Video Link
Sounds of Silenced Science is a salute to all of those who found their own path, while sometimes walking alone through a maze of information and disinformation. It is a solid tribute to those who possessed the confidence to methodically question reality presented from without, but who knew another truth arising from within. We raise a toast to science, as this questioning is its fundamental definition, and the individual trust in this science, multiplied by many, is what united us, and ultimately, at least temporary, saved us from an eternity of lock-downs.
The Adverse Events featuring The Spike Girls might have been born out of good fun, but doesn’t life usually tell you you’re on the right track if even hard work comes by effortlessly? Thanks to four special ladies for the delightful collaboration.
Lyrics:
Hello Darkest MSM,
I’ve come to face you once again,
Because the horrors steadily streaming,
Grew seeds of fear while I was sleeping,
And the nightmares you planted in my brain,
Were sustained,
When you silenced science.
In quarantine I walked alone
Down the halls of my own home
In the halo of a zoom call
I wore a mask ‘cause I was in their thrall
Then my mind was stabbed with a thought of its own free will
I tried until
I understood the science
And on the evening news I saw
Ten million people, maybe more
People jabbing without thinking
People aping without listening
People spewing hate that famous voices shared
But no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
“Fools” said I, “You do not know
That silence like a cancer grows
Learn the science that it might teach you
Do the math that it might reach you”
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of pseudo-science
And the people bowed and prayed
To the CoVid god they made
And the Science shouted its warning
In the findings that it was forming
And I found that “The words of the prophets are written in Substack mail and Twitter jail, and echo against the silence.
“When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.”
― Yevgeny Yevtushenko
The original upload of this video got banned on YouTube. Thanks to a few key people, it found itself in front of many eyeballs for which I’m grateful. I’ll be posting all third rail content on alternative media channels. You can find me most active on VisceralAdventure.Substack.com
Back in 2020 (which seems like a different lifetime), I was fortunate enough to not have anyone close to me get diagnosed with covid and die soon after from/with it. But through the course of the year, the circle of who got sick closed in and I even saw a post or two on social media about a friend’s dad or mom whose death was amplified as a warning to all: the elderly and the really sick people are dying, and so we must do everything we can to stop that from happening, this is a grade A emergency, damnit.
And then, this year rolled around and not a day goes by that I don’t see a tribute post or an obituary, except they are, for the most part, of people who are quite young. And then there are the athletes. And the movie stars. And the public personas. And the politicians. And their kids. There’s cancer, and a wallop of overdoses and lots of suicides, and then there’s SADS: Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome or more commonly known as Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. And that’s just awfully analogous to SIDS, a still mysterious condition, the likes of which have infants tragically dying while they sleep. Incredulously, we’ve come to terms with the fact that, sometimes, ‘nature’ (?) unexpectedly and without a warning terminates a healthy baby. But until this year, I had never heard of SADS. I never knew that this could also happen to a young healthy adult. While they sleep.
How long before SADS becomes as normal as SIDS? Before we all notice that the surges happen around specific milestones and can be prevented only if one slept in the correct sleeping position? Or have we already normalized it? Endemic SADS. Maybe we can rename it SEADS. What’s it gonna end up taking to break our collective camel’s back?
Two yeas ago, iatrogenic deaths were the third leading cause of death in America. What’s the over/under on that rating this year?
Go to VisceralAdventure.Substack.com for more content.
October 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
Leave a comment
Samizdat | October 25, 2022
US President Joe Biden received his fifth Covid-19 vaccine dose on Tuesday, and urged Americans to do the same. While the president is pushing for a yearly vaccine schedule, less than 10% of the eligible population has gotten the latest omicron-specific shot.
“Get vaccinated,” Biden said at a White House event. “It’s incredibly effective, but the truth is, not enough people are getting it. We’ve got to change that so we all can have a safe and healthy holiday season.”
Biden, who caught a recurring case of Covid-19 earlier this summer despite having received a total of four vaccine doses at the time, then rolled up his sleeve and received his fifth dose – this time of Pfizer’s omicron-specific bivalent booster – on camera.
The president said that the coronavirus vaccine is “just like the flu shot,” and added that “for most Americans, one Covid shot each year will be all that they need.”
However, uptake for the latest round of booster shots has been slow. Fewer than 20 million people have taken the updated formulation, or just 8.5% of the eligible population, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Meanwhile, the state of Florida has recommended against mRNA booster shots for children under 18 and males under 39, citing the low risk posed by Covid-19 to children and the elevated risk of cardiac arrest in young vaccinated men. Several European countries have issued similar recommendations in recent months, but the CDC still recommends that children as young as five receive bivalent boosters, and has recommended that Covid-19 vaccines be added to children’s routine immunization schedules.
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Biden combined an intense public messaging campaign with legal mandates for federal workers and contractors in a bid to up the US’ vaccination rate. While some municipalities also drafted their own mandates, legal challenges followed. In New York City on Tuesday, the Staten Island Supreme Court ordered the city to lift its mandate and rehire all employees fired for non-compliance with full back pay.
October 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
Leave a comment
Voter analytics firm PredictWise harvested location data from tens of millions of US cellphones during the initial Covid lockdown months and used this data to assign a “Covid-19 decree violation” score to the people associated with the phones.
These Covid-19 decree violation scores were calculated by analyzing nearly two billion global positioning system (GPS) pings to get “real-time, ultra-granular locations patterns.” People who were “on the go more often than their neighbors” were given a high Covid-19 decree violation score while those who mostly or always stayed at home were given a low Covid-19 decree violation score.
Not only did PredictWise use this highly sensitive location data to monitor millions of Americans’ compliance with Covid lockdown decrees but it also combined this data with follow-up surveys to assign “Covid concern” scores to the people who were being surveilled. PredictWise then used this data to help Democrats in several swing states to target more than 350,000 “Covid concerned” Republicans with Covid-related campaign ads.
In its white paper, PredictWise claims that Democrats were able to “deploy this real-time location model to open up just over 40,000 persuasion targets that normally would have fallen off” for Mark Kelly who was running for Senate at the time and has now been elected.
“PredictWise understood that there were potential pockets of voters to target with Covid-19 messaging and turned high-dimensional data covering over 100 million Americans into measures of adherence to Covid-19 restrictions during deep lockdown,” the company states in the white paper.
PredictWise doesn’t provide the exact dates when this location data was collected but its white paper does note that the data was collected during Covid lockdowns and used during Senator Kelly’s 2020 election campaign. State-level US lockdowns began on March 15, 2020 and Kelly was elected on November 4, 2020 so the data appears to have been collected during the first few months of this 11 month period.
Location data and survey data are just two of the many types of data PredictWise claims to have access to. According to its white paper, PredictWise also tracks “telemetry data” (which is “passively sourced cell-phone data”), media consumption data, and unregistered voter data (which contains verified data on over 50 million unregistered voters that’s updated daily and sourced from credit files and portal registration data). Additionally, PredictWise claims that “Crate&Barrel” (which seems to be a reference to the online furniture and home decor shopping portal Crate & Barrel) is one of the portal registration data sources it has access to.
In total, PredictWise says its data “tracks the opinions, attitudes, and behaviors” of over 260 million Americans – a figure that represents 78% of the entire US population of 333 million.
PredictWise uses the data it collects to create scores on 13 issue preference clusters and 7 value-frame, or psychometric clusters. These clusters use more than 30 million behavioral data points. PredictWise also claims to be able to use this data to predict the party of unregistered voters.
This mass surveillance of location data and lockdown compliance is just one of the many examples of the large-scale data harvesting that occurred during the pandemic. Private companies tracked the everyday activities of citizens, pushed remote learning surveillance technologies, increased surveillance in the workplace, and more. Meanwhile, governments ushered in numerous forms of surveillance such as forcing citizens to wear ankle bracelet trackers, secretly surveilling vaccine recipients via their phones, and combining vaccine passports with digital IDs.
Related: 🛡 Many apps on your phone have pivoted to selling your location data to coronavirus researchers and others
October 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | Covid-19, Human rights |
Leave a comment
Last month, Japanese pharma company Kowa put out a press release of the results of its 1030-person double-blind randomised control trial (RCT) of Ivermectin conducted at 54 institutions in Japan and 2 in Thailand.
Here’s how the results were reported in The Japan Times.
Not effective, you hear! I mean, look at the photo. You don’t get Ivermectin from a pharmacy; you get it from a farmer. Anyway, on to the trial.
A clinical trial was unable to prove the efficacy of the antiparasitic medicine ivermectin against coronavirus variants, according to Japanese drugmaker Kowa Co., which has indicated that it will no longer seek approval for the drug as a COVID-19 treatment.
So this means that not only has IVM not been widely used in Japan (despite what many people outside Japan think) but probably never will be. So what happened? Did the people who took the anti-vaxers’ favourite veterinary medicine all get sick?
In the trial, 1,030 patients with mild COVID-19 were orally administered the drug daily for three days and then compared to others given a placebo.
Ivermectin was found to be safe and few people given the drug developed severe symptoms, Kowa said. But both the group given the drug and the one administered a placebo saw improvements in symptoms, meaning the trial did not show the drug’s efficacy over the placebo as a COVID-19 treatment.
So the reason Kowa was “unable to prove the efficacy” wasn’t because IVM is “not effective”; it was because almost everyone in the placebo group got better quickly too. According to Kowa’s press release, “Both intervention and placebo arms showed milder symptoms around 4 days after the start of administration” and “There were no deaths and hardly any severe cases.”
Although Kowa hasn’t released the full trial details or results, the 0% mortality rate among the 500+ participants in the placebo arm suggests they were mostly at very low risk of severe disease. So the results don’t show IVM was ineffective; they show no medication was necessary for these participants to prevent symptoms worsening or for them to recover quickly.
This a not a new issue in studies on early treatments. Yale epidemiologist Harvey Risch noted the same thing in RCTs showing non-significant effects for another “controversial” drug, hydroxychloroquine.
The RCT studies proclaimed supposedly as definitively showing no benefit of HCQ use in outpatients have all involved almost entirely low-risk subjects with virtually no hospitalization or mortality events and are uninformative and irrelevant for bearing upon these risks according to HCQ use in high-risk outpatients.
When tested on larger numbers of people for mortality benefit, IVM often performs a bit better.
Next, let’s compare how the JT reported Kowa’s IVM trial press release with how Reuters reported Shionogi’s press release for its 1821-person RCT of its anti-Covid drug ensitrelvir.
Japan’s Shionogi & Co Ltd said on Wednesday its oral treatment for COVID-19 demonstrated a significant reduction in symptoms compared with a placebo in a Phase III trial in Asia.
The drug, a protease inhibitor known as ensitrelvir, met its primary endpoint in a trial conducted among predominantly vaccinated patients with mild to moderate cases of COVID-19, the company said in a statement.
A significant reduction in symptoms! So how many people were kept out of the ICU? Well, the Reuters article didn’t clarify what the main result was, so here it is from Shionogi’s press release.
the median time to resolution of the five COVID-19 symptoms [stuffy or runny nose, sore throat, cough, feeling hot or feverish, and low energy or tiredness] was significantly reduced in those treated with the low dose of ensitrelvir (the dose level submitted for approval in Japan) compared to placebo: 167.9 hours versus 192.2 hours, a statistically significant difference of 24 hours (p=0.04).
Yep, ensitrelvir cleared runny noses 1 day quicker than a placebo. So the media reporting of Shionogi’s results wasn’t dishonest, but it wasn’t exactly candid.
Similar to in Kowa’s IVM trial, no deaths were reported among the 900+ placebo recipients in Shionogi’s trial, which again suggests they were very low risk. So these results give us no idea about whether ensitrelvir will prevent the progression to severe disease in high-risk immunocompromised people, which is what actually matters.
Shionogi also reported that no serious adverse events occurred in the intervention arm. But one problem with not trialing a medication on the type of high-risk people who will actually need it is that the trial probably won’t pick up major safety signals that become clear later.
But as El Gato Malo has said, pharma doesn’t make mistakes in trial design; it makes choices.
October 24, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19 |
Leave a comment
This week, Boston University found itself at the centre of scorn over claims its laboratories were engineering a “SARS-CoV-3” virus that would (hypothetically) put humanity one lab-leak away from a renewed Covid pandemic.
In the midst of worldwide relief over SARS-CoV-2’s eventual replacement by the mild, ‘common cold’ Omicron variant, BU’s scientists have created de novo an “Omicron S-bearing virus”, potentially marrying Omicron’s transmissibility with the Wuhan strain’s dangerous pathogenicity.
Boston University leadership should not be shocked by the widespread condemnation of this experiment. It has its own hubris to blame: steamrolling neighbourhood opposition to the urban placement of America’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL), through which BU amasses lucrative research grants. As the philosopher Spider-Man has said, “with great power, there must also come great responsibility.”
In this case, BU exhibits power, but avoids responsibility. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is examining whether these experiments should have triggered a federal review as ‘gain of function’ with SARS CoV-2’s gaining new or enhanced abilities, which NIH deems “inherently risky”. Boston University says it “did not have an obligation to disclose this research”, despite having received federal NIAID funding which BU states was only for “tools and platforms” used by the scientists.
“We take our safety and security of how we handle pathogens seriously, and the virus does not leave the laboratory,” noted NEIDL’s Dr. Ronald Corley. Cynics might point out that as recently as 2018, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) touted that its work “held the secret to preventing epidemics”. NEIDL has (probably) released fewer unintentional pandemics than WIV, so there’s that.
NEIDL can be seen as either a bulwark against – or conversely, a conduit for – bioterrorism. NEIDL houses the Level-3 Biosafety Lab (BSL-3) of this trans-viral graft experiment as well as one of the rare US BSL-4 laboratories, intended for studying the deadliest transmissible diseases, such as Ebola.
Lab-coat scientist researchers are not selected or rewarded for political acumen, nor should they be. Actual wet-lab work often embodies the phrase by which physicians tease anesthesiologists: “99% boredom and 1% panic” – but, without the panic. Instead, researchers have their 1%-portion comprised of the brief, refreshing glory on the occasion of publishing consequential results – the news of which usually stays within a small coterie of PhDs cognisant of the technical ‘twin-speak‘ pertinent to the narrow focus of the experiment performed.
Upending the news cycle, bringing fear and then furor to a Covid-weary populace, and a posse of paparazzi upon itself is not the usual modus operandi of researchers releasing a preprint dryly titled (as they often are): “Role of spike in the pathogenic and antigenic behavior of SARS-CoV-2 BA.12 Omicron“. Boston University’s Mohsan Saeed (et al.) ‘buried the lede‘ by not communicating clearly having formed a SARS-CoV-2 mutant through chimeric graft of Omicron spike onto SARS CoV-2.
The researchers’ insularity is evident in their not predicting that producing novel camouflage for the pandemic’s perpetrator would be sufficient cause for all hell to break loose. Given Dr. Saeed’s interim disappearance from the scene, it is assumed notoriety was not the researchers’ actual intent. His additional lack of communicating the societal need for a rejiggering of COVID-19 spare parts into a new mutant strain is its own problem.
NIAID says that the BU should have communicated in advance the purpose and nature of the study. BU responds that it did not have to because the primary funds were from BU itself. Medical ethicist Dr. Arthur Caplan says, “the entire research community would benefit from better communication.” Perhaps even earlier “better communication” might have obviated the experiment itself.
By focusing so intently within the micro-world, it’s perhaps forgivable virologists lose sense of the macro. Conversely, the general public has earned every right to be twitchy and tetchy over ‘gain of function’ engineered augmentations to SARS-CoV-2 after the many millions of excess deaths following what many suspect was a Wuhan lab leak.
The Daily Mail’s story headlined “‘This is playing with fire – it could spark a lab-generated pandemic’” had this graphic stating the mutant strain has an 80% kill rate.
Sensationalism definitionally entails shocking language at the expense of accuracy. Corrections are therefore in order:
- Yes, this lab is performing a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ experiment: putting Omicron’s spike protein (head) on ancestral SARS CoV-2’s envelope (body) – but, this is the standard operating procedure for virologists. Chimeric work allows comparisons to be made gauging the relative strength or pathogenicity of individual virion segments.
- Yes, this is a brand-new ‘deadly strain’ – but for a particularly and purposefully vulnerable strain of mice, not for humans. The new ‘Frankenstein’ Omicron-spike-and-Wuhan-body chimeric coronavirus caused 80% of hACE-2 lab mice to die – fewer, actually, than had perished from the ancestral Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 itself. For better or worse, these mice have been specifically genetically engineered to have 100% fatality to SARS-CoV-2. If the mice instead replicated human’s very low fatality rate against this virus (less than 0.1% in the non-vulnerable), it would be nigh impossible to make any statistically significant judgements in any experiment unless multi-thousands of mice were included in every phase.
This specific type of work was performed in an appropriate BSL-3 laboratory, and was technically legal even though it encompassed ‘gain of function‘ work. There had been a moratorium in the mid-2010s on such potentially dangerous work within the United States, but that was repealed in 2017. The rationale for reversing the moratorium was similar to that of any military’s maintaining and testing weaponry and engaging in wargames: “Researchers deliberately make viruses more dangerous to help prepare better responses to outbreaks that might occur naturally.”
Ostensibly, the moratorium was lifted to keep us safe; however, it was instituted for the very same reason, in 2014, to curtail scientists’ juicing up avian flu.
In 2011, Fouchier and Kawaoka alarmed the world by revealing they had modified the deadly avian H5N1 influenza virus so that it spread between ferrets (animals used for their similarity to humans’ influenza response). Critics worried a souped-up virus could spark a pandemic if it escaped from a lab (accidentally or as bioterror).
The flip-flopping in allowing gain of function research points to the dual needs in relation to such cutting edge science. Even as the moratorium was lifted, there were rules about the flow of information on gain of function experiments. Open communication is a prerequisite to scientific innovation but also can provide ready blueprints for any intrepid bioterrorist. An additional complication is that almost every study in the U.S. receives federal funds, creating a loophole of having to divulge sensitive results through any given FOIA request.
It is uncertain if BU’s newly chimeric COVID-19 mutant could qualify as a bio threat. Personally, I think not. Almost every one of its mutations is less efficacious than the parent. Viruses go through trillions in order to adapt sequentially to changing immune systems amongst the host. That researchers would come up with a highly dangerous one on the first try seems unlikely. In any event, there is vast natural immunity to Omicron and natural and vaccine immunity to ancestral SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19.
So what was the purpose of the BU NEIDL team? Since poor communication seems to be a threat throughout this story, it is perhaps no surprise that this preprint’s abstract section lacks clarity – and features instances of ‘begging the question (highlighted).
The recently identified, globally predominant SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant (BA.1) is highly transmissible, even in fully vaccinated individuals, and causes attenuated disease compared with other major viral variants recognised to date. The Omicron spike (S) protein, with an unusually large number of mutations, is considered the major driver of these phenotypes. We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant. The Omicron S-bearing virus robustly escapes vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the receptor binding motif (RBM), yet unlike naturally occurring Omicron, efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells. In K18-hACE2 mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80%. This indicates that while the vaccine escape of Omicron is defined by mutations in S, major determinants of viral pathogenicity reside outside of S.
Let’s translate the abstract into general English:
Omicron is milder – and its spike protein is structurally different enough from the ancestral Wuhan strains that an mRNA vaccine to SARS CoV-2 does nothing to protect mice from Omicron. This is somewhat immaterial because Omicron doesn’t make these mice sick in the first place (basically the same situation as with humans). So, with research funding in hand, what are we going to do? Let’s put an Omicron ‘Halloween mask’ on the dangerous Wuhan strain! How many mice will die? A lot, nearly 80%. That’s sounds really bad, but we forgot to mention (in this abstract) that Wuhan strain without the Omicron-spike mask kills 100% of these mice, which sadly are canaries in a coal mine, engineered to die from SARS-CoV-2. Conclusion: the stuff inside the SARS-CoV-2 envelope is the really bad stuff. With its very own original spike protein it’s more dangerous, but what did we expect? We just made a virus that’s different from a fairly dangerous one and it’s not quite as dangerous.
Thus restated, it becomes difficult to ascertain the genuine need for doing this experiment (whose results seem obvious, predictable and axiomatic). Einstein favored Gedankenexperimente (‘thought experiments’) using conceptual rather than actual experiments in creating the theory of relativity. There’s nothing like the ‘real thing’, but I’m imagining 99% of virologists could have foreseen a conclusion similar to this without having done any of the study. Moreover, most would not have seen a real point in doing this study in the first place. Of course, getting paid and churning research grants can help provide motivation.
Even without the researchers’ having read my own article “Is it Time to Accept That Omicron is not COVID-19?” in The Daily Sceptic, September 25, 2022 – they should still have had enough information to know Omicron (despite its Greek letter) is not a SARS CoV-2 variant nor lineal genomic or genetic descendent. Such information was easily available January 2022. With this in mind, the highlighted portions make little sense and the purpose of the study even less.
One virologist offered these criticisms of the preprint’s study (in confidence):
- Why put Omicron S on a virus that is no longer circulating? I’m not sure what scientific question they are trying to answer.
- The grants that are cited for the work were meant to study innate immunity. They claim they want to study the role of spike protein in phenotype but they are not using the proper controls.
- It would have made more sense to have reversed the experiment, i.e., put the Wuhan spike on the Omicron envelope.
- Also, site-directed mutagenesis (creating specific, targeted changes) would have been a more useful technique, given that there are so many mutations in Omicron’s spike protein compared to earlier variants.
- The authors’ conclusion, “These findings indicate that the S protein is not the primary determinant of Omicron’s pathogenicity in K18-hACE2 mice,” should say that “S protein was not a primary determinant of Wuhan pathogenicity”.
- They actually [downwardly] attenuate the Wuhan strain by putting the Omicron-S onto that virus, yet try to sell it as if they had made the virus more lethal.
- Overall, they seem to really be studying Wuhan pathogenicity in the context of Omicron spike.
All products and methods of technology (e.g. nuclear power, mining, fossil fuels) are variously considered ‘double-edged swords’. So too it is with these studies. There are potential benefits and potential risks. In this particular case, were the risks worth it? Was the study appropriately directed and was the information gleaned worth the global consternation? The answer to both is ‘no’.
“It’s not like they made this monster virus, that’s a complete misinterpretation,” states infectious disease specialist Dr. Daniel Kuritzkes. “Researchers compared the ancestral version, Omicron, and a combined version of the two to research what piece of the virus dictates how sick a person will get. What we see in animal models does not translate directly to what we will see in humans. The labs are extraordinarily careful in how they do these experiments. There are strict protocols in place to make sure that nothing produced in the lab is released into the environment.”
My assessment is that this is more ‘tempest in a teapot’ than monster – although Dr. Frankenstein’s methods and ethical issues find resonance here. That there is a federal investigation into this case is interesting for the side reason that it seems an admission against its own interest, namely to the possibility that virology laboratories can potentially leak mutant strains. Who would’ve thought? For so long, it was all but forbidden to consider such a possibility for China’s WIV, even though ancillary evidence is nearly conclusive it occurred.
Dr. Randall Bock is a primary care physician near Boston, Massachusetts, and the author of Overturning Zika.
October 23, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, United States |
Leave a comment
Critics have long questioned why the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would fund experiments by University of North Carolina of Chapel Hill (UNC) professor Ralph Baric to develop a technique for hiding evidence of human tampering in laboratory-created super viruses.
Aided by some $220.5 million in National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funding, Baric developed a so-called “Seamless Ligation” technique, which he boasted could perfectly conceal all evidence of human tampering in laboratory-created viruses. Baric nicknamed his invention the “no-see’m” method.
Now a new study, “Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV2,” published on the preprint server bioRxiv, shows that — apparently unbeknownst to Baric — the “seamless ligation” concealment gimmick leaves its own minute but legible signature.
Most momentously, these same researchers have discovered that damning signature in the genome of the virus that causes COVID-19.
Baric’s technique has long been controversial. “It’s the artist that doesn’t sign his name to the painting; the virologist that doesn’t put his signature into the virus to let us know whether or not it is emerging naturally or whether it is produced in a laboratory,” said Jeffrey Sachs, chair of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, a task force that investigated the origins of COVID-19.
“All of it says, my God, there was really a big, very risky research agenda underway.”
This month, Sachs published the results of his 22-month investigation in The Lancet, including the damaging conclusion that COVID-19 was probably laboratory-generated and that the technology probably came from NIH-funded science.
Referring to Baric’s seamless ligation methodology, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein observed:
“It’s the exact opposite of what you would do if your interest was public health. Public health scientists would be marking their enhancements with red flags — not devising ways to hide them. The only reason you would want a concealer is to advance a sinister purpose — such as illegal bioweapons development — some mischief that the scientist didn’t want traceable back to his lab.”
Baric taught his “no-see’m” method to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s (WIV) “Bat Lady” Shi Zhengli in 2016. In return, Baric received Chinese coronaviruses collected by Shi from bats in Yunnan province. (Scientists have linked the COVID-19 genome’s pedigree to closely related bats.)
Shi and her colleagues at the Wuhan Institute subsequently demonstrated their mastery of Baric’s high-risk technique in a series of published — and highly controversial — gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan lab. It has been even more puzzling to his critics that Baric, again with NIAID funding, chose to share this dangerous technique for weaponizing pathogens with Chinese scientists who have clear links to the Chinese military.
Experts say that the implications of this new study could be far-reaching. By pointing the finger at Baric, the study raises the possibility of potentially devastating liability for the NIAID and the University of North Carolina and other parties.
Scientists, including those close to Dr. Anthony Fauci, have repeatedly pointed out that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has genomic sequences that appear inconsistent with natural evolution: The COVID-19 virus is no longer infectious in bats, and its spiked protein feature — which is unknown in this family of coronavirus — includes numerous mutations that make it ideally infectious in humans.
The closest known coronavirus relative — a coronavirus from the Wuhan lab — is 96.2% identical to SARS-CoV-2. The peculiar spike accounts almost completely for the entire 3.8% difference. Oddly, there are multiple novel mutations in the spike and almost none in the rest of the genome.
Natural evolution would be expected to leave mutations distributed evenly across the genome. The fact that virtually all the mutations occur on the spike led these scientists to suspect that that particular Wuhan lab coronavirus collected by Shi Zhengli is the direct progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 and that its new spike was implanted through engineering.
However, the unmistakable fingerprints of lab engineering were absent — leaving many experts wondering whether Baric’s technique was used to assemble a novel coronavirus with the engineered spike while removing the evidence of lab generation.
This new study connects the biological breadcrumbs that link federally funded research to a global pandemic. That trail leads directly to UNC and NIAID.
The authors of the study — a team of researchers from Duke University, University Clinics of Würzburg and an industry group — identified a characteristic signature in the amino acid code. That indelible artifact could only have emerged from Baric’s “no-see’m” methodology.
In an interview last spring, Baric himself confessed, that at the time the pandemic began, only two or three labs in the world were using his protocol – including his UNC lab and the WIV.
The study’s authors’ conclusions rest on the presence of unique sites in the COVID-19 virus. These sites allow special enzymes called “restriction enzymes” to cut the DNA into building blocks of unique size that then can be “stitched together in the correct order of the viral genome,” according to the study’s authors.
Essentially, Baric’s technique leaves behind unique spellings in the “genetic vocabulary.” The new words include “odd spelling choices” subtly distinguishing them from typical viral vocabulary.
The magic of Baric’s “no-see’m” technique is to invisibly weave these telltale “spelling” changes into the viral sequence between relevant genes without altering the viral protein. This is like changing the “spelling” of the word without changing its meaning; the casual listener will never notice the difference.
The research team used forensic tools to drill down on minute “spelling differences” in the SARS-CoV2 genome that betray laboratory tampering using the “no-see’m” technique.
Consider how a Brit would spell “colour,” “manoeuvre” or “paediatric.” The choice to spell a word in a certain way can reveal your nation of origin. Similarly, these nearly imperceptible changes in the viral sequence give away the laboratory origins of this virus.
In sharing his seamless ligation technique with Shi Zhengli, Baric assured that the WIV possessed all the required elements of the assembly process. EcoHealth Alliance’s infamous DEFUSE proposal describes the same techniques in detail. (submitted to The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, in 2018).
The world now has proof positive that SARS-CoV2 is an engineered laboratory creation generated with technology developed by Ralph Baric with U.S. government funding.
Prosecutors and private attorneys representing clients injured by the COVID-19 pandemic now have a smoking gun. The gun points at humanity. Forensic scientists have now successfully lifted faint but precise fingerprints from the lethal pistol’s grip and trigger. Those fingerprints belong to the NIAID and the University of North Carolina.
Baric is Fauci’s favorite gain-of-function scientist. The cascade of NIAID funding to Baric and his UNC lab has financed 152 studies approaching a quarter-billion dollars.
Those federal grants have made Baric the global kingpin of gain-of-function science. In conformance with standard practice, it is probable that UNC pockets one-quarter to one-half of NIH’s financial felicities to Baric for “administrative costs.”
These monumental payments have probably incentivized UNC to turn a blind eye to Baric’s reckless experiments and to his controversial decision to transfer his dangerous technologies to a Chinese military laboratory known to suffer from deficient safety protocols and shoddy construction that make it, in the words of Congressional investigators, less secure than a “dentist’s office.”
UNC’s role in enabling the questionable conduct may have precipitated a global pandemic that could easily give rise to liability for negligence.
UNC and NIAID’s liability is now clear. But do we have positive proof that the Wuhan lab created the monstrosity that caused COVID-19?
The cumulative evidence strongly suggests that the Wuhan lab used Baric’s methodologies to cobble together the chimeric virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic. But a few missing puzzle pieces still prevent us from definitively proving that this dangerous construction project occurred at the Wuhan lab.
As The Lancet Commission report concluded, the released emails show that NIH’s Dr. Francis Collins, NIAID’s Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak, and others are continuing to collaborate with Shi Zhengli and Chinese officials to suppress the public release of information that would allow us to complete this picture. Stay tuned!
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
October 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Anthony Fauci, Covid-19, NIAID, NIH, Ralph Baric, United States, University of North Carolina |
Leave a comment
Samizdat | October 22, 2022
The White House’s chief medical advisor, Anthony Fauci, and other senior officials are set to be deposed under oath as part of a lawsuit claiming the government worked alongside social media platforms to create a “massive censorship enterprise” throughout the Covid-19 outbreak.
In a Friday ruling, Judge Terry Doughty granted a joint request from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to compel several current and former officials to testify in the suit, among them Fauci, ex-White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Director of White House Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and two high-level figures from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
“After finding documentation of a collusive relationship between the [Joe] Biden administration and social media companies to censor free speech, we immediately filed a motion to get these officials under oath,” Missouri AG Eric Schmitt said in a statement. “It is high time we shine a light on this censorship enterprise and force these officials to come clean to the American people, and this ruling will allow us to do just that. We’ll keep pressing for the truth.”
While the defense insisted that senior officials can only be called to testify about their actions in office under “extraordinary circumstances,” Judge Doughty said the personnel in question met that standard. He added that the two GOP-led states “have proven that Dr. Fauci has personal knowledge about the issue concerning censorship across social media as it related to Covid-19,” ordering him to cooperate with a deposition.
Requests to depose the other officials were granted on similar grounds, as the judge concluded all either held direct meetings with social media firms about the purported censorship, or had close knowledge of those discussions.
Jen Easterly, who heads up the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was also ordered to testify. She played a “central role” in “flagging misinformation to social-media companies for censorship,” the plaintiffs argued, describing the cyber agency the “nerve center” of “the federal government’s efforts to censor social media users.” The same official was said to be involved in the DHS’ now-defunct ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ – dubbed the ‘Ministry of Truth’ by critics – which would have created a new mechanism to facilitate cooperation between the White House and social media sites.
Initially filed last May by Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, the lawsuit claims the federal government encouraged online platforms to censor, delete or ban certain speech about the pandemic, including discussion of the “lab leak theory of Covid-19’s origin,” as well as questions about the effectiveness of face masks, vaccines or lockdown policies, among other issues. The two AGs have largely relied on documents obtained through subpoenas of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook’s parent firm Meta, which detail regular communications between the government and social media sites.
The White House, as well as the eight officials ordered to testify, have yet to comment on Friday’s ruling. The depositions must take place within 30 days of the order, though it remains unclear whether the defense intends to appeal the decision.
October 21, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | CISA, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, DHS, FBI, United States |
Leave a comment
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 |
Leave a comment
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 |
Leave a comment
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 |
Leave a comment
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 |
Leave a comment
