowing was able to identify her pathogen with specificity: ‘A little research tells me that what I have is likely the relatively new “Kraken” strain, an Omicron sub-variant that took hold in the US and has now made its way over here. It is particularly contagious and fast-moving.’

I’m not sure that Cowing’s research went beyond the archives of her own newspaper. Kraken hasn’t caught the public imagination, a clear sign of Covid-19 fatigue. But for Cowing, the analogy is validated by her debilitation: ‘I have a range of symptoms that I never knew were features of Covid. Cramp in my legs and feet, excruciating pain in my lower back that saw me lying on the floor for an hour in search of relief, a burning pain in my arms and legs. Even my hair hurts.’

Hardly able to work at home, Cowing took days to write her short piece. She is trying to keep her nasty symptoms to herself. ‘All conversations with my husband, who is still testing negative, have taken place from behind a door and I have confined myself to one bedroom, with occasional trips to the kitchen for food and water while wearing a mask, careful to wash my hands and disinfect anything I touch.’

Ironically, the likes of Cowing would regard Covid-19 sceptics as delusional, and the claimed vaccine-injured as hypochondriacal. The latter would not doubt that Cowing’s apparently neurological symptoms are painful and distressing. But it’s a shame that this is not reciprocated. And more importantly for Cowing, she needs to break the spell that clouds her comprehension of why she is so ill. Instead, Cowing doubles down on Covid-19 narrative: ‘Yes, Covid-19, in 2023, even for the quadruple-vaxxed like myself, is no joke.’ Because of the vaccine, Cowing has less to fear than those afflicted by the initial outbreak, when there was no relief by needle, and ‘when many young, healthy individuals were ending up in intensive care’.

Like millions of others who believe that it is somehow a positive to contract the very illness that they were supposedly inoculated against, Cowing worships at the altar of the pharma gods. Her blind faith, her ‘doubling down’ and the cognitive dissonance it exposes, is terrifying.

‘Thank goodness for the scientists who created the vaccine. It is because of them that normal life has been able to go on at all. And as I pop some more painkillers and settle down for another nap, I have never felt more grateful.’

A rational response by the quadruple-jabbed Cowing would be to report her symptoms on the Yellow Card system, as these are not the effects normally expected of an endemic respiratory virus, but more likely adverse reaction to the injections. After all the hubris, it is time for belated backtracking by journalists who have failed in their fundamental role of investigating and telling the truth.

February 14, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment