An invitation to visit New Zealand
By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | May 14, 2022
AFTER two years of being closed for business, New Zealand has re-opened its borders. The outcome: unprecedented numbers are leaving rather than arriving. The question is, are you willing to take their place?
For those of you in the UK who are worried that there is one law for the government and another for the people, spare a thought for the people of New Zealand where the government is actually following its own advice.
At least in the UK you can look at your leaders partying and think ‘If they can do that, so can I’. We have to listen to the voices of our leaders filtered through a mask, and then follow them.
Last week I visited Wellington, seat of government and dull party central of the civil service. It was an extraordinary experience. Conformity to the fore. Masking was as near 100 per cent as makes no difference.
This has happened despite there being almost no evidence that masking reduces the spread of infection, and a great deal of evidence that it harms our health.
Medical mask exemptions will soon have to prominently display your name. Fines and jail sentences related to masking non-compliance are slated to be introduced.
Students still have to be fully vaxxed to enrol in universities. Many, if not most, apprenticeship schemes require Covid vaccination.
The government has allowed businesses to continue to enforce vaccination mandates, and many have. In some industries, even employees working from home are being required to show proof of Covid vaccination – to no one.
Just imagine if you are watching The Chase on TV and between every contestant you are subjected to a 60-second government Covid vaccine ad advising you to ‘keep your family safe’with an ineffective mRNA vaccine known to be dangerous. Not only do you know that it is borrowed money paying for this saturation government messaging, but you and your children are going to have to repay it for decades. You are not told that government statistics show that boosted individuals are more likely to end up in hospital with Covid than the unvaccinated – too embarrassing to warrant a media mention.
Can you imagine the level of despair if the leader of the opposition is also a vaccination freak? Ours is on record before the pandemic saying that single mothers should lose benefits if their children are unvaccinated.
Third party leader David Seymour (ACT Party) told people who have lost their jobs due to coercive mandates that it was their choice. So no joy there either.
The Green Party is more pro-mandate than the government and additionally would have us all back on bicycles. Their deputy leader struggled to hospital riding a bicycle to give birth while already in labour, presumably just to show us retirees how it is done.
Undercover surveillance is on the increase. Anti-mandate bloggers have had visits from the police.
Last week a 78-year-old farmer was fined $30,000 (£15,300) for selling a pail of raw milk to a government undercover agent who, along with his back-up team, had taken weeks to worm his way into the veteran farmer’s confidence. In contrast, France has made an international business success out of selling cheese made from raw milk. NZ, dairy capital of the world, has opted out of opportunity.
The government is ready and willing to encourage habits that damage health. Jacinda has famously said that NZ is on track to stamp out smoking within a decade but she forgot to mention that the government has encouraged the switch to vaping. A survey completed in November found an unprecedented and alarming 26 per cent of NZ school students vaped during the previous week. Another good markup for commercial pharma.
There is no end to our nanny state. This week it was suggested that the government would enter the supermarket business. We may soon be collecting our meagre processed rations from them.
So if it’s still on your bucket list and you will be visiting us, well done. Put on a brave face. You will need to test prior to departure and three more after landing. You may not know if anyone you meet is smiling or not, but you can always imagine that you are part of a fan club for the Mask of Zorro.
Oh, and by the way, our Labour tourism minister says NZ now wants to give preference to wealthy tourist. You may think that is a bit rich, or just a sign of an antisocial illness.
The Accusation of Exposure
It’s still happening, and it needs to stop
By E. Woodhouse | May 12, 2022
Imagine you’re back in pre-school.
You’re sitting on the rug, listening to the teacher read a storybook. Suddenly, the nurse calls into the classroom. “Mrs. Jones? Can you send Bobby to the health office right away?”
You’re not sick, and you don’t take any medicines at school like your friend Michael does. Why do you have to go to the nurse?
When you arrive, the nurse tells you that someone else in your class has come down with a sickness called RSV. She can’t say who, but she knows you sit next to him at lunch. So he might have given you RSV, even if you don’t feel yucky yet.
She puts you in a separate room, with a mask on, until your mom can come and you can’t come back to school for 5 days, because if you get sick, you might get other kids sick.
Fast forward to your high school days…
You’re in your 5th period math class, seated in the last row. The nurse comes in just as the teacher says to take out last night’s homework. She leans over and whispers, “I need you to come with me. You were in close contact yesterday during school with someone who tested positive for flu. You didn’t get a flu shot, so you’ll need to go home.”
You have no idea who she’s talking about – and she won’t tell you how someone has decided you were in contact with this person, or why it matters. You’re not sick and you shouldn’t have to leave.
“I want to stay in class,” you whisper.
“No, you have to come with me,” she insists.
“There’s a test tomorrow. I need to stay,” you counter.
The nurse leaves. Five minutes later, two security guards and a Dean come in. Now it’s three versus one; you have no choice. They escort you out, call your parents, and you can’t return until next week on the condition that you present a negative flu test.
I wish these scenarios were fiction, but they’re not. Each is the real story of a child and a teen, respectively, in Chicagoland, from this school year. As you can guess, the illness each student was “guilty” of being exposed to was the eminently-survivable Covid-19.
I also wish these were the only students to which this happened over the past two years. Sadly, millions of children across the country have been individually forced to quarantine in the same manner – some repeatedly for upwards of 40 days or more total. They did nothing wrong; they committed no crime. In most cases, they’ve been denied due-process and equal-protection rights, simply for being in the same airspace as a peer who tested positive for and/or became sick with what is a low-risk respiratory virus for nearly all children.
The law and communicable disease code in my state (Illlinois) does not give schools the independent authority to “figure out” close contacts, or tell not-sick kids to stay home. Only local health departments can issue such orders to a person, who can object to the order and go before a judge.
Unfortunately, months of illegal executive orders, agency workarounds, fearful school boards, and dishonest legal advice have misled parents and the general public about the limits of the government’s ability to limit freedom of movement – including during a pandemic. In most places (Illinois included), we not only need appointed & elected officials to follow existing laws, we need new laws passed that ensure that children can’t be denied an in-person education because they might develop symptoms of an illness.
The truth is, contact-tracing and exposure quarantines are for highly localized outbreaks involving actually-sick people and pathogens that aren’t airborne, seasonal, and endemic. To my knowledge, there’s no evidence that either strategy has been critical to keeping kids in schools during this pandemic. Data recently published by the CDC estimates that over 75% of American children and teens had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 as of December 2021. (Marty Makary rightly notes the current figure is closer to 90%.)
Any school or health department still pretending that Covid is deadly for healthy children – or that it’s possible to prevent the spread of a cold – is either self-interested or deeply deluded.
Evidence of the devastating impacts of keeping kids out of school – either via whole-building closures or individual exclusions – will continue to mount. I predict that class-action lawsuits will be filed eventually, but for now, parents must demand their schools stop accusing children of exposure.
WHO Estimates of India’s Covid Deaths Are Highly Suspect
By Ramesh Thakur | The Daily Sceptic | May 8, 2022
On May 5th, the World Health Organisation (WHO) issued a new report estimating global excess deaths at 14.9m for two years of the pandemic 2020-21 as the true COVID-19 mortality toll, nearly triple the official toll of 5.44m. “Excess mortality” is the difference between the number of deaths that would be expected in any time period based on data from earlier years and the number of deaths that have occurred. For countries with robust data surveillance, reporting and recording systems, this poses no real difficulty. Unfortunately, these conditions are not met in many countries. Therefore their excess mortality can only be estimated and the accuracy is a function of the reliability of the methodology and modelling used in the exercise. Given the overwhelming evidence about the flaws and deficiencies of Covid-related modelling over the last two years, and the damage caused by governments trusting modelling projections over real-world data, this should immediately throw up a forest of red flags about the WHO report.
A second reason to be sceptical is the less than stellar role of the WHO in its well-known Covid-related deference to China, the abandonment of its own summary of the state of the art science on managing pandemics from October 2019, its willingness to manipulate definitions of ‘herd immunity’ in relation to vaccines and natural immunity in order to fit with the experimental pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) that came to dominate Covid policy around the world, and its self-interest in expanding its budget, authority and role in steering global health policies and management by means of a new international treaty.
A third ground for scepticism is they ascribe the total death count to the direct effects of Covid “due to the disease” and indirect effects “due to the pandemic’s impact on health systems and society”. The first part is questionable because it fails to distinguish between deaths with and from Covid. The second is disingenuous because the indirect toll of the NPIs (lockdowns, masks, induced fear, lost schooling, lost jobs, cancelled screenings and operations, aborted immunisation programs, disruptions to global food production and distribution, etc.) and vaccine-related adverse events will prove to be significantly higher than the indirect effects of the disease per se. Any study that fails to disaggregate deaths caused by the disease and by policy interventions to mitigate it lacks credibility.
Figure 1: India’s COVID-19 Deaths, Jan. 1st 2020-Mar. 27th 2022. Source: World Life Expectancy, May 8th 2022
Like many others including Will Jones on this site, I was especially struck by the new figures for India. The report pushes India up to the very top of the Covid mortality toll with 4.74m deaths, nearly 10 times more than the count of 481,486 (as of December 31st 2021), almost one-third of the world total. Sorry, but that is simply not credible.
India’s geographic diversity, population size and economic conditions make data collection especially challenging. In public lectures in Australia and Canada, to drive home the point about the scale, I usually comment that the entire Australian population is a rounding error in 1.3bn-strong India. It suffers from persistent and widespread mass poverty – India is a country of a few mega-billionaires amidst the world’s biggest pool of poor, illiterate and sick people bar none. It might be nuclear-armed, but state capacity when it comes to administration and public and social services is easily the worst of all major economies. The public sector scores high on petty corruption but low on efficiency. The public health service is risible and high quality healthcare is neither accessible nor affordable for ordinary Indians. The best doctors work in the public sector, in medium to large clinics and hospitals in metropolitan centres and as individual practitioners in most towns and villages. Consequently, health statistics are not all that reliable. But this is a general pathology, not one unique to COVID-19.
From everything I know about India, the WHO estimate does not align with overall death data, historical trends and Covid death compensation claims on the Indian Government from states. Indian experts believe that official statistics capture over 90% of all deaths. But this also means that about 10% of deaths would have been missed in previous years, yet the WHO’s ‘excess deaths’ count uses the official numbers as the baseline against which to estimate the impact of Covid. In a related vein, why would under-reporting be limited to Covid-related deaths and not, say, to suicides with its heavy social stigma and traffic accidents where the operators of overloaded buses and vans would try to drastically reduce actual numbers in order to hide the illegal loads (Figure 2)? The WHO estimates are flawed also in relying on 2019 deaths instead of using a five year average 2015-19 to wrinkle out anomalies in any given year.
Figure 2: India’s Top Dozen Killer Diseases (March 1st 2020-May 7th 2022). Top six cancers in order: oral, lung, breast, cervical, stomach, colon. Source: Chart constructed by author drawing on data from World Life Expectancy, May 8th 2022
Estimates of India’s total annual death rate range from 738 per 100,000 people by the World Bank to 1,030 per 100,000 people by World Life Expectancy. The total annual death toll therefore would be somewhere in the 10-13 million range: a very wide range. The WHO estimate of the death rate for 2021 is within the higher range from World Life Expectancy. Simply put, the WHO estimate of all-cause deaths is within any realistic estimate of the margin of error in India’s unique circumstances of scale and state capacity.
The caveats to official data notwithstanding, the WHO estimate would mean almost one-quarter additional deaths than normal. In fact it’s worse. Looking at the detailed tables, the 4.74m excess deaths is calculated from a combined excess death rate for 2020–21 of 171 per 100,00 people. This is disaggregated into 60 and 280 per 100,000 people for 2020 and 2021, respectively. That would imply a 38% jump in all cause deaths in 2021. Despite all the horror scenes we saw on TV of corpses lying in the streets and washed ashore on riverbanks, that’s just not possible. Perhaps the clue to the error lies in the title of the actual document: “Global excess deaths associated with COVID-19 (modelled estimates)” (emphasis added).
Some Daily Sceptic readers had fun with this aspect of the WHO announcement. My favourite exchange was this:
India’s own estimates of excess deaths for 2020 compared to 2019 is 480,000, of which Covid-related deaths were just under 150,000. So over 300,000 excess deaths were due to non-Covid causes, which in itself is far more believable because of the impact of the lockdown measures on exacerbating most of the conditions underlying India’s leading causes of deaths. By contrast, in 2021 the Covid-related death toll was much higher at 332,492.
Much as I have been critical in the past of official dismissals of international reports on India including weakening democratic practices, in this instance the Government is right to reject the WHO methodology of mathematical modelling based on data on 17 Indian states collected from websites and media reports: “This reflects a statistically unsound and scientifically questionable methodology of data collection for making excess mortality projections in the case of India.” As well as defective data collection methodology, the report is marred also by three critically flawed assumptions: that uncounted excess deaths occurred only in 2020-21 and not before; they occurred only for COVID-19 and not other diseases; and Covid-related deaths were due solely to the disease and not caused by policy interventions to control and eradicate it.
Ramesh Thakur is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy and a former UN Assistant Secretary-General.
THE VANDEN BOSSCHE WARNING
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | May 5, 2022
Acclaimed vaccinologist, Geert Vanden Bossche, sits down for his second groundbreaking interview with Del to explain why the intense pressure mass vaccination is putting on the Covid-19 virus will likely drive it to become catastrophically deadly.
Meddling with modelling
Divisive and false claims that the unvaccinated are a danger
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | May 6, 2022
This paper, published in the “peer-reviewed” Canadian Medical Association Journal, quite simply represents an amoral, unethical and utterly transparent attempt to use pseudoscientific modelling to fabricate a false narrative. The apparent objective seems to be sowing divisions in society by marginalising and vilifying the unvaccinated.
The paper describes a “study” which is nothing of the sort. It actually describes a model which the authors have constructed. This is an unnecessarily complex model — and suspiciously so. The model itself has been very expertly taken apart by Jessica Rose here and Drs Rancourt and Hickey for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association here.
The authors appear to have tested their model to death to find the optimal combination of inputs which results in the “narrative” they wish to promote.
The logical flaws in this approach have been brilliantly analysed by Dr Byram Bridle, including a critique of the assumptions made for the various input parameters. Among the more egregious examples are:
(1) the model assumes 80% effectiveness against infection for the Covid injections vs omicron, whereas real-world data suggests zero — at best.
(2) the model assumes very little pre-pandemic immunity present within the community (they assume just 20% when for some time the evidence has suggested much higher levels, especially against severe illness).
(3) the model assumes no waning of efficacy at all over time, a claim not even made by the most ardent promoters of the covid vaccines.
Many news outlets — including Forbes — appear to have been taken in by this sham science and are reporting it as a bone fide “study” with no critical analysis whatsoever, this being their key message:
“The findings counter the common argument that the decision to get vaccinated is a personal one, the researchers said, as the unvaccinated are ”likely to affect the health and safety of vaccinated people in a manner disproportionate to the fraction of unvaccinated people in the population.”
One commentator on Twitter acerbically — though rather accurately — summed up the Forbes article thus:
It is quite clear that the model and the entire article has been constructed to push a political agenda, namely to neutralise the growing realisation by the population that the story they were told in relation to the Covid 19 injections is entirely false. Contrary to the authorities’ official narrative, in the context of Omicron the injections don’t reduce infections or transmission, and actually probably even increase them. Far from being a selfish act, it was in fact entirely rational — and beneficial to one’s fellow man — to decline the injection.
To use Dr Bridle’s words, the paper is actually “Fiction Disguised as Science to Promote Hatred”.
We support and join the many voices calling for this paper to be retracted.
Postscript: When Denis Rancourt, one of the authors of the Ontario Civil Liberties Association’s statement, tweeted the essence of their complaint with it, the paper’s author — David Fisman — didn’t respond by way of any form of scientific justification — he threatened legal action.
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Book Excerpt
Biden’s Closed Circle on Russia
An excerpt from ‘The Great Betrayal’
By James W. Carden | The Realist Review | June 14, 2026
Joe Biden’s presidency may ultimately come to be seen as a cautionary tale. Here was a president who showed little interest in entertaining arguments that might have contradicted his most deeply held assumptions.[1] And there were precious few within the upper ranks of the administration who might have attempted to do so, after all, only policy hands and political operatives who had come up through the ranks of the Clinton and Obama administrations or had longstanding ties to the citadels of the foreign policy community were invited into the fold. … continue
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