On Sept. 26, the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine (Board) suddenly withdrew six accusations alleging misinformation against Dr. Meryl Nass. On Sept. 30, the Board withdrew more factual allegations regarding “misinformation.” The board has now dropped all charges regarding so-called “misinformation” on the cusp of the hearing set for Oct. 11, 2022, at 1 p.m. (EDT). With no patient complaints, the Board is now resting its prosecution on the prescribing of hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and on picayune record-keeping issues that are well within the standard of care.
The Board suspended Nass, a physician of impeccable credentials, on Jan. 12, 2021, without even a hearing. The Board accused Nass, a scientific advisory board member of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), of “unprofessional” and “disruptive” behavior based on her public criticism of government COVID-19 policies and early treatment of COVID-19.
Prior to her suspension, Nass never had a malpractice case or a prior Board action against her in over forty years of practice. Between October and December 2021, there were four complaints to the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine. Two from strangers regarding “misinformation” they saw on the internet, one complaint from a physician regarding prescribing a “deworming medication” (ivermectin) and one from a midwife regarding her prescribing hydroxychloroquine. Without a hearing, the Board ordered her license immediately suspended, demanded a neuropsychological evaluation and implied that she was mentally impaired or a substance abuser and incompetent to practice medicine.
Nass’s Maine counsel, Gene Libby and Tyler Smith, have moved to dismiss all charges and asked the Board to apologize to her for its unfounded case intended only to silence Nass and like-minded physicians who used effective early treatments for COVID-19 — as opposed to no treatment at all until patients were hospitalized.
Nass’s testifying experts will include Professor Emeritus in Epidemiology at Yale Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., pulmonary and critical care specialist Paul Marik, M.D., inventor of mRNA vaccine technology Robert Malone, M.D., intensive care specialist Pierre Kory, M.D. and surgeon Steven Katsis, M.D. of the Oklahoma Medical Board.
You can read two of the Board’s recent notices withdrawing various complaints (second and third notices), Nass’s opening statement to the Medical Board, and defense counsel’s timeline of events that led to her suspension.
Children’s Health Defense is supporting Nass’s defense. “The Board’s attempts to censor physicians like Nass have no role in medicine or science; they present a grave danger to the health and human rights of all Americans,” said CHD president and general counsel Mary Holland.
If you want to view Nass’s hearing on Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2022, at 1:00 p.m. eastern, you can watch here.
I switched on the TV on Saturday morning at 6:30am expecting to get a mixture of different short news stories, but what followed was 26 minutes of a film on the news story of the tragic death of Molly Russell – you can watch it here.
It began with melancholic music, which continued in the background. Molly’s father said that he could see how, if one was exposed to the sort of online content his daughter was exposed to, “it could destroy you”. He described the “toxic corporate culture” at the heart of social media platforms. You could feel the father’s pain and grief. The reporter, BBC’s Angus Crawford, said the coroner ruled that “social media did play a part in Molly Russell taking her own life”.
I am truly sorry for the Russell family’s loss, but the way this story has been presented here feels wrong. The general presentation bears the hallmarks of propaganda techniques I will describe later. There is little other content than what I have described above and it is repeated ad nauseum. In Molly’s death the coroner ruled that “social media played a part” but there was no mention in this media report of any of the possible multitude of other factors that may have been involved. Such a one-dimensional synopsis may even be harmful in itself because it might misrepresent the complexities underlying suicide, giving false hope or belief, with the potential to exacerbate the myriad of other factors that can lead to mental health problems and self-harm, regardless of the reporter’s intent.
It is right that the media should devote a fair amount of news discussion to the very important subject of suicide, but this should be delivered responsibly, sensitively, without pulling at the heart-strings, and provide balanced, accurate reporting that doesn’t dumb down debate or put suicide down to singular causes. The Suicide Prevention Resource Centre lists the eight major risk factors for suicide. It seemed to me that Molly’s father and indeed Molly herself were being exploited in connection with a drive to restart the upcoming Online Safety Bill. Might this particular news story coverage be a form of propaganda?
The Online Safety Bill was put on hold at the beginning of the Conservative leadership contest. It was due to have its second reading in the House of Lords. The Bill is complex and the details of what it constitutes can be found here. There are now, however, renewed calls for it to be brought back by a number of organisations in the wake of the inquest into Molly’s death. My concern is that the Online Safety Bill will effectively reinforce the tendency towards Government-approved media propaganda. To explore the potential minefield of issues that this subject raises I want to pursue the matter from a sceptical angle and understand more about the meaning and techniques of propaganda.
Propaganda might be defined as a special form of communication used especially in news media to manipulate public opinion by distorting the representation of reality. Some descriptions I’ve seen seem to embellish propaganda with a slightly positive spin, in that the ultimate aim may be for the greater good as, for example, suggested in the case of military war. I, however, can only see the term in a negative light because the whole ethos is based on deception, usually on a mass scale. The widespread use of propaganda undermines trust of those in power and eventually leaves the public confused and largely unable to establish what news is actually genuine.
Among other ‘harms’, the Bill creates incentives for social media companies to remove online content that is supposedly ‘legal, but harmful’. Is the targeting of this content simply a way of circumventing a democratic justice system for political purposes, by setting up a parallel system of censorship outside the courts of law to suppress online speech? Justice should be seen to be done and the suppression of legal content must surely be anathema to the idea of fair treatment for all members of society.
Recent articles in the Daily Sceptic and TCW have demonstrated the dire effects propaganda has in relation to the Covid pandemic regime. News of the many confirmed deaths and injuries from the Covid vaccines have been buried and the professional bodies relating to healthcare (the GMC), and law (the SRA) have made it almost impossible for concerned parties to dare speak out or whistleblow. Wouldn’t the Online Safety Bill close the partially open door that challenges the mainstream media narrative and Government diktats? Isn’t a far greater harm the one where Dr. Hoenderkamp’s child patients (in the Daily Sceptic article) with confirmed post-vaccine heart damage will live with the possibly lasting consequences for the rest of their lives, and will forever wonder why they were essentially coerced into receiving a medical intervention that, based on their clinical need, was completely unnecessary? All this because they and many other children and young adults and their parents potentially do not obtain and are prevented from receiving properly informed consent – and this even before such a Bill is on the books? Isn’t the far greater harm the one in which the public have not been given all the information and warnings from experts about lockdowns and the COVID-19 vaccines because those dissenting voices and the potential whistleblowers cannot afford to do so for fear of the proposed consequences of the Bill, which will only make the situation worse?
The full list of propaganda techniques is long but here are some apposite Covid-related examples that demonstrate further harmful effects:
ad hominem – ‘to the person’; used against scientists opposing lockdowns and emergency inoculation;
ad nauseum – tireless repetition of slogans such as ‘save the NHS’, ‘safe and effective’, ‘don’t kill granny’, etc.;
emotional appeal and agenda setting – e.g. the death by suicide of Molly Russell;
appeal to authority – the deployment of the Chief Medical Officer (U.K.), Fauci (U.S.), celebrities and even the Queen (to encourage vaccine uptake);
appeal to fear – the instruction that, despite decades of study showing no clear benefit from mask-wearing in relation to airborne viruses, it was suddenly made compulsory in public places;
appeal to prejudice – that non-mask wearers and the unvaccinated will spread disease;
bandwagon technique – reinforcing people’s natural desire to be on the winning side, be team players and win the battle against those who refuse to join up (vaxxers v anti-vaxxers);
black and white fallacy – presents only two choices, e.g. lockdowns or no action, when a middle ground could have been reached as with the Great Barrington Declaration.
The obvious problem with propaganda is that it never works both ways, it only works the way those in power dictate. I don’t want a Bill that bans governments from saying that the Covid vaccine is 95% effective, extremely safe and will prevent transmission of the virus. All these claims were made by the Government at the beginning of the pandemic and have now been proved wrong. I just want the opposing views to be heard. If there is to be an Online Safety Bill, I would demand that it essentially work almost directly in the opposite fashion – by outlawing media censorship (not just online) of experts with contrarian views and by emphatically protecting whistleblowers.
An Online Safety Bill will only be practical and feasible if it can robustly answer the following:
How does the source making an accusation that content is harmful prove just that; what is the evidence?
Does the evidence stand up to scrutiny and does it take into account the possibility that things can change over time or that present unknowns will later come to light?
How can we be sure that those responsible for scrutinising the evidence are unbiased and accountable?
‘Harmful’ to whom and to what proportion of the recipients? Might some content that is harmful to a minority be beneficial to the vast majority, and who decides?
Ofcom will be appointed as the state regulator of social media but, as I explained in my previous article, this regulatory body is clearly failing in the things it already has a duty to fulfil and should be scrapped in its current form. In business, lawyers warn that the new online rules will have a chilling effect and hit businesses unnecessarily hard.
Thus, in conclusion, I can see no way in which an Online Safety Bill can be made workable without undermining free speech and being far more harmful than any ‘misinformation’ it manages to suppress. The proposals, rather than being kicked into the long grass, should be scrapped altogether.
It is now nearly 11 months since Gillian Dymond started asking Dame June Raine, head of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority (MHRA), to explain what the organisation is doing to investigate the deaths and injuries occurring shortly after Covid-19 vaccination, and this open letter is her latest attempt to get an answer. You can read previous instalments in the saga here, here, here, here and here.
Dear June Raine,
You have not replied to any of the previous letters I have written you regarding the nationwide rollout of novel medications against SARS-CoV-2. I suppose I should simply accept your confident public assertion that these injections are, indeed, ‘safe and effective’: but how can I, when this is contradicted by so many disturbing post-injection reactions among my friends and family? So please excuse me for writing to you again. I am writing because I want to understand. I want to understand why you are doing this. I want to understand why you think it is right to enable the mass prescription of pharmaceutical products whose short-term testing was questionable, and whose medium- and long-term effects are entirely unknown.
You enjoyed an Oxford education, and I want to understand why, with your academic training, you are choosing to ignore the caveats of numerous high-quality experts by giving these injections your blessing. My own experience of university was that an essay which failed to take a balanced overview of any question would receive short shrift. Why, my tutor would ask, had I not considered this or that other important fact or perspective, this or that other authority, before drawing my conclusions?
You are a doctor, and I want to understand why you continue to authorise the emergency use of inadequately tested medications despite the availability of successful protocols involving the early use of tried-and-trusted treatments. I want to understand why, after the emergence of viable alternatives to the novel injections in the summer of 2020, well before any ‘vaccine’ came on to the market, you chose to risk violating the basic requirement of the Hippocratic Oath, ‘First do no harm’, by blacklisting these safe and effective treatments and advocating ‘emergency’ use of the questionable and the unknown.
Of course, both as an academic and as a doctor, you have done no more than fall into line with the vast majority of your peers. From your point of view, it would certainly have been a bad career move to announce that the new pharmaceuticals produced at such speed and such expense had proved to be unnecessary. For ordinary doctors, things were even worse: they faced disgrace and expulsion from their profession if they failed to jab as required. As for academics, even those unblinkered by ideology kept their heads down and played along with censorship of their few dissenting colleagues, on pain of jeopardising valuable funding. Only those who had already retired, secure in an unblemished record and a reliable income, had nothing but comparatively harmless attacks on their reputations to fear when they questioned the ‘settled science’ – indeed, the very idea of ‘settled science’. No wonder the institutions dishonoured by so much mindless kow-towing to the state-sponsored authorities who ordered them to betray their raison d’être have fallen into widespread contempt! How is it possible to respect an academic who acquiesces in censorship? How is it possible to respect doctors who fail to ensure informed consent prior to the injection of a potentially dangerous substance, or who refuse to see their unmasked patients face to face?
But, June, you are not just an academic and a doctor; you are not even just a civil servant; like me, you are a mother: and it is as a mother, above all, that I cannot understand why you have authorised the rollout of these inadequately-tested concoctions to children as young as five; children who stand in far greater danger from the injections than from the illness itself. How do you reconcile the fact that nobody has the least idea of the long-term effects of these treatments with your insistence that they are ‘safe’? How can you be sure that the risks are outweighed by the benefits, when the benefits are proving ever more debatable and the risks of long-term, potentially devastating, injury are unknown? Your own children must be well into adulthood, but would you really have advised your pregnant daughter or daughter-in-law to be injected? Perhaps you have young grandchildren. If so, have you urged them to roll up their little sleeves and be jabbed, without any qualms regarding their future health and reproductive ability?
Perhaps you are, indeed, as enthusiastic about the alleged life-saving qualities of the new medications in your private life as you are in public: in which case, given the mounting evidence against them, I sincerely wish to understand why. What do you know that is sufficient to countermand the indications of the Yellow Card scheme and justify the accumulating tragedies of those suffering serious adverse effects? Presumably you have really convinced yourself that the computer models (rubbish in, rubbish out?) are right, and that your emergency authorisation of the novel injections has saved billions of lives. If so, I would like you to help me understand why.
This issue does, after all, have wider ramifications. It is not a one-off. You have made it clear that the current roll-out is merely a precedent to similar population-wide prescriptions of mRNA medications to similar population-wide prescriptions of mRNA medications, and that the MHRA is busy ‘transforming’ itself into an enabler, rather than a regulator, of new medicines. At the very least the public deserve to be made aware that your agency is now working with the pharmaceutical industry to speed the entry of new drugs on to the market within 100 days of any proclaimed ‘emergency’, using the public as guinea pigs in ‘real-time’ testing. Since very few of us watch MHRA board meetings, and no mention is made of such a transformation in the highly selective news bulletins fed to the public by the mainstream media, this strange departure from the precautionary principle is, like the long-term effects of the medications which will be ‘offered’ to us, largely unknown. If it were better publicised, the public might well insist that the MHRA take its place openly as an ancillary of the drug manufacturers, and demand that a genuine regulatory body, working on the time-honoured principles of long-term testing and ‘First do no harm’, take its place.
It seems to me that your transformation into an ‘enabling agency’, on the back of the ‘pandemic’, is a transformation for the worse, to the point of being a threat to the lives and health of the population. Covid-19 was struck off Public Health England’s list of high consequence infectious diseases on February 19, 2020, even before the first lockdown. Off-label remedies were speedily found to treat the illness successfully. The ‘pandemic’ existed only because it was redefined as such by the WHO and industriously promoted and kept alive by government misinformation. I want to understand why you, an intelligent woman, so easily accepted this misinformation; I want to understand why you chose to abandon academic rigour and the provisions of the Hippocratic Oath when no emergency required you to do any such thing; and I want to understand why you are proposing to repeat this recklessness in relation to a steady stream of future products.
On October 11th a Bill is to be presented to the Queensland Parliament which would impose draconian limits on what doctors can say to their patients. If passed, doctors will no longer be able to express their opinion or use their experience, training and education, if that opinion goes against what the Government health bureaucrats determine to be in the general interests of the public.
The National Law originally came into being after the Commonwealth, States and Territories all entered into an intergovernmental agreement in 2008. By that agreement it was established the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law (the National Law) would first become legislation passed by the Queensland parliament (s.6.3), which the other States and Territories would then mirror and pass via each of their parliaments (s.6.4), The same intergovernmental agreement established the Australian Health Workforce Ministerial Council (s.7.1) charged with overseeing the National Law.
Once passed into law by the Queensland parliament, all the other States and Territories are required to create virtually identical Bills and submit to their parliaments to be made law, thereby effecting the same amendments to the National Law of their State or Territory (s.13.4).
Australian doctors will be bound to follow Government policy regardless of countervailing evidence, which means that Government health bureaucrats will determine how doctors should approach treatment recommendations for their patients.
The Health Practitioner Regulation National Law and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2022 proposes changes which would give the Queensland Health Ombudsman, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) and the Medical Board of Australia unprecedented powers to sanction doctors for expressing their professional opinion based on their assessment of the best available science.
This amendment to the Bill is clearly designed to destroy our healthcare system. A patient visits their doctor for an ‘opinion’, which will be obliterated by the act. Healthcare is nuanced, almost every day I ‘violate’ textbook recommendations because patients do not conform to idealised representations, each has unique features. Those deviations come down to experience, which is the patient’s and doctor’s most powerful asset.
Medicine will cease to evolve. It will become fossilised in the Covid Ice Age. Minor indiscretions like prescribing antibiotics when the indications are blurred could be subject to disciplinary action. Guidelines are contradictory so it would be almost impossible to practise medicine without contravening dictates. Most disease classification is already antiquated with diagnostic definitions set down sometimes 100 years ago or more. This legislation would lead to disastrous consequences for all Australians.
The aim of the Act must be to pave the way for multi-corporate management of healthcare. With 96% of the revenue of the Therapeutic Goods Administration, which is responsible for approving all pharmaceutical products including vaccines, coming from the pharmaceutical industry, the potential for conflicts of interest is self-evident. Therapeutic interventions will become legislated in the interests of big pharma. mRNA vaccines could be delivered unopposed on ‘conscience’ grounds, including to children. The cargo in the mRNA vaccines can be changed at will without going through full regulatory approval. By the time our children turn five, they would be comprehensively ‘protected’ by the ‘Pharma Ring of Protection’, vaccinated against everything from diabetes to in-growing toenails, all without the constraints of clinical opinion.
In the absence of a functioning healthcare system, individuals will be encouraged by authorities to seek their healthcare online from approved ‘trusted sources’. Doctors will become demonised as pariahs, depicted as being left behind in the high tech era. We will doubtless be receiving a concoction of ‘junk food’ medicine upsold with pharma fries. For every thought, action and movement there will be a pharmaceutical solution, requirement even. Your mere existence will demand so, for the safety of others.
This obscene piece of legislation paves the way to an Orwellian nightmare, with consequences that go far beyond healthcare, to the very core of our humanity. It’s the desecration of our rights to autonomous existence, it’s the Monty Python boot trampling in the face of every individual Australian. Our children will be stamped, sealed and delivered from birth, with profit potential identified and catalogued.
For the Australian citizen this is our Stalingrad. Defeat here will open the field to unlimited human resources for oppressive forces that can never be turned back. We must oppose this with all our resolve.
‘Frank Mercy’ is a pseudonym for a doctor with a clinical practice who also holds an appointment at an Australian university.
US chief medical officer Anthony Fauci’s net worth surged to $12.6 million in 2021, nearly twice the $7.6 million it had been in 2019, watchdog group OpenTheBooks revealed on Friday, citing financial disclosures it obtained from Fauci’s employer, the National Institutes of Health.
Already the highest-paid employee in the federal government before the pandemic as director of the National Institutes for Allergies and Infectious Diseases, Fauci pulled down a salary of $456,000 in 2021 and $480,000 in 2022. However, that paycheck represents just a fraction of the money he made while his Covid-19 policies helped push the US economy into a recession.
The disclosures show multiple trusts, retirement accounts, and other financial assets, all of which seem to have appreciated in value during the pandemic even as much of the real economy suffered. Book royalties and the $1 million Dan David Prize from Israel, as well as appearances and speaking fees, round out Fauci’s Covid-19 windfall. When OpenTheBooks asked the NIH to see all royalties paid to the doctor, however, the document they received – which would have shown exactly how much Fauci was financially benefiting from drugs and other patents – was reportedly heavily redacted.
“While Dr. Fauci has been a government bureaucrat for more than 55 years, his household net worth skyrocketed during the pandemic,” OpenTheBooks CEO Adam Andrzejewski told Fox News, attributing the doctor’s wealth spurt to “career-end salary spiking, lucrative cash prizes awarded by nonprofit organizations around the world, and an ever-larger investment portfolio.”
Fauci has been criticized throughout the pandemic for allegedly profiting off the pricey antiviral medication remdesivir, which he proclaimed the standard for treating Covid-19 despite lackluster clinical trial results and having been against the initial advice of the World Health Organization.
Fauci appears to dislike discussing his finances in public, having been caught on a hot mic describing Republican Senator Roger Marshall as a “moron” for merely asking to see what were supposed to be publicly available documents. The Kansas senator, who is also a doctor, asked to see Fauci’s financials during a January hearing only for the NIAID chief to insist they were already public – a statement that was not true at the time. OpenTheBooks sued for access in January and only recently received the documents it posted on Friday.
Following the hearing, Marshall introduced the FAUCI Act (Financial Accountability for Uniquely Compensated Individuals) to require that government employees’ financial disclosures be publicly accessible on the Office of Government Ethics website.
On September 8, I wrote about California Governor Gavin Newsom having AB 2098 — legislation that “tells the state’s medical boards to punish doctors who challenge the coronavirus orthodoxy” — on his desk for him to either veto or sign into law. The punishment the state medical boards could impose under the legislation includes revoking doctors’ medical licenses.
Here is an update. On Friday, Newsom signed into law this bill directing the prosecution of an attack on free speech, medical freedom, and the pursuit of better health.
The coronavirus orthodoxy, or party line, the legislation seeks to protect has repeatedly been wrong — from promoting “social distancing” and mask wearing that have not been shown to provide a net benefit in countering coronavirus to advocating that everyone take the “safe and effective” coronavirus “vaccine” shots that turned out to be both exceedingly dangerous and ineffective. The coronavirus orthodoxy also demanded that much of the economy and social interactions be shut down for an extended period of time in a supposed effort to reduce the spread of the not-very-threatening-to-most-people coronavirus. In short, the coronavirus orthodoxy is an enemy of wellbeing.
Newsom’s decision to sign AB 2098 into law is not surprising given that he has been one of the governors most adamant in imposing a coronavirus crackdown.
Kim Iverson, a TV journalist formerly at The Hill and now streaming her own show on YouTube, has been one of the most honest and courageous voices during the pandemic. She is the rare journalist today who is willing to follow the evidence wherever it may lead. I sat down with her this morning for an interview about California’s latest attempt to suppress the free speech of physicians and undermine the doctor patient relationship. Assembly Bill 2098, which I have posted about previously—see Punishing Dissident Physicians and The Censorship of Medicine—is set to become law unless the governor vetoes it today.
I also had a wide-ranging two-part conversation with Dr. Drew Pinsky on his podcast recently, where we discussed my new book, The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State. It’s available on the Apple Podcasts (link to Part 1 and Part 2), or your other favorite podcast app.
You can pre-order the book here and it will ship in one month…
Like every other important social phenomenon, propaganda regimes have historical genealogies. For example, a very strong case could be made that the ongoing, and sad to admit, largely successful Covid propaganda onslaught under which we now live can trace its roots back to the two so-called demonstration wars (the Panama Invasion and the First Gulf Conflict) waged by George Bush Sr.
The American elites were badly stung by the country’s defeat in Vietnam. In it, they rightly saw a considerable curtailment of what they had come to see as their divine right since the end of WWII: the ability to intervene as they so fit in any country not explicitly covered by the Soviet nuclear umbrella.
And in their analysis of that failure, they correctly alighted to the role that the media—by simply bringing the tawdry and ignoble reality of the war into our living rooms—had played in undermining citizen willingness to engage in such fruitless, costly and savage adventures in the future.
With his massive military build-up and heavy support of proxies in Latin America in the eighties, Ronald Reagan took the first steps toward recovering this lost elite prerogative.
But it was not until the administration of George Bush Sr. and the two conflicts mentioned above that, as he himself exultantly put it in the wake of his pitiless slaughter of some 100,000 poorly equipped Iraqis, “We’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.”
Bush knew what he was talking about, and it wasn’t necessarily, or even primarily, military force or prowess.
What had largely limited Reagan to proxy wars during eight years in office were two things. The first was a citizenry that still had fresh memories of the debacle in Southeast Asia. The second, and arguably more important one was a press corps with on-the-ground familiarity with the reality of these conflicts that continued to challenge him on both their morality and strategic efficacy.
Bush and his team, which as you’ll remember included one Richard Cheney at Defense, made remedying this “problem” of war-hesitancy one of the central aims of his presidency. As Barbara Trent suggests in her remarkable The Panama Deception, experimenting with new media management techniques was not a strategic sideshow of the conflict, but rather its prime goal.
The Panama invasion was followed in quick succession by the Gulf War, where press coverage put heavy emphasis on the opinions of US military figures and their explanations of the technical genius of American-made military technology. In this way, the war was presented to Americans as a sort of exciting video game characterized by flashes of light in the night and precision attacks devoid of any bloodshed and death.
This process of desensitizing of the media, and from there, the American people to the horrendous human effects of war-making culminated in the revolting spectacle, on January 30th, 1991 of reporters chuckling along with General Norman Schwartzkopf as he joked while showing them videos of supposed “smart bombs” killing people like ants from the safety of 30,000 feet.
Having received no coordinated pushback from anyone with power about this degrading treatment of human life and the American people, they tripled down and went full Manichaean after September 11th.
Why not?
With Reagan’s repeal of the fairness Doctrine in 1987 and Bill Clinton’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 never had the media been a) concentrated in so few hands b) so beholden to the government regulation for the continuance of the super-profitability generated through this consolidation c) debilitated by the internet-induced collapse of the newspaper business model and thus d) less obligated to the reflect take into account the concerns and interests of a broad spectrum of the American people.
It was now truly, as George Bush Jr said, a matter of “You’re either with us or against us,” us of course being the war-making government (including the Deep State) along with its slavishly loyal media mouthpieces. If like Susan Sontag—who whether you like her or not, was a very bright and highly accomplished thinker—you believed the maniacal presumptions of the US response to September 11th were flawed, and said so, you could in this new environment, expect to be the object of well-coordinated attacks on your character.
Never once did the administration call for restraint in such attacks, nor did any administration figures remind people of the importance of the supposedly American value of everyone’s right to be respectfully heard.
Seeing the exhaustion of the Bush brand after the Iraq debacle, the Deep State switched party allegiances in the run-up to the 2008 election. And it has stayed firmly on the side of the so-called “left” ever since, encouraging the use of Bush-Cheney-style government-media mobbing against those who might dare to question the motives of the sainted warmonger Obama, or, say, the “logic” of trying to reduce the problems of racism by promoting it through identity politics.
The efficiency of such mob-style takedown tactics was greatly enhanced by the dramatic expansion of social media platforms in the Obama and Trump years.
It is no exaggeration to say that a person born in 1990 or later has little if any understanding of what it means to disagree in detail and in good faith with someone whose political and/or social ideals are different than their own. Nor what it means to feel obligated to respond to the claims of others with careful factual refutations.
What they do know, because it’s mostly all that they have seen from their “betters,” is that to argue is to seek the destruction of one’s interlocutor, and failing that, to make sure his or her arguments are impeded from circulating freely in our shared civic spaces. The ever-increasing dialectical poverty of those who have been socialized and educated in this environment is evident to anyone who has served as a classroom instructor during the last quarter century.
A sanctuary for the weary
While most people seemed to want to pretend that nothing new was happening, that the collaboration between media and government had always been this extreme, many of us did not. We had memories. And we knew the “field of thinkable thought” was dramatically smaller in 2005 than in 1978. And we knew it had become much, much smaller in 2018 than it was in 2005. In our search for answers we turned to media critics and scholars of media history. We also turned to the writings of journalist-activists with both interest and insight into these matters.
When it came to this last group, I found myself drawn principally to what might be termed leftist anti-imperialists. Reading them, I widened my understanding of how elites and their chosen “experts” manage information flows, and constantly seek to shrink the parameters of acceptable opinion on foreign policy issues.
Two years ago last March, however, my sense of intellectual kinship with this subset of thinkers suddenly became very strained. We were facing what I immediately recognized as the largest and most aggressive “perception management” campaign in recent times, and perhaps in the history of the world. One, moreover, that was utilizing all the techniques employed during the previous two to three decades to insure citizen allegiance to US war-making.
And yet in the face of it, almost all my go-to people on propaganda analysis had little or nothing to say. And when I sent contributions outlining my doubts about the congruity of the emergent Covid discourse to places that had generally welcomed my analyses of pro-war propaganda, suddenly there was hesitation on the other end.
And the passage of time cured nothing. Indeed, the only things these people said down the road; that is, if they addressed Covid at all, was to underscore the unprecedented severity of the situation (a very questionable assertion) and harp on Trump’s supposedly disastrous handling of it.
There was virtually no daylight between the opinions of these people and the feckless liberals they, as true-blue leftists, always claimed to disdain. And on it went, for the entire two years of the Covid panic.
A week or so ago, John Pilger, arguably one of the brightest and more persistent leftist analysts of establishment propaganda, published “Silencing the lambs: How propaganda works” on his website and then a number of progressive news outlets.
In it, he repeats all sorts of well-known ideas and concepts. There’s a reference to Leni Riefenstahl and how she believed the bourgeoisie are those most amenable to influence campaigns, a reminder of Julian Assange’s horrendous and undeserved fate, much deserved praise for Harold Pinter’s absolutely extraordinary if largely ignored Nobel acceptance speech, an intelligent discussion about how our media studiously refuses to tell us about anything that went on between Russia and the West, and Russia and Ukraine between 1990 and February of this year.
The underlying thesis of the piece is that while emitting and constantly pushing elite-approved messages are key elements of propaganda, so too is the strategic disappearance of essential historical realities and truths.
All good stuff. Indeed, all themes that I have written about with frequency and conviction over the years.
Toward the end piece Pilger asks the following rhetorical question:
When will real journalists stand up?
And a few lines later, after providing us with a list of where to find the few outlets and journalists that do know what they are doing when it comes to the elite’s informational misdirection plays, he adds:
And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?
Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.
Reading this final flourish while remembering the lamb-like silence of John Pilger in the face of the sustained Covidian onslaught of institutionalized lies and Soviet-grade censorship, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
And when considering that virtually all those he endorses as exemplars of propaganda-savvy journalism—people such as Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone all of whose work I have frequently and enthusiastically championed over the years—took the same cud-chewing path, the sense of farce only grows.
The same can be said of most all of the outlets (Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, Globetrotter ) who portray themselves as being wise to the wiles of elite-sponsored influence operations.
Who, the question thus occurs to me, is actually living in a “a deep bath of righteousness” that impedes the ability to access the truths that lie beyond the “official version” of our past and present?
Who is failing to respond to the presence of fascistic tendencies in our midst?
If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was John and his merry band of crack propaganda dissectors.
Is it that hard for them to see the shadow of fascism in the now heavily documented collaboration between the US government and Big Tech in censoring opinions that go counter to the government’s and Big Pharma’s desired discourse on Covid?
Is it really difficult for them to see the presence of the same dark forces in the US government’s insouciant abrogation of the Nuremberg principle relating to informed consent and medical experimentation?
Are they not troubled by the fact that the experimental vaccines that were sold to the population on the basis of their ability to stop infection do not do that? Or that this was known to anyone who read the FDA briefing papers published when these injections were unleashed on the public?
Does this count as a major “propaganda problem” worth looking into?
Do they care about the millions of people who lost their jobs over these lies, and of course the government’s abject disdain for the longstanding statutory right to object to medical treatment on religious grounds?
As long-time mavens of foreign policy, have they looked into the mafia-like nature of the vaccine contracts forced upon sovereign countries around the world?
Being the great sleuths of information-hiding that they are, did it raise any suspicions in them when Pfizer sought to keep all clinical information relating to the vaccines under wraps for 75 years?
And being the good progressives they are, did the enormous upward transfer of wealth that took place during the years of the Covid state of exception trouble them?
Did it light any suspicions that all this hullabaloo might not just be about health?
Have they organized support groups and action plans for the billions of children around the world whose lives were thrown into chaos by the useless quarantine and masking that was foisted upon them, and who, in all likelihood will never recover the years of developmental progress lost to this program of senseless cruelty?
I could go on.
As far as I can tell, the answer to all these questions is a resounding “NO!”
I am truly grateful for all that John Pilger and his companions in the leftist propaganda dissection cadres have taught me over the years. But as Ortega y Gasset said, a public intellectual is only as good as his ability to remain at the “height of his times.”
Sadly, this group of otherwise talented individuals has failed this test, badly, over the last two-plus years. As much as it may pain them to hear this, they have shown themselves to be much more like the “clerics” that Julien Benda rightly castigated in 1927 after they lost their moral bearings and their critical acuity before the massive propaganda onslaught used to promote the senseless slaughters of World War I.
Why these professional uncoverers of camouflaged realities of our times suddenly decided to unsee what was happening before their eyes is a job for future historians.
But if I had to hazard a guess today, I’d say that it had a lot to do with all the usual human things like fear of losing friends and prestige or being seen by ideological enforcers on their side as going over to the enemy. All of which is fine and understandable.
But if that is the case, isn’t it too much to publicly admit now that you missed the boat on this important story?
And if you can’t manage that, could you at least have the sense to stop issuing sermons on topics like “how propaganda works” for a good long while?
Thomas Harrington, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where he taught for 24 years. His research is on Iberian movements of national identity and contemporary Catalan culture. His essays are published at Words in The Pursuit of Light.
One of the best places to raise children is The Netherlands. In several consecutive UNICEF reports the Netherlands ranked first for raising the happiest children among wealthy countries (2008, 2013, 2020). However, in the spring of 2020, The Netherlands became a harsh place for children and young people. The Dutch government adopted a one-size-fits-all policy handling the covid-19 pandemic, which did not spare the youngest and took a great toll on Dutch children. The Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt remarked that the Dutch policies would ‘set the record for worst covid-response ever.’
‘Intelligent Lockdown’
Unable to withstand the rising global panic, the Dutch government on March 16th 2020 announced an “intelligent” lockdown, a phrase coined by Prime Minister Mark Rutte.
Dutch society came to a halt. Offices, shops, restaurants and bars, libraries, sport facilities, as well as daycare centers, schools and universities were closed. The closure of schools was unexpected since the government’s official advisory group, the medics-dominated Outbreak Management Team (OMT), advised against it, for a school closure would have a minimal effect on the spread of the coronavirus.
A reconstruction of events showed that the main reason the Dutch government closed schools was that the educational field started to panic about keeping schools open.Closing schools was a political decision to follow the panic, not a medical decision. Schools supposedly closed for three weeks. Three weeks became three months. Research by The University of Oxford (Engzell, et al. 2021) shows that during the first wave the average Dutch student learned next to nothing during homeschooling. Moreover, students whose parents were not well-educated suffered up to 60% more learning losses.
School Closure ‘No Effect’
According to the Dutch equivalent of Fauci – Jaap van Dissel, chief scientist of the Dutch Health Agency (RIVM) and chairman of the Dutch OMT – the closure of schools in the spring of 2020 had “no effect.” Media, experts and politicians paid no attention to evidence though. Children were portrayed as ‘virus factories’ and schools were depicted as ’unsafe’ environments. Fear had a strong grip on the field of education and teaching unions exaggerated the risks of teachers in schools resulting in a drastic increase in safety demands.
The data was clear that not only did children not run any significant risk, but also that there was ‘no evidence that children play an important role in SARS-CoV-2 transmission.’ Still, a second lockdown would hit children. That second lockdown – now called a ‘hard lockdown’ – was announced on December 15th 2020. Schools closed again, this time advised by the OMT who had increased the number of areas it deemed itself expert on, on the basis of models, of course, proving Martin Kulldorff’s point that lab scientists are no public health scientists.
Dutch minister of Health Hugo de Jonge caused a stir by explaining this intervention was meant to coerce parents to stay at home. The international children’s rights organization KidsRights harshly criticized this policy: “The Netherlands has set a bad example internationally by closing schools during the corona pandemic to keep parents at home.” This children’s rights organization concluded that children were not a priority in Dutch corona policy and warned for the possible consequences.
As new insights on the negative impact of closing schools on children’s lives emerged, governments from countries all over the world decided not to close them again in the future. Undeterred, the Dutch government closed schools again on December 18 2021, just long enough to deny children their traditional Christmas dinner at school with their classmates, a big event in the childhood of Dutch children.
The deteriorating mental health of Dutch children was striking. The Dutch Health Authorities (RIVM) published a disturbing report which stated that more than one in five (22%) teenagers and young adults between the ages of 12 and 25 seriously considered taking their own life between December 2021 and February 2022 during the third lockdown. From happiest in the world to suicidal in a matter of three lockdowns.
Record Low in Sports Participation
Not only were schools closed by diktat. For two years, sports facilities were also repeatedly forced to close. The restrictions were constantly changing, with as a low point banning parents from watching their child play sports outdoors. Once again, there was no scientific evidence that this would help minimize the spread of the virus. The result is a record low in sports participation nationwide. The Dutch Olympic Committee and the Dutch Sports Federation (NOC*NSF) were ‘particularly’ worried by the negative effect on young people’s sports participation.
The Corona Pass
So no school and no sports. Another low point with regard to children was the corona pass (Coronatoegangsbewijs) that was mandatory from September 25th, 2021 for every Dutch citizen above 12. The corona pass was required for most social activities, such as going to the movies, attending a sports game with parents, or entering the canteen at sports club with teammates to drink tea or lemonade after the match.
Unsurprisingly, there was no scientific evidence that this intervention would reduce the spread of covid-19, but the Dutch government enforced it anyway. Crucially, the corona pass required vaccination, recovery from covid-19 or a negative result from a coronavirus test taken less than 24 hours before entry. So essentially, access to social life was used by the government to blackmail Dutch children into invasive medical procedures.
The madness continued, unsupported by evidence. At one point in time, outside playgrounds for children were closed. Parents were not allowed to enter swimming pools to dress their preschoolers before and after swimming lessons. In the winter of 2020-2021 the Dutch government even went as far as trying to regulate snowball fights, by dictating that only those from the same household were allowed to participate, and that their group could not exceed a certain number.
Neither sex nor the sea were exempt from the regulators. Young adults were advised which forms of sex were recommended, bearing the 1.5 m distance rule in mind. Drones were used to prevent people from gathering on the beach. To restrict the movements of young people even further, an evening curfew was introduced. It was not supported by any scientific explanation, just “boerenverstand” (common sense) as the advisory group OMT called it.
Restricting the lives of children and young people during the pandemic should require a great deal of evidence, as well as a risk-benefit evaluation. The Swedish government decided early in January 2020 that the measures in Sweden should be evidence-based. So it kept schools open, a decision supported by the evaluation of the Swedish Corona Commission in 2022. In Norway – where schools only closed briefly – the corona commission concluded in April 2022 that the Norwegian government had not done enough to protect children and that the measures regarding children had been excessive. The Norwegians essentially took the unethical initial decision to harm children without evidence and its authorities recognized that afterwards.
Sweden’s approach to the pandemic contains inconvenient truths for the Dutch, which is why Dutch authorities ignored the evidence from Sweden (and from Norway). As the Swedish journalist and author Johan Anderberg states in the epilogue of his book The Herd:
“From a human perspective, it was easy to understand why so many were reluctant to face the numbers from Sweden. For the inevitable conclusion must be that millions of people had been denied their freedom, and millions of children had had their education disrupted, all for nothing. Who would want to be complicit in that?”
This year, my wife and I decided to spend our summer holidays in Sweden and after two years of often doubtful restrictions in our home country, the Swedish summer and the beaches of Skåne were a breath of fresh air. As a parent and a Special Needs Education Generalist (and former teacher of Physical Education) I am greatly impressed by the path chosen by The Swedish Public Health Agency and the Swedish Government as they remained focused on the health, well-being, and education of children in the process of policy-making. Anders Tegnell and his predecessor JohanGiesecke have tirelessly advocated for not disturbing the lives of children, and they have been proven right.
A very outspoken Giesecke gave his frank opinion on Swedish television: “I am a father and grandfather myself, and I feel if children are given the opportunity to receive a good education and that the risk for me to become infected with covid-19 would increase slightly, it is worth it. Their future is worth more than my future, and it’s not just about my grandchildren, it’s about all the children.”
The successful Swedish approach shows that in many countries government policies met the criteria of child abuse. A key lesson for the future is that schools should not close again in similar circumstances. The Dutch government and the OMT failed the children of their country, a dark and shameful chapter in our history that future historians will surely not look favorably upon.
All expert knowledge and wisdom that has contributed to the health and well-being of Dutch children was thrown out of the window overnight in the spring of 2020. Children and young people were made to carry the burden in order to ‘supposedly’ protect adults.
As Sunetra Gupta and many others have stated, that is the precautionary principle turned upside down. The Danish-American epidemiologist Tracy Beth Høeg rightly condemned such policies, which were also pursued in the US, by calling them: Sacrificing children’s health in the name of Health.
After two years of closing down children’s lives, I firmly believe we owe it to children and their parents to make amends for the wrongs that were done to Dutch children. Above all, Article 3 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child should never be forgotten: “In all measures concerning children, the best interests of the child must come first.” It is mind-boggling how quickly children’s rights have gone out of the window worldwide. With disastrous consequences.
For children and young people a recovery plan should focus on repairing the damage done in education, recovering sports participation, and restoring the trust in the government and institutions that they can traditionally rely on for their health and their well-being. The Netherlands should be a safe haven for children, as it used to be. Pandemic preparedness also includes watching over children’s health and well-being and in this regard the Dutch failed their children and young people. We should do better in the future. Much better.
Dr. Hans Koppies has completed the Academy of Physical Education (ALO). He then studied Pedagogical Sciences at the VU University Amsterdam, specializing in Orthopedagogics: Families in Psychosocial Difficulties. He has worked as a remedial educationalist at various institutions in youth care and special education. He writes about growing up and raising children, parenting and counseling in articles and essays in newspapers and magazines.
As my beleaguered teaching colleagues and I try to get our school communities into the swing of things once again this new academic year, I find myself to be merely, powerlessly wishing that no more grotesque permutations of the Covid Madness return for a third consecutive winter. ‘Home-learning’ in particular was, of course, disastrous for children in a myriad of ways. On a purely practical level, it was fairly tricky for the teachers too, so I do believe that most of the profession hopes to avoid the insidious perfidy of forced absences or outright closures. Granted, I would prefer my colleagues to be motivated in these desires by an understanding of the abhorrent, casual neglect of children’s fundamental needs over which we were forced to preside for two years. But I’ll have to be content if the Department for Education will just let us stay open.
Belatedly, conventional wisdom has it that Covid doesn’t tend to seriously affect the school-aged population. Perhaps if the undistorted version of that truism was more widely accepted – that Covid doesn’t tend to seriously affect the healthy population – some teachers (and their unions) might find that their selfish and flawed but unending clamour for ‘more to be done’ lost its sympathisers.
It’s been a typically warm and sunny September thus far, but a small number of our students remain curiously attached to their face-coverings, sporting them lesson in, lesson out, as I look on aghast but unable to order their removal. The so-called harmless, cost-free non-pharmaceutical intervention continues to wreak its harms.
For those of us who have, by now, long fought Covid restrictions, it might feel like a further, renewed battle this Autumn to see off the prospect of the Return of the Madness. After all the hammer-blows of Spring 2020, we ordered our thoughts, picked our battles, identified our sacrifices, practised our polemics, marshalled our arguments and, eventually, took to the fray. For many of us with little or no previous experience in politicking, we may even have learnt some tricks about the art of discourse and debate along the way.
I am not referring here to my professional life of course. In my professional life I am – quite rightly – not permitted to express my personal or political ideologies or opinions to students. No good and proper teacher would dream of doing so – unless of course you suddenly, naively found that your beliefs fell in line with the government propaganda of the day. If you happened to support the mantra “Hands, Face, Space”, you could plaster it across every TV screen and vacant stretch of wall in the whole place. If you were minded to promote social distancing, or face coverings, or bubbles, or ‘don’t kill granny’, or healthy 12 year-olds giving their own consent to being tested for Covid before entering the building, or any other similar paean to the dreaded virus – exhort it from the corridors, folks! If you were an Assistant Head, you might even have the surprising chutzpah to lead a series of science-themed assemblies (to 1,200 impressionable young minds) in which you vaingloriously celebrated the disingenuous and risible proposition that Professor Sarah Gilbert’s AstraZeneca vaccine “saved 2 billion lives”.
No – when I refer to my endeavouring anew to muster awareness of the risk of restrictions this winter, I’m talking about in my personal life, away from school.
There is a danger for those of us who have resisted the mainstream Covid narrative for two-and-a-half years that we forget quite how completely and devastatingly uninterested the compliant majority are in our version of events. Many may have shifted their positions slightly, faced with ever more piles of evidence (from their own preferred sources) of the damage needlessly done. Surely, it would be hard to find someone who would embrace it all quite so gleefully all over again.
But the big arguments are not won; the wider population are still just not listening. Family members try to gently talk us down; friends tactlessly avoid the subject altogether or just silently disappear from view; some colleagues regard me warily and with increasing wryness as a bit of a crank. They all seem to manage to tell themselves that none of it really affects them and, with a special kind of inward-looking perspective, I suppose they can make that be true.
So we keep talking and waiting and wondering where the socially palatable prima facie evidence to incontrovertibly back us up and help us definitively put a stop to all this might come from. I continue to posit theories, based on my understanding of basic principles of human decency and common sense. Anecdotes, ideas and experiences should be part of our arguments and, after all, when that single piece of elusive, critical, confirmatory data lands – why should anybody ever believe what any expert says these days anyway?
Some older adults – I overhear them in crowded cafes – are delightedly and obediently getting in line for their fifth (count ‘em!) Covid jab, and some disconcerting individuals in the High Street and park remain devotedly wedded to their face-covering. They don’t seem one bit ashamed or embarrassed by the many peculiar and ridiculous things their Government forced them to do for a good while there. Is that just it for them? Over and Out, Shut Up, Move On. Are these things, this history, these awful, ungodly consequences we’re all living with, just a permanent feature of the rest of their lives, no questions asked?
There are certainly those who seemed to revel in the whole drama of it all, those who still reel performatively, sanctimoniously backwards in doorways when you dare to step near; those who complied without thought and still appear blissfully ignorant of any possibility of error or mishap or downside and who probably watch too much TV; those who spewed the new terminologies of their epoch with uneasy, faltering confidence: ‘flatten the curve’, ‘viral load’, ‘third wave’, and – my personal favourite – ‘asymptomatic’.
Is it possible that this merry, obstinate lot are the very same people who seem in recent times also to be lurching emptily but enthusiastically from one cause to another? ‘Stay Safe everyone!’ ‘Respect this virus!’, bang a kitchen pan and ‘Save the NHS!’, erect a flag and ‘Stand with Ukraine!’, buy some frozen Chicken Kievs, close everything when it’s hot and etcetera and blah, ad infinitum.
Could it be that the common thread which connects all the headline-followers, the unquestioning, the frighteningly readily compliant, is a lack of something raw, true, local, deep and meaningful in their lives? Might there be a link between the modern world’s malaise, the tragic lack of connection and community, and a very public hankering after connection and community? You don’t know your neighbour, you’re not invested in your town, you couldn’t possibly overcome the awkwardness involved in helping the elderly lady down the road – why not get your phone out instead to prove how good you are at Joining In and Helping Out?
If people don’t have a potentially perilous stake in something close, precious and valuable, or anything at all to believe in which reaches them viscerally, it seems as though they might just keep scrambling around, somewhat manically and pathetically, for Another Good Cause to get behind.
And if I’m right about all of that, then the solution to the real Covid problem lies with people and professionals who don’t know they’ve got a problem.
Get a life. Get a community. Get some meaning. And do not force a single school kid to stay at home again this year.
The Lancet recently released its long-awaited COVID-19 commission report. The report well reflects the current state of public health science and addresses the business needs of the Lancet. It may have been naïve to expect further, but health is an important area and should be taken more seriously.
The level of obfuscation of evidence, misrepresentation of prior knowledge, and disregard for diversity of scientific evidence and opinion does not reflect well on either Lancet or the commission itself.
The Lancet in context
Medicine and public health are particularly dependent on truth and transparency, as the lives and health of people cannot be entrusted to dogma and superstition. Clear and open debate is fundamental to minimizing mistakes, which can kill, and to building the trust that patients and populations need to follow guidance (as they must ultimately be the decision-makers). These two related disciplines are also increasingly lucrative for practitioners and for the companies supplying the wares they employ. These forces inevitably pull in different directions.
Private companies making these wares, such as those in the pharmaceutical industry, have a responsibility to maximize profits for their shareholders. This means encouraging more people to use their tests or drugs, rather than putting people in states of health where they do not need them (either good health, or death).
This is not an extreme position, it is a simple truth – it is how this industry is structured. If there is a wonder drug in a lab somewhere that resolves all metabolic disease with a single dose, and it is easy to manufacture and copy, then the Pharma industry would collapse. Pharma has a duty to build a market, not heal.
Transparency and truth, on the other hand, could mean admitting certain highly profitable drugs are not needed or even dangerous; that an alternative safe and cheap drug, previously available for other purposes, will be more cost-effective and lower risk.
We cannot expect private companies to state this, as it will damage or destroy their income (their business). If they do not try to block a repurposed drug that puts their own investments at risk, they would be betraying their investors. What they should do, for their investors, is overemphasize the advantage of their own product, maximize the desire of people to use them, and run public campaigns to ensure this situation is prolonged as far as possible. This is what any for-profit business does – it is their job. It is not unexpected.
We have long relied on medical journals to act as a conduit for information from researchers to medical practitioners and the public. This is a plausible model if journals are independent and the staff and owners of the journal promote truth above politics or company profit.
This was once the case; the Lancet, a subject of this article, was once family-owned and that could hold to the values of Thomas Wakley and his descendants, standing against medical authorities up to 1921. It has since been owned by other for-profit companies, now a subsidiary of a larger Dutch-based publishing conglomerate, ‘Elsevier.’
Elsevier in turn is owned by RELX group (back in London), a large company with a typical list of major institutional investors including BlackRock (and so its major owner Vanguard), Morgan Stanley and Bank of America – the same list as major pharmaceutical and biotech corporations whose products Lancet publishes on.
The above does not tell us there is intentional wrong or malfeasance, just intrinsic conflicts of interest of the type journals such as Lancet are supposed to guard against. Lancet’s ultimate ownership has a duty to shareholders to use their portfolio of assets to maximize return; on this measure alone Lancet should favor certain pharmaceutical companies. The only thing that could stand in the way is lack of competence by the owners, or a moral code that rates investors below integrity.
In this context, Lancet’s track record over COVID-19 has been checkered. In February 2020 it published a major letter on COVID-19 origins that ignored major conflicts of interest in which nearly all authors were implicated in the alternative lab origin hypothesis. It published clearly fraudulent data on hydroxychloroquine that were significant in halting early treatment studies.
A lack of early effective treatment was necessary to secure Pharma profits for later COVID-19 medications and vaccines. The later exposure of the fraud was subsequently described by The Guardian and was one of the biggest retractions in modern history.
In 2022 Lancet published a weakly-evidencedopinion advocating medical fascism; dividing and restricting people based on compliance with pharmaceutical interventions. Lancet’s top leadership has remained unchanged throughout. This is relevant context for understanding the report of the Lancet ‘commission’ on COVID-19.
The Lancet COVID-19 Commission’s Report
In mid-2020 Lancet recruited people from various aspects of public life to review various aspects of the COVID-19 outbreak. This ‘commission’ (a somewhat grand name for a privately-convened group from a private for-profit business) was headed by economist Jeffrey Sachs, who preceded the recent release of the report by publicly discussing conclusions on the potential source of SARS-CoV-2, highlighting the probability of a laboratory origin as opposed to direct animal-human spread.
This part of the commission’s investigation had been halted early when Sachs discovered that several panel members had undisclosed conflicts of interest amounting to receipt of funding to conduct the very laboratory gain-of-function research widely suspected of promoting rapid human spread. Some had been authors of the earlier Lancet origins letter.
The Executive Summary provides a foretaste of the quality of work to come, noting IHME estimates of “17·2 million estimated deaths from COVID-19,” a “staggering death toll” as the commission notes, particularly staggering as it is higher than the WHO estimates for total excess deaths throughout the pandemic period. These WHO estimates include all deaths caused by lockdowns and those where virus detection was incidental. It is an implausible figure, even ignoring the lack of context here (nearly all in late old age, and with severe comorbidities).
Ironically, the commission reports in its main text over 2.1 million excess deaths from malaria, tuberculosis and HIV arising from the COVID-19 response in 2020 alone. However, this is a misunderstanding by commission members of WHO’s actual estimates – WHO does report significant excess 2020 deaths from these diseases but not this many – though many more will accumulate through subsequent years.
Reflecting the lack of inclusiveness of the commission itself, the report recommends censorship of the alternate approaches, considering “failure to combat systematic disinformation” to be a contributor to severity. The commission then inadvertently provides an example of disinformation in its characterization of the Great Barrington Declaration, misrepresenting it as calling for “uncontrolled spread of the virus.”
This, based on the declaration itself, must be a lie, as the commission must not have read the declaration within the two years they had available. Did they not consider it pertinent to question those who wrote it or (over 900,000) signed it? Whether the declaration was correct or not, it reflected prior WHO evidence-based policy. Ignoring this is simply untenable for a serious inquiry.
The overall findings of the commission are extremely disappointing from the point of view of science, public health, and simple honesty. Its apparent lack of familiarity with prior public health norms and practice, including that of the World Health Organization (WHO), may have been genuine, or may be contrived to emphasize a narrative it was intended to support. Given Lancet’s COVID-19 track record and business imperatives, the latter would not be entirely unexpected, but it is disappointing to see adults in positions of influence producing a document of this nature.
Summary of key findings
The Report helpfully provides a three page ‘Key Findings’ section. While missing aspects of the main body such as the euphemism “prosocial behaviour” to denote social exclusion, and extolling the “logic” of the completely illogical WHO slogan for mass COVID-19 vaccination, “No one is safe until everyone is safe,” it generally captures the main thrust of the whole text. Reading the rest is however recommended to understand how modern public health thinking has so clearly gone off the rails.
The key findings are stepped through here. Anyone with a public health background is encouraged to refute the concerns raised, as many of the commission’s assertions appear to involve common traps that seem inexcusable for public health professionals. They hang heavily on a failure to grasp three fundamentals of COVID-19 and public health:
Public health interventions are about risk and benefit. Interventions have positive and negative impacts. Recommendations therefore cannot be given without considering the potential harms they may cause in the short and long term, weighing these against perceived benefits.
COVID-19 mortality is highly skewed towards very old age, and heavily associated with comorbidities. Therefore it is imperative to consider COVID-19 disease burden relative to other diseases in terms of life-years lost, not raw mortality (from or with) COVID-19.
Prolonged lockdowns, workplace and school closures were not part of prior policy, or were partially recommended only in far more severe outbreaks. This is not implying the interventions were good or bad, it is just a fact that they defied public health norms and prior evidence. They were recommended against due to the harm they potentially cause. This lands most heavily, as WHO notes, on low income people and populations.
Highlights of the commission’s key findings:
“WHO acted too cautiously and too slowly on several important matters: … declare a public health emergency… restrict travel … endorse the use of facemasks…”
The commission seems unaware of the prior WHO pandemic influenza guideline. It is not among their 499 references. WHO specifically warned against restricting travel in this guideline, also noting that evidence on facemasks is “weak.” Travel restrictions can be significantly harmful to economies – cutting tourism income alone in low-income countries can increase mortality through poverty. The report fails to mention costs that extending these response measures would impose. Where lockdown costs are mentioned at all, it is in the context of costs of ‘failure’ to implement earlier or heavier, never in terms of weighing harm avoided against that caused. Ignoring relative costs, including the long-term health costs of increased poverty from longer lockdowns, is anathema to good public health policy.
Metanalysesof randomized control trials of community masking do not show significant benefit, and trials during COVID-19 show similarresults. At a minimum, WHO was therefore evidence-based when recommending against community-masking – the organization is yet to provide evidence to back its later endorsement of their widespread use. The Lancet commission appears to be specifically recommending against the use of evidence-based approaches.
“… most governments around the world were too slow to acknowledge its importance and act with urgency in response….”
Most people live in low and middle income countries with low COVID-19 mortality and far higher burdens from other infectious disease, which occur in far younger people. This statement therefore seems strangely Western-centric. If they had known earlier, what would countries have actually done? (if earlier implementation of poverty-inducing responses, then for how long?)
The commission appears unaware of serological evidence of spread prior to January 2020, in some cases backed by PCR. This would negate any benefit from this recommendation, even ignoring the harms.
Citing the Western Pacific Region as an example of ‘lockdowns working’ similarly makes little sense, as comparisons elsewhere (e.g. Europe) did not show significant benefit, while in crowded slum areas they are clearly pointless. Evidence of early wide transmission (e.g Japan) indicates that low mortality was due to other factors.
“Epidemic control was seriously hindered by substantial public opposition to routine public health and social measures, such as the wearing of properly fitting face masks and getting vaccinated.”
This statement is ignorant or disingenuous. If the commission members have experience in public health, they know that quarantine of healthy people, prolonged ‘distancing’ and workplace closures were never used at scale before, and that widespread lockdowns were not ‘routine public health and social measures.’ If they did not know this, they had two years to find out. The world, including Lancet, knew by March 2020 that COVID-19 overwhelmingly targets the elderly and has little impact on healthy working-age adults.
The vaccines do not significantly reduce overall transmission – heavily vaccinated countries continue to show high transmission – so to suggest low vaccination hindered epidemic control is a vacuous statement. It may seem intuitive (e.g. it occurs with some other vaccines) but the commission had 18 months to observe COVID-19 mass vaccination.
“Public policies have also failed to draw upon the behavioural and social sciences.”
This is an extraordinary statement to use regarding COVID-19. Many Western governments have openly employed behavioral psychology in an unprecedented way in the COVID-19 outbreak. No public health campaign has ever gained such media attention or had such uniform suppression of non-official messaging from media outlets. It is strange to see a statement so removed from reality.
“Heavily burdened groups include essential workers, who are already disproportionately concentrated in more vulnerable minority and low-income communities.”
This appears to be a nod to compassion for vulnerable populations. It is true that certain groups did suffer higher rates of severe COVID-19, though these are highly correlated with rates of comorbidities (obesity in Western countries is unfortunately associated with poverty, and poverty with certain ethnic groups).
However, the burden was overwhelmingly on the elderly – to a rate several thousand times that in young people. It is the response that burdened these groups most clearly and the report does mention inequity-driving school closures, but this appears forgotten elsewhere in an apparent blind support for faster and harder lockdowns.
“In low income and middle-income countries (LMICs)… better outcomes were seen when previous experiences with outbreaks and epidemics were built upon, and when community-based resources—notably community health workers—were used to support screening and contact tracing, capacity and trust-building within communities.”
This claim appears false. Sub-Saharan African countries did well irrespective of prior experience, with a relative exception of South Africa where obesity is more prevalent and there is a higher proportion of old people. Tanzania instituted very few COVID-19 specific measures but has similar outcomes. More than half the sub-Saharan population is less than 20 years of age, an age-group with extremely low mortality in the West. Actual spread in Africa, confirmed by WHO, has been very high.
“… the support for vaccine production in LMICs, for use in those countries, has come at a great cost in terms of inequitable access to vaccines.”
Nearly all people in low and middle income countries (except perhaps China) will by now haveimmunity. Post-infection immunity is equal or more effective to vaccine-induced immunity. Therefore, mass vaccination of a whole population with COVID-19 vaccines that don’t significantly reduce transmission cannot plausibly provide much benefit, whilst resource diversion is harmful. This statement is therefore devoid of public health sense.
“Economic recovery depends on sustaining high rates of vaccination coverage …”
Economic recovery depends on removing impediments to a functioning economy (lockdown measures). Vaccinating immune people with a vaccine that does not stop transmission cannot help to ‘reopen’ an economy. This statement parrots official mass-vaccination messaging elsewhere, but Lancet’s commission had an opportunity to promote logic and evidence-based policy.
“The sustainable development process has been set back by several years, with a deep underfinancing of investments needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.”
This is indeed clear. Poverty is worse, malnutrition is worse, and preventable disease burdens are higher. Women’s rights are greatly reduced across much of the world, and school attendance has been denied to hundreds of millions of children, entrenching future poverty. Acknowledging this is important, but it also calls into question much of the remainder of the report. Recommendations that acknowledge these mass harms which are concentrated on populations with lowest COVID-19 risk, but go on to recommend more of the interventions that caused them, do not seem well considered.
The remainder of the key findings recommend policies of mass vaccination ‘to protect populations,’ more money for the World Health Organization, and more money internationally for supporters of the growing pandemic agenda. This plays to Lancet’s gallery, but does not consider the harms of resource diversion, the actual very low mortality from pandemics over the last 100 years, or the heterogeneity of human populations and of risk to disease.
If vaccines worked in reducing mortality (for all-cause mortality (the Pfizer and Moderna randomized controlled trials have not shown this to date), if vaccination was confined to highly vulnerable groups where benefit is most likely, and if the trillions of dollars spent on lockdown compensation, mass testing and mass vaccination had been spent on chronic and endemic disease burdens and poverty mitigation, does the Commission really believe more people would have died and outcomes been worse?
A travesty of public health and science
The commission members appear convinced that lockdowns and mass vaccination were a net benefit, but It also appears that in two years of consultation they have not considered the alternative. The loss of decades of progress on infectious disease, human rights, and poverty reduction caused by lockdowns has not been given sufficient pause for thought.
A virus that mainly targets people over 75 years of age was addressed with a public health response that targets the children and the economically productive, cementing long-term poverty and inequity. They support this approach, but consider it should have been instituted earlier, and was lifted too soon.
After emphasizing mandatory and restrictive measures throughout, and misrepresenting or ignoring alternative approaches, the report ends on a note that it should perhaps have started with. “We note the timeliness of recommitting to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN’s moral charter, as we celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2023.”
This declaration includes rights to work, travel, socialize, and express opinions freely including, specifically, through any media. A quick read of the WHO’s charter would also have helped – health includes social and mental well-being (and physical well-being beyond a single disease). The report is void of such thinking – a travesty of both human rights and public health.
The report could well have been written based on slogans from WHO, Gavi and CEPI (whom the Lancet recommends should receive more money), from Pharma companies (on whose support Lancet is heavily directly or indirectly reliant) and from the World Economic Forum (who seem everywhere these days).
Some will have hoped for careful and considered thought, wide consultation, and a strong evidence base. It seems the corporate world may no longer have time for such indulgence. This is, in the end, a rich person’s club, seeking increased taxpayer funding for their favorite project. They are doing this in the name of public health.
It was reasonable to have hoped for better. What would Thomas Wakley have thought?
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is the former Program Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland.
During an appearance at the “Goalkeepers 2022” event, investor and philanthropist Bill Gates lamented “misinformation” that was shared about him amid the coronavirus pandemic and complained that so-called misinformation about masks and vaccines reduced compliance with mandates.
“I’d say the biggest tragedy is that it [misinformation] fragmented society where certain sources, if they told you to wear a mask, that was the last thing you were going to do,” Gates said. “Or if they told you, you know, get the vaccine, particularly to protect, reduce transmission to elderly people, they didn’t comply. It is a phenomena that held us back and hurt us in a pretty dramatic way.”
Gates also dismissed “conspiracy theories” about him wanting to track people.
“This whole tracking thing, why would I want to track you?” Gates said. “I don’t know, you know. Do I have time to track all these people?”
While Gates was seemingly referring to vaccines, just one day later, at the “Forbes 400 Philanthropy Summit,” Gates admitted that he has a group dedicated to tracking what people say about him online.
“I have a group that tracks what’s on the web that’s talking about things that connect to me,” Gates said. “Overwhelmingly during the pandemic, 95% was all the conspiracy theory stuff. It is calming down now.”
At the Goalkeepers 2022 event, Gates also complained that conspiracy theories are “cynical” and look for “one bad person who’s doing all this stuff” and welcomed “trusted sources” and “fact-checkers” partnering with social media companies to slow down the spread of content that he deems to be misinformation.
Gates’ nonprofit, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to some of the Facebook fact-checkers whose content is used in warning labels that are appended to Facebook posts. When these warning labels are added to Facebook posts, their click-through rates decline by around 95%.
While Gates framed the debate around so-called misinformation and conspiracy theories as a tragedy that reduced compliance with the advice being pushed by trusted sources, he failed to mention that these so-called trusted sources have issued false or conflicting advice throughout the pandemic.
The theory that the coronavirus leaked from a Wuhan lab was initially dismissed as a conspiracy before so-called trusted sources finally admitted the lab leak theory was a possibility.
Those who challenged or questioned the “trusted sources” were accused of spreading misinformation and censored by Big Tech platforms, even though many of their challenges and questions later turned out to be true.
By James W. Carden | The Realist Review | June 14, 2026
Joe Biden’s presidency may ultimately come to be seen as a cautionary tale. Here was a president who showed little interest in entertaining arguments that might have contradicted his most deeply held assumptions.[1] And there were precious few within the upper ranks of the administration who might have attempted to do so, after all, only policy hands and political operatives who had come up through the ranks of the Clinton and Obama administrations or had longstanding ties to the citadels of the foreign policy community were invited into the fold. … continue
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