Covid-19 « Aletho News

Vast majority of Swiss citizens don’t buy into vaccine PR

Free West Media | July 11, 2022

Corona is still dividing society to a considerable extent. This was shown by a recent survey from Switzerland. The Lucerne University of Applied Sciences wanted to find out how the Swiss rate communication regarding the “pandemic” – and to what extent they trust the authorities.

The results make one sit up and take notice: 17 percent of those surveyed were dissatisfied with the government, the media and the communication of the authorities during the “pandemic”.

They believe the campaign had been a targeted control of the population by “powerful people”. Another 24 percent were satisfied with the communication from the federal government and the media, but could imagine that “there was a larger secret plan behind the global events surrounding the pandemic”.

Notably, another 24 percent were not satisfied with the crisis communication of the authorities and the media. They did not rule out the possibility that the government had deliberately concealed information in some cases.

Only the remaining 35 percent apparently had no worries, were basically satisfied and did not believe that certain issues had been kept secret. Some 65 percent, on the other hand, were suspicious and considered that secret intentions on the part of those in government were at least conceivable.

This survey is a resounding slap in the face for the state and the media.

July 11, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Covid-19 | Leave a comment

The Work of Factions and the Pandemic’s Political Collapse

By Maximilian C. Forte | Zero Anthropology | July 10, 2022

We are now facing a regime that is losing, is aware that it is losing, and wants at all costs to survive even if it means damning everyone else. That is the picture that we get, in bold strokes. In practice, there may be considerable divisions and emergent factionalism within the pandemicist regime. By pandemicism I mean the intersection of catastrophism and authoritarianism. This article is written from within the Canadian and sometimes the Quebec contexts.

Three Factions: Fugitives, Perpetual Promoters, and Vandals

Fugitives: Typically led by provincial government leaders, some local politicians, the federal Conservative Party, and a small number of doctors, academics, and journalists who have broken away. At the provincial level these are politicians who have lifted all mandates and restrictions, even as the federal Liberals wanted them to be permanent, and augmented (national compulsory “vaccination,” for example). They have resisted reimposing any of the previous measures—yet they also state that what they have done is merely to “suspend” such measures.

An unflattering description, by those who have suffered their harms, would go like this: this faction consists of those who, like unwilling accomplices fleeing the scene of a crime, seek refuge in a web of alibis, disclaimers, disavowals, and caveats.

They may wish to recant, but do not want to admit guilt publicly—instead, they revoke, recall, and “relax the public health measures”. This faction seeks to avoid further damage to the economy, society, and health and welfare of citizens, by cutting losses and trying to withdraw under the pretext that success has either been achieved, or the costs are too high to continue. At least there is recognition in this group that the imposed restrictions did far more harm than good (as they should have known, since not even the WHO recommended such policies, and pre-existing preparedness plans in Canada were simply discarded—see Dr. Schabas here). This faction realizes that its members have served as an instrument for causing massive damage—politically, economically, and socially—and at most can only indirectly admit to that fact by now pursuing a different course. The fugitive faction would like to see us exit this trauma without any hard feelings, with little if any accountability, cheered by the promise that “we won’t do it again”. They would prefer to declare that “it is all subsiding” as we “learn to live with the virus”.

The existence of a faction of fugitives may also explain why suddenly there is more room in some media outlets for views that, until moments ago, were banished and censored as “misinformation” and “fake news”. We see such examples appearing in Newsweek (on multiple occasions), the Wall Street Journal (also here), the Toronto Sun (numerous times in fact—also here) and even the Globe & Mail (more than once), among others. While in Canada regime media speak of “anti-mandate” figures as if they were a rogue species of criminals, even a hard-line publication like The Economist can paint a grim picture of the harms of lockdowns for children. That these media publish the views of members of this faction is just a reaffirmation of the simple fact that it is easier for former insiders to be heard, than it is for outsiders who were never let in to begin with.

Fugitives, having developed doubts, misgivings, or even regrets, are joined by a large portion of the population that simply does not want to hear anything ever again about Covid, lockdowns, “masks,” “the pandemic,” and so on. Typically, these are people who have had two doses of the non-vaccines, and will not have a third—and will also resist having their children injected (more on this later).

In the Canadian context, in terms of size and influence, this is the largest of the factions. Its size and influence has grown particularly as 2022 has progressed. At the leadership level particularly, this faction contains those who have drifted away from the other two factions. Elements of this faction existed very early in 2020, before folding themselves into the pandemicist lockdown regime. Early expressions of doubt from political leaders, messages that contradicted the lockdown dogma that was imposed at lightning speed, and reopening policies that alarmed the media, were some of the indications of the existence of this prospective faction. A large percentage of the population that was coerced into getting “jabbed” forms the popular base of this faction. Otherwise, it is quite distinct from the resistance that has been fighting “vaccine” mandates, lockdowns, and other restrictions from the start—and who do not constitute a splinter of a regime to which they never belonged.

Internationally, the already existing global mass movement against mandates and restrictions is being joined by other disaffected quarters that have been harshly affected by economic transformation, ushered in by the same lockdown regimes, in what appears to be a rising global rebellion.

Perpetual Promoters: Unperturbed enthusiasts of eternal lockdowns, this middling class of stay-at-home professionals cherishes the pandemic as a lifestyle choice. This faction seeks straightforward continuity—maintain or reintroduce “measures,” encourage further “vaccination,” maintain or bring back “masking,” and so on. A Zoom-based social segment, this preachy faction consists of regime media and regime academia, whose specialties as advocates is to manipulate symbols and re-engineer values in order to normalize the state of exception. These exponents of the emergency lifestyle strive to maintain a permanent pandemic by sustaining a high level of propaganda and fear-mongering. They are constantly on alert. They are champions of “vigilance”. Behaving like overzealous hall monitors and pompous snitches, they are pious apostles of authoritarianism. In terms of its reality-denial capacity, it is the most psychotic of the factions—that is not an insult, but more of a clinical diagnosis.

This faction now invites ridicule from former believers (citizens qua parishioners), because this faction’s members fail to recognize the depth of indifference or anger that has sprouted in the society, especially post-Omicron, with the evident failure of the non-vaccines and the resulting rupture of the contract that believers were promised. Members of this faction also seem entirely numb to the consequences of their choices.

Unbridled enthusiasts of every wrong decision and the worst of choices, they continue cheerleading even when the game is over. They are idealists, true believers, who will cheerfully offer one booster after another until immune systems completely collapse, just in time for the complete collapse of the social system. This faction can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from the following, far more sinister cluster of interests, because to a significant extent it is, in functional terms, the “useful idiot” of what follows.

Initially extremely influential, and well remunerated from the Canadian federal government, this faction has seen its influence decline dramatically, especially in 2022.

Vandals: The third faction, that of the progressivist wreckers proclaiming a new order, is the one that is most worrying. This faction, consisting of champions of demolition, is the one that is capable of considering one final all-out assault that is so massive that it can only end in total destruction and provoke generalized violence in the form of civil unrest. This is the faction that seeks to crash the economy, by aggravating inflation, maximizing fuel shortages, damaging agricultural production, all under the pretext of “greening” the economy and ushering in a “transition” to “renewables” while fighting to preserve the phony “liberal world order” against the Russian bogeyman. Failed tools, like “vaccines” and sanctions, have been their favourites thus far, but they are capable of worse forms of collective punishment against recalcitrants. This third faction actively aims to escalate tensions and create further divisions in the society. This faction desires censorship to be institutionalized, legalized, and normalized. It wants pure dictatorship (in the name of “saving our democracy,” that is, the democracy that allows space only for them alone). The model some admire is China’s dictatorship, because that totalitarian system has served their interests very well. Key actors in this faction include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, GAVI, Big Pharma, the World Health Organization, numerous Harvard graduates, NATO, the European Commission, the Atlantic Council, and so on. The third faction is also the one serviced by political functionaries such as Justin Trudeau, Mark Rutte, Emanuel Macron, and Joe Biden. Members of this faction may call themselves “liberals,” but they are in fact ex-liberals, illiberals, or post-liberals. They detest individual freedoms, civil liberties, and human rights. They embrace “social justice” only when it is cost-free, benefits (microscopic) minorities, and helps to create social divisions. (Note: according to the most recent census, Canada’s “trans” and “non-binary” population amounts to a whopping 0.003% of the total population—and even that is more than twice as large as the number of officially proclaimed “Covid deaths”.) They want a New World Order ruled by absolutist technocrats, unaccountable and non-elected “experts,” and they are willing to tempt the apocalypse to get to their destination.

If the experts, elites, and functionaries in power, who belong to this third faction, come to the realization that they cannot rule any longer, then they are going to make sure that there is nothing left to rule, or nothing left that is worth ruling. They are that suicidal and nihilistic. Bringing forth the full violence that is latent in progressivist ideology, they will opt for a scorched earth policy if they are not defeated first.

This third faction is the one that is least popular in the society, but it retains most of the levers of power—in particular, a monopoly over the means of violence, a tight grip on the country’s finances, and almost total sway over the courts and the media. It is by far the most dangerous faction and is located at the top of the regime’s pyramid of power.

The main difference between the second and third factions is that the latter is far more extreme, while the former is in denial about the extremism of the latter. The second faction is largely dependent on the third, but not vice versa.

What is common about all three factions is that they are dominated by actors who are neither willing nor capable of admitting mistakes. This is a problem, especially because they have been wrong on just about every major issue and significant problem for the past two decades, who can boast only of an uninterrupted litany of failures. In “The Insufferable Arrogance of the Constantly Wrong,” Clayton Fox listed just some of these epic failures of reason, analysis, or basic credibility among these discredited and defeated “experts” and technocrats.

What is to be hoped is that the first faction will break off completely, and form something like a mass movement comprising a cross-section of all classes, occupations, and regions of the country. Within the current regime of interlocking interests and partnerships between governments, the media, universities, the courts, the police and armed forces, and private corporations and foundations, the first faction is the one creating the most friction where the advancement of the plans of the other two are concerned. One hopes that friction will evolve into open resistance.

Outside of this arrangement of factions are those that resisted, criticized, and protested the lockdowns, “masking,” mandates, and the “vaccines” themselves. In Canada they numbered about 10% of the adult population (far less than many nations in Europe, and most in Africa and the Caribbean). However, their influence is growing. Much like the power structure they oppose, they consist of a complete cross-section of the national society: members of all ethnic groups and classes; representatives of every professional occupation; residents in every part of Canada; the complete range of educational achievement; supporters of every political party and ideology; and even politicians at all levels of government. Totally non-existent within the outsider group, however, is the presence of Big Banks, Big Tech, or Big Pharma.

The Stakes: Capital and Power

Much is at stake for the regime, beyond its reputation. The political economy of pandemicism is at stake—the ability to extract capital from the people, and accumulate it in the pockets of the super-rich and their corporations. “Vaccine uptake,” even after the repeated, demonstrated failures of the non-vaccines to achieve even the most minimal of the promised goals (while evidence of damage accumulates), remains a key goal. “Vaccine uptake” is about sustaining demand, that is, of sustaining the profit margins for commercial pharmaceutical interests. The maintenance of fear is thus essential to sustaining demand. In addition to extracting capital, there is the very basic question of power: the unrestrained ability to dominate the masses, without question, triumphing against resistance. The “vaccine” gravy train coming to its last stop threatens all of this, as do a number of other challenges: Ukraine, inflation, and the recession, and the immense unpopularity of those in power.

Like the “war on drugs,” then the “war on terror,” this horrific “war on the virus” (which is in fact a war on the people) is one more grand failure (except, perhaps, as an intentional crime). A regime can withstand only so many monumental failures, or commit so many crimes, before it can stand no more.

Regarding sustaining demand, there is now a gradation of forms of “vaccine resistance,” as reported in data from Public Health Canada:

15% of the population has had no dose;
The 82% of the population that took two doses, dropped to 49% of who took a third—even as the federal government declared those with two doses “not up to date” and removed the term “fully vaccinated” (following Fauci);
Less than 10% have had a fourth dose;
56% of children (5 to 11 years of age) have had one dose, which drops to 42% having the “primary series” (two doses).

As things stand now in Canada, 64% of the population is defined as “not up to date,” that is, not in compliance. In the US there is growing public criticism about the rush to “vaccinate” toddlers, including from esteemed persons who previously formed part of the mainstream second faction, the promoters, such as Dr. Paul Offit.

To an extent, the growing extremism of the second and third factions is apparently impelling the formation of the first faction listed at the outset, driving away even some stalwarts.

In an ongoing effort to “study up,” which includes reading and analyzing the scripts produced by regime media, what follows is just about a week’s worth of snapshots that illustrate some of the main points above. Before proceeding, I want to explore the “regime media” concept a little further.

Regime Media, Part 2

Regime media are a fusion of a police force and a public relations firm. Whether they are privately owned, yet receive government payouts, or they are publicly owned and prey to corporate advertisers, in Canada all of the media of domination (CBC, CTV, Global News, The Toronto Star, The Globe & Mail, etc.) are aligned with and actively support the pandemicist regime and indulge its elitist virtue signalling about select, preferred minorities that are elevated for special recognition and rewards. Gesticulating toward celebrity-approved “social justice” issues, and fanning all of the latest moral panics that occupy the minds of the dependent urban middle class, regime media have thus been able to dull suspicions from the left. The self-identified left has largely fallen in line with regime media and extend the regime’s core messages through various “alternative” media—which are no alternatives at all (they are simply less resourced). It is not surprising then to find some of the most extreme advocacy for Zero Covid policies emanating from the left, much of which is also pro-China, the industrial engine of contemporary globalization and the first country to set the pattern for the lockdowns that followed around the world.

Regime media may call themselves “news media,” but there is next to no actual journalism involved in their work. In that spirit, students at contemporary Canadian schools of “journalism” are in fact being trained in the methods of policing restive subjects with “unacceptable views”. Embracing “advocacy,” they have degenerated into mere practitioners of propaganda whose ultimate aim is the reproduction of the ideas of the ruling faction of the regime.

Here they are followed by professors and students in a variety of disciplines which these days are busy churning out one predictable thesis after another that essentially involves policing : using the Internet to engage in surveillance of troublesome “fringe minorities” with “extremist views” that threaten to “incite hatred”—and they do this without any sense of irony. Their work is one-dimensional, simplistic, conspiratorial, and their “data” is cherry-picked. Rather than full and richly textured biographies, they produce caricatures dressed up in the theoretical jargon that is currently in fashion in their disciplines. Master compilers of shitlists, they squat for long days in social media on the lookout for anyone deviating from their preferred narrative, so they can then pounce and declare deviants to be violent extremists. Nobody is permitted to be “wrong” on the Internet. The aim of the students and professors is to make these “minorities” legible to the authorities, while reaffirming their own sense of superiority as specially endowed super-citizens with a natural right to manage inferior others, “for their own good”. Regime academia, like regime media, consists of a non-elected political class mesmerized by its belief in its own inherent goodness, and its right to rule. The writing of this class reads more like pseudo-legislation than scholarly analysis, and their “theories” are little more than ideological wishful thinking mixed in with complaints. They see the world as a collection of “problems” that require their management. An inanely partisan document produced by the UNESCO research chair in Quebec exemplifies many of these traits—see “Le mouvement conspirationniste au québec : leaders, discours et adhésion” (“The Conspiracy Movement in Quebec: Leaders, Discourse and Membership”). The art of these “scholars” consists of punching down while sucking up.

Regime media’s main functions are: surveillance, censorship, and prosecution. Stories are written with a tensely vigilant, accusatory tone, meant to put readers on guard, or on notice. Critical-minded questions, if they are even mentioned, are instantly dismissed out of hand or simply associated with mental illness or amorphous “extremism”. They do not try to keep their “finger on the pulse” of society—they instead aim to determine the pulse rate itself.

Regime media’s public scripts involve a regression to some of the most outmoded forms of propaganda seen since World War I. Their work involves a classically crude command structure: they tell people what to think, plain and simple. Then they tell people what to think about, and here the agenda-setting is particularly exclusive. One will never read stories of the “vaccine injured,” or see or hear interviews with anti-mandate protesters, dissident doctors, and so forth. Theirs is a regimist record, cleansed of all opposition and inconvenient facts. It reads almost like a colonial archive, only with greater gaps and silences.

What the regime media tell people to think is hatred, especially hatred for the non-compliant Other. Inciting hatred against marginalized categories of Canadians over the past two plus years has already been abundantly documented—this is not a theoretical statement, it is now merely an observation.

What the regime media tell people to think about is emergency and safety. Also well documented, any perusal of the pages of the print and Web regime media will quickly confirm this.

Inversion and projection are key tools of regime media: their work consists of broadcasting disinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories, false allegations, hyperbole, fear-mongering and character assassination, while producing “news stories” that are entirely and exclusively one-sided and indistinguishable from straightforward editorials.

In 2022, such regime media turned their attention to explicitly attacking freedom. Openly praising sheep, an article in the Globe & Mail advocated that humanity follow the example of sheep. In the same paper, another article cautioned that freedom “is not absolute,” and it does not mean we have the right to do anything we want—in other words, the author fully tilted against a complete straw man (absolutely none of the anti-mandate protesters ever advocated any such thing… they just wanted their jobs back). The CBC laboured to turn “freedom” into a dirty word that it conflated with the politics of “far-right” extremism. Canadians though they may be, they publicly worry about flying the Canadian flag, because it has been sullied by those fighting for freedom. Perennially perturbed by “nationalism,” they have no such qualms when painting their social media profiles with the Ukrainian flag, or claiming to support First Nations.

Perpetual Promoters: “Do Not Allow the People to Rest Even for a Moment”

Here I will continue my commentary on the work of the second faction, and simply illustrate it with snapshots taken over the course of a week (if that much). The significance of the week in question is that it featured the proclamation of a “seventh wave” in Quebec. This time—given the degree of popular contempt for restrictions that are proven failures, and mindful of a provincial election in October—the government of Quebec is acting like a member of the Fugitive faction. Members of the Perpetual Promoters’ faction are turning on the government, trying to school it back into authoritarian “measures”.

As an anthropologist, I have been trained to view the narratives of authorities with considerable skepticism, knowing that such narratives tend to push for a desired reality more than they accurately describe an actually existing reality, and that such narratives reflect the vested interests of powerful actors. Reality in the papers and reality on the ground are thus often very different. As an anthropologist with ethnographic experience, I tend to privilege reality on the ground—and on the ground, there is no “seventh wave”. People are carrying on as normal, meaning a pre-2020 normal. They seem to be enjoying their summer as best as they can, at least in the rural region where I live: swimming in lakes; boating; barbecuing; setting off fireworks every weekend; gathering with friends around backyard fires; neighbourhoods alive with the sounds of children playing; shopping and dining occurring without “masks” or any apparent concern for “social distancing,” and so on. Nobody is panicking. The Perpetual Promoters just hate that.

One example of a common injunction against any relaxation from anxiety, is an article like this one from the Montreal Gazette: “It’s too soon for Montrealers to bet on a COVID-free summer: experts”. No summer for the masses—the “experts” have sealed this: “Few masks, plentiful travel and a highly contagious sub-variant mean we need to remain cautious”. The fear-mongering was thus also intended to boost the social capital of “experts” while draining the people of any sense of hope: “As COVID-19 case counts fall and hospitalizations slowly drop, Quebecers are wondering if they’ll be able to enjoy another relatively COVID-free summer this year. The short answer is probably not…”. The experts warn, and lament: “only 52 per cent of Quebecers have gotten a third vaccination, leaving half the population vulnerable as the immunity from their vaccinations or infections wane”. They added: “And for sure get your third dose. This is not a virus that anyone wants to get”. The stress is on an imputed “vulnerability” which then becomes a sales pitch for Big Pharma’s experimental gene therapies which have done nothing to prevent spread. The experts also imagine a severe virus, one that nobody wants to get, but everyone got anyway (and without a massive die off). Be cautious, feel vulnerable—even knowing all of the damage done by sustained fear and anxiety for people’s mental health, in a desperate bid to remain relevant the perpetual promoters throw any real care for public health to the wind.

They are immune—so now it is time to scare them to death. This time courtesy of Global News, we have another lesson in how sophistry works. To be clear, absolutely nothing in the article proves that those infected by Omicron will likely get sick from a subsequent infection with an Omicron variant. The purpose of the article is simply to make people feel insecure, and then rush for the nearest shot of precious mRNA. The way the author of the article tries to smuggle through the fear messaging, is first by lumping together both those who were mRNA injected and got Covid, and those who kept their systems clear of the experimental gene therapies to begin with (with no increased incidence of myocarditis or pericarditis, which is not the case for the injected). By conflating the two groups, the author does not need to talk about immune imprinting, and the fact that those with three doses now have significantly negative immunity. Across Canada, in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec, government data show that those with three doses or more account for the majority of hospitalizations and deaths, despite numbering no more than 50% of the population. However, it is standard fare for regime media to generalize all risks, which justify one-size-fits-all (i.e., totalitarian) “solutions”.

What Global News does is to take the analogy of the glass half full to an extreme: “… one in every eight people who contract the virus do not develop antibodies in their blood from their illness”. “So forget going to some kind of ‘COVID party,’” said Dr. Catherine Hankins, a professor at McGill University in the Faculty of Medicine and co-chair of Canada’s COVID-19 Immunity Task Force: “Infection is not a viable strategy to achieve or maintain immunity”. Why forget the Covid party? Did the article not just state that 7/8 people develop immunity? Therefore, if we take their data at face value—with zero scrutiny or debate—that means that 87.5% of persons have immunity. That sounds like a pretty viable strategy. At this point one might only hear the din of preparations resuming for Covid parties (not that it would even be necessary to have these anymore).

The article also quietly conflates infection with actual sickness. So you might test positive again for Covid (assuming you even care to be tested). And so what? The Perpetual Promoters continue to instill shame in infection, as if infection were proof of some sin. Colleagues and students of mine have “admitted” to getting Covid: “I know!” one exclaimed apologetically.

Prof. Hankins, the party pooper at McGill, also added: “We do have one in eight people that don’t show any antibodies in their blood, so they’re not responding to the vaccine. And if they get infected, we’re not seeing evidence of it… So we don’t quite know what’s going on”. Indeed.

Later in the same article Global News’ “experts” admit that one reason why there are lower levels of antibodies among the Omicron-infected, is because “it’s a milder infection”. However, as if forgetting themselves and losing the train of their own thought, moments later they repeat the mantra: “there is strong scientific evidence showing the vaccine does prevent severe illness and death”. But if Omicron itself does not cause severe illness and death—which they admitted—then how do they credit the non-vaccines with saving people?

The real purpose of the article is clearly revealed at the end. It uses fear as a sales pitch: “I think it’s important that people understand that if you’ve had it before, you are still a sitting duck… you don’t have the immunity that you had closer to when you got your vaccine… So it’s really important to get that booster”.

Yet another editorial appeared in The Montreal Gazette moaning about breathing barriers not being forced onto everyone’s faces, immediately. It has been only a couple of weeks since “mask” mandates have been lifted in Quebec, for all settings except medical ones. We are only half way through the summer, but regime media cannot wait until the fall—restrictions need to come right back now. Remember: no summer for you, the party is over. This is the second such editorial in a week. The editorial board is complaining that Quebec’s plans looks like “everyone for themselves”—and while they speak of “everyone,” what they are really doing is using “the immunocompromised” as rhetorical and political shields. Adept as hostage-takers (humanitarian abduction), regime media will hold any minority they can find at ransom, until everyone else is forced to bend.

To further add to a record of deception, deflection, and sophistry, the editorial board argues: “It is hard to imagine that the dropping of just about all masking requirements has not also contributed to the upswing in cases. Relatively few people seem to be wearing masks these days”. There is not even a pretense of “science” anymore; now it is just a matter of “imagining”. For some reason they are unable to recollect, even a few short weeks later, that 50% of Canadians got Omicron over the past few months, when we were still at the height of mandates and restrictions. “Masks” did nothing to “protect” people. Indeed, virtually nobody needed “protection”. Most visitors to the Gazette’s website now know that.

But the Montreal Gazette, with its increasing desperation on display, is starting to play its hand too visibly. From “science” we have gone to “imagination”. From “protecting health,” we have gone to the Gazette’s real target: that “segment of the population being courted by the Quebec Conservative Party, whose star seems to be rising”. Here they allude to Eric Duhaime, the popular leader of the Quebec Conservative Party, only you would not know how popular he has become thanks to the blackout in Anglophone Quebec media. His weekly meetings and call-in programs with tens of thousands of Quebecers during “the pandemic,” have helped to build a powerful grassroots anti-mandate, anti-emergency movement that, in Quebec, likely helped to shape the first faction mentioned at the outset of this article.

Regime academia, promoted by regime media. Regime academia is keen to gin up fear of the “seventh wave,” but is clearly anxious about not being able to exploit it. McGill’s Donald Vinh “says the province should reimplement public health measures. And refusing to do so because it may seem like taking a step backward after removing them, he added, is a ‘failing mentality that could get us in trouble’”. Dr. Nathalie Grandvaux outright proclaims a permanent pandemic, and urges everyone to follow her hysterical signalling: “The virus is constantly here, she said, and there’s no reason to believe the province will somehow be shielded from future variants, either”. “Speaking about waves is a bit like telling people there’s nothing to be concerned about between them,” Grandvaux said. “But that’s not the case — the virus is always there”.

They do not deny reality on the ground, that is, how people (fail to) respond to their fear-mongering. Instead they attack reality on the ground. We see a glimpse of this in, “Montreal businesses, customers have no plans to return to COVID-19 restrictions”. Here are some of the opinions that were expressed:

“I think at this point, we all have to make it part of our life. I think we have to start moving on and moving forward, because the number of small businesses that closed and didn’t get to reopen, it can’t happen again because too many people will suffer.”

“I think that the media likes to play on people’s fears and make it worse. We just have to deal with it.”

“I think we should be talking more about what it means to live with a virus period, rather than this virus, because there are going to be many viruses and it’s going to happen again. I think the world is a little more prepared for a heavy-duty virus. I’m not particularly worried about it.”

“Maybe we should stop talking about waves and start talking about a new normal.”

“I think the customers feel super safe here. Those who don’t feel comfortable just don’t come. It feels like normal times again.”

“I think it’s just another virus we will have to live with, like the flu.”

As minimal and polite as such remarks are, they are the surface evidence that people have turned against the narrative of the failed elites and the discredited expert class. They have joined all the other fugitives. Pandemicism eventually has to meet resistance, and it can and will be defeated. And not even a reich proclaimed for a thousand years lasted more than 12. Tick-tock.

July 10, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Canada, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, Quebec | Leave a comment

From Wild-Type SARS-2 to Omicron: Towards a Theory of Corona Evolution

With additional thoughts on why mass containment probably made everything worse, by playing to the most central strategy of the virus

eugyppius | July 10, 2022

Scientific discourse on Corona remains focused on microbiological minutiae, while ignoring the broader evolutionary and behavioural patterns of SARS-2. This is especially frustrating, because our mass containment policies were at base attempts to change the behaviour of the virus, and their failure has prompted no introspection about the limits of our understanding.

Equally neglected is the evolutionary trajectory of Corona. Aside from simplistic, one-dimensional concerns about things like escape variants, almost nobody in mainstream scientific circles has tried to account for observed evolution or describe the various selection pressures SARS-2 faces.

Among the few people to have given serious thought to the evolution of viral pathogens is Paul Ewald, author of the book Evolution of Infectious Disease, as well as numerous articles explaining the evolutionary pressures on the virulence and transmissibility of viruses.

As he explains in this piece from 2011:

Much of the variation in the harmfulness of acute infections is associated with the dependence of transmission on host mobility. When transmission occurs by direct contact, infected hosts generally need to be mobile to facilitate contact with susceptibles. When transmission of pathogens does not depend on the mobility of infected hosts, evolutionary considerations predict that natural selection should favor high degrees of host exploitation and hence high degrees of virulence.

Basically, the virus wants to make as many copies of itself as possible. But, very roughly speaking, the more aggressively the virus copies itself, the sicker its hosts become. This places an upper limit on the virulence of viruses that depend on person-to-person contact, and it explains why widely transmitted respiratory viruses all fall within the same narrow range of pathogenicity and cause the same kinds of symptoms. The pandemicists raise money by wargaming pandemic viruses with 10% fatality rates, but in the real world, the truly deadly viruses never get very far. They’re all like SARS-1 – they put people in the hospital too soon.

But what about smallpox? And cholera, and yellow fever and dengue fever? Are these not deadly viruses?

They are, but they don’t spread via direct contact. Smallpox falls into what Ewald calls a “sit-and-wait” category of transmission. These are viruses that have remarkable durability, remaining viable in the external environment for months or (in the case of Variola) even years. They can thus disable their hosts while still having hope of new victims. Yellow fever and dengue, meanwhile, are “vector-borne.” They depend on mosquitoes to hop from host to host, and they’re free to make their victims as sick as they want. “Waterborne” pathogens like cholera are similarly advantaged.

More importantly for our purposes, Ewald defines a fourth category of what we might call mediated transmission facilitating higher virulence. This is “attendant-borne” transmission, which occurs primarily in hospitals, where staff unwittingly circulate viruses among patients. Attendant-borne viruses, like their vector-borne and waterborne colleagues, are free to develop remarkably high virulence. Ewald believes that the 1918 influenza outbreak achieved its unusually high mortality via attend-borne transmission related to troop transports at the end of the First World War.

SARS-1, although never properly adapted to human hosts, also depended on attendant-borne transmission, and MERS is a more straightforward case of this phenomenon. But the clearest example of all is surely pre-Omicron SARS-2, which caused elevated mortality near the top of what we would expect for pandemic influenza; and which flourished nowhere as effectively as in healthcare institutions, including hospitals and especially nursing homes.

Remember that SARS-2 arrived in Europe no later than November 2019, and in America no later than December 2019. The West saw multiple months of community Corona transmission, in other words, without anybody noticing that anything was amiss. Hospitals remained as empty or as full as ever. As soon as we imposed lockdowns and started testing everybody, though, mortality spiked. These containment procedures involved nothing so much as identifying Corona patients and putting as many of them as possible in environments favouring attendant-borne transmission – from Corona testing centres to hospitals. And as the mass containment regime continued through 2021, SARS-2 began evolving towards greater virulence, as nosocomial and nursing home infections came to dominate the case statistics almost everywhere.

Omicron, whatever its origins, broke this dynamic. Unlike prior SARS-2 lineages, this is a classic direct-contact respiratory pathogen. With the advent of Omicron, Corona no longer spreads preferentially in healthcare institutions, and behaves much more like a mild flu or the common cold, with an emphasis on keeping its hosts healthy and mobile.

The worst thing we could do, from an evolutionary perspective, is continue the mass containment regime. We want to keep SARS-2 circulating via direct contact in the community. All such respiratory viruses, despite their stark differences, have been subject to the same convergent evolution, with remarkably similar effects on their human hosts. We must stop intervening in matters we don’t understand, or we’ll just continue our recent history, of always making everything worse.

July 10, 2022 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 | Leave a comment

Joe Biden and Other Politicians, not Coronavirus, Caused Children’s Educations to Suffer

By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | July 7, 2022

President Joe Biden declared Tuesday at Twitter: “Due to the pandemic, kids are behind in math and reading.” This is yet another example of politicians’ blame shifting we have seen throughout the coronavirus scare. Kids in America have fallen behind in their educations during the coronavirus scare, but not because of coronavirus. They have fallen behind because of coronavirus crackdown actions supported by Biden and many other politicians in the name of protecting students, teachers, and staff at schools from coronavirus that did not improve safety but did interfere with students’ ability to learn.

Since early on in the coronavirus scare it was known that children tended to be in miniscule danger from serious sickness or death from coronavirus. It was also known that, at schools, teachers and other adults tended not to get coronavirus from students. Yet, most American politicians with control over education policy did not say that “for the children” schools would be kept open and continue operating normally, something that was done in other countries and a few places in America without problems. Instead, as politicians are apt to do, they used the “for the children” plea as an excuse to wreak havoc. They shut down schools, then replaced them to some extent with dysfunctional attempts at virtual education, and ultimately reopened the schools in an absurd and menacing manner.

Many schools, when they finally reopened, had all kinds of mandates that made the schools insufferable. The mandates, while failing to protect people from coronavirus, did carry health dangers of their own. Mask mandates, obsessive disinfecting of surfaces at schools and even of children’s hands, enforcement of “social distancing,” the presence of ubiquitous plastic barriers separating people, coronavirus testing, and pressure or even mandates for students to take experimental coronavirus “vaccine” shots were among the nasty changes confronting students at their “new normal” schools. Students found themselves trudging through a real life version of a dystopian novel.

No wonder students’ learning suffered through the coronavirus scare. Learning was not high on the priority list of many politicians rushing to exercise their new powers. And, due to government pressure and bad choices by people in charge, the situation was similarly awful at many private schools as at government schools.

Fortunately, this dark cloud of politicians harming student’s educations in the name of countering coronavirus does have a silver lining, though only for a small subset of students. “Enough is enough,” decided some parents along the way of witnessing the school closures, the dysfunctional virtual learning efforts implemented to replace regular school, and the dystopian “new normal” schools that ultimately came into being. These parents took their children’s educations into their own hands, moving their children to homeschooling. The result is that many more children now than before the coronavirus scare are free from the politicians’ harmful meddling, whether undertaken in the name of protecting children from phantom coronavirus danger or accomplishing other objectives at variance with advancing the math and reading skills Biden mentioned at Twitter. It is a safe bet that most of these new homeschooling parents will do a much better job than the schools they left behind at making sure their children’s educations serve their children’s needs and interests.

Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute

July 9, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, Joe Biden, United States | Leave a comment

Sacrificing Children’s Needs for Those of Adults was Devastating and Must Never Happen Again

BY MOLLY KINGSLEY AND LIZ COLE | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JULY 6, 2022

A photo circulating on social media in summer 2021 shows a scene which would have been unimaginable in 2019. In it, a row of small children – aged four or five perhaps – line up holding hands. They are all masked. Behind them stands a row of adults, one of whom is the Governor of New York. None of the adults are masked, and their smiles beam out at the camera. It is an archetypal example of the inversion at the heart of our global pandemic response.

Over the last two years the youngest members of society have often borne the heaviest burden of Covid restrictions, even though the risk from COVID-19 increases dramatically with age. This has created a deep and seemingly perverse inequity between adults’ and children’s lives, spanning contexts and borders. Indeed, it has become so ubiquitous that it risks becoming normalised.

At its most extreme, this upending of society’s natural responsibility to care for our young has endangered children’s lives.

In autumn 2020, U.K. university students finally returned to their campuses after months of isolation during lockdown. Even pre-pandemic, mental health issues were spiralling into a full-blown crisis for this age group. Barely out of childhood, this extremely vulnerable cohort deserves our protection and care. Yet, with a single-minded fixation on ‘protective’ measures, the institutions’ leadership too often discarded any compassion for these vulnerable teenagers in favour of decisions that can only be described as inhumane.

In November 2020, with the second lockdown underway, University of Manchester students awoke one morning to find metal barriers constructed around their halls of residence. The reported objective was to prevent student households from mixing. Horrified by the lack of prior warning, students protested by tearing down the barricades. The university backed down, but for a nervous 18-year-old away from home for the first time, the effective imprisonment must have been terrifying, and the mental health consequences could have been fatal.

Then, at the nearby University of York, during the same period, health and safety guidance decreed that in the event of a fire, self-isolating students should wait behind to allow ‘non-self-isolating’ colleagues to exit first. This ludicrous diktat not only displayed a profound lack of risk balancing, but also a dereliction of a fundamental duty of care and an ignorance of basic safety standards.

In January 2022, in a particularly shocking example, officers in Texas arrested a teacher for suspected child endangerment after her son was discovered in the boot of her car at a drive-through PCR testing site. The mother allegedly told officials that she had transported her child in this way so she wouldn’t be exposed to his infection.

These distressing cases testify to something deeply dysfunctional in our societal response to Covid. We have normalised the mistreatment of children, collectively justifying it against the backdrop of the pandemic state of exception.

This treatment of children should be unacceptable in any civilised society, no matter what respectability it is given by the cloak of ‘public health’. Much has been made throughout the pandemic response of the need for public health to act in the interests of an ill-defined concept of a ‘greater good’. Yet it’s striking that a now reengineered concept of ‘public health’ has barely acknowledged children as part of the ‘public’. In its name, we have not only marginalised our young people’s wellbeing, but often actively put them in harm’s way.

A pre-pandemic 2019 Public Health England strategy document lays out its vision and goals for the next five years. The document notes that:

Giving children the best start in life is vital for a healthy thriving society. The foundations of good physical and mental health, healthy relationships and educational achievement are laid in preconception through to pregnancy and the early years of life, which is when many inequalities in health often begin.

In crisis, we chose to cast aside these principles and priorities and inverted our public health paradigm by requiring the young to sacrifice their own health and wellbeing to safeguard that of adults. In doing so, we have shattered our implicit social contract.

In the brutal landscape of the Arctic Circle, reindeer do whatever it takes to protect their young. When the herd is threatened, the animals stampede in a cyclonic formation, making it impossible for predators to target an individual. A swirling wall of adult deer on the perimeter shields the fawns at the heart of the circle from harm.

How is it that the U.K. and most Western democracies have failed this basic tenet of nature, systematically and deliberately placing our young on the outside of our societal herd and demanding that they shoulder a burden that should never have been theirs to carry?

Molly Kingsley and Liz Cole are the founders of UsForThem, which since May 2020 has advocated that children be prioritised during the pandemic response. This is an extract from their new book The Children’s Inquiry: How the state and society failed the young during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is out now and you can buy here and here.

Commendations:

A devastating analysis of a country’s failure to prioritise its children and young people during a global disaster.

Professor Lucy Easthope, author of When the Dust Settles

Brave, urgent, fierce and vital.

Laura Dodsworth, author of A State of Fear

A truly important book. It needs to be read by policymakers and parents so that never again will our children be betrayed as they have been in the last two years.

Allison Pearson, Daily Telegraph columnist and bestselling author

About the book:

Despite being least affected by the virus itself, children and young people bore the brunt of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. When schools were closed, playgrounds taped up and play outlawed, children’s lives were closed down. The catastrophic impact on children and young people’s education, mental health, wellbeing, and life chances is becoming ever clearer, with the most disadvantaged suffering disproportionately.

In May 2020 Liz Cole and Molly Kingsley founded UsForThem to advocate – in an often hostile climate – for children to be prioritised during the pandemic response. Having heard from thousands of families, and having often clashed with policymakers, they have a unique perspective on how the state’s response to the pandemic has affected our children.

Here they document their shocking findings: how completely children’s health and welfare were sacrificed for that of adults; how policymakers appeared to disregard the harms they were causing; and how adults charged with protecting the young stood by and watched as children visibly struggled or slipped out of sight altogether. This dereliction of duty should haunt us for decades to come.

With exclusive testimony from academics, politicians, scientists, educators, and parents, as well as former Children’s Commissioners, the book exposes the problems at the heart of policymaking which led to the systemic and ongoing betrayal of children. From public health to politics, and from media discourse to safeguarding, the authors show how children were too often used as the means to further adult interests. Ahead of the public inquiry, the authors call for an honest appraisal of what went wrong, and commitment from stakeholders to reimagine – not just recover – childhood.

July 9, 2022 Posted by aletho | Book Review | Covid-19, UK | Leave a comment

Anthony Fauci on day 26 of his Paxlovid- and vaccine-enhanced Corona experience

Says that he is “Close to if not at 100% the way I was before infection”

eugyppius – July 8, 2022

Despite not only following, but embodying, The Science, global vaccinator-in-chief Anthony Fauci caught Corona while attending his high school reunion on 11 June. While most Omicron infections resolve within a week, the quadruple-vaccinated NIAID director and blight upon human civilisation suffered Paxlovid rebound at the end of June and is now approaching a month of infection.

Yesterday, he ended his radio silence to give some press interviews:

I believe I’m about close to if not at 100% the way I was before infection. So I’m really fortunate that I’ve done very well. And I keep telling people when they ask me that, is that I was vaccinated, and doubly boosted, and I believe if I did not have that degree of background protection I would’ve had a much more serious course. My course was relatively light minor symptoms, and right now I’m completely without symptoms and I feel very good, very energetic.

Nonzero chance he rebounds again.

July 8, 2022 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine | Leave a comment

Stop the War on Doctors

My Rather Public Reply To The Threat Made Against Me By The American Board Of Internal Medicine

By Pierre Kory | July 2, 2022

Anyone in America who deviates from the group-think enforced by public health bureaucrats runs the risk of cancellation. Politicians, parents, comedians, teachers – now they’re even coming for the doctors.

As a lung and ICU specialist, I have practiced medicine for 14 years and successfully treated more than 450 patients during the pandemic. Long before anyone had heard of Covid-19, I was studying and implementing cutting-edge methods to treat critically ill patients. I’m the Senior Editor of a best-selling textbook in my field, now in its second edition, which has been translated into seven languages.

For my efforts, I now find myself on the receiving end of “disciplinary sanctions” from the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), who sent me a letter threatening “suspension or revocation of board certification.”

The “sin” threatening to end my medical career was my unwillingness to go along with Fauci’s monolithic vaccines-above-all-else strategy. The failure of this approach is plain to see, and anyone with an ounce of curiosity knows there are many methods of treating the virus.

Ivermectin is one of them. This cheap, readily available generic medicine is approved by the FDA for certain uses in humans – but not for Covid-19, despite 85 controlled trials from around the world demonstrating its effectiveness. In Brazil, the largest study to date found a reduction in Covid mortality rate of 70%. In India, the second most populated country in the world, the drug has been credited with near eradication of the disease. Studies attempting to discredit ivermectin have been debunked again and again.

Other trials, such as the recent TOGETHER trial, are designed to fail from the start to drive a desired narrative. In the National Institutes of Health’s ACTIV-6, despite starting the majority of patients on treatment after five days of Covid-19 symptoms at a lower than recommended dose, they found a statistically significant reduction in the time to recovery, particularly among the most severely ill. Unsurprisingly, major newspapers reported that the study showed ivermectin was ineffective.

Despite ivermectin’s proven effectiveness, in the opinion of the ABIM, advocating for its usage is a form of “disinformation” and carries the penalty of losing one’s medical license and livelihood.

Throughout the pandemic, I’ve maintained an open mind, analyzed what works for patients, discussed strategies with fellow doctors, and conducted my own extensive research. When new data arose that changed my understanding, I admitted as much and changed course—like with the vaccines. If only the powers that be at the ABIM and our government could say the same.

Consider the evolution of accepted facts about Covid-19 safety measures from Fauci and his ilk. Despite government mandates, neither lockdowns nor cloth masks prevent transmission. They never have. It turns out former Surgeon General Jerome Adams had it right when he tweeted in March 2020 that masks are, “NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus” – a comment for which he was pilloried. We are only beginning to learn the impact of the societal costs of these early preventative measures, a price our children who were kept home from school will be paying for years.

Second, there is no evidence the vaccines stop Covid-19, despite the constant lecturing from the Biden Administration and the mainstream media. In the United States and globally, cases continue to rise and fall without any correlation to the pace or percentage of population vaccinated. This is not what we were promised. In 2021, Fauci said vaccinated people were “dead ends” for the virus, and President Biden declared, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” Today, approximately 110,000 cases are announced daily in America, where more than two thirds of the population is fully vaccinated.

There is a backlash brewing in America right now, and it goes beyond inflation rates and gas prices. People are tired of arrogant public officials and compromised institutions who believe they have all the answers but constantly get it wrong and make no apologies as they steamroll those who don’t support the current narrative. The ABIM’s sudden (and suspiciously well-funded) persecution of doctors who stray from the party line is only the latest example.

Doctors on the ABIM’s board and across the country need to stand up against this witch hunt. It’s demeaning to honest doctors and dangerous to the patients we’ve dedicated our careers to serving.

Pierre Kory, M.D., is president and chief medical officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.

July 7, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Ivermectin, United States | Leave a comment

LOCKDOWN’S LASTING EFFECTS

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | July 5, 2022

As we move past the COVID era, the devastating effects of lockdowns are becoming apparent, from the current mental health crisis, to substance abuse spikes and developmental delays in infants.

July 7, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, Human rights | Leave a comment

Vaxsplainers

German state media “debunks” eugyppius

eugyppius – July 6, 2022

I’m happy to report that my remarks on lower case rates in lesser-vaccinated East Germany, after being recycled by BILD, are now the subject of a long state media debunking in Tagesschau.

Why Are Case Rates Lower in the East? ask “science” reporter Anna Behrend and official state media “fact-finder” Pascal Siggelkow.

The nationwide seven-day incidence in Germany has been on the rise again for several weeks now. Health Minister Karl Lauterbach has already spoken of a summer Corona wave. But a look at the developments reveals that there are huge differences between the federal states:

While the incidences in Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein have already passed the threshold of 900, the numbers in Thuringia and Saxony are still under 400. In general, it’s remarkable that all the East German states – with the exception of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern – are significantly below the national average incidence of of 687.7. And this is despite the fact that Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia have some of the poorest vaccination rates. In conspiracy-theory circles, people are already fantasising about “negative efficacy”, especially with regard to booster vaccinations, saying that the figures amount to proof that the vaccines are ineffective. But is there really a causal connection between the vaccination rate and the incidence?

Before they get into that, Siggelkow and Behrend light the incense and cycle through the familiar vaccinator nostrums. “Vaccination protects against severe outcomes and death,” even though the rise of Omicron has led to a great many “breakthrough infections.” Mysterious “studies,” which are never further characterised, are said to show “that vaccinated people … are slightly less contagious,” although they have to concede that “there isn’t enough data to conclude this decisively.”

Then, when they’re reasonably sure most people have stopped reading, comes an uncomfortable admission. Case incidences, the cornerstone of Tagesschau Corona reporting since 2020, are of, uh, “limited significance”:

If the vaccination rate … is not the decisive factor … how is it that the number of new infections in the East is comparatively low right now? First of all, it must be said that the current infection figures are only of limited significance. “One must always also consider that incidences are calculated on the basis of reported laboratory results,” says [virologist Johannes] Knobloch. As before, only positive PCR tests count in the RKI statistics. Willingness to be tested and the accessibility of PCR tests therefore have a very large influence on the measured incidence. … “The number of unreported cases is probably higher than in all previous phases of the pandemic.”

According to experts, the incidence continues to indicate whether the wave of infection is rising or falling. Caution is advised, however, when making regional comparisons, as the testing strategies and also the number of tests differ greatly across states. Fewer tests mean that fewer infections are detected. A high proportion of positive tests … indicates a high number of unreported cases …

Ah, so they just have super high positivity rates in the East then? That’s the explanation?

Ha no:

But it’s not the case that Eastern states have uniquely high positive rates compared to the others. So different testing patterns alone cannot explain the current low incidence there either.

It wasn’t that long ago that all manner of respectable journalists, especially those working for Pravda operations like Tagesschau, wrote long think pieces on the “global menace” of “vaccine scepticism,” complete with histrionics about the lower vaccination rates in Eastern Europe causing “much higher infection figures.” Lazy Googling yields many typical items, such as this piece from MDR in November, lamenting that the “incidence among unvaccinated in Sachsen-Anhalt is significantly higher than among the vaccinated.” This at a time when the vaccinated were exempt from most testing, while many unvaccinated had to submit to daily antigen tests before they could even go to work.

Now that these games no longer favour the vaccinated, though, we’re allowed to wonder about things like positivity rates. These certainly matter, but – unbeknownst to our crack fact-checking team – they’ve become totally meaningless in the era of lateral flow testing, as a plurality of PCR tests in Germany are conducted to confirm a positive antigen result, and nobody has any idea what the true rate of testing might be.

Frustrated on this front, Siggelkow and Behrend look for other signs that infections might really be higher in the East, even though the official incidence is lower there. More and more, you have the feeling of a desperate grasping after straws:

If the true incidence were in fact higher, you would expect to see this in ICU admissions …

Yet the proportion of Covid patients in ICU is currently not conspicuously high in the East compared to the rest of Germany.

Foiled again!

So were most people in the low-incidence states already infected and now immune? Those who become infected with the coronavirus usually form antibodies against it. How long and how well these antibodies protect against a new infection with the virus has not yet been conclusively researched.

However, if we assume that there is at least some protection for a while, one conceivable reason for the low incidence in some states would be that more people have already come into contact with the virus there and are therefore less likely to be infected now.

… It’s not known precisely how much of the population in which states has already recovered from infection. If you take the number of new infections … since the beginning of the year as a rough approximation of the circulation of Omicron, you find no confirmation of the assumption that the population of the East has had greater contact with the virus. …

How confusing. Do Tagesschau no longer stand by their dire proclamations, uttered just this past winter, that lower vaccination rates were to be blame for higher infections in the East? Is their position now that the East never saw higher rates of infection at all, even though the vaccines definitely protect against infection? Also too, why have we abandoned so soon our thesis that the incidence is of “limited significance,” can only tell us when cases are going up or down, and says nothing about how many cases there actually are? I thought regional comparisons of case numbers were bad?

Way down at the bottom, when Behrend and Siggelkow are triply sure nobody is reading anymore, they toss out the possibility that cases might indeed be lower in the East – not because of the vaccines, but because the new Omicron variants haven’t gotten there yet:

One reason the nationwide incidences are rising so sharply in the first place is the Omicron subtypes BA.4 and BA.5, which experts consider more contagious than the previously known “sister variants.” BA.5 is now dominant … It’s of course possible that some states are more affected by the new variants than others, where these variants have not yet arrived.

If BA.5 infects the vaccinated preferentially, and vaccination rates vary substantially across regions, there will be many places where BA.5 never quite seems to have arrived. Perhaps aware of this close brush with crimethink, our braintrust wraps things up with some cleansing mantras:

What is certain, though, is that there is no scientifically sound reason to assume that a high vaccination rate could be partly responsible for a high incidence. On the contrary: Scientific data show instead that people infected with Omicron are less likely to infect others than the unvaccinated.

Every conspiracy theory must first be ignored, then denied, and finally debunked, before it becomes true.

July 6, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Germany | Leave a comment

‘We Need to Be Allowed to Ask Questions,’ Says Canadian Prof Suspended for Questioning COVID Shots for Kids

By Julie Comber, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 5, 2022

A Canadian university professor suspended for comments he made during a December 2021 conference about COVID-19 vaccines in an interview this week with The Defender called for “openness, critical thinking and to stop believing what we are being told is the truth.”

“We need to be allowed to question again,” said Patrick Provost, Ph.D., an infectious and immune diseases researcher who learned June 13 that Laval University in Quebec City was suspending him for eight weeks without pay.

Laval University also suspended Nicolas Derome, Ph.D., a professor in the university’s biology department, for concerns he raised in November 2021 about Quebec’s campaign to vaccinate 5— to 11-year-olds.

In his interview with The Defender, Provost also discussed an article he wrote questioning COVID-19 policies, published June 22 on the Québecor media platform, then retracted a day later.

For the article, Provost used Quebec’s publicly available data to raise questions about the province’s management of the pandemic. The province of Quebec is home to about 8.5 million people, the second-most populous province in Canada.

“I was so happy when I found out my article was going to be published,” Provost told The Defender, “I really thought it would be a game-changer in the public debate about COVID-19 [in Quebec]. That finally, based on official public data, we could start to discuss the situation.”

However, by the next day, June 23, Québecor had removed Provost’s article from all of its websites.

Sébastien Ménard, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Journal de Québec, one of Québecor’s publications, tweeted (in French):

“Although we encourage debating ideas, we have decided to remove this letter [by Dr. Provost] from our websites. After verification, some of the elements it contained were inaccurate or could mislead the public, which we cannot support.”

Commenting on the retraction, Provost said:

“I’m really worried about the direction we are heading, about our democracy. Why hide the truth? These numbers are real, this was just my analysis of them. Maybe it’s a disturbing truth.”

Libre Média, a new Quebec-based independent media website, on June 24 published Provost’s article so it is still publicly available.

Libre Média prefaced the article with a note that it was publishing Provost’s article in full, “in accordance with its mission to protect freedom of the press.”

Criticism of COVID vaccines for young children led to suspension

Two days after Québecor removed his article, Provost went public with the news that Laval notified him on June 13 that the university was suspending him, effective June 14.

Provost filed a grievance through his union, the Union of Laval University Professors.

According to Provost, he sent an email to all his colleagues at Laval University last December, in which he urged them to engage in debates on COVID-19 vaccination and public health measures, because he felt public debate had been lacking.

In the email, he gave the example of a lecture he had given at a conference on Dec. 7, 2021, in which he criticized Quebec’s campaign to vaccinate 5- to 11-year-old children against COVID-19.

The conference was organized by Réinfo Covid Québec, a Quebec collective of caregivers, doctors and citizens “gathered around an idea: the need for a fair and proportionate health policy in Quebec and elsewhere in the world.”

“As a result of this, a professor from the faculty of medicine filed a complaint against me in January, outraged that I was raising questions,” Provost told The Defender. “In particular, that I said the risks of adverse effects [of Pfizer’s mRNA shot] outweighed the benefits for children.”

Provost said his suspension didn’t factor into Québecor’s decision this week to censor his article, as he had not made the news of his suspension public before the article was removed.

COVID mortality rate ‘greatly overestimated’ data show

In his article, Provost noted that the vaccine mandates for travel within Canada and for federal public servants had been suspended two days before, on June 20.

However, mandates could be reimposed, so Provost invited readers to consider a true portrait of the impact of COVID-19 in Quebec, based on the province’s own publicly available data.

As of June 19, when Provost accessed the cumulative data online, there were 15,462 deaths related to COVID-19 (Chart 2.1) out of a total of 1,077,256 confirmed cases of COVID-19 (Chart 1.1), for a calculated mortality rate of 1.44%.

Provost wrote:

“This mortality rate is greatly overestimated, mainly (i) by including, in the numerator, deaths with, and not because of, COVID-19, which were apparently as numerous, and (ii) by excluding, in the denominator, cases of asymptomatic or unreported infections, which were several times higher than the reported symptomatic infections.”

Provost then turned to official figures from the Institut de la statistique du Québec and the Institut national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ), and made these five observations based on the data:

There was no excess all-cause mortality since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, except for people age 70 and over during the first wave (April to June 2020) and in January 2022, shortly after the lockdowns and curfews were imposed, which was also when the third vaccine doses were offered.
More than 90% of people age 70 or older who died with or from COVID-19 had two or more pre-existing medical conditions (Table 2.2).
69.2% of the people who died were over the age of 80 (Figure 2.3), thus the average age of people who died with or from COVID-19 was beyond their life expectancy at birth.
The number of deaths (Table 2.1) compared to the number of cases (Table 1.1) is 0.07% in people with no pre-existing conditions, 6 times higher in people with one pre-existing medical condition (0.4%), and 98 times higher in people with two or more pre-existing conditions (6 .9%), according to data last updated on May 2.
Between 0 and 5 people under the age of 40 (with less than one pre-existing medical condition) have died in Quebec since the start of the pandemic (Table 2.2).

According to Provost, early on in the pandemic, the analysis of official government data showed two of the main risk factors for complications and death from COVID-19: “advanced age and the number of pre-existing medical conditions, in particular, obesity.”

“The threat of COVID-19 was very real,” wrote Provost, “but was it of the magnitude that we have been told?”

According to the public data available on the sites of INSPQ and of Quebec Data Partnership, from April 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021, there were 20,616 hospitalizations due to COVID-19 out of a total of 986,607 hospitalizations — so approximately 2.1% of hospitalizations were a result of COVID-19 infections.

At the worst point in the crisis, COVID-19 hospitalizations peaked at 5.9% of the total.

Given the above data, Provost asked if the public health measures taken were justified. He raised a series of questions, including:

Did the data support imposing such severe and comprehensive health measures, rather than targeted ones that would protect those most at risk?
Did the data justify not considering the collateral effects of restrictive health measures?
Did the data justify preventing physicians from making individualized risk versus benefit assessments of a medical intervention (COVID-19 vaccination) with their patients?

Provost also asked if the data justified overriding the right of individuals to consent, in a free and informed manner, to an injection that is still experimental.

He questioned mass vaccination of the entire population for a disease that particularly affects the very old and sick, and of imposing vaccination on young people and workers.

Quebec used vaccine passports, and Provost asked if the data justified restricting the right to access public places and hindering the freedom of movement by train or plane of people who were not “adequately” vaccinated, “even though the shots do not prevent infection or transmission.”

With respect to governance, Provost said the government assumed power by self-proclaiming and perpetuating a state of health emergency and certain measures beyond the emergency period.

He noted that professionals and academics were muzzled if they were critical of health measures, through pressure from their professional organizations or their institutions, under penalty of losing their jobs.

He also pointed out that the polarized and polarizing media coverage sowed fear, anxiety and division, and that citizens were encouraged to discriminate against people who were not vaccinated against COVID-19.

As part of the remedy to what he viewed to be heavy-handed public health measures, Provost stressed the “importance of depoliticizing decisions that infringe on individual rights and freedoms by establishing, for example, by a Council of Scholars that is independent from the government, so that these decisions are based on science and are made more quickly.”

Provost closed his article by calling for a review of the management of the pandemic:

“An assessment of the management of this crisis, which has revealed the limits, even the flaws, of our system and our democratic life, is essential.

“We owe it to too many seniors whom we have failed to protect, as well as to those whose rights and freedoms have been violated for too long.”

Dozens of messages of support

Provost told the Defender that in the hours before his article was pulled, one idea was to have another professor write a rebuttal to his article.

But instead, Quebecor’s news sites simply deleted the article.

On Monday, Joel Monzée wrote an article in Libre Média about the censorship of Provost’s article and its implications for science. “Science is only science because it questions itself,” Monzée wrote.

Monzée said that with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic, “It is blithely claimed that there is a scientific consensus. However, this only exists because certain academic personalities seem to have enough influence over their colleagues to curb any questioning of the consensus, at least in public.”

Monzée asked, if there were inaccuracies in Provost’s article, then why not address them with a counter-analysis?

Provost is the supervisor of four Ph.D. students whose work has been affected by his suspension.

“Because of my suspension, I cannot go on the campus, enter the Research center or talk to them,” Provost said. “They are essentially left alone. They are collateral damage.”

Provost said that though the situation was difficult, in the past few days he had received dozens of messages of support, and also observed that a growing number of citizens “have a thirst for truth and openness.”

Provost told The Defender, “I would like to raise awareness about how our society is evolving, it’s not in a good direction. It is getting to the point where private interests will be directing our country, we will just be servants.”

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

July 6, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Canada, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, Laval University | Leave a comment

US should pay compensation if Covid-19 claim confirmed – Russia

Samizdat | July 6, 2022

The US may owe the world huge compensation for the damage caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian State Duma, said on Wednesday. He cited remarks made by the chair of The Lancet commission on the disease, who suggested the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have originated from an American research program.

Speaking in Madrid last month, economist Jeffrey Sachs called the current situation “a mess” and blamed diminishing American leadership for it, identifying the pandemic as one of the US failures. He said he was convinced that the virus “came out of US lab biotechnology” as opposed to evolving naturally, citing his experience with the authoritative British medical magazine.

Volodin asserted that the US government would not comment on Sachs’ remarks because President Joe Biden is “afraid that the world will know the truth about the true culprit of the pandemic.”

He added that the suffering of millions of people who contracted the virus, including the many who passed away, and the economic crisis caused by the pandemic were the US’ responsibility. “The US must compensate the damage to all nations affected,” he demanded.

The Russian official added that the US should “stop and declassify” its “military bioweapons research,” referring to the chain of biolabs scattered across the world that receive funding from the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The US says they are used to detect emerging pathogens, but some countries, including Russia and China, believe they may be used for clandestine military research.

Sachs himself called his remark “provocative” and lamented that the theory “is not being investigated, not in the United States, not anywhere,” despite evidence that warrants such a probe. “They don’t want to look underneath the rug too much,” he said.

The theory that Covid-19 started as a leak from a Chinese lab in Wuhan was popularized by the US government under President Donald Trump, who stated that Beijing should pay compensation for its supposed guilt. The Chinese government and Trump’s political opponents at home angrily rejected the idea. Major US tech companies even suppressed the lab leak theory as “disinformation” on their online platforms.

The censorship was reversed under President Joe Biden’s administration, which accused Beijing of failing to subject its microbiology research to international scrutiny. The outbreak was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan, which hosts a top biosecurity lab that has extensive records of doing research funded by American grants.

The World Health Organization conducted a probe into the origins of Covid-19 and concluded last February that the virus most likely came from an animal host.

July 6, 2022 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | China, Covid-19, Russia, United States | Leave a comment

Financial Times Censors Criticism of Vaccine Article

BY TOBY YOUNG | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JULY 5, 2022

Earlier today, the Financial Times removed a comment from a reader calling himself ‘Mykonos Mike’ underneath an article about why COVID-19 infection and vaccination are only partially effective – and, in some cases, completely ineffective after a certain period of time has passed – when it comes to reducing a person’s likelihood of becoming re-infected, infecting others, and ending up with a severe bout of the disease. The reason given for removing the comment, in spite of the fact that it was the most liked and commented on, was “violating our community guidelines”, although, needless to say, no more detail was provided.

In light of this, we thought it was only right to republish Mykonos Mike’s comment in full.

Is this the long winded drivel to explain how people who have taken four doses of a 95% effective vaccine can get infected multiple times? The science in the pandemic has been so wrong it entered fairy tale wonderland story telling level, almost from the beginning. This is volume 15 of series four of the story. I’ll provide a spoiler – nobody cares anymore. And the decisions made in relation to this virus were ineffective and have created massive social and economic problems that will last decades. Time to start calling it as it is FT, the media are hugely complicit in this nonsense. Governments, scientists, health authorities and pharmaceutical companies need to answer very direct questions.

You can read the FT article Mike is commenting on here. Here’s an excerpt.

A surge in COVID-19 hospital admissions driven by the BA.5 subvariant of Omicron, accompanied by the inability of vaccines to prevent reinfection, has prompted health policymakers to rethink their approach to boosters.

U.S. regulators last week recommended changing the design of vaccines to produce a new booster targeting Omicron — the first change to the make-up of shots since their introduction in late 2020. Research into immune imprinting, whereby exposure to the virus via either infection or vaccination determines an individual’s level of protection, is now driving the debate over the make-up of COVID-19 vaccines.

Immunologists say that, more than two years into the coronavirus pandemic, people have acquired very different types of immunity to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, depending on which strain or combination of strains they have been exposed to — leading to big differences in COVID-19 outcomes between individuals and countries.

“The effect is more nuanced than ‘more times you have it, less protection you get’,” said Professor Danny Altmann of Imperial College London, who is investigating the phenomenon with colleagues. “It’s more helpful to consider it as progressive fine-tuning of a huge repertoire. Sometimes this will be beneficial for the next wave, sometimes not.” …

A study of 700 U.K. healthcare workers by the Imperial team, published last month in the journal Science, found that Omicron infection had little or no beneficial effect of boosting any part of the immune system — antibodies, B-cells or T-cells — among people who had been imprinted with earlier SARS-CoV-2 variants.

The Daily Sceptic has addressed the claims being made about this study and the supposed loss of natural immunity with Omicron here.

July 5, 2022 Posted by aletho | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Financial Times | Leave a comment

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TV Drama Review

Japanese drama projects Japan’s wartime atrocities onto Chinese characters

Global Times | October 25, 2026

By portraying Chinese characters as perpetrators of ruthless violence while casting Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF) intelligence operatives as defenders, the season 2 of the Japanese drama Vivant has recently drawn criticism from Chinese netizens, who argue that its depiction turns historical reality on its head while ignoring Japan’s wartime atrocities.

The TBS drama series – a spy suspense story in which an alleged unofficial intelligence unit of the SDF operates across the globe — has attracted a passionate fanbase. Its currently airing season 2 opened with a household rating of 18.8 percent, the highest for a TV drama this year, according toa commentary article by Japanese media Toyo Keizai.

What draws attention is the portrayal of the enemies in the series, the article noted. Scenes in which the Chinese organization subjects kidnapped members of the SDF unit to brutal torture are repeated with unrelenting intensity.

It is rare for Japanese TV dramas to explicitly portray a real-life country as the enemy, the article noted.

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi also made a reference to the drama, saying that she has been recording Vivant and hopes to binge-watch it over the year-end and New Year holidays, according to Japanese media outlets.

China’s CCTV News report on Sunday revealed that the drama features scenes in which Chinese personnel cut off the fingers of and stab Japanese intelligence operatives in the abdomen. Such acts bear striking similarities to the torture inflicted on Chinese nationals by invading Japanese troops during the World War II.

The drama distorts the truth by attributing these atrocities to modern Chinese characters. Beneath the surface, it subtly glorifies Japan’s cross-border overseas operations, blurs the functional boundaries of the SDF and implicitly promotes an expansionist narrative, per CCTV News. … continue

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