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Judge Orders Fauci to Cough It Up

BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | SEPTEMBER 8, 2022

A lawsuit against the federal government – Anthony Fauci in particular – from the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana has been brewing for a good part of the summer of 2022. The issue concerns the censoring of certain high-level experts on social media, three of whom are senior scholars of the Brownstone Institute. We know for sure that this censorship began early in the pandemic response and included exchanges between Fauci and then head of NIH Francis Collins, who called for a “quick and devastating takedown” of the Great Barrington Declaration.

At issue is whether and to what extent the government itself has had a hand in encouraging tech companies to squelch speech rights. If so, this is unconstitutional. It flies in the face of the First Amendment. It never should have happened. That it did required arduous legal means to expose and, hopefully, stop.

The Framers guaranteed that Congress would make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The Constitution never allowed an exception for an administrative bureaucracy answerable not even to voters to collaborate with large-scale private corporations to obtain the same result by other means. It’s still a violation of free speech.

It is of course true that any private company can regulate itself and make terms of use. But matters are different when its managers directly collude with government agencies to distribute only information of high priority to administrative bureaucrats while censoring dissident voices at the behest of government and its interests.

In order to determine if that happened, courts need access to full information on precisely what was going in their circles of communication. On September 6, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty released a decision that orders the government to give up information relevant to the case and do so in 21 days.

Dr. Fauci’s communications would be relevant to Plaintiffs’ allegations in reference to alleged suppression of speech relating to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin, and to alleged suppression of speech about the efficiency of masks and COVID-19 lockdowns. (Karine) Jean-Pierre’s communications as White House Press Secretary could be relevant to all of Plaintiffs’ examples.

Government Defendants are making a blanket assertion of all communications to social media platforms by Dr. Fauci, and Jean-Pierre based upon executive privilege and presidential communications privilege. Plaintiffs concede they are not asking for any internal White House communications, but only external communications between Dr. Fauci and/or Jean-Pierre and third-party social media platforms.

This Court believes Plaintiffs are entitled to external communications by Jean-Pierre and Dr. Fauci in their capacities as White House Press Secretary and Chief Medical Advisor to the President to third-party social media platforms…

The initial complaint was filed May 5, 2022 and can be read in full here. It includes vast evidence of collusion between government officials and social media companies. But the government answered by claiming some kind of executive privilege and would not fork over information.

An amended complaint added the fireworks: It documented that 50 government officials in a dozen agencies were involved in applying pressure to social media companies to censor users, reports Zachary Stieber of Epoch Times.

That second filing might have flipped the switch and resulted in the judge’s decision to pull no punches. Indeed, it is a remarkable document, reproducing vast amounts of correspondence between government agencies and Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

What you see here is not antagonism but obsequious friendship: ongoing, relentless, guileless, as if nothing could be wrong here. They knew what they believed to be the problem voices and were determined to stamp them out. And that target included the documented censorship of top scientists associated with Brownstone Institute along with thousands of other credible experts and regular citizens who disagreed with the government’s extreme policy response to Covid.

Martin Kulldorff, Aaron Kheriaty, and Jay Bhattacharya are represented in the filing by the New Civil Liberties Alliance with Jenin Younes leading the legal team for the scientists. Within weeks, we’ll have a better sense of whether and to what extent these individuals were the targets directly and how many other accounts were named in takedown orders. For example, we know for sure that Naomi Wolf, another writer for Brownstone, was directly named in correspondence between the CDC and Facebook.

All of this went on for the better part of two years, during which time the First Amendment was a dead letter insofar as it concerned Covid information on platforms that are overwhelmingly dominant on the Internet. Through those means, individual citizens were restricted in their access to a diversity of views and instead inhabit a world of censorship and tedious hegemonic exhortation that have seriously hurt the credibility of the platforms that cooperated.

Finally we see courts coming around to the view that government needs to be held accountable for its actions. It is happening far too little and far too late but at least it is happening. And at long last, we might gain a clearer look into the mysterious works of Fauci and its imperial reign over American public health during the worst crisis for constitutional rights in many generations.


Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.

September 8, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

A 5th jab? Implications for the immune system

FDA advisory member hints at ‘original antigenic sin’

By Maryanne Demasi, PhD | September 6, 2022

Following the recent authorisation of the new omicron boosters, the former US Surgeon General encouraged Americans to receive two to four mRNA jabs annually.

Residents in northeast Australia have been told they might need a fifth dose by the end of the year.

In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that New South Wales’ top doctor said that people should expect to receive covid-19 booster shots “indefinitely.”

But could repeated boosters at close intervals be causing more harm than good?  I speak with experts concerned that policymakers are not following the science.

Europe sounded the alarm

Earlier this year, the European drug regulator sent a dire warning to the world. The agency was concerned that repeated boosters every four months could weaken a person’s immune response to the coronavirus.

Marco Cavaleri, the agency’s head of vaccines strategy, said that regular boosters might be “overloading people’s immune systems and leading to fatigue.”

I spoke with Cody Meissner, an FDA advisory member, ahead of the agency’s April 6 meeting, during which experts were to discuss the evidence for a fourth dose. He told me that he was not convinced by the data at the time.

Prof Cody Meissner, FDA advisory member

“I personally don’t think that we have sufficient basis on which to recommend a fourth dose, and we don’t know what the harm will be,” said Meissner.

“The reason we’re giving the vaccine is to keep people out of the intensive care unit and to keep people from dying, or even going into the hospital. So, before we vigorously endorse a fourth dose of this vaccine, I think we have to understand not only more about the immune response, but also about how much severe disease is occurring after three doses,” he added.

Meissner blamed socio-political interference for many of the questionable covid-19 strategies. “I think that the politicians and certain groups within society, such as the teacher’s union here in the United States, have driven a political agenda that is certainly not based on science. People like to say it’s based on science. It’s not. It’s based on emotion and generating great fear,” said Meissner.

Despite the concerns, most policymakers have forged ahead with recommending third, fourth and fifth doses for large swathes of the populations.

But over the past year, observational data have emerged from countries like the UK, Scotland and Australia showing that the most highly vaccinated people are acquiring the highest rates of covid-19 infections, suggesting that the vaccines have lost their effectiveness or something unexplained is happening.

Multiple jabs, multiple infections

Meissner hinted at a possible explanation for why someone’s immune response could be suppressed after multiple covid-19 shots. “It gets into this issue of ‘original antigenic sin’, which is still a theoretical issue, but may have some validity it seems to me,” said Meissner earlier this year.

Original antigenic sin – scientifically referred to as immune imprinting – is a phenomenon whereby prior exposure to one virus strain (e.g. wuhan stain) limits the development of immunity against new variants (omicron strain), because the immune system has been “imprinted” to favour the original strain.

This leaves the immune system trapped because the antibodies it prefers to produce against the original strain are ‘mismatched’ for the new strain.

Meissner said, “To keep vaccinating with very similar [wuhan] antigens, may or may not be beneficial — or the benefit may not outweigh the harm. I think we need to look at that.”

Since then, the data suggesting that immune imprinting is occurring, has only strengthened says Nikolai Petrovsky, Professor at Flinders University and developer of a protein-based covid-19 vaccine called SpikoGen® in use in Iran.

Prof Nikolai Petrovsky, Flinders University

“I feel the evidence for immune imprinting is increasingly compelling. It’s a known phenomenon with flu where it was first described, and the data now suggests it’s happening with covid-19,” said Petrovsky.

“The omicron vaccines may struggle to switch the immune system of a heavily vaccinated person to making omicron-specific antibodies, as their immune system is so heavily biased toward the Wuhan spike protein in the original vaccines. In the end, this could be harder to achieve in a vaccinated person than someone who has not yet been exposed to any spike protein, for example, someone unvaccinated,” he added.

Petrovsky says not only do too many shots of the mRNA vaccines increase the risk of immune imprinting, but they also seem to be uniquely pushing the immune system into “tolerance” against the virus.

“Immune tolerance” occurs when the immune system becomes unresponsive to a particular antigen after repeated exposure. This is the principle for desensitising people to allergy, i.e. by repeatedly injecting them with small doses of the offending allergen over time.

Petrovsky points to a recent pre-print study out of Germany. “People who’ve had three or more doses of mRNA showed a change in their antibodies to IgG4 which is typically an antibody associated with allergy desensitisation but not a normal antibody seen produced after infectious disease vaccines,” said Petrovsky.

Petrovsky said, “What this means, we simply don’t know as this has never been seen before.  That in itself is concerning as it indicates just how little we understand about what these new mRNA vaccines are doing and how they work. But to me, it raises a red flag that repeated doses of the mRNA vaccines might be driving immune tolerance against the virus. Maybe this could explain why the more doses of these vaccines, the less they seem to work, and more and more people are getting breakthrough infections?” Interestingly, the study did not find a similar shift in antibody patterns after AstraZeneca’s covid-19 vaccine.

Now, that the FDA has authorised the new bivalent boosters – which code for the original wuhan strain plus BA4/BA5 omicron lineages – without first requiring any human data to be collected, it has left many doubting that our public health authorities are even paying attention to the science.

September 7, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

Coronavirus Fact-check #16: “Can you HEAR Covid19?”

OffGuardian | September 7, 2022

Yesterday, the UK’s Daily Mail published an article about a new app which claims to be able to diagnose Covid19 infection just through the sound of your voice.

The story was also covered by Sky, The Independent, the Telegraph and many others.

The Mail headlined:

Could a mobile APP replace lateral flows? Scientists reveal new Covid testing software that detects virus through a person’s voice in under a minute – and experts say it can be more accurate than a swab test

The article goes on to explain:

The Dutch researchers say coronavirus usually affects the upper respiratory tract and vocal chords, leading to changes in a person’s voice. The team decided to investigate whether it was possible to detect the novel virus in people’s voices.

This is not the first app to make this claim, as early in the “pandemic” as May 2020 an EU-funded group based in Cambridge began claiming they could diagnose “Covid” just by listening to people cough.

Now, does this make any sense? Is it really possible to diagnose disease just from the sound of someone’s voice?

Simply put, almost certainly not. Without seeing the scientists’ actual data it is not possible to rule it out completely, but there are multiple apparent issues.

  • “Covid19” is not the only infection which affects the respiratory tract. How could an app differentiate “Covid” and “flu”?
  • Different mobile devices have different microphones, how can the app distinguish feedback or interference from a sore throat?
  • Huge numbers of (alleged) Covid19 “cases” are supposedly symptomless, so the app could never detect those.
  • The only way to test the results is by confirming with PCR tests, which don’t work, or lateral flow tests, which also don’t work.

So, even if “Covid19” was a thing (which it isn’t), and even if we try to be objective and open-minded about the idea, it doesn’t seem like it would be any use at all.

And honestly, it feels like we’re giving the concept WAY more respect than it deserves. The very idea you can diagnose disease through the sound of a voice is completely ridiculous. But Covid times have enabled all the clowns in the world.

However, if you want a little silver lining read the comments below the Daily Mail article, and see that no one is buying this. One of them makes an interesting observation:

So they have harvested your DNA with the PCR test swabs, now they are after your voice print as well?

Is that what’s really going on here? We can’t rule it out.

September 7, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Judge orders Fauci and WH Press Secretary to hand over records related to online censorship pressure

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | September 7, 2022

The US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued a ruling, ordering Dr. Anthony Fauci and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to respond to document requests by the New Civil Liberties Alliance in conjunction with the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general on behalf of plaintiffs in State of Missouri ex rel. Schmitt, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al.

Judge Terry A. Doughty made the order, which has great importance for the millions of Americans experiencing censorship on social media – which is allegedly at the pressuring of government bodies and officials and would therefore be a violation of the First Amendment.

We obtained a copy of the order for you here.

The judge’s ruling was on “whether the White House Defendants, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre and Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci should be compelled to respond to Plaintiffs’ interrogatories and document requests” and “[w]hether Dr. Fauci, in his capacity as National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (“NIAID”) Director, should be required to provide additional responses to Plaintiffs’ interrogatories and document requests.”

The judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and the defendants have no legal right to refuse to comply with the order.

“In accordance with the previous expedited discovery order, Plaintiffs served interrogatories and document requests upon White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and upon Dr. Anthony Fauci in his capacity as Chief Medical Advisor to the President,” the ruling states. “Government Defendants have refused to provide any interrogatory responses or responsive documents, maintaining that these would be internal communications that would implicate serious separation of powers concerns, that Plaintiffs are required to exhaust other avenues for the discovery first, and that it would be unduly burdensome and disproportional to the needs of the case.”

“The breadth and extent of the government’s censorship activities has turned out to be massive and far exceeded that disclosed by the federal government in response to initial court-ordered discovery made public last week,” the NCLA said in a statement to Reclaim The Net.

Much light has recently been shed on the Federal Government’s role in calling for direct censorship on social media platforms, as a result of the documents obtained during the lawsuit. Collusion between social media platforms and the CDC was also evident.

NCLA is representing several plaintiffs, some of which are prominent and well-respected epidemiologists who were censored by Big Tech platforms for diverging from the White House’s narrative on COVID-19.

The US district court judge Terry A. Doughty ruled on Tuesday:

“First, the requested information is obviously very relevant to Plaintiffs’ claims. Dr. Fauci’s communications would be relevant to Plaintiffs’ allegations in reference to alleged suppression of speech relating to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin, and to alleged suppression of speech about the efficiency of masks and COVID-19 lockdowns,” the ruling continues. “Jean-Pierre’s communications as White House Press Secretary could be relevant to all of Plaintiffs’ examples.

“Government Defendants are making a blanket assertion of all communications to social media platforms by Dr. Fauci, and Jean-Pierre based upon executive privilege and presidential communications privilege,” the order adds. “Plaintiffs concede they are not asking for any internal White House communications, but only external communications between Dr. Fauci and/or Jean-Pierre and third-party social media platforms.”

September 7, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Bats not to blame for Covid-19 – study

Samizdat – September 6, 2022

There is no compelling evidence linking bats to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Israeli researchers at Tel Aviv University have found after examining numerous scientific papers on infectious diseases.

“Two years after the pandemic first broke out, we still do not know for sure what the exact origin of the COVID-19 variant is,” Dr. Maya Weinberg, the lead author of the study, which was published in the August issue of iScience, said.

According to Weinberg, blaming the pandemic – which has taken the lives of over 6.4 million people – on bats is an “erroneous theory” that “was not based on sufficient compelling scientific proof and caused unnecessary stress and confusion worldwide.”

The possession of antibodies for the novel coronavirus by bats does not necessarily mean the disease was passed on to humans by them. It only shows that the animals were able to survive the disease and became resistant to it, Dr. Weinberg said. “Bats have a highly effective immune system that enables them to deal relatively easily with viruses considered lethal for other mammals.”

The researcher said her team studied papers on the origins of around 100 viruses, including Covid-19, SARS, and Ebola, finding that almost half of the claims regarding bats in them were “based on the incidence of antibodies or PCR tests, rather than actual isolation of identical viruses. Moreover, many of the reported findings are not convincing.”

“In general, bats are mistakenly conceived of as reservoirs of many contagious diseases,” she added.

On the contrary, scientists “must study in-depth the immunological anti-viral capabilities of bats and thus obtain new and effective means of coping in humanity’s struggle against contagious disease, aging and cancer,” Dr. Weinberg said.

September 6, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

WHO’S DRIVING THE PANDEMIC EXPRESS?

By Dr David Bell and Emma McArthur | PANDA | September 4, 2022

Sceptics of the growing ‘pandemic prevention, preparedness and response’ (PPR) agenda celebrated recently, heralding a perceived ‘defeat’ of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) controversial amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR). Although the proposed amendments would have undoubtedly expanded the WHO’s powers, this focus on the WHO reflects a narrow view of global health and the pandemic industry. The WHO is almost a bit-player in a much larger game of public-private partnerships and financial incentives that are driving the pandemic gravy train forward.

While the WHO works in the spotlight, the pandemic industry has been growing for over a decade and its expansion accelerates unabated. Other major players such as the World Bank, coalitions of wealthy nations at the G7 and G20 and their corporate partners work in a world less subject to transparency; a world where the rules are more relaxed, and a conflict of interest receives less scrutiny.

If the global health community is to preserve public health, it must urgently understand the wider process that is underway and take action to stop it. The pandemic express must be halted by the weight of evidence and basic principles of public health.

Funding a global pandemic bureaucracy

“The FIF could be a cornerstone in the construction of a truly global PPR system in the context of the International Treaty on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response, sponsored by the World Health Assembly.” (WHO, 19 April 2022)

The world is being told to fear pandemics. Ballooning socio-economic costs of the COVID-19 crisis are touted as justification for increased focus on PPR funding.

Calls for ‘urgent’ collective action to avert the ‘next’ pandemic are predicated on systemic ‘weaknesses’ supposedly exposed by COVID-19. As the WHO steamed ahead with its push for a new pandemic ‘treaty’ during 2021,  G20 members agreed to establish a Joint Finance & Health Task Force (JFHTF) to ‘enhance the collaboration and global cooperation on issues relating to pandemic prevention, preparedness and response’.

A World Bank-WHO report prepared for the G20 joint task force estimates that US$ 31.1 billion will be required annually for future PPR, including US $ 10.5 billion per year in new international financing to support perceived funding gaps in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Surveillance-related activities comprise almost half of this, with US $4.1 billion in new funding required to address perceived gaps in the system.

In public health terms, the funding proposed to expand the global PPR infrastructure is enormous. By contrast, the WHO’s approved biennium programme budget for 2022-2023 averages US $3.4 billion per year. The Global Fund, the main international funder of malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS – which have a combined annual mortality of over 2.5 million – currently dispenses just US $ 4 billion annually for the three diseases combined. Unlike COVID-19, these diseases cause significant mortality in lower income countries and in younger age groups, year in, year out.

In April 2022, the G20 agreed to establish a new ‘financial intermediary fund’ (FIF) housed at the World Bank, to address the US $10.5 billion PPR financing gap. The FIF is intended to build upon existing pandemic funding to ‘strengthen health systems and PPR capacities in low-income and middle-income countries and regions’. The WHO is predicted to be the technical lead, landing them with an assured role irrespective of the outcome of current ‘treaty’ discussions.

The establishment of the fund has proceeded with breathtaking speed, and it was approved on June 30 by the World Bank Board of Executive Directors. A short period of consultation precedes an expected launch in September 2022. To date, donations totalling US $1.3 billion dollars have been pledged by governments, the European Commission and various private and non-government interests, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust. The initial areas for the fund are somewhat all-encompassing, including country-level ‘disease surveillance; laboratory systems; emergency communication, coordination and management; critical health workforce capacities; and community engagement’.

In scope, the fund has the appearance of a new ‘World Health Organization’ for pandemics – to add to the existing (and ever-expanding) network of global health organisations such as the WHO; Gavi; the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI); and the Global Fund. But is this increased expenditure on PPR justified? Are the escalating socio-economic costs of COVID-19 due to a failure to act by the global health community, as is widely claimed; or are they due to negligent acts of failure by the WHO and global governments, when they discarded previous evidenced-based pandemic guidelines?

COVID-19: failure to act or acts of failure?

In the debate surrounding the growing pandemic industry, much attention is being directed towards the central role of the WHO. This attention is understandable given the WHO’s position as the agency responsible for global public health and its push for a new international pandemic agreement.

However, the WHO’s handling of the response to COVID-19 creates serious doubts about the competency of its leadership and raises questions about whose needs the organisation is serving.

The WHO’s failure to follow its own pre-existing pandemic guidelines by supporting lockdowns, mass-testing, border closures and the multi-billion-dollar COVAX mass-vaccination program, has generated vast revenue for vaccine manufacturers and the biotech industry, whose corporations and investors are major contributors to the WHO. This approach has crippled economies, damaged existing health programs and further entrenched poverty in low-income countries. Decades of progress in children’s health are likely to be undone, together with the destruction of the long-term prospects of tens of millions of children, through loss of education, forced child marriage and malnutrition. In abandoning its principles of equality and community-driven healthcare, the WHO appears to have become a mere pawn in the PPR game, beholden to those with the real power; the entities who are providing its income and who control the resources now being directed to this area.

Corporatizing global public health

Recently established health agencies devoted to vaccination and pandemics, such as Gavi and CEPI, appear to have been highly influential from the beginning. CEPI, is the brainchild of Bill Gates, Jeremy Farrar (director of the Wellcome Trust), and others at the pro-lockdown World Economic Forum. Launched at Davos in 2017, CEPI  was created to help drive the market for epidemic vaccines. It is no secret that Bill Gates has major private financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry, in addition to those of his foundation. This clearly places a question mark over the philanthropic nature of his investments.

CEPI appears to be a forerunner of what the WHO is increasingly becoming – an instrument where individuals and corporations can exert influence and improve returns by hijacking key areas of public health. CEPI’s business model, which involves taxpayers taking most of the financial risk for vaccine research and development whilst big pharma gets all the profits, is notably replicated in the World Bank-WHO report.

Gavi, itself a significant WHO donor that exists solely to increase access to vaccination, is also under direct influence of Bill Gates, via the Bill and Melinda Gate Foundation. Gavi’s involvement (alongside CEPI) with the WHO’s COVAX program, which diverted vast resources into COVID-19 mass-vaccination in countries where COVID-19 is a relatively small disease burden, suggests the organisation is tied more strongly to vaccine sales than genuine public health outcomes.

Pandemic funding – ignoring the big picture?

At first glance, increased PPR funding to LMICs may seem a public good. The World Bank-WHO report claims that ‘the frequency and impact of pandemic-prone pathogens are increasing.’ However, this is belied by reality, as the WHO lists only 5 ‘pandemics’ in the past 120 years, with the highest mortality occurring in the 1918-19 H1N1 (‘Spanish’) influenza pandemic, before antibiotics and modern medicine. Apart from COVID-19, the ‘Swine Flu’ outbreak in 2009-10, which killed less people than a normal flu year, is the only ‘pandemic’ in the past 50 years.

Such a myopic focus on pandemic risk will do little to address the most serious causes of illness and death, and it can be expected to make matters worse for people experiencing the most extreme forms of socio-economic disadvantage.

Governments of low-income countries will be ‘incentivised’ to divert resources to PPR related programs, further increasing the growing debt crisis. A more centralised, top-down public health system will lack the flexibility to meet local and regional needs.  Transferring support from higher burden diseases, and drivers of economic growth, has a direct impact on mortality in these countries, particularly for children.

The WHO-World Bank report states that the pillars of the global PPR architecture must be built on the ‘foundational principles of equity, inclusion and solidarity’. As severe pandemics occur less than once per generation, increased spending on PPR in LMICs clearly violates these basic principles as it diverts scarce resources away from areas of regional need, to address the perceived health priorities of wealthier populations. As demonstrated by the damage caused by the COVID-19 response, in both high and low-income countries, the overall harm of resource diversion from areas of greater need is likely to be universal. In failing to address such ‘opportunity costs’, recommendations by the WHO, the World Bank, and other PPR partners cannot be validly based in public health; nor are they a basis for overall societal benefit. .

One thing is certain. Those who will gain from this expanding pandemic gravy train will be those who gained from the response to COVID-19.

The pandemic gravy train – following the money

The new World Bank fund risks compounding existing problems in the global public health system and further compromising the WHO’s autonomy; although it is stated that the WHO will have a central ‘strategic role’, funds will be channelled through the World Bank. In essence, it financially side-steps the accountability measures at the WHO, where questions of relative worth can be raised more easily.

The proposed structure of the FIF will pave the way for organisations with strong ties to pharmaceutical and other biotech industries, such as CEPI and Gavi, to gain even greater influence over global PPR, particularly if they are appointed ‘implementing entities’ – the operational arms that will carry out the FIF’s work program at country, regional and global level.

Although the initial implementing entities for the FIF will be UN agencies, multilateral development banks and the IMF, plans are already underway to accredit these other international health entities. Investments are likely to be heavily skewed towards biotechnological solutions, such as disease surveillance and vaccine development, at the cost of other, more pressing, public health interventions.

Protecting public health rather than private wealth

If the world truly wants to address the systemic weakness exposed by COVID-19, it must first understand that this pandemic gravy train is not new; the foundations for the destruction of community- and country-based global public health began long before COVID-19.

It is unarguable that COVID-19 has proved to be a lucrative cash cow for vaccine manufacturers and the biotech industry. The public-private partnership model that now dominates global health enabled vast resources to be channelled into the pockets of corporate giants, through programs they directly influence, or even run. CEPI’s ‘100 days Mission’ to make ‘safe and effective’ vaccines against ‘viral threats’ within 100 days – to ‘give the world a fighting chance of containing a future outbreak before it spreads to become a global pandemic’ –  is a permit for pharmaceutical companies to appropriate public money on an unprecedented scale, based on their own assessments of risk.

The self-fulfilment of the ‘increasing frequency of pandemic’ prophecy will be ensured by the push for increased disease surveillance – a priority area for the FIF. To quote the World Bank-WHO report:

“COVID-19 highlighted the need to connect surveillance and alert systems into a regional and global network to detect zoonotic transmission events, raise the alarm early to enable a swift public health response, and accelerate the development of medical countermeasures.”

Like many claims being made about COVID-19, this claim has no evidence base – the origins of COVID-19 remain highly controversial and the WHO’s data demonstrate that pandemics are uncommon, whatever their origin. None of the ‘countermeasures’ have been shown to significantly reduce the spread of COVID-19, which is now globally endemic.

Increased surveillance will naturally identify more ‘potentially dangerous pathogens’, as variants of viruses arise constantly in nature. Consequently, the world faces a never-ending game of seek and ye shall find, with never-ending profits for industry. Formerly once per generation, this industry will make ‘pandemics’ a routine part of life, where rapid fire vaccines are mandated for every new disease or variant that arrives.

Ultimately, this new pandemic fund will help to hook low- and middle-income countries into the growing global pandemic bureaucracy. Greater centralisation of public health will do little to address the genuine health needs of people in these countries. If the pandemic gravy train is allowed to keep growing, the poor will get poorer, and people will die in increasing numbers from more prevalent, preventable diseases. The rich will continue to profit, while fuelling the main driver of ill-health in lower income countries – poverty.

Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva, and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a member of the Executive Committee of PANDA.

September 6, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Economics | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Climate and COVID ‘Science’

By Donald J. Boudreaux – AEIR – September 4, 2022

Physicist and former CalTech provost Steven Koonin’s superb 2021 book, Unsettled? What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, busts many popular myths about climate change. Koonin is clear that global temperatures are indeed rising, and that some of this rise in temperatures is caused by human activity. But Koonin warns – and he marshals much data to justify his warnings – that what we really know about the details behind and beyond these large facts about climate change, and about efforts to arrest it, is surprisingly tentative. Indeed, such knowledge is often so skimpy as to be non-existent.

Our relatively meager amount of knowledge about climate change, as well as about the likely consequences of different policies to deal with it, is surprising not because of any recent discoveries that cast new-found doubt on what was once legitimately believed to be ample knowledge. No, our relatively meager amount of knowledge about climate matters has always been meager, yet this ‘meagerness’ has been consistently ignored by prominent politicians, journalists, and other ‘elite’ molders of public opinion.

A public frightened into believing that some collective calamity is in the offing is a public more eager for, or at least more docile in the face of, authoritarian efforts marketed as necessary to prevent the calamity.

With the turn of almost every page of Unsettled? I was struck by the ominous parallels between the mainstream narrative on the climate and the mainstream narrative on COVID. Pointing out such parallels wasn’t at all Koonin’s purpose; in fact, I suspect that he himself took no notice of these parallels. And, of course, I’d earlier been alerted by other writers to these parallels. But the length and reality of these parallels weren’t driven home to me until I’d read Koonin’s tract. Each and every one of the following attitudes – which I distill from my reading of Koonin’s book and from my immersion over the past 30 months in all things COVID – is prominent in matters of COVID as well as in matters of the climate.

Humanity is doomed to suffer gravely unless the government takes drastic, indeed, unprecedented corrective action and does so immediately!

Nothing – no other goal, aspiration, hope, or concern – nothing is as important as doing all that we can to reduce as much as is physically possible our exposure to the toxic substance that poses an existential threat to humanity! Therefore, there’s no need to account for the ‘costs’ and other collateral harms that might arise from drastic corrective action, for none of these costs and harms, even if they’re real, can possibly compare to the costs and harms that will befall us if we don’t take in full measure the prescribed drastic action!

The present emergency demands decisive interventions that are neither delayed nor diluted by trifling concerns, such as the sanctity of private property rights or the desire to avoid overreach by the government’s executive branch!

The problem is one that can be correctly diagnosed only by scientific experts. Fortunately, such a diagnosis has been confidently made. And so to save humanity we must put aside our petty individual self-interests and for the greater good do as we are instructed by the experts! Humanity’s very survival demands that we all obey the Science, for only the Science can light the path from a dark and dangerous today into a shining and safe tomorrow!

The Science reveals that there is one and only one path to our salvation. Everyone must follow the One Path! Those who insist on other paths would not only destroy themselves but all of humanity!

Fortunately, the Science is clear, complete, and settled! Therefore, anyone who challenges the Science – anyone who dares to challenge the prediction that catastrophe will occur unless government overhauls society and the economy as instructed by the Science and the Scientists – is a slack-jawed ignoramus, a sociopathic apologist for plutocrats, or a dangerously benighted ideologue! And so there’s nothing to be gained by allowing these dissenting voices to speak! Indeed, dissenting voices must be silenced lest they lure the unsuspecting masses into a self-destructive skepticism of the Science!

To keep to a minimum the number of anti-social renegades who insist on acting contrary to the counsel of the Science, the Scientists and their champions in government and the media must, sad to say, routinely simplify or exaggerate – and occasionally, alas, even to falsify – the public messaging. Taking such liberties with the strict, literal truth is, of course, not to lie; only a rube would think it to be so. The taking of such liberties with the strict, literal truth furthers the higher Truth. Taking such liberties is a necessary means of promoting the greater good by ensuring that the noble masses, simple-minded creatures that they are, aren’t misled by pointless doubts and irrelevant nuances to behave self-destructively.

These parallels of public discussions about the climate and public discussions about COVID are indeed real and ominous.

The passage in Koonin’s book that, more than any other, drove home to me the reality of these ominous parallels appears on page 171:

Creating alarming headlines through highly uncertain projections of the future is one thing, but promoting the specter of climate-related deaths by distorting existing data is quite another. A 2019 article in Foreign Affairs by the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Ghebreyesus, was titled “Climate Change Is Already Killing Us.” Yet the text doesn’t deliver on the catchy title. Astoundingly, the article conflates deaths due to ambient and household air pollution (which cause an estimated 100 per 100,000 premature deaths each year, or about one-eighth of total deaths from all causes) with deaths due to human-induced climate change. The World Health Organization itself has said that indoor air pollution in poor countries – the result of cooking with wood and animal and crop waste – is the most serious environmental problem in the world, affecting up to three billion people. This is not the result of climate change. It’s the result of poverty. That pollution does indeed affect the climate … but pollution deaths aren’t caused by a changing climate; it’s the pollution itself that kills. Such brazen misinformation by the WHO’s leadership is particularly upsetting for its potential to diminish confidence in the organization’s public health mission.

Readers might recall that Dr. Ghebreyesus, seated in his high perch, has a habit of predicting calamity from COVID, even well into the virus’s decline in lethality. This dishonest or incompetent (I’m not sure which) performance by one of the world’s supposed leading public-health officials is, obviously, part of a longer pattern. The pattern is ominous.

Science is an especially sweet and nutritious fruit of the Enlightenment. But an even sweeter and more nutritious fruit is the recognition that truth – including, but not limited to, scientific truth – is only reliably approached without ever being absolutely and forever secured, and approached only through open inquiry, discussion, debate, and tolerance for dissenting opinions and perspectives.

Too many elite intellectuals and public officials today – and, I fear, also too many ordinary men and women – have lost sight of the fact that science and reason are tools for improving our understanding and for supplying us with some information that’s useful for making the complicated and inescapably value-laden trade-offs that, in this vale, we must make. The belief that science is a source of complete and godlike knowledge is not merely mistaken, it’s a toxic fuel of authoritarianism when it’s combined with the false understanding of social problems as being a science project to be ‘solved’ by persons in power.

September 6, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Ivermectin Cuts Covid Mortality by 92%, Major Study Finds – Why is it Still Not Approved?

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | SEPTEMBER 3, 2022

Regular use of ivermectin led to a 100% reduction in hospitalisation rate, a 92% reduction in mortality rate and an 86% reduction in the risk of dying from a COVID-19 infection when compared to non-users, a major new study has found.

The study, published in the medical journal Cureus, analysed data from 223,128 people from the city of Itajaí in Brazil, making it the largest study of its kind and giving its findings a high degree of certainty. Senior author Dr. Flavio A. Cadegiani wrote on Twitter: “An observational study with the size and level of analysis as ours is hardly achieved and infeasible to be conducted as a randomised clinical trial. Conclusions are hard to be refuted. Data is data, regardless of your beliefs.”

The study compared those who took ivermectin regularly, irregularly and not at all prior to being infected with COVID-19 (i.e., as prophylaxis), and found a dose-dependent relationship, confirming that the difference in outcomes is very likely to be due to the drug and not other factors, such as differences between the groups.

The authors used a technique called ‘propensity score matching’ to control for confounding factors that may otherwise have biased the study in one direction or another. For example, those taking ivermectin tended to be older than those not taking it (average age 47 years vs 40 years), but by matching people of similar age in each group and comparing outcomes this confounding factor was controlled for.

Here is the abstract of the study, which summarises the methods and results.

Background

We have previously demonstrated that ivermectin used as prophylaxis for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), irrespective of the regularity, in a strictly controlled citywide program in Southern Brazil (Itajaí, Brazil), was associated with reductions in COVID-19 infection, hospitalisation, and mortality rates. In this study, our objective was to determine if the regular use of ivermectin impacted the level of protection from COVID-19 and related outcomes, reinforcing the efficacy of ivermectin through the demonstration of a dose-response effect.

Methods

This exploratory analysis of a prospective observational study involved a program that used ivermectin at a dose of 0.2 mg/kg/day for two consecutive days, every 15 days, for 150 days. Regularity definitions were as follows: regular users had 180 mg or more of ivermectin and irregular users had up to 60 mg, in total, throughout the program. Comparisons were made between non-users (subjects who did not use ivermectin), and regular and irregular users after multivariate adjustments. The full city database was used to calculate and compare COVID-19 infection and the risk of dying from COVID-19. The COVID-19 database was used and propensity score matching (PSM) was employed for hospitalisation and mortality rates.

Results

Among 223,128 subjects from the city of Itajaí, 159,560 were 18 years old or up and were not infected by COVID-19 until July 7th 2020, from which 45,716 (28.7%) did not use and 113,844 (71.3%) used ivermectin. Among ivermectin users, 33,971 (29.8%) used irregularly (up to 60 mg) and 8,325 (7.3%) used regularly (more than 180 mg). The remaining 71,548 participants were not included in the analysis. COVID-19 infection rate was 49% lower for regular users (3.40%) than non-users (6.64%) (risk rate (RR): 0.51; 95% CI: 0.45-0.58; p < 0.0001), and 25% lower than irregular users (4.54%) (RR: 0.75; 95% CI: 0.66-0.85; p < 0.0001). The infection rate was 32% lower for irregular users than non-users (RR: 0.68; 95% CI: 0.64-0.73; p < 0.0001).

Among COVID-19 [infected] participants, regular users were older and had a higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes and hypertension than irregular and non-users. After PSM, the matched analysis contained 283 subjects in each group of non-users and regular users, [283] between regular users and irregular users, and 1,542 subjects between non-users and irregular users. The hospitalisation rate was reduced by 100% in regular users compared to both irregular users and non-users (p < 0.0001), and by 29% among irregular users compared to non-users (RR: 0.781; 95% CI: 0.49-1.05; p = 0.099). Mortality rate was 92% lower in regular users than non-users (RR: 0.08; 95% CI: 0.02-0.35; p = 0.0008) and 84% lower than irregular users (RR: 0.16; 95% CI: 0.04-0.71; p = 0.016), while irregular users had a 37% lower mortality rate reduction than non-users (RR: 0.67; 95% CI: 0.40-0.99; p = 0.049). Risk of dying from COVID-19 [once infected] was 86% lower among regular users than non-users (RR: 0.14; 95% CI: 0.03-0.57; p = 0.006), and 72% lower than irregular users (RR: 0.28; 95% CI: 0.07-1.18; p = 0.083), while irregular users had a 51% reduction compared to non-users (RR: 0.49; 95% CI: 0.32-0.76; p = 0.001).

Conclusion

Non-use of ivermectin was associated with a 12.5-fold increase in mortality rate and a seven-fold increased risk of dying from COVID-19 compared to the regular use of ivermectin. This dose-response efficacy reinforces the prophylactic effects of ivermectin against COVID-19.

The authors draw particular attention to the dose-dependent relationship as confirming the efficacy of the treatment:

The response pattern of ivermectin use and level of protection from COVID-19-related outcomes was identified and consistent across dose-related levels. The reduction in COVID-19 infection rate occurred in a consistent and significant dose-dependent manner, with reductions of 49% and 32% in regular and irregular users, when compared to non-users. The most striking evidence of ivermectin’s effectiveness was the 100% reduction in mortality for female regular users.

The data in the study come from official government databases and, according to the authors, “conclusively show that the risk of dying from COVID-19 was lower for all regular and irregular users of ivermectin, compared to non-users, considering the whole population”.

The study, while not a randomised controlled trial (RCT), used a “strictly controlled population with a great level of control for confounding factors” and was larger than would be feasible in an RCT.

The authors highlight a “notable reduction in risk of death in the over 50-year-old population and those with comorbidities”.

They conclude that the evidence provided by the study is “among the strongest and most conclusive data regarding ivermectin efficacy”.

Many governments have suppressed the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19, claiming there is a lack of evidence of efficacy. However, this purported lack of evidence often relies on poorly designed trials and biased conclusions. For example, a recent widely-reported RCT concluded the study “did not show adequate support for the effectiveness of this drug” – yet its own results showed statistically significant benefits for speed of recovery as well as large (though not, in that study, statistically significant) benefits for mechanical ventilation and death. Participants also were not given the treatment until over a week into having symptoms and the study may have been confounded by people in the placebo arm also taking the drug.

One of the new study’s authors and a seasoned proponent of repurposed treatments like ivermectin, Dr. Pierre Kory, made clear his thoughts on Twitter in April as he responded to an FDA tweet reminding the public that ivermectin is not approved: “Messaging BS with one corrupt study while ignoring 82 trials (33 RCTs) from 27 countries, 129K patients – sum showing massive benefits. Stop lying man, people are dying. #earlytreatmentworks.”

Social media companies have censored information about ivermectin, often considering any suggestion that it is an effective treatment for COVID-19 to be misinformation. Yet ivermectin is a cheap, safe drug that many studies have shown brings considerable benefit in treating and preventing COVID-19. The latest study impressively confirms this efficacy as a prophylactic, with a reduction in mortality of up to 92%.

Shockingly, most governments still do not have a protocol for early treatment or prevention of COVID-19. The NHS says treatment is only available for those at high risk of serious disease who have a positive test and symptoms that are not getting better. Its guidance on self-care for people ill at home only recommends paracetamol and ibuprofen. Yet here is a highly controlled study of over 200,000 people that shows huge benefit – 92% reduction in mortality, 100% reduction in hospitalisation – for the prophylactic use of a cheap, widely available drug, and which confirms the results of multiple earlier studies. What are our governments waiting for? What more do they need to approve drugs that have been shown to save lives?

September 5, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

DR. PETER MCCULLOUGH ISSUES EMERGENCY COVID-19 WARNING

The Alex Jones Show | September 3, 2022

September 4, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Australian Academy of Science demands social media platforms ban climate “misinformation”

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | September 3, 2022

In a public submission to tech giants in the 2022 review of the Australian Code of Practice on Misinformation and Disinformation, the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering called on online platforms to crack down on “climate denialism misinformation.”

The academies want online platforms to fight what it calls “climate denialism” by “actively promoting reliable, peer-reviewed, and appropriately labeled material from trusted sources.”

The academies’ submission noted that the Code of Practice on Misinformation and Disinformation “excludes professional news content that is published under a publicly available editorial code.” It adds that the exclusion “allows climate science denialism and other misinformation to flourish, either through lack of enforcement of the disinformation provision of the code or failure of news outlets’ misinformation to meet the higher bar of being considered disinformation.”

The submission singles out Sky News Australia as a “key source of climate misinformation globally,” citing a recent report from the UK titled “Deny, Deceive, Delay.”

The paper refers to “political right-wing top influencers” as being part of an “intellectual dark web.” It names prominent staff at Sky News Australia, including Rita Panahi, as well as other skeptics from Europe, the UK, and North America.

“While climate issues are not part of their [conservative pundits] main content strategy, they nevertheless engage in frequent criticism of their respective governments’ environmental policies, attack or ridicule prominent climate activists, or employ narratives outlined in the previous section of this report,” the paper reads.

The Toxic Ten paper attacks online platforms for failing to censor climate change denialism and taking money from organizations that profit from fossil fuels.

“It is the greatest crisis ever faced by our species… We are calling on Facebook and Google to stop promoting and funding climate denial, start labeling it as misinformation, and stop giving the advantages of their enormous platform to lies and misinformation. As long as Facebook and Google carry on doing business with climate deniers, they cannot claim to be ‘green.’ They owe it to us and the planet we all share, to deliver.”

The academies also called on online platforms to crack down on health misinformation, even though health experts have continued to change their minds on what is actually “misinformation,” especially information related to COVID-19.

September 3, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

These global tyrants want to make slaves of us all

By Dr Mike Yeadon | TCW Defending Freedom | September 2, 2022

Dear everyone nervously looking around and asking ‘What the hell is going on?’: this is the most important single message I’ve ever written. I hope this isn’t too controversial. It’s certainly frightening, but I believe we are still the right side of disaster and if enough of us become aware of what is happening here and throughout the democratic world, we can recover the situation. However we really don’t have long. I believe it’s likely things will change irretrievably over this coming winter.

Everything that’s happened and is happening becomes much simpler and it all makes sense when you force yourself to think the impossible. If you experimentally adopt the position that our government is actively working to harm us, to dismantle modern society and enslave the people in a digitally controlled totalitarian world, it all fits. Nothing is surplus.

Even if your immediate response is that this is absurd, please try it for a day or so.

I ask you further to adopt the experimental position that the media, controlled by just six global corporations, all allied to a single global organisation you’ve all heard of, is relentlessly lying to you and has been doing so for more than two and a half years. Same for the internet, controlled by fewer global corporations, also all allied to that same global organisation.

I am certain it’s true because this all started with a scientific fraud relating to a virus, augmented with a relentless campaign of fear and measures known to be useless, which wrecked the economy and smashed civil society. Then we were coerced to accept unnecessary, ineffective and deliberately dangerous injections. Obviously this is an odious crime. Nothing like it has ever happened.

I have absolutely no incentive to say any of this if I wasn’t certain. I am certain. This all took place ‘in my wheelhouse’, my domain of expertise.

I’ve been 41 years in life sciences from training to successful biotech CEO and was worldwide research head and Vice President of Pfizer’s respiratory unit (1995-2011). Here’s what a former Pfizer board member wrote about my accomplishments. Do I sound like a fool?

I’ve given more than 70 interviews, all censored. I’ve been foully smeared. It’s propaganda. It tells you what they’re capable of.

Many have asked why people didn’t resist tyrants in the past. Partly it is fear. But it’s more than that. It’s that normal people, like you and me, simply cannot imagine being so evil. We trust in humanity. And so we should. Most people are good. Few are truly terrifyingly horrible. But some are. It’s the inability to believe it’s happening that really stopped people objecting when they should, when the evidence was unmistakable but had not yet quite reached their door, their family. They are coming for you and your children. There’s ample evidence emerging of long-term, patient planning.

It’s now up to you. I genuinely don’t see what else I can do.

Best wishes,

Mike

Mike Yeadon is the former Pfizer scientist and Vice President who from the very start of the ‘pandemic’ has courageously spoken out against the official narrative at great personal cost. He was prompted to write this article by reading a blog which he describes as a ‘superb expose of malfeasance in UK government’. You can see it here. You can find his previous articles for TCW here, and an extended interview by James Delingpole here.

September 2, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

How Are the Unvaccinated Doing? Survey Says: Healthy But Unjustly Treated

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 30, 2022

A new study published Aug. 12 in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research showed evidence of potentially illegal discrimination against individuals who declined COVID-19 vaccination.

The study reported the survey results of 18,497 individuals unvaccinated against COVID-19 throughout the world who voluntarily offered personal information through the Control Group Cooperative — also known as the “Vaccine Control Group” — which is a citizen-led initiative that seeks to provide an “independent, worldwide, long-term study of the health outcomes of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine-free.”

After collecting the survey results, the Control Group Cooperative invited a team of independent international medical researchers to analyze and publish the data.

The authors — including Robert Verkerk, Ph.D., from the U.K., Dr. Christof Plothe, D.O., of Germany, Naseeba Kathrada, M.B.Ch.B., of South Africa and Dr. Katarina Lindley, D.O., of the United States — said that “between 20% and nearly 50% of respondents, depending on region, reported being personal targets of hate, implying victimization, owing to their COVID-19 vaccination status.”

They added:

“Proportionately, rates of such victimization were highest in Southern Europe and South America and lowest in Western Asia and Southern Africa (although the number of respondents in the latter regions were also substantially lower).”

Moreover, the study authors noted:

“Such discrimination and restriction of liberties based on a medical choice may fall foul of relevant national anti-discrimination laws and international treaties, such as the United Nation’s International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (UN Office of Public Information, 1966), which includes fundamental rights to liberty and security of person, freedom of movement, privacy, religion and belief, freedom of expression, and peaceful assembly.”

Teachers and nurses ‘most intensely impacted’ by medical choice discrimination

Verkerk — who led the study team and is the scientific director for the Alliance for National Health International — told The Defender in an email that their data showed teachers and nurses were the two professions “most intensely impacted” by discrimination for their medical choice to abstain from COVID-19 vaccination.

“In many countries,” he explained, “but most especially in Australia and Canada, they required vaccination for many employees as a condition of work.”

For instance, on Aug. 24 Sky News reported that the Education Department in Queensland, Australia, issued a letter stating they will dock up to 18 weeks of pay for unvaccinated teachers as a disciplinary measure for refusing COVID-19 vaccination.

The department claimed the teachers had “acted inappropriately” by ignoring the public health advice.

Such actions were reflected in the study data, Verkerk said.

“Survey respondents reported feeling more victimized by the respective government authorities than by the non-state entities,” according to the study authors.

“Rates of perceived discrimination were greatest among respondents in Southern Europe (61%), Western Europe (59%), Australia and New Zealand (57%) and South America (57%),” they wrote.

Based on their analyses of the survey data, the study authors included a list of contributing factors that they considered to likely be “major drivers of discrimination,” Verkerk told The Defender.

The authors’ list included:

  • Widespread misunderstandings about, and overstated benefits of, COVID-19 “vaccines.”
  • False claims over societal risks posed by the unvaccinated.
  • Misleading or plainly false media or state propaganda.
  • Coercion to ensure high rates of COVID-19 vaccination.
  • Institutional mandates.
  • The desire for in-group identity as explained by social identity theory (Scheepers & Derks, 2016).

Study results show ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ was misinformation

Verkerk told The Defender that the study data exposed the “nonsense” behind the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” narrative which claimed that COVID-19 infection rates were higher among those unvaccinated against COVID-19.

On average, one quarter (n = 4,636, 25.1%) of the survey respondents reported experiencing symptomatic COVID-19 at some stage during the survey period, the authors said.

“Most of the reported symptoms were rated as mild (14.4%),” they noted, and “8.7% were reportedly moderate and just 2% were reported as severe.”

They added that 3% (n = 556) reported experiencing an asymptomatic case of COVID-19.

Moreover, the study data showed that less than 2% of the cases required hospitalization. The authors said:

“Only 74 respondents out of the 5,196 (1.4%) who reported suspected or known SARS-CoV-2 infection also reported that they were hospitalized following infection.

“Therefore, outpatient or inpatient hospitalization was reported in just 0.4% of the full survey cohort.”

As a rough comparison, data from New York as of Aug. 22 indicates that 0.52% of vaccinated individuals over the age of 5 have been hospitalized with COVID-19.

Vitamin D, vitamin C, zinc and quercetin were used regularly by the majority of the cohort in treating COVID-19, they said.

Study a step toward comparative research between vaccinated and unvaccinated

Although the study included data only from individuals unvaccinated against COVID-19, the Control Group Cooperative’s ultimate goal is to collect large-scale health data from both those vaccinated and unvaccinated against COVID-19 and facilitate an “independent, comparative analysis to show whether the vaccine-free do, or do not have better long and short-term health outcomes.”

“Our belief,” the Control Group Cooperative said on their website, “is that without a vaccine-free control group to compare against, there is no true measure of the levels of safety and effectiveness proclaimed by governments and health organizations across the world.”

They added “science demands that every experimental treatment must have a control group in order to properly evaluate its long-term success and efficacy.”

According to the Control Group Cooperative, the COVID-19 vaccines “were rushed out” under Emergency Use Authorization, using “novel technology without any long-term testing.”

The original control group for the “experimental treatment,” they noted, was eliminated several months after the trial commenced when the placebo recipients were offered the vaccine, “which the vast majority took. Therefore, there is no longer an official control group.”

The Control Group Cooperative is now an invaluable resource that serves as an international database collecting information from unvaccinated individuals.


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. 

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.

September 1, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment