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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

Covid Narratives ‘By the Numbers’

These numbers are estimates, but I think they make my point.

By Bill Rice, Jr. | February 13, 2023

As far as I am concerned, here are the Covid numbers that matter most.

N = 40,000 – Estimated number of mainstream “journalists” in America.

N = 0 – Estimated number of these journalists who have published a major story questioning any of the authorized Covid narratives.*

Note: For the purposes of this article, I’m not counting journalists who work for, say, Fox News or The Epoch Times as “mainstream journalists.” If I did, the above number would not be 0 … but it would still be minuscule.

*At the end of this article, I list 29 elements of the “authorized Covid narrative.”

N = 100,000 – Estimated number of credentialed “scientists” in America. (Note: About 2,000 per state).

N = 95,000 – Estimated number of credentialed scientists in America who support all the Covid narratives.

N = 5,000 – Estimated number of contrarian scientists who do not support all the Covid narratives.

N = 0 – Number of scientists who support the Covid narrative who have been banned by social media.

N = 2,500 – Estimated number of contrarian scientists who do not support the narrative who have been banned by different social media platforms (50 percent).

N = 1.074 million – Estimated number of active physicians in the U.S.

N = 5,000 – Estimated number of active physicians who have publicly disagreed with key parts of the authorized Covid narrative. (About 100 physicians in each state).

N = 99.995 percent – Approximate percentage of active U.S. physicians who have been unwilling to speak out against any of the authorized Covid narratives. (Approximately 0.046 percent have been willing to speak out publicly against the authorized narrative).

N = 600 – Approximate number of U.S. Senators and Congressmen who have served in Congress since the official pandemic began.

N = 5 – Approximate number of members of Congress who have publicly and consistently challenged key aspects of the authorized Covid narrative. (0.083 percent of Congress – less than 1 percent).

N = 0 – Number of Covid tribunals or Commissions authorized by U.S. government to date.

N = 60 percent – Approximate number of federal politicians who would have to support such tribunals to create them.

N = 500 – Approximate number of Substack authors who routinely challenge elements of the authorized Covid narrative.

N = 5 million – Approximate number of regular readers of “Covid contrarian” Substack sites.

N = 300 – Approximate number of “mainstream” press organizations in America (about 250 large newspapers and about 50 national sites).

N = 250 million – Approximate number of Americans who get Covid stories from “mainstream” news sources.

N = 2,040 – Estimated number of coroner or medical examiner officials/offices in the U.S. in 2018.

N = 0 – Estimated number of coroners or public medical examiners who have spoken out publicly about vaccine injuries or deaths.

N = 500 – Number of Fortune 500 companies.

N = 0 – Number of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies who publicly challenged elements of the authorized Covid narrative.

Expressed differently …

About 0-in-40,000 mainstream journalists and editors (not counting a few at Fox News or The Epoch Times) are willing to speak out against the official Covid narrative.

About 0-in-2,040 medical examiners/coroners are willing to speak out about possible vaccine deaths and injuries.

About 0-in-500 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies criticized elements of the official Covid narratives.

About 1-in-200 physicians have been willing to challenge the authorized Covid narratives.

About 1-in-120 elected members of Congress have been willing to challenge at least some elements of the authorized Covid narrative.

As a percentage …

  • Zero percent of “mainstream” journalists have challenged parts of the official Covid narrative.
  • Zero percent of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies challenged parts of the official Covid narrative.
  • Zero percent of coroners and medical examiners have raised any questions about an increase in all-cause deaths.
  • Fewer than 1 percent of the members of Congress have spoken out in a conspicuous and consistent manner.
  • Zero percent of Democratic politicians at the state or national level have spoken out against parts of the Covid narrative.

On the other hand …

  • Maybe 75 percent of “alternative media” or Substack journalists who write about Covid have challenged aspects of the authorized Covid narrative.

The Question …

Given the above estimates, what’s the probability something substantial or meaningful will be done to expose elements of the Covid narrative as false or even as “crimes against humanity?”

I would say the probability of this happening is very close to zero percent.

I would also argue that maybe 80 percent of Americans don’t care or want any of the possible Covid lies or frauds exposed as such.

However, I would argue that maybe 20 percent of Americans do care passionately about seeing “the truth” exposed, and would like to see the officials who are most guilty/responsible exposed and punished.

What all of the above tells me is …

What this thought exercise (or “by-the-numbers” presentation) shows is that Congress, elected officials, the mainstream press, corporate leaders and almost all physicians and scientists do not care at all about the views of approximately one-fifth of the country. 

This also tells me that the only things that really matters are the views of the mainstream press and the politicians. Really, the only organizations that could hold substantive hearings or tribunals that would “have teeth” and make a difference (change narratives) are official elected office holders.

I’ve always assumed politicians DO or will respond to pressure from voters or the public … but the only pressure or media they pay attention to is the “mainstream” media reports … so the mainstream media does matter.

So far at least, the reporting and commentary of “the alternative” media – which is actually sane and still capable of critical thinking and is still willing to be skeptical of pronouncements of officials and experts … and which is growing in size  – doesn’t matter.

Basically, a significant population cohort (20 percent, per my estimate) is being ignored by officials and the mainstream press, but is still fighting as hard as they can to bring attention to issues that the people and organizations “that matter” still don’t want to discuss or investigate.

In short, the dichotomy of views on “what’s important” – and what should change or be exposed regarding Covid topics – is nothing short of stunning.

“Our” side is definitely in the minority, but 20 percent of people is still a significant percentage of the population.

In a nutshell, the mainstream press, politicians, bureaucrats, corporate leaders, physicians, scientists, coroners, etc. hold views that are 180-degrees opposite the views of 20 percent of the country.

Re-stated: All the important people and organizations think nothing like myself and probably 99 percent of my readers … or the millions of readers who now visit Substack or “alternative media” sites every day.

All I can say is that all of this is… bizarre.

***

Defining the ‘Authorized Covid Narrative’ …

Above, I make many references to organizations or groups that supported all or most elements of the “authorized Covid narrative.” So what are the parts of the “authorized Covid narratives?”

Here’s a quick effort to define these elements. Most of these statements are still considered to be “settled science.” For what it’s worth, I would argue that every one of these ‘authorized” narratives is/was dead wrong.

N = 29 – Elements of the “authorized Covid narrative” (Partial list).

N = 0 – Groups or individuals cited above who challenged or disputed any of the following statements.

The Covid vaccines are “safe” – i.e. they don’t produce adverse reactions and/or have never led to any deaths. Anyone who died after a vaccine didn’t die from the vaccine.

The Covid vaccines are “effective” – they prevent infection and transmission.

Vaccines are superior to natural immunity at preventing infection and spread.

Alternative treatments like ivermectin or HCQ do not work and should not be allowed or prescribed by doctors. (C19 is not a “treatable” illness via existing medications).

Asymptomatic spread is a major cause of transmission. (People who don’t have symptoms are a major or important avenue of virus spread).

The virus can be spread from physical surfaces.

The virus can be easily spread outdoors.

Masks prevent the spread of the virus and prevent people from getting infected … and should thus be mandated.

C19 poses a serious mortality risk to everyone, including children and healthy people under the age of 60.

Testing of non-symptomatic people is an excellent way to prevent infections and spread and should either be mandatory or strongly encouraged by employers and officials.

Remdesivir saves lives and should be given to many people.

More than one million Americans have died “from” Covid.

There has NOT been an increase in “excess” mortality in America in the last two years. And if there has been, the cause of these deaths must be Covid – even after widespread administration of Covid vaccines, which are 95 percent effective at preventing severe cases and deaths.

There has been no increase in deaths of people 18 to 64.

There has been no increase in deaths from young people playing sports.

Lockdowns prevented cases and thus serious infections and deaths. Absent lockdowns, millions more people in the world would have died from Covid.

Closing schools saved countless lives. Ceasing routine medical procedures and diagnostic surgeries saved many lives. Cancelling church services saved many lives. Not allowing family members to visit their loved ones in the hospital or nursing home saved countless lives.

Closing non-essential businesses saved the economy by preventing countless Covid cases and deaths.

Lockdowns and business closings did not increase suicides, suicide attempts, drug overdoses, depression, alcohol abuse or domestic abuse …. or, if they did, dying from suicide or drug overdose is better than dying from Covid.

Trillions of dollars in Covid expenditures did not accelerate or cause inflation.

Censorship of “disinformation” has saved countless lives.

Cancelling sporting events, concerts, plays, family reunions and keeping people from traveling to see family saved countless lives.

The novel coronavirus did not begin to spread around the world until “latter January” 2020. There were zero cases of Covid in communities in America before January 2020.

Everyone who had Covid symptoms before mid-January 2020 had the flu or some other virus, but not Covid, because Covid was not spreading until February 2020.

Wide-spread use of ventilators were very important to saving lives. Officials saved countless lives by getting more ventilators in hospitals and doctors saved countless lives by making sure they put patients on ventilators.

Boosters save lives.

People who have been vaccinated or boosted get Covid far less often than people who do not.

If you have been vaccinated or boosted, your case of Covid will be less severe than people who have never received a shot.

February 13, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

The Silencing of the Inconvenient Truth About Face Masks

BY DR GARY SIDLEY | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | FEBRUARY 13, 2023

How might strong advocates of community masking – who happen to occupy positions within the hierarchy that provide opportunities to influence research activity – go about achieving their aims? I suggest it would include some combination of discouraging the undertaking of robust research about mask effectiveness and potential harms, impeding and delaying the publication of unfavourable findings, and undermining the value of rigorous empirical science. A look at the history of the Cochrane mask reviews seems to offer an illuminating case study of these insidious forces in action.

Cochrane reviews are widely recognised to provide the most authoritative and comprehensive evaluation of the scientific evidence regarding specific healthcare interventions, and their raison d’être is to inform the decision-making process. On January 30th 2023, the latest version of the Cochrane review of the effectiveness of physical interventions (including masks) in reducing the spread of respiratory viruses was published. In keeping with their earlier reviews, the overarching conclusion of the authors confirmed what we already knew: masks achieve no appreciable reduction in viral transmission. Arguably of more interest are the indications that powerful forces within the academic world were at work to obstruct the dissemination of this inconvenient truth.

In regard to the potential benefits of mask-wearing, the findings of the review were emphatic: after considering 12 research trials (ten in the community and two among hospital workers) the main takeaway message was that face coverings made “little or no difference to influenza-like or COVID-19-like illness transmission”. When only studies where respiratory infections had been confirmed in a laboratory were included in the analysis, the conclusion was even more stark: “Wearing masks had no effect on… influenza or SARS-CoV-2 outcomes”. Furthermore, the type of mask used – the surgical variety or the higher-quality N95/P2 respirators – made no difference to the outcome.

It is plausible to assume that the conclusions of the Cochrane scholars did not make easy reading for the pro-mask establishment. The Covid era has been characterised by extraordinarily high levels of censorship of views that did not tally with the dominant public health narrative, and this silencing of alternative perspectives has often been evident within the academic and research spheres. A close inspection of the two most recent updates to the Cochrane review – their development and content – suggests that these malign forces of suppression may have been targeting this initiative in an effort to dilute the impact of its masks-are-ineffectual message. There are five observations consistent with this premise.

1. Scarcity of robust studies

It is intriguing that, three years after the start of the Covid event, there is a dearth of prospective randomised controlled trials (RCTs) – the type that provide the most robust kind of scientific evidence – to evaluate the efficacy of community masking as a means of reducing viral transmission. In the words of the Cochrane review authors, there was a “relative paucity” of such studies “given the importance of the question”. In a politicised environment, where Covid policy was often determined without recourse to empirical evidence, perhaps those in power did not want to fund research that would provide a definitive answer to the question of whether masks offered an effective viral barrier, particularly in light of the earlier discouraging results?

2. Unpublished research

In November 2020, the Danish mask study – the first RCT of mask efficacy specific to the SARS-CoV-2 virus – found that masks achieved no significant benefit for the wearer. Despite this ground-breaking conclusion, the research was initially rejected by at least three prestigious medical journals. This publication bias is also evident in the current Cochrane review where the authors, when discussing the range of RCTs included in the analysis, state that: “We identified four ongoing studies, of which one is finalised, but unreported, evaluating masks concurrent with the COVID‐19 pandemic” (my emphasis). Why would a finalised RCT, on such a pressing issue as mask effectiveness, not be published? The most likely answer, in this censorial environment, is that it came to the ‘wrong’ conclusion.

3. A disregard of the harms of masking

Very few of the studies included in the Cochrane review addressed the potential harms of wearing masks; harms were “rarely measured and poorly reported”. When one considers the wide range of credible negative consequences (physical, social and psychological) associated with mass masking in the community, this is a glaring omission. Once again, the most plausible reason for this inattention to harms in mask research in the last three years is political pressure – Government policy makers urgently sought evidence to support their premature decisions to impose mask mandates, to demonstrate their effectiveness as a viral barrier, and were disinclined to investigate the potential harms.

4. Publication delays

A blatant indication of top-down censorial influence on the ‘masks don’t work’ message is the way that publication of one of the Cochrane review updates was delayed. The previous 2020 version, incorporating updates up until January 2020, had passed peer review and was finalised by April of the same year. Extraordinarily, its publication was delayed until November 2020 due to “unexplained editorial decisions“. According to lead author, Dr. Tom Jefferson, this extra scrutiny was “a very unexpected event in Cochrane, especially during a period in which the topic of the review and the setting of policy was of global importance”.

It is unlikely to be coincidence that this window of delay corresponds to the period when the U.K. and other Governments, under intense pressure from pro-mask groups, U-turned and imposed mask mandates on their populations. In the midst of this policy flip-flop, it would have caused considerable political embarrassment to our public health leaders should the Cochrane group – the source of the most authoritative and comprehensive scientific evidence – have broadcast its conclusion that masks are ineffective as a viral barrier. In the words of Dr. Jefferson, by the time their report was published in November 2020, “the advisers had changed their minds about the evidence, and the policies had been set”.

The latest Cochrane review update includes studies up to October 2022. Its publication three months later suggest that this edition was not delayed, presumably because, at a time when most of society is unmasked, its conclusions are likely to evoke less discomfort for policy makers.

5. Editorial interference

An explicit example of the top-down interference with the Cochrane review process (referred to above) is an editorial that accompanied the 2020 edition. Including statements such as, “Waiting for strong evidence is a recipe for paralysis”, the content of this commentary appears totally at odds with the ethos of the Cochrane initiative. Indeed, this decisions-before-evidence assertion mirrors the proclamations of pro-mask zealot Professor Trish Greenhalgh, who has previously stated that the rigorous search for empirical evidence is the “enemy of good policy“.

In the words of Dr. Jefferson, the 2020 Cochrane editorial “seemed to undermine our work” and had the effect of “completely subverting the precautionary principle”. The lead author of the editorial was Dr. Soares-Weiser (Cochrane’s Chief Editor) who is “responsible for ensuring that the Cochrane Library meets its strategic goals of supporting health care decision-making by consistently publishing timely, high-priority, high-quality reviews”. Clearly, the 2020 Cochrane mask review failed her ‘timely’ criterion and her trivialisation of the value of empirical evidence is at odds with the ‘high-quality reviews’ aspiration.

Dr. Gary Sidley is a retired NHS consultant clinical psychologist and a co-founder of the Smile Free campaign that opposes mask mandates.

February 13, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Inside an Australian Quarantine Camp

By Bobbie Anne Flower Cox | Brownstone Institute | February 12, 2023

After I won my landmark “quarantine camp” lawsuit against Governor Hochul and her Department of Health a few months ago, people from around the globe started reaching out to me. Some wanted to simply send congratulations on a job well done, and thank me for giving them hope that this tyranny that somehow magically took hold contemporanously in countries around the world, could be defeated.

But many others wanted more than that. They wanted actual help. They wanted to know how they could fight back against the intense tyranny in their countries. So, I started doing interviews and presentations to groups based in the UK, South Africa, Canada, and Australia. I shared with them my legal theory behind my case, the separation of powers argument, and all about my courageous plaintiffs (Senator George Borrello, Assemblyman Chris Tague, Assemblyman [now Congressman] Mike Lawler, and a citizens’ group called Uniting NYS).

I told them about the other wonderful group of NYS Legislators that supported us with an Amicus Brief (Assemblymen Andy Goodell, Will Barclay and Joseph Giglio), and the battles that we fought and won along the way, as the Attorney General tried tactic after tactic to stall, derail and destroy our case. I shared all that I could with them in the hopes that it would assist them in their countries, as they pushed back against their government abuses.

At first I was taken aback by the response from those who reached out to me from abroad. It was hard for me to imagine that all those foreigners were watching our quarantine case so intently. Many told me they’d heard about it through “alternative media” sources, and had been quietly cheering me on and praying for a win. This made me realize that the utter helplessness brought on by the flagrant despotism of so many nations’ governments was eerily simultaneous – and equally frightening to all citizenry, no matter which country one called home.

Our quarantine camp lawsuit win against New York’s governor was almost akin to the proverbial shot heard around the world. Almost. Not quite. One big difference is that my lawsuit was (and still is today) heavily censored. Mainstream media barely covered it when we won, except for an article here and there in the New York Post and my interview on OAN Network. Epoch Times TV did a deep-dive interview with me on their wildly popular show, American Thought Leaders, but still yet, the Epoch Times is not legacy, mainstream media that continuously pours over the airwaves day in and day out.

Local and alternative media were covering it, but not mainstream media. I previously wrote an article about the censorship of my quarantine case which you can read here.

With my exposure to citizens from countries far and away, I was hearing tales of horrific happenings. Things that I simply could not believe governments would do their people, especially in countries that were supposedly “free”. And yet, here they were, telling me stories, sending me news articles or photos or actual video footage of atrocities I could not wrap my head around.

Some of the images are forever burned into my memory, no matter how hard I try to erase them. And at the end of each story that someone recanted, or each video that I watched, I thought to myself, “Thank God we won our quarantine camp lawsuit here in New York.”

I realized that we had not only stopped this complete totalitarianism from taking place in my home state, but we had likely stopped it from spreading across the nation to the point where quarantine camps would become the “new norm” as a way to (supposedly) stop the spread of a disease – or to punish someone the government didn’t like. (Remember, the languange in the reg we got struck down said the government did NOT have to prove you actually had a disease)! For more details on the reg and our lawsuit, go to www.UnitingNYS.com/lawsuit

Through my connection with Brownstone Institute, I was introduced to a wonderful and brave Australian who had spent two weeks in a quarantine camp in northern Australia. Let’s refer to her as “Jane”. I share with you now her first hand account that she shared with me of what happened and what it was like, replete with photographs from inside the camp.

At the time Jane was in the camp, Dan Andrews was (and still is) the Premier in Australia. The country had very strict COVID19 policies, which Jane points out, were constantly changing. Literally, the government would change a policy whilst people were flying mid-air, and upon landing at their destination, they’d be arrested because they now suddenly were in violation of a new COVID policy just issued!

The rule at the time was that no Australian was allowed to leave their state, unless you had a “legitimate reason” to do so, and in order to actually leave, you had to first quarantine for 2 weeks. Not in your home. No, don’t be silly! You had to quarantine in a facility that was run by the government. Some people got to choose which facility, others did not. There was a large camp in the Northern Territory near Darwin, and then there were many quarantine hotels scattered throughout the country.

Reportedly, the quarantine hotels were a total nightmare where you were shut into a room for 2 weeks, no exiting your room, no going outdoors allowed, and some rooms didn’t even have windows! But living in Melbourne, a large city in southest Australia, was just as bad. The government would only let you out of your home for ONE HOUR/day, with a mask on, and you couldn’t stray more than 5 kilometers from your house. You not only couldn’t leave the city, you couldn’t leave the country!

Forget having anyone visit – no guests were allowed in your home. The government set up a hotline so that Australians could call and report any of their neighbors who were disobeying the COVID mandates. The police would often check on the citizens to see if they were complying. They’d phone you, and if you didn’t respond within 15 minutes, they’d come knock on your door! The camp where Jane was quarantined seemed almost like a holiday, comparatively speaking. Well, not really.

So how it worked was that, if you had family or friends or business in another state, you had to first go to a government facility to quarantine for 2 weeks. Again, only if you had what the government deemed to be a legitimate reason. Jane needed to leave Melbourne, so she packed up her bags, booked an absurdly expensive flight to the Northern Territory, and off she went to the quarantine camp in Darwin for 2 weeks. Did she go “voluntarily”, of her own free will? That’s a very fine line of semantics there folks. Yes, she herself booked her flight and packed her bags to go, but it was only because the government told her that was the only way she could leave Melbourne. I don’t consider that free will. I hope you share my view.

The quarantine camp:

The camp had rows of trailer-like buildings that housed the inmates – I mean the there-of-their-own-free-will Australians. Jane was put into a unit that had a bedroom and a bathroom. Each unit had a small front stoop, sort of like a porch (see photo below). You were allowed to sit outside and talk to a neighbor, through a face mask of course, if you could stand the sweltering heat. Police were constantly patroling the camp, walking past the trailers, ensuring everyone was complying with the “social distancing” requirements and the forced masking, etc.

You weren’t allowed to do anything other than sit on your front stoop, or walk “laps” through the camp… as long as you stayed the proper distance from others, wore your mask, and didn’t try to do anything else. There was a swimming pool, but you were only allowed a dip in the pool twice during your 2 week stint there, and that was only if you were going to do some laps… no games allowed!

The food was terrible. No alcohol allowed. Cell phones and internet were allowed, at least when Jane was there. She said one woman tried to escape, but she was caught and then put into solitary confinement.

Now, sit down for this next part. The government restricted you from leaving your town, your state, your country, forced you into quarantine hotels or a camp if you were able to convince them that you had a real reason to cross a state border, treated you like a criminal, and get this – YOU had to pay for it!! And it was not cheap. The price tag was $2,500 for an individual, $5,000 for a family at the camp. The “hotels” apparently were more costly at $3,000 for the 2 weeks.

There were more details that Jane shared with me, but I cannot cover all here. At this point, I’m going to close out this story with a part of my conversation with Jane that really struck me. She could tell that I was flabbergasted by the things she was telling me. She could hear it in my voice, but also in the long pauses in between my questions after she would answer the litany of inquiries I was throwing at her.

My underlying astonishment was obvious… “How could your government do these things to its people?!”

Her response was immediate and direct, “We don’t have your Second Amendment. If we had, our government never would have treated us this way.”

Let that sink in for a minute.

Lawsuit update:

As I mentioned above, we defeated New York’s quarantine camp regulation when we won our lawsuit last July against Governor Hochul and her DOH. The Attorney General filed a notice of appeal, and had 6 months to appeal the win. Elections were November 8th. Not surprisingly, no appeal was filed, until…

The first week of January, just days before their 6 month deadline was up, the Attorney General asked for an additional 2 months to appeal our victory over quarantine camps! Unfortunately, the Court granted the request, despite our objection.

For more information about the case, the timeline, or if you’d like to support our lawsuit against the Governor and her quarantine camp regulation, go to www.UnitingNYS.com/lawsuit

Together, we win this!

Bobbie Anne is an attorney with 25 years experience in the private sector, who continues to practice law but also lectures in her field of expertise – government over-reach and improper regulation and assessments.

February 12, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Covid and the pandemic of moral injury

By Valerie Nelson | TCW Defending Freedom | February 12, 2023

The term ‘moral injury’ is a new one for me, as it probably is for most. It’s more commonly applied in a military context and only recently in health and social care, since 2020 to be precise. Indeed, the literature gently, knowingly or unknowingly, nudges us into believing that moral injury, reframed as occupational moral injury, isn’t a new concept but an inevitable consequence of working in an ethically challenging health and social care system.

Moral injury is understood as the damage done to an individual’s conscience or moral compass when they perpetrate, witness or fail to prevent acts that transgress their own moral beliefs, values or code of ethics. The term is thought to have originated after the Vietnam war when returning veterans and their carers struggled to make sense of high levels of anguish, anger and alienation that couldn’t be explained in terms of a mental health diagnosis such a post-traumatic stress disorder. It doesn’t take much stretch of the imagination to understand why veterans were morally injured but the Moral Injury Project at Syracuse University in New York cites examples such as using deadly force in combat and inadvertently causing harm or death to civilians and colleagues, giving orders which result in the injury or death of colleagues, failing to provide medical aid to civilians or colleagues and failing to report incidents such as sexual assaults.

When lockdowns were implemented in 2020, the health and social care workforce faced insurmountable and intolerable challenges when it was deemed unsafe in many situations to have close contact with fellow human beings who were in need of assistance.  In essence, a workforce who function on the need for human contact could endanger life by simply doing their job. Subsequently, care and support was withdrawn or compromised through almost non-existent face-to-face interactions or time limited, with minimal physical contact if they took place at all.

Moral injury therefore makes sense in the context of health and social care. Staff were forced to deny medical and compassionate care to the injured and dying, leave adults and children in risky situations which in some cases led to death and injury, isolate frail older people from the life-giving company of family and friends and ignore or dismiss situations that previously justified urgent attention; all done while hiding smiles and humanity behind useless and potentially dangerous masks.

Moral injury during the pandemic can surely be applied across most professions and indeed the population: the police officer investigating a peaceful family gathering, the funeral director separating distressed relatives, the religious leader closing the door of a place of worship or the teacher who forced children to wear masks for hours on end. There were also the children who isolated their parents and parents who isolated their children, neighbours and community groups who withdrew essential help and support, and friends and family who got angry or fell out with those they disagreed with. Emotions and tensions ran high, leading me to think that many of us are morally injured to some degree or another. Is it any wonder that so many are struggling with poor mental health?

The growing number of articles drawing attention to moral injury, the most significant in the BMJ in July 2020 and a reference point for further articles, all focus on reassuring staff that a conflict of morals and the potential for injury is a normal consequence of doing what was necessary to prevent illness and death from Covid-19. At no point are the logic and morality of the rules called into question, which is surprising because the Moral Injury Project makes reference to two other potential causes of moral injury that are not referred to in recent literature:

‘Following orders that were illegal, immoral, and/or against the Rules of Engagement or Geneva Convention’;

‘A change in belief about the necessity or justification for war, during or after one’s service’.

As the realisation slowly dawns on the world that the inhumane actions which staff were forced to take were in fact unnecessary and based on flawed concepts with no robust evidence base, are we facing a rising tide of the morally injured? All measures were applied in the absence of risk/benefit analysis, despite common knowledge that blanket approaches to managing risk are likely to cause more damage than the presenting problem. Yet the whole population was terrified into believing we were all at equal risk of severe illness or death from a lethal virus, to which we had no natural immunity and was quietly spread from those with no symptoms, especially children. Lockdowns, school closures, testing, mask wearing, social distancing, mass vaccination programmes and subsequent passports were said to be necessary but in reality were unjustified and immoral. Dismissing the question of the necessity and morality of these measures and normalising moral injury as a natural consequence of a warlike situation places accountability solely on those who enforced the polices and vindicates those who created them.

A morally injured workforce is evidence that the response to Covid-19 was morally wrong. None of us know how we would have behaved in the shoes of the workers who enforced immoral policies that contravened their conscience and moral compass. However, we can be sure of one thing: many of the injured will need support to come to terms with the realisation they have inadvertently played a part in injuring some of the very people they intended to protect.

February 12, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

NEW STUDY SHOWS MASKS DON’T WORK AGAINST ILLNESS, BUT WHAT DOES?

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | February 9, 2023

A definitive study from the Cochrane Collaboration has solidified the uselessness of masking to prevent COVID-19 and other illnesses. However, more studies now show both vitamin D and exercise as cheap, empowering and extremely effective strategies against COVID

February 11, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | | Leave a comment

Robbed? It wasn’t Covid that issued the shutdown edicts.

By James Bovard | Brownstone Institute | February 9, 2023

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Biden rewrote the history of the pandemic. Biden lamented, “Covid had shut down our businesses. Schools were closed. We were robbed of so much.” But it wasn’t Covid that issued the shutdown edicts.

We were robbed by politicians like Biden who disrupted lives in a futile effort to thwart a virus that infected hundreds of millions of Americans anyhow. There was never solid evidence to justify shutting businesses or schools but that did not deter politicians from promising to save humanity by destroying freedom.

After Pfizer and Moderna, Biden was perhaps the biggest Covid profiteer in America. In 2020, Biden ran one of the most fear-based presidential campaigns in modern history. Biden talked as if every American family had lost a member or two from this pestilence. He routinely exaggerated Covid death tolls by a hundred- or a thousand-fold, publicly asserting that millions of Americans had been killed by Covid-19. Biden was helped mightily by fear-mongering media coverage.

A Brookings Institute analysis noted, “Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to overestimate [Covid] harm. Forty-one percent of Democrats… answered that half or more of those infected by COVID-19 need to be hospitalized.” At that time, the rate of hospitalization was between 1 percent and 5 percent – so those Democratic voters overestimated the risk of hospitalization by up to 20-fold.

In the final debate between the presidential candidates in October 2020, Biden blamed Trump for every Covid fatality: “220,000 Americans dead…. Anyone who’s responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States.” Biden promised, “I will take care of this. I will end this. I’m going to shut down the virus, not the country.” In a speech on the day before Election Day, he declared, “We’re going to beat this virus. We’re going to get it under control, I promise you.” Biden won the presidency as a result of only 43,000 votes in three swing states. The disruption and damage caused by lockdowns were invoked as proof of Trump’s negligence, rather than seen as evidence of an unprecedented political panic-mongering and repression.

After taking office, Biden issued a flurry of edicts, including mandating masks for anyone on federal property. In September 2021, he mandated that more than 100 million be injected with Covid vaccines, despite proliferating evidence that the vaccines were failing to prevent transmission or infections. In an October 2021 CNN Town Hall, Biden vilified vaccine skeptics as murderers who only wanted “the freedom to kill you” with Covid.

On Tuesday night, Biden announced, “Covid no longer controls our lives.” But Biden extended the official Covid emergency at least until May 11, entitling him to sweeping additional power. Biden still claims that Covid miraculously entitles him to “forgive” half a trillion dollars in federal student debt. And the Biden administration is fighting to perpetuate vaccine mandates on foreign visitors to America and to preserve the president’s prerogative to impose mask mandates.

The carnage from Covid crackdowns is still being tabulated. A 2022 Johns Hopkins University analysis of 24 studies on the impact of lockdowns in the United States and Europe found “no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality.” The pointless shutdowns did far more damage than Biden will ever admit:

  • A National Bureau of Economic Research analysis estimated that young Americans suffered “171,000 excess non-Covid deaths during 2020 and 2021… a historic, yet largely unacknowledged, health emergency.” Many of those fatalities were “collateral damage” from shutdowns and other Covid policies.
  • Millions of jobs were lost thanks to lockdowns, a major reason why life expectancy in the United States had its sharpest plunge since World War Two.
  • Forced isolation was a Grim Reaper. Deaths from drug overdoses set an all-time record of 108,000 in 2021 and alcohol-related deaths jumped 25% in the first year of the pandemic.
  • The Biden administration suppressed free speech on Twitter and other social media based on a single theme: “Be very afraid of Covid and do exactly what we say to stay safe,” as journalist David Zweig summarized in the TwitterFiles. Official fear-mongering helped boost the percentage of Americans reporting struggling with depression or anxiety by more than 300 percent.

If Biden can shift blame for disastrous Covid policies, politicians will be more likely to pointlessly lock down the nation in the future. Americans deserve to see all the federal records and all the state government records to expose the recklessness and deceit that permeated Covid policies. America will not recover from the pandemic until all the COVID lies and abuses by officialdom have been exposed.

James Bovard, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is author and lecturer whose commentary targets examples of waste, failures, corruption, cronyism and abuses of power in government. He is a USA Today columnist and is a frequent contributor to The Hill. He is the author of ten books.

February 9, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Former Twitter Execs Squirm As They’re Told They Could Be Arrested For Election Interference

“Who the hell do you think you are?”

By Steve Watson | Summit News | February 9, 2023

Former Twitter executives looked at times uncomfortable, but betrayed their staunch anti-free speech biases during a House Oversight Committee heading on Wednesday.

The hearing was called to investigate the role government played, specifically the FBI, with regards to censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop report by the New York Post.

Former Twitter Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, Former Deputy General Counsel James Baker, and Former Global Head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth were grilled by Representatives, with Congressman Clay Higgins telling them they could be arrested for interfering with the 2020 presidential election.

“The bottom line is that the FBI had the Biden Crime Family laptop for a year. They knew it was leaking. They knew it would hurt the Biden family. So the FBI used its relationship with Twitter to suppress criminal evidence from being revealed about Joe Biden one month before the 2020 election,” Higgins asserted.

“You, ladies and gentlemen interfered with the United States of America 2020 presidential election! Knowingly and willingly!” he continued, adding “That’s the bad news! It’s gonna get worse! Because this is the investigation part! Later comes the arrest part, your attorneys are familiar with that.”

“I’d like to spend five hours with these ladies and gentlemen doing depositions surely yet to come,” the Congressman added.

Elsewhere during the hearing, Rep. Nancy Mace blasted the former executives for also, as highlighted by the Elon Musk’s release of The Twitter Files, working to suppress information regarding COVID.

“I along with many Americans have long term effects from COVID. Not only was I a long-hauler, but I have effects from the vaccine,” Mae declared.

She continued, “It wasn’t the first shot but it was the second shot. I have now developed asthma that has never gone away since I had the second shot. I have tremors in my left hand. And I have the occasional heart pains that no doctor can explain. And I’ve had a battery of tests.”

“I find it extremely alarming Twitter’s suppression spread into medical fields,” Mace told the former execs.

“You’re not a doctor, right?” Mace directly asked Gadde, adding “What makes you think you or anyone else at Twitter have the medical expertise to censor actual, accurate CDC data?”

Gadded pathetically claimed she was not familiar with these particular situations.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you’re not,” Mace shot back.

Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan told them they “got played by the FBI” over the Hunter Biden laptop, forcing Roth to admit that the New York Post report didn’t violate any Twitter policies in his opinion, but was censored anyway.

“This to me is the real takeaway,” Jordan said, going on to state “51 former intelligence officials, five days after you guys take down the Hunter Biden story and block the New York Post’s account, five days later, 51 former intel officials send a letter and they say, ‘the Hunter Biden story has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.’ The information operation was run on you guys, and then by extension then run on the American people. And that’s the concern.”

Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert asked the former Twitter executives “Who the hell do you think you are?” for shadow banning people they disagree with on the platform.

Boebert also asked the execs if they had shadow banned her own account.

“I can reach out to Elon and to his staff, and I can see what’s happened ,and I can sit here today and hold you all in account,” Boebert concluded, adding “I am angry for the millions of Americans who were silenced because of your decisions, because of your actions, because of your collusion with the federal government. They can’t reach out to Elon. They can’t sit here today and hold you in account.”

The chair of the Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky highlighted Tweets made by Roth in the past calling Republicans ‘Nazis’.

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia told Roth “You permanently banned my Twitter account but you allowed child porn all over Twitter.”

The former execs mostly either claimed ignorance and denied any wrong doing.

James Baker said he can’t recall speaking with the FBI while working at Twitter, and denied that he acted unlawfully.

Meanwhile, Roth attempted to argue that censorship on Twitter under his watch helped to create more freedom of speech.

Roth also admitted that he finds it “regrettable” that the conservative account LibsOfTikTok is still allowed to be active on Twitter… More videos

February 9, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , | Leave a comment

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