Yesterday, author and data analyst Justin Hart filed new evidence in his federal lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter, and U.S. President Joe Biden. The evidence documents collusion between social media companies and the federal government to silence Americans online on the Internet — a public forum the Supreme Court has determined is the most important place for the exchange of ideas. Hart sued the social media giants and Biden administration in August 2021 for violating his First Amendment right to free speech for working together to monitor, flag, suspend, and delete social media posts it deems “misinformation.”
Hart is represented by attorneys from the Liberty Justice Center, a national public-interest law firm that fights to protect fundamental constitutional rights. Since filing the federal lawsuit, Liberty Justice Center, other nonprofit law firms, and state attorneys general have uncovered communications and documents proving collusion between Big Tech and Biden administration officials at every level. Hart’s attorneys have submitted this evidence gained through public records requests with an amended complaint.
“New evidence confirms what we have long known: our federal government is working directly with Big Tech to silence Americans,” said Daniel Suhr, managing attorney at the Liberty Justice Center. “The government is directing private companies to violate Americans’ free speech rights. Censorship may have started with what they call ‘COVID misinformation,’ but it opens the door for any administration to define any message they don’t like as ‘misinformation.’ This is unconscionable and illegal.”
Justin Hart is the author of Gone Viral: How COVID Drove the World Insane and founder of RationalGround.com. Over the last two years, his Facebook and Twitter accounts were suspended multiple times for sharing data and scientific research about COVID. At the time Hart’s statements and valid public health messages were censored, the facts were deemed “misinformation” by the Biden administration and Big Tech. However, much of what he shared about the detrimental effects of masking, lockdowns, and school closures are now widely accepted as true.
“The depth of the collusion between Big Government and Big Tech is alarming and reveals a sinister plot to undermine the rights of Americans by fully removing certain ideas and people from public discourse,” said Justin Hart, author and plaintiff. “The government does not have a monopoly on truth. By directing and pressuring social media companies to censor Americans, our government is silencing critical discussions and, most importantly, violating our most sacred rights.”
New evidence proves that prior to Justin Hart’s deplatforming in July 2021, the federal government and Big Tech coordinated regularly:
- Facebook offered the federal government, and it accepted, $15 million in free COVID-19 public health advertising to promote its public health message on the Internet.
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Biden administration officials coordinated its COVID “misinformation” response with Facebook and Twitter by holding regular “be-on-the-lookout” meetings and by providing examples of the types of messages that contradicted the government’s message and it wanted censored.
- Facebook used proprietary tools to monitor social media posts that contradicted the federal government’s COVID-19 narrative and reported such posts to the federal government.
- Facebook adjusted its policies and algorithms to align with misinformation policies set by the federal government.
The lawsuit, Hart v. Facebook, was filed Aug. 31, 2021, and is being heard in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division. Case filings are available here.
October 21, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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Orwellian parallels worsen by the week
The recent actions of the financial technology company, PayPal, to close the accounts of subscribers expressing political opinions of which they disapprove, represents the latest example of censorship within so-called liberal democracies. Their strategic decisions to block the online monetary activities of the Free Speech Union, the Daily Sceptic website and the Us For Them campaign group – although later reversed – signal the willingness of powerful global big-tech companies to collude with governments in the crushing of activities that challenge the dominant narratives. But no one should be surprised; we have all been manipulated by top-down censorship and state propaganda for many years, a dystopian process that accelerated during the covid era.
Since the emergence of the novel coronavirus in early 2020, there has been widespread censorship of views that do not support the two mantras of covid-19 orthodoxy: namely that, ‘Lockdowns and other restrictions were appropriate responses’ and ‘The mRNA vaccines are safe and effective’. Indeed, the unprecedented and non-evidenced covid restrictions could not have been so successfully imposed without propaganda in all its forms. Contrary to popular opinion, techniques of manipulation do not only characterise recognised totalitarian regimes, but are now endemic within contemporary liberal democracies. And three, overlapping, forms of non-consensual persuasion have been widely deployed throughout the covid era to control the narrative and subsequent behaviour of citizens:
1. Control through emotional manipulation
The covert influencing of people’s emotions via use of behavioural-science ‘nudges’ has been well documented. Based on the advice of state-employed psychological experts, the covid-19 communication strategy has relied heavily on evoking uncomfortable feelings in the populace as a way of inducing them to ‘do the right thing’, where what is ‘right’ is solely determined by government-appointed officials. In particular, the manipulation of fear, shame and scapegoating – or ‘affect’, ‘ego’ and ‘norms’, to use the euphemisms of behavioural science – has been conducted for this purpose via the broadcasting of selective statistics, alarming images and emotional messaging. Furthermore, the decision to impose mask mandates was most likely informed by the knowledge that face coverings enhance the power of each of these three nudges, thereby increasing people’s compliance with government diktats.
Despite escalating concerns about the ethical basis of the state’s deployment of behavioural science, there has been a stark reluctance of anyone in authority to accept responsibility for this form of manipulation. The British Psychological Society (the formal guardians of ethical application of psychological interventions) is of the view that covertly inflicting emotional distress on people so as to promote compliance with covid restrictions and the vaccine rollout is acceptable as it is encouraging ‘social responsibility’, thereby colluding – along with other professional bodies – with the state’s mission to silence dissent and eliminate contrary behaviour. Meanwhile the Government show a reluctance to explore the ethics underpinning their deployment of nudges as evidenced by their ‘Public Administration and Public Affairs Committee’ ignoring a request for an independent inquiry and the omission of any mention of behavioural science in the draft terms of reference for the Inquiry into the covid-19 pandemic.
2. Control through modulating the flow of information
A second way of controlling dissent – used at unprecedentedly high levels throughout the covid event – has been via the regulation of information flow within our TV, radio, newspaper and social media outlets. Ease of access to facts, data and opinion (including that of scientific experts) has been mainly determined by the degree to which the information corresponds with the dominant narratives: write or speak words supportive of lockdowns, masking and vaccination and they will typically receive preferential treatment within the media’s editorial processes, gaining prominence and ease of access; in contrast, say or print something contrarian and it will most likely be submerged in the quagmire of daily media output.
The seeds of this system of selective information flow had been sown prior to 2020 with the formation of the ‘Trusted News Initiative’ (a coalition of mainstream media, publishers and big-tech companies) aspiring to ‘create a global alliance of integrity in news’ by countering ‘misinformation’ and ‘bias’. Furthermore, at the start of the pandemic, Ofcom – the UK’s communications regulator – instructed broadcasters not to cover anything that went against the Government’s narrative. This censorial alliance ensured that voices expressing dissent about covid restrictions and the vaccine rollout were disadvantaged, displaced to the inaccessible fringes of media output.
In the UK, there has even been military involvement in the form of the 77th Brigade with their explicit mission to create and spread material ‘in support of designated tasks’ while also ‘supporting counter-adversarial information activity’. Internationally, the WHO has effectively modulated the flow of information via the use of fact-checking organisations and collaborations with Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and YouTube, so as to guarantee that ‘science-based health messages from official sources’ (aka the dominant narrative) appear first when one searches for covid information.
Specific examples of the impact of this – seemingly global – operation to control information flow are numerous. They include: Professor Gupta (an epidemiological expert) being instructed not to mention the Great Barrington Declaration prior to appearing on a BBC discussion programme about lockdowns; academic journals blocking the peer-reviewed covid research of Dr Peter McCullough and the suppression of trial findings that had concluded that Ivermectin was an effective treatment; the removal of Dr Robert Malone (the inventor of mRNA technology) from Twitter; and the removal of MPs Sir Christopher Chope and David Davies from YouTube for, respectively, raising concerns about vaccine damage and vaccine effectiveness.
One fundamental consequence of this selective regulation of information was that our Western media – a supposed pillar of democracy – failed us all in their refusal to scrutinise and evaluate the actions of public officials.
3. Control through erasing dissenting voices
Presumably based on the assumption that eliminating people before dissent is expressed is a more effective censorial method than controlling their information output, throughout the covid era there appears to have been a systematic state-driven attempt to discredit or cancel those brave individuals expressing views that are inconsistent with the dominant restrict-and-jab narrative.
Since March 2020, anyone who has expressed a contrarian covid opinion in a public space will likely have attracted criticism involving accusations of being ‘right wing’, fascist or a ‘conspiracy theorist’. Efforts by powerful players to destroy reputations and livelihoods through smearing and character assassination have been commonplace. Arguably the most high-profile example of this egregious practice is in regards to the targeting of the main authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a multi-signatory document arguing for an alternative to the blanket lockdowns. In leaked emails between Anthony Fauci (Chief Medical Advisor to the US president) and Francis Collins (the Director of the US National Institute of Health), these powerful state officials refer to the illustrious authors of the document as ‘fringe epidemiologists’ while describing the need for a ‘quick and devastating public takedown’ of their arguments. Furthermore, the extremely popular US podcaster, Joe Rogan, was smeared as a transphobe and racist in the aftermath of him giving a platform to experts expressing views at odds with the dominant covid narrative.
A threat of imminent loss of earnings – actual or implied – is another tactic that has been commonly deployed to cancel those criticising the approach of Western governments to pandemic management. Many academics have suffered in this way, including Canadian professor Julie Ponesse who lost her job after she challenged the vaccine mandates. Of course, such a draconian sanction serves as a warning to many other university scholars who might also be considering expressing dissent.
The recent actions of PayPal suggest that our medico-technocratic powerhouses are not satisfied with inflicting emotional distress, censorship and character assassination on the Western population, but now seek to control how we spend our money. Manipulation by means of regulating access to our finances may be the new front in the war on freedom of verbal and behavioural expression. It raises the spectre of the imposition of a totalitarian social credit system, mediated via a Central Bank Digital Currency, a world where unelected global bureaucrats determine our monthly spend based on the degree to which our behaviour conforms to their version of what constitutes the ‘greater good’.
In the words of Piers Robinson (an expert on global propaganda), ‘That the censorship, smearing and coercion … has come to be tolerated is a clear indicator of how far our democracies have slipped into an authoritarian abyss’. And the imminent Online Harms Bill, with its ‘legal but harmful’ category, may further restrict our basic human right to freedom of expression. But there is still hope. As more and more people become aware of the associated collateral damage, the dominant narratives on the benefits of lockdowns, school closures, masks and ‘safe-and-effective’ covid vaccines are beginning to crumble. As awareness of ubiquitous state-funded manipulation and censorship grows, increasing numbers of citizens are turning to independent sources of expert information – such as HART and PANDA – for reliable covid updates. The basic human right of freedom of expression within Western democracies must be protected; once lost, it is unlikely to be restored within our lifetimes.
October 21, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, UK, United States |
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Samizdat | October 17, 2022
Scientists at Boston University claim to have created a new variant of Covid-19 with an 80% mortality rate, by combining the highly-transmissible Omicron variant of the coronavirus with the original Wuhan strain. The research, which echoes experiments thought to have created the virus in the first place, has caused outrage.
In a research paper published last week, the scientists explained that they isolated the spike protein of the Omicron variant and combined it with the “backbone” of the original strain that circulated in early 2020. This created a virus that “robustly escapes vaccine-induced… immunity” and inflicts “serious disease” on laboratory mice, 80% of whom died during testing, the paper stated.
While the team admitted that their mutant strain would likely be less deadly in humans than mice, they found that it produced five times as many virus particles in lab-grown human lung cells when compared to the Omicron variant.
The paper has yet to be peer reviewed.
News of the research caused outrage online, as it is widely believed that similar ‘gain-of-function’ research – a term describing the alteration of a pathogen to enhance its potency – at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China led to the global Covid-19 pandemic. The US funded such research at the Wuhan Institute, although it is still unclear whether the specific coronavirus that caused the pandemic originated in the lab.
“This should be totally forbidden, it’s playing with fire,” former Israel Institute for Biological Research head Shmuel Shapira said of the Boston experiments. “How many times did virologists say they were not making chimeric SARS viruses more deadly? How many???” reporter Paul Thaker tweeted.
The Boston team aren’t the only scientists returning to potentially dangerous research in the aftermath of the pandemic. EcoHealth Alliance, the private company responsible for much of the Wuhan Institute’s pre-2020 gain-of-function research, was awarded a $650,000 grant by the US last month to study “the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam.”
October 17, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, United States |
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It’s been known since the outbreak of Covid that obesity leads to higher rates of hospitalisations and deaths. Despite this, very few resources were deployed to encourage healthier eating and lifestyles. This article argues that this was a disastrous decision for the long term health of the nation and the short to medium term capacity of the NHS.
Boris Johnson (BMI 34; healthy is under 25) in his New Year message broadcast on December 31st 2020 said: “Get a vaccine, it’s far easier than losing weight” (see video from two minutes in). Well, the people of the U.K. took him at his word: we’ve had 30 months to galvanise the population into losing weight and getting fitter, 30 months entirely squandered.
First, let’s just look at how effective spending £25bn injecting 150 million vaccines into the U.K. population has been. As the NHS continues to struggle to meet demand, perhaps Covid hospital admissions are the key metric. For the vaccine programme to have been a success we should expect the unvaccinated to be disproportionately admitted to hospital. They’re not. These figures come from the latest UKHSA Weekly Vaccine Surveillance Report; table 12a on page 49 gives us the figures for hospital admissions between March 21st and August 28th of this year. In each age cohort the unvaccinated are proportionately less likely to be hospitalised than the vaccinated. As an example, in the 50-64 year-olds, 129 of the 1,342 admissions were unvaccinated, that’s 9.6%. Yet, about 14% of that age group are unvaccinated. If the unvaccinated were more likely to be hospitalised we would expect the figures to be reversed, to see a higher proportion of the unvaccinated hospitalised than the total proportion of people unvaccinated.
Demonstrably, despite the Government’s claims that vaccines have reduced hospital admissions, this can’t be true. Something has reduced hospital admissions from the peaks in the first two waves, but if the rate of admission is much the same for the vaccinated and the unvaccinated I struggle to see how vaccines can explain it. Surely, far more likely are the twin benefits of immunity brought about by prior infection and a less virulent variant. Figure 2 shows the peaks and troughs of Covid hospital admissions since the start of the pandemic.
Also worth noting, the seven-day average number of hospital admissions for Covid is currently 132% higher than it was on October 7th 2020, before anyone anywhere had been vaccinated, and 86% higher than on October 7th 2021 when most people had been vaccinated – though it should be noted that over half of Covid hospital admissions since Omicron have been primarily being treated for something else.
Despite my deep scepticism of the efficacy of the mRNA vaccines and the real world evidence presented above, to avoid any accusations of dogmatism I’m going to indulge the vaccine zealots’ figures for vaccine effectiveness. Again, with the data taken from the Government’s week 40 vaccine surveillance report, figure 3 suggests that the UKHSA thinks that the best protection a fourth dose of vaccine can offer is about 50%, soon falling to 20%.
Now let’s compare that vaccine efficacy with the impact of obesity on severe Covid outcomes by turning to a fascinating study published in June in the Lancet that looked at how BMI affects Covid outcomes. What made this latest study particularly interesting was that it used real, though anonymised, data from about 20% of the U.K. population. The data, from QResearch had over 12 million patient records but about 3 million couldn’t be used, mainly because BMI data were missing, but that still left 9,171,524 patient records to be analysed. So, again, we’re looking at real-world evidence whereas the UKHSA vaccine efficacy rates are estimates.
The data related to the period from December 2020 to November 2021. This was the period covering the initial rollout through to booster doses in older people. Part of the summary table is reproduced in Figure 4. I’ve highlighted in red hospital admissions.
There were 3,509,213 people of a healthy weight in the study, of whom 8,315 were hospitalised with Covid, that’s 0.23%. Of the 3,062,925 overweight people, 10,653 or 0.35% were hospitalised. That means the overweight were 50% more likely to end up in hospital than those classed as healthy weight.
Of the 2,278,649 obese people 13,044 or 0.57% were hospitalised. This means they were 150% more likely require hospital treatment than the healthy weight group.
Let’s now compare the relative risk of being vaccinated with that of being obese. The obese get hospitalised at a rate 150% greater than those of a healthy weight while the best you can hope for from your fourth vaccine is a 50% reduction in the likelihood of being admitted to hospital, dropping to 20% after about four months. And that’s another key point, keep the weight off and that risk reduction remains in contrast to any benefit from vaccination that soon wanes to nothing (assuming it ever existed in the first place).
But of course, it’s not just Covid where the overweight and obese have worse outcomes. The Lancet study goes on to list some of the other health outcomes for other conditions. The obese are almost six times more likely to have type 2 diabetes, more than twice as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease and over three times more likely to suffer hypertension.
Lose weight and many of these rates of disease would fall. The burden on the NHS would be reduced, the people losing weight, in most cases, would feel better and no doubt their mental health would, in the round, be improved.
I was interested in a piece by Michael P. Senger in the Daily Sceptic on October 14th 2022 highlighting the demonisation of the unvaccinated. I really don’t recall anyone in the mainstream media or in Government objecting to this vilification at the time yet it was evident from the Week 35 2021 Vaccine Surveillance Report that in each of the age groups from 40 to 80 the double dosed were testing positive for the virus at a higher rate than the unvaccinated (see an article I wrote back in June that goes into some detail on this point), so it was evident that the unvaccinated represented less of a threat than the vaccinated. Likewise, it’s been known since the Covid outbreak on the Diamond Princess back in February 2020 that obesity was a risk factor. However, can you imagine the furore that would result if people were to suggest that the obese were denied hospital treatment?
It’s not the unvaccinated who are clogging up the NHS, it’s disproportionately the obese and overweight – some of whom have been particularly vocal in vilifying the unvaccinated or in failing to promote healthier lifestyles:
- Andrew Neil (estimated BMI 32) argued for restrictions on the freedoms of the unvaccinated.
- Piers Morgan (estimated BMI 29) argued for the unvaccinated to be denied NHS care if they caught Covid.
- Boris Johnson (estimated BMI 34) attempted to bring in vaccine passports.
- Michael Gove (estimated BMI 28) was a keen advocate of vaccine passports.
- Therese Coffey (estimated BMI 30), the new Health Minister appears to be far keener on promoting vaccines rather than healthy lifestyles.
The Government spent about £12bn vaccinating the under 50s, largely a pointless exercise. As an advocate of lower taxes and a smaller state I don’t argue that this money should have been spent on schemes to subsidise healthier living. Such schemes invariably fail. What’s more, I would object just as fiercely to coercing people to lose weight as I do to coercing people to get vaccinated. However, I would like to see them campaign to raise people’s awareness of the risks associated with a high BMI. In rough terms, there appears to be about a 10% Covid hospitalisation risk reduction for each BMI point reduction and associated risk reductions for various cancers, diabetes, heart conditions, muscular/skeletal problems and mental health.
Body positivity is all well and good but being overweight is neither risk or cost free. If Andrew Neil, Piers Morgan, Boris Johnson et al. want target a group to be censorious of perhaps they should follow Jordan Peterson’s advice and go tidy their own room first.
October 17, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, UK |
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Is this the smoking gun that proves hospital neglect and malfeasance, in the midst of a drummed up crisis environment, killed covid patients?
Daniel Horowitz recently interviewed Scott Schara, whose 19-year-old Down syndrome daughter Grace died of “covid” in Ascension’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.
In this stunning interview, Scott laid out the real-life horror movie of Grace’s experience in the hospital as a mentally disabled individual, culminating in her being sedated to death by hospital staff. According to him, the cruel indifference of the hospital was at least in part because Grace had Down Syndrome. (Scott created a website that contains all of his meticulously documented evidence and research where you can get all the sordid details for yourself.)
This “anecdote” aligns with the numerous and widely reported instances of the shocking descent of some hospital administrators and healthcare staff into depravity reminiscent of medical war crimes, one of the defining atrocities of the pandemic.
To give one quick example, Nicole Sirotek, founder of America’s Frontline Nurses, has been involved in “jailbreaking” a number of patients from hospitals where they were being abused and/or held against their will. She gave riveting testimony at Senator Ron Johnson’s Senate roundtable event “Covid 19: A Second Opinion.”
However, while vignettes of individual cases abound, there had not yet been any published data suggesting a direct link from hospital neglect to covid outcomes that would effectively be a smoking gun that hospital malfeasance was and is systematically killing patients.
Shedding light on this situation is a study published in Nature entitled “Trends and associated factors for Covid-19 hospitalisation and fatality risk in 2.3 million adults in England.” The goal of the study was to see if they could distill from the vast reams of UK hospital data throughout the pandemic what factors were most strongly associated with covid hospitalization and death. Here is what they found:
“Of 2,311,282 people included in the study, 164,046 (7.1%) were admitted and 53,156 (2.3%) died within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test. We found significant variation in the case hospitalisation and mortality risk over time, which remained after accounting for the underlying risk of those infected. Older age groups, males, those resident in areas of greater socioeconomic deprivation, and those with obesity had higher odds of admission and death. People with severe mental illness and learning disability had the highest odds of admission and death.”
In plain English, they discovered that having a “severe mental illness or learning disability” was a stronger predictor than age and obesity of becoming hospitalized and dying from covid.
It is less clear why there should be higher rates of hospital admission for mentally incapacitated individuals. Regardless, even if there is a completely separate reason for higher hospitalization rates for mentally disabled people, the most plausible explanation why having a learning disability is a greater “comorbidity” than age or obesity is that hospitals/LTC’s are ‘treating them to death’ whether by oversedation or using other inappropriate medical interventions; or utter neglect.
To be fair, the authors noted that obesity “had higher risk of admission than those of a healthy weight, but mortality risk was lower in those overweight, which may indicate higher perceived risk amongst clinicians and a lower threshold for admission.”)
Anyone reading this is undoubtedly well aware that age and obesity have consistently been the two most lethal comorbid factors for covid outcomes. So how can having a severe mental illness or *learning disability* be more lethal than being 258 lbs or 87 years of age?
Now, it is theoretically possible that ‘severe mental illness’ is in reality catching underlying conditions that are the real culprit of the increased hospital admissions and deaths and not the mental illness itself, as people with severe mental illness often are also suffering from severe physiological problems (which are also sometimes contributing to their psychological impairments).
It is not remotely plausible that “learning disabilities” have a physiological connection or influence on the pathological course of covid infection or disease, certainly not en masse that would show up as a stronger safety signal than both age and obesity. The proposition that an otherwise perfectly healthy individual with a learning disability is at a higher risk from covid than your 83-year-old grandma is so absurd that it should call the entire study into doubt.
It is plausible though that hospitals were systematically taking advantage of patients who were mentally incapacitated and therefore especially susceptible to utter neglect, and/or unable to resist adverse “treatment” by medical providers.
The implications of this finding are significant. Although this particular study is analyzing UK data, considering what we know about the general scene in US hospitals, it is overwhelmingly likely that this finding would be replicable using US data (by honest researchers). Consider that it was widely reported by the mainstream media that there were already plans made to triage care away from disabled patients and not just the elderly, e.g. this NBC report.
More importantly, this is another datapoint in the broad mosaic of evidence pointing to the complicity of hospitals and other healthcare provider institutions in the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of covid patients.
In a truly ironic twist, the study authors unwittingly captured the root issue quite accurately, concluding that “People with severe mental illness and learning disability were amongst those with the highest odds of both admission and mortality, indicating the need for proactive care in these groups.”
Is there evidence of similar behavior in the UK?
This is relevant insofar as showing that the mindset, willingness and the means to essentially euthanize patients exists independently of the allegations regarding mentally incapacitated patients in the UK, which would be powerful evidence affirming that the reason that mental disabilities are the most lethal ‘comorbidity’ is that they were selectively discriminated against on an institutional level to receive potentially lethal medical interventions.
UK: Care homes accused of using powerful sedatives to make coronavirus victims die more quickly as use rocketed toward 100%.
CARE homes have been accused of using powerful sedatives to make coronavirus victims die more quickly. Prescriptions for the drug midazolam rocketed during the height of the pandemic, with some claiming it has “turned end-of-life care into euthanasia.”
UK: ‘You stayed at home, to protect the NHS, but they gave Midazolam to the Elderly and told you they were Covid Deaths.’ This is a brilliant and extremely thorough (and long) investigatory piece of the Midazolam scandal in the UK.
As Canada is very much culturally intertwined with the UK, it is noteworthy that the same phenomena are present in Canada as well:
Canada: Who Killed Granny? Pandemic Death Protocols in Canada’s Long-term Care Facilities.
That elderly nursing home residents represent a large proportion of Covid-19 fatalities is a familiar if sad fact to most Canadians. Even sadder and more disturbing would be if many of those deaths were avoidable. And if some were deliberate, it would be shocking and outrageous. In this investigative piece, Anna Farrow explores the widespread use of “population triage” in several jurisdictions during the pandemic’s early months. While healthcare establishments seemed woefully unprepared in nearly all respects, Farrow found they were lightning-quick to adopt what amounted to killer protocols on thousands of elderly and vulnerable citizens. This included not merely the withholding of advanced care but end-of-life measures using fatal drug cocktails.
Canada: Palliative care doctors worried about ‘potentially excessive’ dosages:
Several establishments in Quebec have already suspended the application of protocols, developed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which aimed to relieve patients suffering from respiratory distress.
Canada: ‘It was all set up ahead of time:’ COVID-positive nursing home residents were given deadly euthanasia cocktails.
Starved and dehydrated
Canadians heard about it when the military were sent into elderly care homes in late April 2020. “To read Brigadier General C.J.J. Mialkowski’s report about the Ontario homes is to read a document that conveys in the precise, meticulous language of a soldier the horror the military personnel felt. It reads as dispatches from a new kind of battlefield,” Farrow states.
“There were common themes across the five facilities: lack of permanent, trained, and coordinated staff; misuse of narcotics; shortage of supplies; inadequate nutrition and hydration of residents.”
At risk of rehashing what I stated above, these scandals are a solid indication of the following:
- The medical profession is capable of sedating or otherwise ‘treating’ patients to death, both morally and practically.
- Medical institutions had developed protocols to systematically implement treatment regiments that result in the deaths of patients.
- Medical practitioner and healthcare worker whistleblowers claiming that hospitals and nursing homes were committing negligence or outright causing patient deaths are credible as a general matter.
This neatly fits in with the hypothesis that hospitals were systematically taking advantage of mentally disabled patients to withhold treatment, or worse, recklessly administer sedatives and ventilate them.
Aaron Hertzberg is a writer on all aspects of the pandemic response. His Substack is called Resisting the Intellectual Illiteratti.
October 17, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Canada, Covid-19, Human rights, UK, United States |
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COVID-19 is much less deadly in the non-elderly population than previously thought, a major new study of antibody prevalence surveys has concluded.
The study was led by Dr. John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Stanford University, who famously sounded an early warning on March 17th 2020 with a widely-read article in Stat News, presciently arguing that “we are making decisions without reliable data” and “with lockdowns of months, if not years, life largely stops, short-term and long-term consequences are entirely unknown, and billions, not just millions, of lives may be eventually at stake”.
In the new study, which is currently undergoing peer-review, Prof. Ioannidis and colleagues found that across 31 national seroprevalence studies in the pre-vaccination era, the average (median) infection fatality rate of COVID-19 was estimated to be just 0.035% for people aged 0-59 years people and 0.095% for those aged 0-69 years. A further breakdown by age group found that the average IFR was 0.0003% at 0-19 years, 0.003% at 20-29 years, 0.011% at 30-39 years, 0.035% at 40-49 years, 0.129% at 50-59 years, and 0.501% at 60-69 years.
The study states that it shows a “much lower pre-vaccination IFR in non-elderly populations than previously suggested”.
A breakdown by country reveals the wide range of IFR values across different populations.
The significantly higher values for the top seven suggest some of the difference may be an artefact of, for example, the way Covid deaths are counted, particularly where excess death levels are similar. Note also that the antibody studies date from various points during the first year of the pandemic, most of them prior to the large winter wave of 2020-21, when levels of spread and numbers of deaths were more varied than later in the pandemic as subsequent waves caused countries to converge.
The reason some countries had much lower values and some much higher is not completely clear. The authors suggest that “much of the diversity in IFR across countries is explained by differences in age structure”, as per the plot below.
However, the age breakdown by country suggests that the IFR differed for each age group in each country, casting doubt on that suggestion. (In the chart below, note the logarithmic scale, and ignore the zig-zag lines, which are due to small countries having low numbers of deaths.)
Why are countries seeing differing IFRs even for the same age groups? The authors suggest a number of explanations, including data artefacts (e.g. if the number of deaths or seroprevalence are not accurately measured), presence and severity of comorbidities (for example, obesity affects 42% of the U.S. population, but the proportion of obese adults is only 2% in Vietnam, 4% in India and under 10% in most African countries, though it affects almost 40% of South African women), the presence of frail individuals in nursing homes and differences in management, healthcare, overall societal support and levels of drug problems.
Prof. Ioannidis has previously published a number of papers estimating COVID-19’s IFR using seroprevalence surveys. He and his team conclude that their new estimates provide a baseline from which to assess further IFR declines following the widespread use of vaccination, prior infections and evolution of new variants such as Omicron.
October 17, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19 |
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For the third autumn in a row, the German press screeches about overwhelmed hospitals, and there’s no reason to think they’ll ever stop.
It’s virus season, and the headlines are already here: Many New Corona Infections: Hospitals Demand Indoor Mask Mandate — Lauterbach Already Hopes for Corona Restrictions — High Covid Incidences: Medical Association Wants Compulsory FFP2 Masks Indoors — Corona: Baden-Württemberg Health Minister Considers Mask Mandate Possible. I could add a dozen more, but you get the idea. It’s the same reheated pablum from last year. Hospital staff have their backs against the wall; a new tide of Corona patients threatens to overwhelm their meagre resources; the Apocalypse threatens if we don’t immediately return to indoor plastic face coverings.
If you look at hospitalisations, though, you’ll have a hard time finding any crisis at all. Here, for example, are hospitalisations for severe acute respiratory infections since 2017, as published last week by the Robert Koch Institut:
The red dot is where we are right now. Admissions are totally in line with the pre-pandemic era. The ICU admissions tell exactly the same story:
Nor is anybody really dying at the moment:
To the extent that there is any crisis at all here, it’s of our own making. Hospital patients with Corona diagnoses have to be treated according to strict isolation protocols, in special wards. These rituals are staff-intensive, and they effectively reduce across-the-board hospital capacity. It’s the same as our quarantine laws, which induce worker shortages by forcing millions of otherwise healthy Germans into isolation whenever they test positive. We could declare a rhinovirus pandemic tomorrow and suffer all the same problems from the common cold, and by the same token we could end all of this ourselves in an instant, by abolishing our foolishness and choosing to ignore SARS-2. Instead, we insist that this virus is dangerous and through our own behaviour we make it so.
The most onerous part of all this, is the inability of the German press to find a new narrative, ask new questions, or to change their reporting in any way at all — despite the totally different behaviour of Omicron and the near-universal levels of immune exposure to SARS-2. I know some of you complain that I repeat the same themes and arguments overmuch, but Germany has descended into some kind of purgatorial alternate reality, where it’s always March 2020, and our hospitals are always on the verge of melting down, and we never have enough information, so we just have to try masking and social distancing and hope for the best. They’re wrong about everything and they just keep telling the same lies over and over.
October 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, Germany |
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Dr. Jeff Barke, a founding member of America’s Frontline Doctors, joins Del to discuss California’s new law enacted with the passage of AB2098, which effectively makes it illegal for doctors to disagree with politicians.
October 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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Pictured is the Federal President of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, violating the Infection Protection Act, which requires masks in all local and long-distance trains. He pleads that he only took his mask off for a few seconds for the purposes of a short video message and some publicity photographs. Alas, the law provides for no such exception, and why should it? The official position of the German government is that unmasked people are a danger to themselves and others, particularly when they are on trains.
Now this is merely the latest in a string of similar incidents, including these barefaced mask mandate-happy Greens at Oktoberfest and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s unmasked government flight to Canada. It’s long become clear that nobody—not even the politicians most in favour of mandates—believes that masking is worth the trouble. And when you think about it, that’s depressing indeed, because how can we ever get rid of these rules if they are this discredited, and yet they persist?
October 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Covid-19, Germany, Human rights |
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Repeat after me: New York City’s emergency rooms were not overwhelmed by visits in spring 2020. In fact, they were busier during the 2017-2018 flu season than they were at any point between lockdown orders and January 2022’s “omicron surge.”
Data from the New York City Department of Health & Hygiene, provided via FOIA request, tell a different story from the one told by elected officials, news media, dancing nurses, and aspiring celebrity doctors.
Contrary to The Narrative, Governor Cuomo’s stay-home orders didn’t come “just in time” to save NYC’s healthcare system from collapse. They triggered a staggering 60%+ decline in the number of people coming or being brought to ERs. (NYC’s spring 2020 emergency visit decline was even greater than Chicago’s.) That’s a hard truth to handle given the city’s record high number of EMS calls and hospital, outpatient facility, & ER deaths in spring 2020.
It’s likewise a hard, if predictable, truth to handle for those of us who were/are anti-lockdown.
- We remember how selected images of & video from NYC hospitals scaring people across the country about how dangerous covid must be.
- We remember being told, implicitly if not explicitly, that in order to avoid what was happening in New York, we must be content with Zoom church, screen school, carryout, & minimal in-person contact with humans outside our own household.
- We remember that anyone who questioned the wisdom of these directives – or wondered whether NYC hospitals were truly any busier than during a bad flu season – was a grandma killer. (Meanwhile, grandma was being killed by the very policies & protocols put in place to *save hospitals* and *slow the spread,* not only in the hospital and at the long-term care facility, but also at home.
NYC deaths occurring at decedent’s home (all causes)
No one denies that thousands of New Yorkers died needlessly in March – May 2020. Now we know it wasn’t because the city’s ERs were overrun.
October 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception | Covid-19, United States |
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On controlled opposition, compassion and staying afloat in a choppy sea.
I want to talk about Dr Aseem Malhotra. After the press conference on 27 September, there were concerns from some circles that World Council for Health was associating itself with Dr Malhotra. While some regard him as ‘controlled opposition’, others object to his lack of questioning vaccines in general, given Covid-19 “vaccine” and pharmaceutical industry corruption revelations.
We are living through interesting times. As the institutions entrusted with public service and care, reveal themselves to have betrayed our trust, as vaccine harms become ever harder to shove under the carpet, and as governments become ever more incompetent and unaccountable, we find ourselves apparently cast adrift on a turbulent sea, understandably wondering who is our enemy and who is our friend.
What helps me stay centred and free from fear, is the 7 Principles of A Better Way. They came out of the collective wisdom shared in May’s Better Way Conference, and they are a lodestar in these times of extreme pressure.
One of the Principles is:
We value different perspectives.
We celebrate respectful discussion as the means to ever more refined knowledge, compassion and wisdom.
It is in the spirit of this noble principle that we hosted Dr Malhotra’s press conference. Not all of us agree with his view that traditional vaccines are safe and effective. But we do agree that the Covid-19 vaccine roll-out should be halted immediately, and this is something that World Council for Health has been calling for almost since its inception. Dr Malhotra’s press conference has been viewed well over 100,000 times. Many wrote to us to say that they would be sharing it with their loved ones as it was just the thing that would reach them and get them thinking.
My hope is that his courageous efforts will, in particular, reach doctors and other medical professionals – those who are questioning the ‘safe and effective’ narrative but are afraid to speak up. They are certainly under the cosh: on Friday, California’s Governor Gavin Newsome signed a bill that means any doctor can lose their licence for sharing ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ about Covid-19. In Queensland, Australia, a similar bill is being presented to Parliament next week that goes even further, prohibiting doctors from giving any advice or opinion that goes against public health edict. Governments are going out of their way to shut doctors up, and while that may be terrifying for doctors – and their patients – it is also an indication of the power doctors hold. Governments know that if enough doctors speak up, the ‘safe and effective’ narrative will quickly crumble.
How we treat Dr Malhotra may be a deciding factor as to whether other doctors follow suit to stand up for medical ethics and their patients. Will we welcome them with gratitude and compassion, or shun them for not having spoken up sooner? This is a personal question for each of us, and one that we will all have to reckon with at some point. Is it for us to judge and does it serve the highest good of all to do so?
There are those who benefit from us dividing ourselves and each other into the binary camps of friend or foe. Of debating whether this or that person is controlled opposition, or bona fide. In this endless speculation we exhaust our precious life force, and find ourselves lacking the energy to create a better way.
If we can just relax and remember ourselves and why we are here, we can reclaim the broader view: that humanity is inherently fallible and yet capable of the most extraordinary acts of redemption. That we are all beings of light, but that we each have our own darkness as well. And, that we are all redeemed in the light of compassion for ourselves and each other.
This Saturday 15th October, we are holding a UK Doctors Conference in London. Our wish is for every doctor and health professional to feel they are welcome. It will be a safe and private space for people to ask questions, learn more about what’s really going on, and speak freely with each other. Please watch NHS Consultant Dr Julia Wilkens’ invitation (click on the image to view) – she could not have put the value of being there any better:
Please share this event widely: there is still space and we want as many people as possible to come together and realise that they are not a sole dissenter but one of many ready to question, to inquire, and understand.
‘Winning Doctors Back One at a Time’ Hearts of Oak podcast
I recently returned to the highly informative Heart of Oak podcast to speak about doctors, health, and of course the doctors conference. I really enjoyed our conversation – if you’d like to tune in, you’ll find it on the Hearts of Oak home page here.
October 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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Title says it all – the evil of Mandates, when they had to know they served no purpose but… totalitarianism and control! Great one to share with normies, as all the data is packed in here too.
NOTE: My extensive research and interviewing / video/sound editing, business travel and much more does require support – please consider helping if you can with monthly donation to support me directly, or one-off payment: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=69ZSTYXBMCN3W – alternatively join up with my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IvorCummins
Ivor Cummins | October 5, 2022
I’ve just been included in a nonsense propaganda publication! A book no less – publishing tomorrow Oct 6th – “Web of Lies”. Unbelievable deceit dripping through the piece they decided to share with me before publication – and stunningly incorrect throughout. Btw if referring to this book or sharing thoughts, always use the hashtag #WebOfLies – and PLEASE don’t comment if talking depopulation, radio waves or any other such stuff – always stick to the pandemic response ‘science’, and to published science/data – I never associate with anything other than the latter, as you should well know… 😠
That said, this vid will give you and your friends/family an invaluable education on how these guys craft propaganda. Enjoy, while I blow their deceit out of the water with trivial ease – directly from the published data – as always 😉 p.s. the white paper I sent them – a key resource to download and share: https://thefatemperor.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Evidence-For-and-Against-the-Effectiveness-of-Lockdown-Policies-DRAFT-RevC.pdf
October 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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