Early during lockdowns in 2020, when the whole of the media marched in lockstep with the most appalling reach of public policy in our lifetimes, two doctors from Bakersfield, California went out on a limb and objected.
Their names: Dan Erikson and Artin Massihi from Accelerated Urgent Care. They held a press conference in which they claimed that lockdowns would only delay but not finally control the virus. Moreover, they predicted, at the end of this, we would also be sicker than ever because of our lack of exposure to endemic pathogens.
You could say they were brave but why should it require bravery simply to share conventional wisdom that is part of every medical background? Indeed, the idea that reducing exposure to pathogens creates more vulnerability to disease is a point every generation in the last hundred years has learned in school.
How well I can recall the outrage! They were treated like seditious cranks and news media blasted their comments as somehow radically heterodox, even though they said nothing I had not learned in 9th-grade biology class. It was utterly bizarre how quickly lockdowns became an orthodoxy, enforced, as we are now learning, by media and tech platforms working closely with government agencies to warp public perceptions of science.
Among those warpings was an incredible blackout concerning the basics of natural immunity. My goodness, why did this happen? It’s not conspiracy to draw an obvious reason: they wanted to sell a vaccine. And they wanted to push the idea that Covid was universally deadly for everyone so that they could justify their “whole-of-society” approach to lockdowns.
Here we are three years later and the headlines are all over the place.
And so on.
Isn’t it time to give these doctors some credit and perhaps regret their vicious treatment at the hands of the press?
Video link
Meanwhile, it’s time we get clear on some basics. There is no one better to lay it out other than the greatest living theoretical epidemiologist, Sunetra Gupta. I think one way to understand her contribution is to see her as the Voltaire or the Adam Smith of infectious disease. The very essence of liberal political economy and liberal theory generally from the Age of Enlightenment to the present is the observation that society manages itself. It does not need a top-down plan and the attempt to centrally plan the economy or culture always produces unintended consequences.
So too for the issue of infectious disease. Dr. Gupta’s observation is that we evolved with pathogens in a delicate dance in which we share the same ecosphere, both suffering and benefiting from our entanglement with them. Disturbing that balance can wreck the immune system and leave us more vulnerable and sicker than ever before.
Writing in the Telegraph, she says “I am used to viewing infectious disease from an ecological perspective. Therefore, it did not come as much of a surprise to me that some non-Covid seasonal respiratory diseases almost immediately started to take a knock on the head during lockdown. Many took this to be an indication that lockdowns were working to stop the spread of disease, forgetting that the impact of lockdowns on already established or ‘endemic’ diseases is completely different to the impact on a new disease in its ‘epidemic’ phase.”
She explains that society-wide pathogenic avoidance creates an “immunity debt,” a gap in the level of protection that you have developed from previous exposure. There is a “threshold of immunity in the population at which rates of new infections start to decline — known as the herd immunity threshold. If we are below this threshold, we are in immunity debt; if we are above it, we are in credit — at least for a while.”
With normal diseases, we experience immunity debt in winter and so the herd immunity threshold rises. That’s when we experience more infection. As Fr. Naugle points out, this reality is reflected in our liturgical calendar during the winter months when the message is to look out for danger, stay healthy, be with friends and family, and intensify your concern for issues of life and death.
However, this period of conventional sicknesses gives rise to an immunity surplus as we move into spring and we can go about our lives with more confidence and a carefree attitude, and hence the symbolism of Easter as the beginning of new life. And yet the months of sun and exercise and party time gradually contribute to building up another immunity debt in the population which will be paid again in the winter months.
Notice that this pattern repeats itself in every year and every generation, all without the help of government public health agencies. However, writes Gupta, “disturbing this order can have a profound impact on an individual’s ability to resist disease. More than anything, it is clear that we are experiencing an entirely predictable perturbation in our finely balanced ecological relationship with the organisms which are capable of causing serious disease.”
Lockdowns changed nothing about these seasonal and natural processes except to make our immunity debt deeper and scarier than ever. To be sure, lockdowns in the end did not stop the pathogen that causes Covid. Instead, they only forced one group to be exposed earlier and more often than other groups, and this allocation of exposure took place entirely based on a politically scripted model.
As we saw, the working classes experienced exposure first and the ruling classes experienced exposure later. The policies entrenched a grim and medieval-style political hierarchy of infection. Rather than encouraging the vulnerable populations to shelter and everyone else to gain immunities through living normal life, lockdown policies pushed the working classes in front of the pathogen as a protection scheme for ruling classes.
And yet now, the results are in. Those who delayed infection for as long as possible, or otherwise tried to game the careful ecological balance with newly invented shots, not only eventually got Covid but made themselves even more vulnerable to diseases that are already endemic in the population.
What Gupta has explained with such erudition was actually the common understanding of previous generations. And nothing about the dangerous innovation of lockdown ideology has changed these natural processes. They only ended up making us sicker than ever. So there is some irony in reading stories of alarm in the high-end media. The right response to such alarm is simply to say: what else did you expect?
The Bakersfield doctors were right all along. So was my mother, her mother, and her mother before her. Together they had far more wisdom about infectious disease than Anthony Fauci and all his cohorts.
Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.
December 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, Human rights |
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The COVID-19 pandemic brought us a panoply of lies and evidence-light declarations that were less intended to inform Americans than to consolidate power and buy time. Among these were Anthony Fauci’s famous shift from arguing against wearing masks, to recommending wearing one, and, finally, to wearing two.
Fauci also tried to convince us that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not manipulated in a lab even though his inner circle had emailed him about “unusual features” of the virus that looked “potentially engineered.” And, of course, we had “fifteen days to stop the spread,” an evergreen concept that dragged on for two years. Lest readers fault us for forgetting, there was also the “gain of function” controversy, the focused protection battle, school closures, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and vaccine misrepresentations.
These topics have received much public attention. The one pandemic topic that hasn’t, and is nonetheless important, is the maligned ivermectin. It’s time to set the record straight.
If you’ve followed the news closely over the last two years, you’ve probably heard a few things about ivermectin. First, that it’s a veterinary medicine intended for horses and cows. Second, that the FDA and other government regulatory agencies recommended against its use for COVID-19. Third, that even the inventor and manufacturer of ivermectin, Merck & Co., came out against it. Fourth, that one of the largest studies showing that ivermectin worked for COVID-19 was retracted for data fraud. And, finally, that the largest and best study of ivermectin, the TOGETHER trial, showed that ivermectin didn’t work.
Let’s consider the evidence.
Ivermectin has a distinguished history, and it may have benefits comparable to those of penicillin. The anti-parasitic’s discovery led to a Nobel Prize and subsequent billions of safe administrations around the world, even among children and pregnant women. “Ivermectin is widely available worldwide, inexpensive, and one of the safest drugs in modern medicine.”
The FDA put out a special warning against using ivermectin for COVID-19. The FDA’s warning, which included language such as, “serious harm,” “hospitalized,” “dangerous,” “very dangerous,” “seizures,” “coma and even death,” and “highly toxic,” might suggest that the FDA was warning against pills laced with poison, not a drug the FDA had already approved as safe. Why did it become dangerous when used for COVID-19? The FDA didn’t say.
Because of the FDA’s rules, if it were to make any statement on ivermectin, it was obliged to attack it. The FDA prohibits the promotion of drugs for unapproved uses. Since fighting SARS-CoV-2 was an unapproved use of ivermectin, the FDA couldn’t have advocated use without obvious hypocrisy. Ivermectin’s discoverer, Merck & Co., had multiple reasons to disparage its own drug.
Merck, too, couldn’t have legally “promoted” ivermectin for COVID-19 without a full FDA approval, something that would have taken years and many millions of dollars. Plus, Merck doesn’t make much money from cheap, generic ivermectin but was hoping to find success with its new, expensive drug, Lagevrio (molnupiravir).
A large study of ivermectin for COVID-19 by Elgazzar et al. was withdrawn over charges of plagiarism and faked data. Many media reports seem fixated on this one dubious study, but it was one of many clinical studies. After the withdrawn studies have been removed from consideration, there are 15 trials that suggest that ivermectin doesn’t work for COVID-19 and 78 that do.
The TOGETHER trial received significant positive press. The New York Times quoted two experts who had seen the results. One stated, “There’s really no sign of any benefit [from ivermectin],” while the other said, “At some point it will become a waste of resources to continue studying an unpromising approach.”
While the Elgazzar paper was quickly dismissed, the TOGETHER trial was acclaimed. It shouldn’t have been. Researchers who have analyzed it have found 31 critical problems (impossible data; extreme conflicts of interest; blinding failure), 22 serious problems (results were delayed six months; conflicting data), and 21 major problems (multiple, conflicting randomization protocols) with it.
While the popular narrative is that the TOGETHER trial showed that ivermectin didn’t work for COVID-19, the actual results belie that conclusion: ivermectin was associated with a 12 percent lower risk of death, a 23 percent lower risk of mechanical ventilation, a 17 percent lower risk of hospitalization, and a 10 percent lower risk of extended ER observation or hospitalization. We have calculated that the probability that ivermectin helped the patients in the TOGETHER trial ranged from 26 percent for the median number of days to clinical recovery to 91 percent for preventing hospitalization. The TOGETHER trial’s results should be reported accurately.
Based on the clinical evidence from the 93 trials that ivermectin reduced mortality by an average of 51 percent, and on the estimated infection fatality rate of COVID-19, about 400 infected Americans aged 60-69 would need to be treated with ivermectin to statistically prevent one death in that group. The total cost of the ivermectin to prevent that one death: $40,000. (Based on the GoodRx website, a generic prescription for ivermectin is priced at approximately $40. Roughly 2.5 prescriptions would be needed per person to receive the average dose of 150 mg per patient.)
How much is your life worth? We’re betting it’s worth far more than $40,000.
When the next pandemic strikes, by necessity we’ll rely on older drugs because newer ones require years of development. Ivermectin is a repurposed drug that helps, and could have helped so much more. It deserves recognition, not disparagement. What we really need, however, is a way to inoculate ourselves against the lies and misrepresentations of powerful public figures, organizations, and drug companies. Sadly, there are no such vaccines for that contagion.
David R. Henderson is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a professor of economics at the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy, Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California.
Charles L. Hooper is President and co-founder of Objective Insights, Inc. Prior to forming Objective Insights in 1994, Charley worked at Merck & Co., Syntex Labs, and NASA. Charley’s experience is in decision analysis, economics, product pricing, forecasting, and modeling. He is passionate about helping pharmaceutical companies think clearly about their business opportunities.
December 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Ivermectin |
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Zero Covid is deemed surplus to requirements
Newsflash from China: the world’s last bastion of Zero Covid has finally given up the pretence. “Covid China cracks”… this is a message that seems to have penetrated even the mainstream media’s coverage.
What is not, however, entirely clear is how brave BBC reporters can travel around the world to capture footage in the Far East, but were blind to peaceful protests closer to home. Those voices of reason who have been ignored for almost three years have found the cognitive dissonance more than a little unnerving. How can it simultaneously be true that lockdown sceptic protests and protestors in UK are bad, selfish and unscientific, while lockdown sceptic protests and protestors in China are brave and pushing back against regime oppression?
Even in their dissonant apostasy, the media cheerleaders still struggle with fundamental misconceptions due to their alignment with the crumbling narrative and blindness to the obvious: “the main challenge is ensuring the inevitable uptick in infections does not lead to mass deaths” claims the BBC. Really? With almost three years of data now to hand, is it now not blindingly obvious that the UK’s Chief Scientific Officer Patrick Vallance was absolutely correct when he stated on 16 March 2020 that “this is a mild disease in most people”? If these brave reporters want to investigate ‘mass deaths’, how about some hard-hitting investigative reporting on iatrogenesis instead?
This unpalatable (and hard to ignore) charade aside, can we at least hope that this is the end of an era? Can the Zero Covid chapter be closed for good?
Let us hope so. Humanity may – finally – have rid itself of Zero Covid policies, but what of its erstwhile supporters – what new hair-brained schemes are they now supporting? Whether the chaos they were involved in creating was by accident or design is arguably immaterial: how can society protect itself against future periods of collective self-harm?
The precautionary principle “emphasises caution, pausing and review before leaping into new innovations that may prove disastrous”.
Winding back the clock almost three years, it was for this reason that many of us had a principled objection to draconian non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs, i.e. lockdowns) from before they were enacted. While this view is now fashionable, many supported these policies at the time and then did not want to back down from this shibboleth. But why was it ever acceptable to deploy this combination of hand grenades to crack a nut? Why did society go along with a perverse inversion of the anti-precautionary principle: “panic; shout ‘fire’, abandon detailed disaster planning and then implement the precise opposite, botch the implementation, shut down constructive debate and then vilify those that challenge the new orthodoxy”?
It is instructive to observe the flailing attempts by vocal proponents of Zero Covid and its associated policies (school closures, rules of six, masks, vaccine mandates) to post-rationalise and excuse their mistakes. This is where lessons will be learned (and not, incidentally, from the preposterous attempts by those who piloted the ship onto the rocks to shift blame onto others or to claim that the right decisions were made “based on all the information available at the time”).
We have previously outlined clear evidence of what was common knowledge by mid-March 2020. Chief Scientific Advisor Vallance, quoted above, went on to state: “Epidemics are like a pole vaulter taking flight: the outbreak starts slowly, takes off rapidly, reaches a peak and then comes back down to earth”. No different to what had happened in previous months on the Diamond Princess, in Wuhan and in Bergamo. This was a known quantity well before the UK launched itself, lemming-like, off the cliffs on 23 March 2020.
From hereon in it was one-way traffic for much of the next two years. Dissent was essentially criminalised, and the full force of far-from-benign authoritarian state machinery was turned against its citizens. Rational discourse was squashed (why would authorities collude with the media to stifle calm voices of reason such as Professor Jay Bhattacharya and instead promote shrill panic-mongers?); the media controlled via carrot (advertising) and stick (OFCOM diktat); dissenters were made an example of. None of this was necessary, and a normally-functioning society and fourth estate could have led us quickly back to balanced rationality, avoiding much of the human cost and unnecessarily-wrought collateral damage of the Coronapanic debacle.
They might prefer us to forget, but we must not. Thankfully, public records exist that will serve as a salutary reminder to future generations of what our own home-grown Zero Covid zealots wanted to perpetrate. For example, in the dark days of February 2021, 47 MPs from Opposition parties tabled an Early Day Motion promoting Net Zero. This Motion – as well as its stated (and implicit) underlying assumptions – has not aged well, the most egregious claim being that harsher draconian measures might avoid “putting huge additional strain on the NHS” – tell that to those on the now-gargantuan waiting lists for essential treatment. Most of the 47 signatories on this Motion are Labour MPs… Labour is currently riding high in the polls. They might well now criticise the UK Government’s handling of the last few years, but it was Labour – and their union paymasters – who were consistently pushing for more and more restrictions. Voters should be careful what they wish for.
So good riddance to Zero Covid, but have we learned any lessons? Unfortunately, there is as yet little evidence to show that society has the strength to resist the siren calls of the next Zero Policy fiasco… for example, could it be that Net Zero is an unholy hysteria rather than a holy grail? We would do well to look a bit more closely before we leap into deindustrialised pauperisation.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and in the interests of protecting all that we hold dear, we can only encourage everyone to keep constructively challenging and critiquing the official narrative.
December 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK |
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When I write of the pandemic response as a basically undirected social and institutional contagion, the same question always comes up: What about Event 201, and the 2017 SPARS exercise, and all those other creepy prophetic pandemic wargames? Don’t they indicate some of kind of unified plan? How else to explain the foreknowledge of the planners?
I’ve given partial replies here and there, but I’ve never laid out all of my ideas in one place. I think these strange exercises seem much less bizarre when considered against the broader backdrop of the pandemicists and the beliefs they share. You might call their most central article of faith pandemicism, which is the doctrine that pandemics represent a serious threat to human health, and that they can be prevented or substantially ameliorated with the right scientific interventions.
Aspects of pandemicism are as old as 1918, but the proximate origins of this mind virus are much more recent. Tellingly, they don’t lie with any kind of pandemic at all, but rather with the WHO campaign to eradicate smallpox. This started in 1967, and it took ten years to complete. Any institutionalised enterprise that persists for a full decade will acquire institutional momentum, such that it can’t simply be turned off when the mission is over. Just as the push for trans rights and trans acceptance owes a lot to the institutional forces accumulated by the gay rights movement since the 1970s, pandemicism became the next stage of advocacy for the smallpox eradicators after they had put themselves out of business. All the careers, institutions and grand funding schemes that had been thrown at smallpox needed a second act.
The smallpox eradicators began their transition to a post-smallpox world by fantasising that the virus they had killed off would someday return. Donald Henderson, director of the eradicators, founded the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies in 1998, a key pandemicist think tank that was later rechristened as the Center for Health Security, and that went on to hold a series of notorious and well-publicised pandemic war games. The earliest of these – Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm – were funded by the US Department of Defence and involved elaborate fictional scenarios of smallpox biowarfare. Later on, with the rise of billionaire philanthropy and the ever waning cultural significance of Variola, the Johns Hopkins pandemicists began peddling horror scenarios of other pandemic pathogens. Event 201 was their first major tabletop exercise featuring a pathogen other than smallpox that entered humans via a natural spillover event.
There are, then, two pandemicist eras – an early period, fuelled by Defence funding and devoted primarily to biowarfare scnearios, with curious parallels to the 1995 film Outbreak; and a later period driven by banal third-worldist philanthropy, that is more heavily focused on natural pathogens and reflected in the film Contagion. The Hollywood resonances are no accident; the pandemicists are above all interested in publicity and fundraising, and they try hard to make their mark on popular culture. The earliest wargames were at base morality tales intended to convince the US government to increase its smallpox vaccine stockpiles. The second era of pandemicist thought owes a great deal in turn to the SARS outbreak of 2003. Vaccine development at this stage becomes the central concern, and the pandemicist mission expands with novel projects to predict and preempt the emergence of novel human-infecting viruses. The old roots were still there, and the Defence Department funds were a major part of this new research.
The primary problem of pandemicism, is that there just aren’t very many pandemics, which means that most of the time the pandemicists don’t have anything to do. Wargaming attracts publicity and the interest of fundraisers, and it gets scary viruses into headlines in the absence of any reason for them to be there. Pandemicist wargames feature what we should think of as “fundraising viruses.” These are either fictional pathogens with very high infection fatality rates (often modelled on SARS), or real viruses like Nipah that are extremely deadly but not very contagious. The pandemicists almost never bother to wargame the most common pandemic virus, namely influenza, because nobody finds it particularly scary. As founding pandemicist Larry Brilliant said in 2007:
Last year, six hundred thousand people died and we didn’t notice. That’s a little bit of the reason you find so much hyperbole in the whole question of pandemic flu. Because a lot of public health people are saying, oh goody, we have something that’s going to frighten rich people, let’s use it as a chance to build up the public health system.
Fundraising viruses are a fictional threat. Any viral pathogen adapted to spread widely via direct person-to-person contact in human hosts will cause nothing more than influenza-like illness, with mortality well within the familiar range for seasonal respiratory viruses. This important difference, between what grabs attention and what is actually biologically likely to occur, is one reason I think that most scientists, and the pandemicists in particular, ignore the broader behavioural patterns of viruses and the evolutionary pressures to which they’re subject. Looking too deeply into these questions threatens to turn up evidence that we don’t really need the pandemicists at all.
Formally, it seems that this bland pandemic theatre is supposed to familiarise “stakeholders” and “decision-makers” with the expected mitigationist response. As late as Event 201 in Fall 2019, this response consisted of not doing very much. Before Corona, the pandemicists didn’t like the idea of travel restrictions or lockdowns. These might be used to contain very local outbreaks, but once a virus had achieved pandemic status, closures were considered counterproductive and likely to increase poverty and disease in the developing world. The pandemicists preferred things like travel advisories and fast-tracking vaccine development. The idea of mass containment emerged in the wake of SARS; it was never a part of Western pandemicist doctrine, though brief lockdowns were trialled in Mexico in 2009 against the nothingburger Swine Flu, and again in 2014 against Ebola.(1)
As I never tire of typing, what happened in the West was a hybrid response. Via China and pressure from the WHO, mass containment came to be added at the very last minute to the standard mitigationist playbook that the pandemicists had been peddling for a generation. This is why the messaging shifted so suddenly after February 2020. Until that date, we were in the standard world of Event 201, and authorities talked down the risk of the virus in an effort to prepare us all for the inevitable infections and deaths. Mass containment, adopted with the Italian lockdown in March, required a vastly more hysterical and overblown messaging strategy, in an effort to convince all of us to hide at home.
All that wargaming about how we’d stay open didn’t matter very much in the end, because well-publicised pandemic wargames aren’t actually planning exercises and have very little strategic importance. They’re for fundraising and publicity.
Probably the most obtrusive feature of pandemicist material – and the least discussed – is its extremely low quality. This is above all why I have a hard time buying theories that these events reflect any nefarious plan. They are just so, so stupid, it is actually hard to put into words. While earlier wargames were fairly textured and elaborate, there’s been a steady decline, worsened by the arrival of Big Philanthropy. I strongly advise that you not waste your life watching the extremely insipid Event 201 videos. Far more digestible is the SPARS pandemic exercise, which is often cited as another ominously prophetic document, particularly for its lengthy discussions of anti-vaxxers and pro-vaccine public health messaging. There are some parallels to recent events, but if you read carefully, you’ll see that the whole thing is firmly rooted in vintage 2016 anxieties about social media disinformation. And, again, it’s just really, really dumb. Every chapter concludes with tiresome questions for discussion by “public health risk communicators,” whoever they are. It feels like a weird textbook written for virusphobic primary school children in an alternate reality, where the hot new social media platform is called ZapQ and the big antivaxx disinformationist is a “science blogger” named EpiGirl and public health officials recruit a “hip hop icon” named BZee whose fictional tweets get fewer retweets and likes than mine do (see the figures on p. 25).
Nevertheless, the SPARS scenario and others like them have their moments of foreknowledge. I would never exclude malfeasance outright, but the general explanation for this phenomenon is that we get the virus freakouts we plan for. Virus fantasies like Event 201 and SPARS reflect a prior epidemiological interest in specific pathogens, and they serve to focus the attention of the public health brigade further on specific viral species. Monkeypox and the 2009 Swine Flu show that pandemicist attention alone – in the absence of any serious mortality – is enough to generate widespread hysteria. These are prophecies, but they are mostly self-fulfilling ones. That is also why the laboratory origins of SARS-2 are such a big piece of this puzzle.
What’s missing from all these planning scenarios – what every last one of them fails to predict – is the steely biomedical dictatorship that emerged to ruin all of our lives in 2020. Nobody in any of these wargames is ever locked up in their homes. Public health officials respond to the off-message EpiGirl with press releases, not threats and deplatforming. There are no green passes. The unvaccinated are never deplored or fired. Part of the reason is that, before 2020, lockdowns had never been part of the plan, and they gave public health bureaucrats a chance at overt and direct repression, which they’d never counted on before. But it’s also true that the basic project of pandemicism has authoritarian and repressive elements baked into it, which I think the pandemicists themselves never really noticed. They’re just not the most intelligent or introspective people.
(1) In the years after SARS, some public health bureaucrats and pandemicists played with ever more restrictionist mitigation regimes, contemplating school closures and work-from-home orders, but their focus remained firmly mitigationist. The purpose was only to slow infections to spare the healthcare system. Mass containment, by contrast, is eradicationist in outlook, aiming not to slow infections but to stop the virus altogether.
December 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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More and more evidence is coming to light that the ‘lockdown and wait for a vaccine’ strategy unleashed in 2020 was being cooked up inside the U.S. Government for decades before COVID-19 appeared and gave too many people an excuse to put the dreadful plan into action.
Recently the role of CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) in producing key lockdown guidance for America in March 2020 came to light.
Now, a pandemic plan from 2007 produced by the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) and currently hosted on the CISA website has emerged.
The plan contains the original list of pandemic ‘essential businesses’ that was used by CISA in 2020 to lock down America. The 2007 plan (which was itself based on a Department of Homeland Security plan from the previous year) clearly states the intention to ban large gatherings “indefinitely”, close schools and non-essential businesses, institute work-from-home, and quarantine exposed and not just sick individuals. The aim is simple and clear: to slow the spread to wait for a vaccine.
During a pandemic, the goal will be to slow the virus’ transmission; delaying the spread of the virus will provide more time for vaccine development while reducing the stress on an already burdened healthcare system.
Here’s the relevant section of the 2007 NIAC plan in full.
2006 and 2007 were a turning point in U.S. biodefence planning. Prior to 2006, such planning had been focused on biological attacks, but after that point major mission creep set in and the new draconian ideas were applied wholesale to general pandemic planning. This controversial switch in focus so riled leading U.S. disease expert D.A. Henderson, who had been involved with the project up to that point, that he issued his famous riposte objecting in the strongest terms to the new ideas. He and his fellow dissenters wrote, presciently:
Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.
I’m told by someone who was involved with the programme in the early days that the original biodefence planning in 2002-2003 assumed a targeted biological weapons attack with smallpox as the viral case and anthrax as the bacterial case – both considered worst case scenarios. It was recognised that the old smallpox vaccine was too risky to try to use on a wider population to protect them if such an attack occurred, thus the effort for a new vaccine. But very quickly, within a year or two (not least due to the SARS outbreak in 2003), there was a massive expansion of the original mission and suddenly every infectious agent, whether dangerous or not, was cast into the web of biodefence.
Outside the U.S. there was more resistance to this kind of totalitarian nonsense. However, even the 2019 World Health Organisation pandemic guidance bears many of its marks. While this guidance commendably did not recommend “in any circumstances” contact tracing, border closures, entry and exit screening and quarantine of exposed individuals, it did make conditional recommendations for use of face masks by the public, school and workplace closures and “avoiding crowding” i.e., social distancing.
The purpose was also the same: to ‘flatten the curve’ to wait for a vaccine, as illustrated in the diagram below. The WHO guidance states: “NPIs are often the most accessible interventions, because of the time it takes to make specific vaccines available”; “specific vaccines may not be available for the first six months”; NPIs are “used to delay the peak of the epidemic… allowing time for vaccines to be distributed”.
These untested ideas, which the WHO’s own guidance rightly admitted had no good quality evidence to support them, have now become a terrible orthodoxy for global pandemic response. This is despite them utterly failing to achieve any of their goals – a point that no one who backs them seems to have noticed.
Somehow, the world must learn the right lessons from this debacle. Yet it keeps threatening to learn all the wrong ones.
December 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | CISA, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, DHS, Human rights, United States |
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Former United Kingdom Health Secretary Matt Hancock, self-styled as an official who was at the forefront of Britain’s battle against Covid, didn’t seem to feel like he had done enough in 2020 and 2021, so he felt compelled to milk the pandemic cow by writing a book about that “battle.”
But he wasn’t laboring alone, since he had a co-author, Isabel Oakeshott, who reports say is actually opposed to Hancock’s policies and is a lockdown skeptic.
And now, Oakeshott, who had access to official records and Hancock’s notes exchanged with “all the key players in Britain’s Covid-19 story” – as the book’s blurb states – has penned her own “story,” an article based on the collaboration published by the Spectator, whose content draws from the material used for the book.
Oakeshott writes about the “key lessons” that include revelations about the details of UK’s vaccine and mask policies, but also the mechanisms to deal with dissenters, particularly online.
According to the journalist, Hancock genuinely considered those who disagreed with him on how to handle the situation as “mad and dangerous” and more importantly, as persons that “needed to be shut down.”
Judging by the article, his “response” to online skepticism effectively came even before pandemic restrictions themselves. Hancock had no problem revealing that in January 2020, his special adviser was already in conversation with Twitter about the ways to “tweak” the platform’s algorithms.
Another social media giant was co-opted somewhat later, and by Hancock personally, when he got in touch with former British PM and politician Nick Clegg – now president for global affairs at Meta.
Clegg, who was at the time Facebook’s VP of global affairs and communications, was reportedly “happy to oblige.”
And according to Oakeshott, Hancock’s department together with the Cabinet Office (PM and government), “harnessed the full power of the state to crush individuals and groups whose views were seen as a threat to public acceptance of official messages and policy.”
The Cabinet Office enlisted the help of a unit that previously worked on stifling the influence of Islamic State (ISIS) to now deal with “anti-vaxxers,” she writes, and notes that the policy of zero tolerance did not spare doctors, scientists, and academics, such as those behind the Great Barrington Declaration.
Even then PM Boris Johnson was not as ardent a “dissent suppressor” as Hancock, Oakeshott’s writing suggests.
December 12, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, UK |
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On Friday, Elon Musk confirmed that under previous leadership, political candidates were blacklisted on Twitter. In 2018, Twitter executives testified that the platform did not “shadow ban” people.
On Wednesday, journalist Bari Weiss published the second batch of “Twitter Files,” which showed that “teams of Twitter employees” built blacklists that were used to limit the spread of content.
People have always suspected that some users are shadow banned but Twitter has never been transparent about it and never tells users when they’re being suppressed. The documents obtained by Weiss showed that Twitter used “visibility filtering” to “suppress what people see to different levels.”
Weiss mentioned some of those who were added to the blacklists, including conservative commentators Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and Libs of TikTok. She did not say whether or not politicians were among those that were blacklisted.
Reporter Ian Miles Cheong asked both Musk and Weiss, “were any political candidates – either in the US or elsewhere – subject to shadowbanning while they were running for office or seeking re-election?” Musk responded, “Yes.”
Testifying before Congress in 2018, Twitter executives denied that users were suppressed based on political views.
“To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgments based on political views or the substance of tweets,” said Kayvon Beykpour, the former head of product.
“We don’t shadow ban, and we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints. We do rank tweets by default to make Twitter more immediately relevant (which can be flipped off),” said former CEO Jack Dorsey.
December 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | Covid-19, Human rights, Twitter, United States |
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EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, who worked closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, helped steer the media and scientific community away from questions about whether COVID-19 could have originated in a lab, emails released under the North Carolina Public Records Act show.
Emails between Daszak and University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric, another collaborator of the laboratory at the pandemic’s epicenter, offer new behind-the-scenes insights into Daszak’s influence. Baric’s experiments with the Wuhan lab included gain-of-function experiments to make viruses more transmissible or virulent.
The White House was dissuaded from investigating the possibility of a lab origin of COVID-19 in part by discussions that included both Daszak and Baric, according to a March 2020 email written by Daszak.
And in a separate May 2020 email, Daszak told Baric that he used talking points intended to discourage reporters from asking questions about potential gain-of-function work on coronaviruses.
Daszak has been a vocal proponent of a natural origin of COVID-19. EcoHealth Alliance has worked closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and received millions in government funding to discover and study animal viruses.
Though the public does not have a complete picture of the pre-pandemic work underway, none of the viruses published by EHA or the WIV could have directly sparked the COVID-19 pandemic.
These new revelations add to the evidence of Daszak’s central role in shaping public perceptions about COVID-19’s origins. He secretly organized a statement in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet deeming a lab origin a “conspiracy theory.” He served as the U.S. representative on the 2021 World Health Organization origins investigation in China, which dismissed a lab origin as “extremely unlikely.” He also formerly chaired a Lancet Commission probe into the origins of COVID-19 which was disbanded after Daszak declined to share his grant reports.
No lab release hypotheses ‘anytime soon’
Daszak told Baric in March 2020 that a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) discussion they participated in helped sway the Trump White House away from examining a possible lab origin of COVID-19.
Daszak and Baric both participated in the task force convened by the National Academies to inform the White House’s science office about information required to determine the origin of the pandemic.
In a February 3 call, the experts discussed the possibility of a lab origin of COVID-19 dismissively, other emails obtained under FOIA show.
National security staff were on the call, Daszak told Baric. This suggests that biothreat experts guiding the government’s response heard the scientists’ message.
The resulting letter to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2020 assumed a natural origin. The possibility of a lab-related incident was not mentioned.
Both Daszak and Baric were consulted as experts for the letter.
Daszak seemed to think that this letter he influenced – together with a letter in the journal Nature Medicine beset by conflicts-of-interest – were strong enough to sway White House opinion and prevent NASEM committees from delving into possible lab origins.
“I don’t think this committee will be getting into the lab release or bioengineering hypothesis again any time soon — White House seems to be satisfied with the earlier meeting, paper in Nature and general comments within [the] scientific community,” Daszak told Baric.
After more evidence in favor of a lab origin emerged, including Daszak and Baric’s undisclosed conflicts of interest, the National Academies issued a new statement in 2021 acknowledging that the origin of the pandemic is unknown, and that a lab-related incident is a possibility.
‘I practice lines like that’
In the May 2020 email, Daszak coaches Baric on how to deflect a reporter’s questions on COVID-19’s origins and gain-of-function research.
“I practice lines like that,” Daszak said before suggesting ideas to change the topic, such as vaccines or the risks of natural spillover.
“They [reporters] will eventually move on to that topic. I will from now on make everything extremely clear to reporters about the way this all happens,” he said.
He first recommends saying that gain-of-function research issues have already been resolved by the NIH.
“That’s already been debated extensively and decided on by NIH,” Daszak suggests telling reporters.
(NIH hosted a debate among scientists about the limits of gain-of-function research in the years before the pandemic. New oversight mechanisms were developed in 2017, but many scientists believe these remain too weak and opaque.)
Daszak then recommends citing the 2020 National Academies letter and the Nature Medicine article.
These efforts “clearly show the virus has a natural origin, no evidence of manipulation,” Daszak claimed.
However, neither source proved a natural origin for the pandemic.
Though the National Academies letter did not mention the possibility of a lab leak, discussions that led to the letter mentioned that a novel feature of the SARS-CoV-2 genome called the furin cleavage site could have arisen in a lab.
An early draft of the letter also mentioned the possibility of a lab origin, but the final draft did not.
The Nature Medicine paper, titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” was a correspondence rather than a scientific journal article presenting novel experimental results. Though it had an enormous impact, the paper was fraught with undisclosed conflicts of interest.
Keeping discussions ‘comfortable’
Daszak’s emails to Baric renew conflict-of-interest concerns about Daszak since he didn’t disclose to reporters the role he may have played in the National Academy proceedings he claimed proved a natural origin.
Elected as a member to the National Academies in 2018, Daszak was involved in many early discussions that may have influenced the research agenda of the COVID-19 task force advising the federal government.
Daszak also served on this National Academies task force and chaired a separate forum on microbial threats.
Following his nomination to the standing committee, Daszak offered to recuse himself from discussions concerning the origins of Covid-19.
“I got some questions from NAM (National Academies of Medicine) about my relationship to the Wuhan lab, but I explained that it’s purely academic (no funds from China to me), and I offered to recuse myself from any discussions about the conspiracy theories re. lab release or bioengineering,” wrote Daszak to Baric on March 17, 2020.
However, the extent of his recusal is unclear.
Documents written in April 2020 show Daszak on two NAM working groups, one whose goal was to examine “viral genetics, origin, and evolution of SARS-CoV-2.”
Notes in the document suggest their research focused on analyzing how the SARS-CoV-2 genome changed over time and in different countries. This information was needed for the “development of diagnostics and therapeutics” rather than determining how the pandemic began.
Yet in October 2020, Daszak appears to steer National Academy discussions with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) toward “natural history” hypotheses for the comfort of their Chinese colleagues.
“We discussed ways we could frame a future topic that would allow us to talk about some important issues around the ‘natural history’ of SARS-CoV-2, that might also be comfortable for our Chinese colleagues,” wrote Daszak.
Benjamin Rusek, a senior program officer at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), appears to adopt or agree with Daszak’s suggestion.
“More discussion on the origin or “natural history” of the virus focused on preventing future outbreaks (since George Gao seems to be open to it) might be possible as well,” wrote Rusek about potential NAS-CAS dialogues.
In an earlier email dated May 7, 2020, Rusek suggests that there are “issues we should probably avoid” during US-China dialogues on COVID-19.
Rusek and Daszak’s sentiments may reflect a desire to maintain scientific collaboration on public health issues of mutual interest amid rising political tensions between China and the U.S. Indeed, joint NAS-CAS meetings focused on Covid-19 public health responses, understanding of the disease, “vaccine development and delivery”, and “immunity, testing, and diagnostics.”
Daszak didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The documents reported on in this article were obtained from the University of North Carolina through litigation under the North Carolina Public Records Act. Documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know about COVID-19 origins and risky virological research can be found here.
Emily Kopp is an investigative reporter with U.S. Right to Know.
Karolina Corin, Ph.D., is a staff scientist with backgrounds in both engineering and biology.
December 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | China, Covid-19, EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, United States |
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Stanford University Medical School professor and epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has responded to the bombshell revelation that Twitter secretly blacklisted his account by suggesting that the federal government could have been pulling the strings of this censorship.
“I suspect very strongly that there was some government direction of this,” Bhattacharya said during an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. ”
Bhattacharya continued by discussing the findings from a Biden administration-social media censorship collusion lawsuit that he’s involved in.
The documents that have been released and the sworn statements that have been made as part of this lawsuit have revealed that federal government officials have pressured Big Tech companies to censor many pieces of content that they deemed to be “misinformation.”
One of the documents that’s pertinent to Bhattacharya is an email from then-National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Anthony Fauci where he called for a “quick and devastating published takedown” of the premises of The Great Barrington Declaration — an anti-lockdown statement published by Bhattacharya and other leading epidemiologists.
“We’ve uncovered tremendous evidence that… there were federal agencies that were… directing social media companies about what to censor, even who to censor,” Bhattacharya told Ingraham. “If that is actually the case… that this blacklisting was directed by the government against American citizens, that’s a direct violation of my civil rights, it’s a direct violation of the First Amendment, and every American should be outraged.”
Bhattacharya continued: “A lot of the leadership of Silicon Valley, a lot of… the people who give advice to Silicon Valley and to the government about about these content moderation policies, they’ve gone… way too far.”
The Stanford professor also commented on the far-reaching implications of this censorship of discussions about basic scientific policy.
“Imagine how different [things would have been],” Bhattacharya said. “All the small businesses could have stayed open, all the people that wouldn’t have missed their cancer screenings, all the kids that wouldn’t be depressed and suicidal, all the learning loss that could have been avoided if we just had an open scientific discussion.”
Additionally, Bhattacharya suggested that the censors deployed these tactics because “their arguments were not strong enough to survive the light of day” and called for a “national conversation that brings us back to the American commitment to free speech rights, the American commitment to… open discussion, and… honest dealings.”
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), the legal group that’s representing Bhattacharya in the Biden admin-Big Tech censorship collusion lawsuit, said:
“We already know the federal government had a hand in Twitter censorship, especially of those who articulated perspectives that conflicted with government messaging on covid. As Elon Musk exposes further information about Twitter’s inner workings, we anticipate learning more about the extent of government involvement in blacklisting those who express disfavored views.”
Not only does the recent disclosure about Bhattacharya’s account being blacklisted shine a light on the pervasiveness of Big Tech’s censorship but it also demonstrates that Twitter was still engaged in this censorship more than a year after the pandemic began with Bhattacharya only joining Twitter in August 2021.
Twitter’s blacklisting of Bhattacharya’s account is the latest of several examples of the tech giants censoring him after he challenged the government’s Covid narrative. Reddit mods deleted The Great Barrington Declaration, Facebook deleted The Great Barrington Declaration page, and YouTube deleted a public health roundtable featuring The Great Barrington Declaration authors, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and former White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Scott Atlas.
December 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, United States, YouTube |
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Sir Patrick Vallance is with Chris Whitty. Source: Sky News
In this dystopian era, honest scientists and physicians have become accustomed to having to painstakingly counter the fabrications and unsubstantiated claims made by ministers and health officials.
They have done this with cool logic and hard evidence. The Great Barrington Declaration put forth sensible analysis and advice, but politicians were far too excited by the fairground fortune-tellers at Gates-funded Imperial College with their box of toys designed to generate mass fear, to entertain logic.
So Chief Medical Officer Sir Chris Whitty, Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance and their merry crew at No. 10 set about suspending economic and social activity, destroying livelihoods and swamping the airwaves with ominous exhortations, thus succeeding in destabilising public wellbeing and preventing access to medical care.
This was unsurprising, because they had engaged armies of behavioural psychologists, paid for by taxpayers’ money, to imprison people’s minds in a form of Stockholm Syndrome. Indeed, behavioural psychologist David Charalambous and his team have discovered more than 200 different ways which were used to manipulate behaviour, and they suspect there are many more.
Now, with the predicted tidal wave of sickness and excess deaths resulting from their folly and the insidious ‘vaccines’ they so avidly pushed too voluminous to hide, Whitty and Vallance resort to contortions to distort reality.
‘Lockdowns were always a matter of the least bad option’, they assert in a ‘technical report’ on the challenges of the pandemic. Omitting the fact that they ignored all alternative sensible plans, they plead that letting the disease spread would also have had ‘major significant harmful effects’.
Making wild assertions unsubstantiated by a shred of evidence has become a regular feature of those drunk on power. It brings to mind another interesting observation made by David Charalambous, founder of Reaching People , namely that those who repeat propaganda from a podium end up more hypnotised than those the propaganda is aimed at.
Attributing a sudden increase in heart attacks and strokes, as well as the rapid development of previously unseen cancers and those that were in remission, to ‘reluctance’ to seek medical care during the lockdowns, is an audacious stab at explaining away the scale of vaccine injury that’s escalated in line with the volume and cumulative effect of multiple vaccinations.
But real-world evidence can’t be held back. In an article for The Defender entitled ‘Risk of dying from Covid was always “minuscule”, regardless of age’, Dr Joseph Mercola lists the risks of dying from Covid-19 by age group, based on published data from the Irish census bureau and the central statistics office for 2020 and 2021.
For those under 70, the death rate was 0.14 per cent, for those under 50 it was 0.002 per cent, while under 25 the mortality rate was 0.00018 per cent, or a one in half a million risk of death. Set against this risk profile, we have copious data on the broad spectrum risks of the Covid-19 ‘vaccines’.
In a talk in November, cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra highlighted the original Pfizer trial data, saying: ‘One is more likely to suffer a serious adverse event, disability, hospitalisation, life-changing event from the “vaccines” than one was to be hospitalised with Covid (prior to the rollout)’. He added that at least one in 800 people will suffer a vaccine injury.
The Canadian physician Dr Charles Hoffe went public in April 2021 with his findings on the vaccinated. Alarmed at the amount of serious adverse events he was witnessing in his practice, he tested his patients at four to seven days after vaccination, and found that in a sample of several hundred cases, 62 per cent indicated the presence of micro clots. His open letter of April 5, 2021 to the British Columbia Ministry of Health can be seen here.
Cardiovascular and neurological damage is the most manifest, but the synthetic spike proteins which circulate in the bloodstream after vaccination clearly have the potential to harm any one of the body’s systems – including cardiovascular, neurological, immune, reproductive, digestive, endocrine, lymphatic and muscular-skeletal.
As the mRNA ‘vaccines’ introduce into the body’s cells a gene sequence which is a set of instructions to manufacture synthetic spike proteins, it stands to reason the body is being set up to attack itself, which is the very definition of an auto-immune condition.
In July of 2021, Professor Michael Palmer gave a video presentation of the pharmacokinetics and toxicity of mRNA injections as part of the Doctors for Covid Ethics symposium. It featured a study of how spike proteins gravitated in particularly high concentrations to the liver, spleen and ovaries.
In a later video, Professor Sucharit Bhakdi reported the autopsy findings of Covid-19 vaccination fatalities across a wide range of ages. He warned that depletion of the body’s natural defences could activate many agents which ordinarily lie dormant in the body, such as tuberculosis, as well as an eruption of cancer tumours whose cells are otherwise held in check by healthy immune systems.
American pathologist Dr Ryan Cole has flagged up an exponential increase in the incidence of cancer, as has a Danish oncologist specialising in breast cancer. Oncologist Professor Angus Dalgleish’s open letter to the British Medical Journal on his findings further confirms this phenomenon.
In an article in The Defender entitled ‘How Covid shots harm the immune system’, Stephanie Seneff, a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discusses her paper ‘Innate Immune Suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccinations’ published in June in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology.
The paper was co-written by doctors Peter McCullough, Greg Nigh and Anthony Kyriakopoulos, and describes in detail the mechanisms whereby the Covid-19 injections suppress the innate immune system.
A campaign was launched to have the paper retracted, and the controversy led to the resignation of the editor of the journal. Efforts were made to discredit Seneff, and McCullough has since been stripped of his medical credentials. But the paper has not been retracted.
Smear campaigns and corruption won’t hold back the tide of data indefinitely. Chris Whitty’s rhetoric suggesting we are going to be living in a state of revolving pandemics needs to be dismantled outright, along with the biological weapons industry. All mRNA vaccines should be withdrawn, and the resources deployed in developing detoxification protocols for the vaccinated.
December 8, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, UK |
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