Covid-19 « Aletho News

Open Letter to Therese Coffey Urging Her to Apologise to the Care Workers Forced Out by Vaccine Mandate

BY TOBY YOUNG | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | OCTOBER 10, 2022

Campaign group Together’s latest campaign, an Open Letter to Health Secretary Therese Coffey urging her to “Apologise, Reinstate, Compensate the 40,000 Care Workers Forced Out by Covid Jab Mandate” has attracted over 10,000 signatures within a few hours of going live. Here is an extract:

Forcing out approximately 40,000 social care workers for declining the Covid jab was not just unethical, but disastrous for the care sector and those it supports. The sector now has 165,000 vacancies, with 500,000 members of the public waiting for assessments, care or reviews. The situation is grave and urgent, not least as without a functioning care sector the NHS will collapse.

Failure to respect bodily autonomy was wrong in principle. ‘No jab, no job’ amounted to blackmail. But even on a practical level, the ‘mandate’ policy was always illogical and ill-advised.

For starters, natural immunity was totally ignored as a factor – for reasons that remain unclear. Throughout most of 2021 it was clear that Covid jabs did not prevent transmission and by October, the Guardian was explicitly reporting that ‘research reveals fully vaccinated people are just as likely to pass (the) virus on… whether an infected individual is themselves fully vaccinated or unvaccinated makes little or no difference to how infectious they are to their household contacts’. This alone should have been enough to kill off this divisive policy. Yet, seemingly oblivious to the actual scientific data, your predecessor Sajid Javid took to television the same month, belligerently ‘warning’ care workers ‘if you cannot be bothered to go and get vaccinated then get out… go and get another job.’

On November 9th 2021, the Department of Health and Social Care warned Javid that his ‘mandate’ policy would result in upwards of 40,000 care staff leaving the sector. He persisted with it anyway, and on 11 November workers who had not already been forced out were sacked in droves. Many lost not only their jobs, but also their pensions.

Already a range of well-known people including Prof Carl Heneghan, journalists Allison Pearson and Julia Hartley-Brewer, author and broadcaster Laura Dodsworth, Richard Tice of Reform UK and Laurence Fox of the Reclaim party, medics Dr Tony Hinton, Dr Renee Hoenderkamp, Dr Clare Craig and Dr Teck Khong, and sportsman Matt Le Tissier, have all signed.

You can read the Open Letter in full and sign it here.

October 10, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, NHS, UK | Leave a comment

Doctors File First Lawsuit Challenging California Law That Seeks to Punish Physicians for COVID ‘Misinformation’

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 6, 2022

Two doctors on Tuesday became the first to file a federal lawsuit to stop a new California law that subjects the state’s doctors to discipline, including the suspension of their medical licenses, for sharing “misinformation” or “disinformation” about COVID-19 with their patients.

Dr. Mark McDonald, a Los Angeles psychiatrist, and Dr. Jeff Barke, an Orange County primary care physician and founding member of America’s Frontline Doctors, filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

The lawsuit names 12 members of the Medical Board of California and California Attorney General Robert Bonta.

The plaintiffs also filed papers seeking a preliminary injunction to protect their free speech rights as the case unfolds.

Barke told The Defender :

“[This new law] puts patients at risk. Requiring physicians to consider the state’s narrative when making a medical decision, is bad medicine and dangerous. Consensus in science only occurs when dissenting opinions are censored.”

Commenting on the lawsuit, Mary Holland, president and general counsel for Children’s Health Defense, said, “California’s new law is a clear violation of the First Amendment. It’s startling that the legislature and the governor would even attempt to pass such legislation.”

Holland added:

“Censoring information about health never leads to health, but it certainly can and has led to medical catastrophes. I look forward to courts striking this law down.”

The Los Angeles Times today reported that some doctors fear California’s new law “could do more harm than good.”

“What was misinformation one day is the current scientific thinking another day,” Dr. Eric Widera, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, told LA Times.

Liberty Justice Center, a national nonprofit law firm dedicated to protecting Americans’ constitutional rights, is representing McDonald and Barke.

Daniel Suhr, managing attorney at the center, said, “We rely on our doctors to give us their best medical advice, yet the State of California is stopping doctors from doing just that. That’s not just wrong, it’s unconstitutional.”

He added, “Doctors enjoy the same free speech rights as other Americans. The State of California cannot define a so-called scientific consensus on an issue and then punish anyone who dares challenge it.”

Law is ‘at odds with the scientific method itself’

California Assembly Bill 2098 (AB 2098), signed into law Sept. 30 by Gov. Gavin Newsom, defines “misinformation” as “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care” and “disinformation” as “misinformation that the licensee deliberately disseminated with malicious intent or an intent to mislead.”

Newsom said the law applies only to physicians’ speech with patients during discussions directly related to COVID-19 treatment.

But Drs. McDonald and Barke allege AB 2098 violates the First Amendment, imposes “government-approved orthodoxy” and “is at odds with the scientific method itself.”

The lawsuit states:

“Disagreement is integral to the progress of medical science, a value that cannot be served by using the power of the state to punish those who dissent from the official line.

“This is particularly objectionable in the context of a new disease like COVID-19, about which consensus opinions and official guidance have regularly adjusted as new information is learned.

“At the beginning of the pandemic, public health authorities insisted that the public not wear masks, arguing they would provide little benefit and should be reserved for front-line medical professionals — that was soon replaced with broadly mandated mask wearing for much of the population.

“Schools were closed in the face of the fear that the disease would spread among children too young to adhere to quarantine procedures — but it turned out that the young were at the least risk, and that such closures may well have been harmful to their development.

“Reasonable minds disagreed then, and continue to disagree now, about any number of such topics, but the search for truth cannot be furthered by a government edict imposing orthodoxy from above, punishing those who disagree with the loss of their profession and their livelihood.”

The lawsuit also alleges that AB 2098 “intrudes into the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship” by “replacing the medical judgment of the government for that of the licensed professional and chilling the speech of those who dissent from the official view.”

The plaintiffs asked that the court “enjoin enforcement of AB 2098 and leave these important matters to the marketplace of ideas.”

AB 2098 was introduced in mid-February by California Assemblymember Evan Low — one of seven Democratic lawmakers who in January formed the Vaccine Work Group to develop legislation promoting the use of COVID-19 vaccines while “battling misinformation.”

The American Medical Association (AMA), which strongly supports the bill, hopes other states will follow suit in “ensuring that licensing boards have the authority to take disciplinary action against health professionals for spreading health-related disinformation,” according to a new policy adopted at its mid-June annual meeting aimed at addressing public health “disinformation.”

The AMA’s adopted policy expanded on prior efforts and called for the organization to work with “health professional societies and other relevant organizations to implement a comprehensive strategy to address health-related disinformation disseminated by health professionals.”

Language in the bill points out that the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) has warned that physicians who spread misinformation or disinformation “risk losing their medical license, and … have a duty to provide their patients with accurate, science-based information.”

The FSMB, as previously reported by The Defender, takes money from Big Pharma and has a history of challenging and attacking non-pharmaceutical medical approaches used by integrative doctors as falling outside the “standard of care” as they define it.

“If this period has taught us anything,” McDonald said, “it is that the scientific and medical environments are constantly evolving, as new information and studies confirm or reject prior policies.

He added:

“Doctors need the freedom to explore alternatives and share opinions that challenge the scientific consensus — that is inherent in the nature of the scientific enterprise.

“California cannot insert itself into the physician-patient relationship to impose its views on doctors and end all debate on these important questions.”

Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.

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 8, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | AMA, California, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States | Leave a comment

Doctors Call for Investigation Into FSMB Attacks on Physicians, Ties to Big Pharma

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 4, 2022

Scroll down for video

Dr. Emanuel Garcia, a New Zealand doctor who said he believes he lost his medical license for questioning and speaking out against the official COVID-19 narrative, also believes that the U.S.-based Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) played a role.

“We desperately need a real and deep investigation into this private entity that is pulling strings worldwide,” Garcia told The Defender.

Garcia — a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist who received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986 — is board-certified in psychiatry and neurology by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He has lived in New Zealand since 2006.

Garcia was a public health consultant psychiatrist until the end of October 2021, when he resigned from his position at the Hutt Valley District Health Board rather than get a COVID-19 vaccine, he said.

His medical license came up for renewal with the Medical Council of New Zealand at that same time.

Garcia reapplied for his license to keep it — but instead of receiving a successful renewal notice from the country’s medical council, Oct. 29, 2021, he received a letter stating that the council had “resolved” to suspend him from practicing because, “Dr. Garcia’s conduct raises one or more questions about the appropriateness of his conduct or the safety of his practice.”

In an interview with The Defender, Garcia said:

“Apparently, the chief psychiatrist of my hospital reported me to the medical council because I made these videos wherein I spoke about natural immunity, the early treatment, how ridiculous it was to try to eliminate a respiratory environment.”

The council found fault with Garcia’s lack of “adherence” to the council’s May 6, 2021, guidance statement, “COVID-19 Vaccine and Your Professional Responsibility,” and his lack of “adherence” to other statements made by the council.

Council Chair Dr. Curtis Walker said there was no place for “anti-vaccine messages” in a medical professional’s practice — or on their social media.

In its letter, the council listed complaints about Garcia’s behavior, including that he wrote an open letter to the prime minister titled, “Another Disastrous National Lockdown,” posted videos about COVID-19 on Voices For Freedom, YouTube and Odysee, and voiced opinions about the handling of COVID-19 on social media that did not align with the council’s statements.

Garcia called the letter “a farce.” He said none of the things he did were “great” or “revolutionary” — in his mind, he was pointing out “basic things” to the public as he witnessed the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic and the New Zealand government’s response to it.

Garcia didn’t fight the suspension because he was “sick of their duplicity” and “wanted out.”

“My lawyers were advising me to fight and to sign a so-called ‘voluntary undertaking’ which would have muzzled me,” he said.

If he had signed the voluntary undertaking, Garcia would have agreed to not say anything that ran counter to the council’s statements on COVID-19. The idea was, he said, that doctors who signed a voluntary undertaking were signaling to the council that they were willing to “play by their rules” and that the council, therefore, would “be more lenient with the punishment they dole out” — such as fines or suspension of the doctors’ license.

“I refused,” Garcia said. “I gave a lot of talks at parliament during the protests here in New Zealand, and I spoke freely — unfettered.”

Garcia said he chose to retain his freedom of speech and was able to “fully disengage” from the council through the use of common law, or equity law, to legally sever his professional ties to the council.

“According to the rules and principles of equity, I exercised my equitable right to annul, abrogate and cancel my registration with the Medical Council of New Zealand,” Garcia said.

Soon afterward, Garcia learned about the council’s connection with the International Association of Medical Regulatory Authorities (IAMRA), which is the international arm of the FSMB.

“The Chair-Elect of the IAMRA, Joan Simeon, just happens to be the CEO of the Medical Council of New Zealand, and the Secretary of the IAMRA, Dr. Humayun Chaudhry, just happens to be the President and CEO of the FSMB,” Garcia said.

Doctors worldwide who have “questioned things” have come under attack by their medical boards — and these medical boards “all come under the aegis of the FSMB,” Garcia said.

Garcia told The Defender :

“We have to do something different. We have to create an entirely new medical system that is out of the grip of these board-run matrices, one that honors basic medical precepts and practices rather than following algorithmic guideline-driven procedures engineered by bureaucrats.

“There is an opportunity for a magnificent renaissance of healthcare and it WON’T happen within the existing totalitarian system, it has to come from us.”

FSMB report targets practitioners of alternative medicine

Most doctors have not heard of the FSMB and are unaware of its influence, according to Garcia. He, himself, was unaware until his colleague, Dr. Bruce Dooley, a U.S.-trained medical practitioner who also lives in New Zealand, told him about it.

Dooley recently spoke out publicly about his knowledge of the FSMB.

In an “explosive” Sept. 24 interview with FreeNZ’s Liz Gunn, Dooley explained that the FSMB and IAMRA are private “registered charities with ‘hidden and anonymous’ donors who oversee disciplinary action of licensed medical doctors.”

Dooley — who trained at Jefferson Medical College (now called Sidney Kimmel Medical College) in Philadelphia, has a master’s in immunology and virus research from Villanova University and is a medical practitioner licensed in Hawaii, Florida and New Zealand — said the FSMB and IAMRA particularly target clinicians working beyond the Big Pharma paradigm, whom they label as “fringe” or “quack.”

“Big money must not be allowed to beat integrity and experience,” said a New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science spokesperson in a Sept. 28 press release about Dooley’s interview with Liz Gunn.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, while he was the president of the Florida chapter of the American College for Advancement in Medicine (ACAM), Dooley witnessed first-hand the FSMB’s attack on doctors who practice complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).

ACAM is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating physicians and other healthcare professionals on the safe and effective application of integrative medicine.

At the rate ACAM was growing during the late 1990s, the “world’s medical scene” would have become a “totally different thing” if the FSMB had not attacked integrative doctors 25 years ago, Dooley told The Defender.

“We had 1,200 members,” Dooley said, as doctors from New Zealand, Australia and Europe who were exploring integrative medicine were joining ACAM in large numbers and bringing with them their financial resources.

“We had a million dollars in the bank,” he added.

As a leading CAM practitioner, Dooley testified about the value of CAM during the Clinton administration for the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy.

During this time, Dooley also investigated the FSMB by attending its annual meetings as a paying conference participant. He noted how during conference sessions, FSMB leaders encouraged doctors to harass their fellow doctors who were offering natural health treatments.

Moreover, Dooley obtained a report produced by the Special Committee on Health Care Fraud (later renamed the Special Committee on Questionable and Deceptive Health Care Practices) showing that the FSMB perceived CAM and doctors who practiced it to be a “risk to public health.”

The FSMB’s governing body in April 1997 accepted the committee’s report as policy.

The report — which is no longer available on the FSMB website but which Dooley shared with The Defender — negatively labeled CAM as “questionable” practices that could constitute “health care fraud.”

The report said:

“In April 1995, Federation President Robert E. Porter, MD, established a special committee on health care fraud. The need for such a committee arose from the proliferation of unconventional and unproven medical practices and promotions in the United States, some of which may be questionable and thereby pose a risk to public health, safety and welfare.”

But according to Dooley, the committee’s motivation was not to ensure public well-being but to ensure that Big Pharma continued to get money. Natural and integrative medicine treatments, such as CAM, were getting in the way of profits for pharmaceutical companies.

The committee’s report said, “It has been estimated that up to $100 billion is lost to health care fraud in the United States annually.”

The committee members added:

“Medical interventions that do not conform to prevailing scientific standards are becoming increasingly popular.

“It is estimated that in 1990, Americans made 425 million visits to providers of ‘unconventional’ medicine, exceeding the number of visits to all U.S. primary care physicians, at a cost of approximately $13.7 billion.”

According to Dooley, the committee’s statements are essentially anti-competitive. “It’s such an anti-competitive piece,” he told The Defender, adding:

“Basically, the end says to the medical councils, ‘Look, we’ve got to stop this. This questionable medicine stuff is growing too fast. You need to get on board with us to pretty much slap down these doctors.’”

Now, 25 years later, Dooley said, the FSMB is employing a similar tactic against doctors who share what the FSMB calls “misinformation” or “disinformation” about COVID-19.

Some doctors, like Garcia, who questioned the pharma-driven global response to the COVID-19 pandemic had their licenses suspended.

Moreover, the FSMB actively seeks to influence federal and state legal policies, thus suggesting it may have played a direct role in generating California’s new law, signed last week, that punishes doctors who share “misinformation” or “disinformation” about COVID-19 with their patients.

The FSMB’s report obtained by Dooley openly stated:

“Through its Legislative Services Department and government relations firm, the Federation monitors federal legislative initiatives to identify proposals that could impact state medical boards.

“Upon the identification of such measures, the Federation develops strategies to intervene and oppose measures that could negatively affect state medical boards. The committee supports and encourages the Federation in its legislative efforts to protect the authority of state medical boards to regulate the practice of medicine, both conventional and unconventional.”

Indeed, the FSMB’s current website says it plays a “crucial role” in advocating for federal and state policies that “positively impact the health and safety of patients and the medical regulatory system.”

Could Sherman Anti-Trust Act be key to exposing FSMB?

Dooley agreed with Garcia that there needs to be a full and transparent investigation into who exactly funds the FSMB.

An effective way to accomplish that, he said, would be for a group of doctors who practice CAM or who have lost their licenses due to sharing COVID-19 “misinformation” to form a class-action lawsuit against FSMB for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

Dooley said he voiced this idea in the late 1990s, to a class-action law firm. “After I went to two of their [FSMB’s] meetings, I actually took tapes and everything they had given out.”

“They’re quite arrogant, and they just tape everything. People are talking about ‘quack this’ and ‘how to get the quack’ in your area,’” he said.

Dooley said he told the law firm:

“Look at this. This is anti-competitive. I can get 100 doctors together who have all been ‘beaten up’ by their medical boards, all in the same way. Then we can, under discovery, find out who supports this ‘monster.’

“Because that’s the only way you’re going to get their books.”

Garcia and Dooley participate in New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science, a group that has written letters to the New Zealand government expressing concern about the Pfizer COVID-19 shot, “as well as the implication from our regulatory bodies that we would be considered incompetent in our duties if we provided fully informed consent about this procedure.”

Garcia told The Defender that New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science steering committee member, Dr. Matt Shelton — a primary care medical doctor since 1985 and a lecturer and examiner in integrative medicine — has had his license suspended twice.

The Defender contacted Shelton, but he was unable to give an interview by deadline.

In a Sept. 28 press release for Dooley’s interview with Liz Gunn of FreeNZ, New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science said it “agrees with Ontario Supreme Court Judge Pazaratz,” who asked if “misinformation is even a real word … or has it become a crass, self-serving tool to pre-empt scrutiny and discredit your opponent?”

Watch Dooley’s interview with Liz Gunn on FreeNZ here:

October 6, 2022 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, New Zealand, United States | Leave a comment

Maine Board Licensure in Medicine Suddenly Withdraws ‘Misinformation’ Allegations Against Dr. Meryl Nass

The Defender | October 6, 2022

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.

October 6, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States | Leave a comment

The Online Safety Bill Will Only Reinforce the Regime of Government Propaganda and Censorship

Dr. Mark Shaw | The Daily Sceptic | October 6, 2022

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.

Dr. Mark Shaw is a retired dentist.

October 6, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | BBC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, UK | Leave a comment

Covid vaccines: I just want to understand why, Dame June

By Gillian Dymond | TCW Defending Freedom | October 4, 2022

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.

Please enlighten me.

Yours sincerely,

Gillian Dymond

Footnote: The now monthly (formerly weekly) Yellow Card report is a week overdue from the well-funded (by drug manufacturers, the World Health Organisation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as the Department of Health and Social Care) and well-staffed MHRA.

October 4, 2022 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, UK | Leave a comment

The End of Doctors’ Freedom to Ignore What the Government and Pharmaceutical Industry Says Should Worry Us All

BY DR FRANK MERCY | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | OCTOBER 4, 2022

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.

October 4, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Australia, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights | Leave a comment

Fauci doubled his wealth during Covid-19 – report

Samizdat | October 2, 2022

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.

October 2, 2022 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Dan David Prize, NIH, United States | Leave a comment

Gavin Newsom Sics California’s Medical Boards on Doctors who Challenge the Coronavirus Party Line

By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | October 1, 2022

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.

October 1, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | California, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Gavin Newsom, Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

Repressive Legislation in The New Abnormal

Doctors To Be Silenced

By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | September 30, 2022

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…

October 1, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | California, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

Why did the Left Fail the Covid Test So Badly?

BY THOMAS HARRINGTON | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | SEPTEMBER 19, 2022

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 30^th, 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 11^th 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.

September 30, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, United States | Leave a comment

How the Dutch Failed their Children – A Cautionary Tale

By Hans Koppies | Brownstone Institute | September 28, 2022

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 16^th 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 15^th 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 Johan Giesecke 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.

September 28, 2022 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights, Netherlands | Leave a comment

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