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COVID persists, but the COVID vaccine narrative has taken on so much water, the powers that be have stopped bailing

They are going to let these vaccines slowly sink

By Meryl Nass, MD | April 16, 2022

There has been so much bad news about the vaccines in the last few months, it even leaked into the mainstream media. I think the cabal’s plan, at least in the US but probably everywhere, is to stop propping the ludicrous vaccine claims up and allow them to die a natural death. I explain why below.

There was just too much bad news, too few getting boosted, too much resistance from parents. Getting 8 or 10 doses into everyone was not going to happen. The terrified obedient masses were becoming fewer and fewer.

For example, here is one story that got lots of traction: ABC News covered the fact that “At least 72 COVID cases in the fully vaccinated resulted from the Gridiron dinner.” Not only did Nancy Pelosi test positive, but several other members of Biden’s Cabinet and many other Washingtonian glitterati did too. All of whom had to have been vaccinated in order to attend.

There was plenty of happy talk that the afflicted politicians in DC had only mild COVID cases. Good for them. But, if vaccinations caused them to become asymptomatic spreaders instead of spreaders with symptoms, who would know to stay home while sick, the vaccines could actually be doing more harm than good in terms of transmission. They could be causing more COVID cases, not less.

By now, it has to be apparent to everyone who walks by a newsstand or turns on the TV that the media are begging much too hard for more shots.

It must be obvious to all that the shots do not prevent spread and therefore there is no logical way you can mandate them. Because if my shot does not protect you (and only with lots of fairy dust will it protect me) why would you have any interest in whether or not I am vaccinated?

Once you stop caring about my vaccination status, the cabal’s nexus of control starts to fall apart. That was their ace in the hole. Time for them to move on to something else.

The kicker for childhood vaccines: the NY state Department of Health study of vaccine efficacy in children. After 2 months, efficacy in the 5-11 year olds had fallen to 12%. In other words, 7 out of 8 vaccinated kids derived no benefit after 2 months, only risk. The data were derived from 365,000 children, and apparently there was no way CDC could spin them, or 12% was the best spin they could put on the data. This report is a huge obstacle to universal child vaccinations. The cabal cannot surmount it.

It is important to mention again–because we keep forgetting–that while the vaccines are nominally licensed for adults, in fact you can only find the EUA (unlicensed) product in the US, and legally an EUA is experimental–and therefore forcing someone to be vaccinated is a Nuremberg violation and a violation of federal law.

The imposition of mandates for these experimental gene therapy products is therefore a crime, being committed by states, federal government and certain companies and other institutions. It seems that because US law was not designed for situations in which the government is the criminal, it has been very difficult to use the judicial system to change what is happening. But surely if this persisted much longer an honest judge somewhere would finally rule that the vaccines are experimental and the COVID mandate house of cards would then collapse. Like Humpty Dumpty (it is Easter today after all):

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put COVID mandates together again

What else has been happening that undermines the vaccine story? Well, in addition to all the collapsing athletes, there is now a large collection of mayors suddenly dropping dead throughout Germany.

In Australia, Queensland’s health minister just admitted that ambulances are being summoned for a lot more calls for cardiac events and sudden deaths: 40% more to be exact.  Thanks to Igor Chudov for following this story, and including a video of the clueless minister admitting it, but having no idea why…

Then there were the 3 insurance companies, one each from the US, India and Germany, that admitted there were about 40% more deaths than expected in working-age people in the second half of 2021. The German official who blew the whistle, a CEO or VP, was immediately fired, which is a strong indication he was telling the truth.

Three doctor whistleblowers released a large cache of data from the military’s DMED database showing huge increases in service-member deaths. There has been a lot of confusion about these data. In part, that is because the military then reissued its data for the preceding several years, making the 2021 comparison look less dire. Mathew Crawford has some ideas about what really happened to the data. The only thing that is absolutely clear so far is that there has been a coverup, and the health of vaccinated members of the military appears to have taken a dive. But we don’t know how deep.

Everyone in the world must have heard the term ‘myocarditis’ by now, and knows that it is a vaccine injury. A lot of people also know that CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said post-vaccination myocarditis was extremely “rare but mild,” except it isn’t and she lied. The rate of myocarditis she cited is at least 10 times too low. About 1 in 2000 young men aged 18-24 sought care for this diagnosis after getting their second mRNA shot.

In fact, CDC was so intensely worried about blowback regarding its recommendation to vaccinate teens (despite the risk of myocarditis) it got the heads of about 20 professional medical organizations to sign on to a declaration supporting CDC’s recommendation. Wonder how much CDC paid for that. Getting such back-up was an unusual move, but perhaps unsurprising for risk-averse bureaucrats who worry about their own butt but not anyone else’s. Rochelle even mentions these “cosigners” from many medical organizations in her ABC-TV interview. Collecting a bunch of “co-signers” is actually the proof that CDC knew its vaccine recommendation was going to considerably harm children.

While no one in a federal health agency has admitted it, many people must be aware that myocarditis is only the tip of the COVID vaccine injury iceberg. Myocarditis got attention because it’s life-threatening and almost always happens within 4 days of the second shot–it can’t be written off as coincidence, the way heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary emboli, sudden deaths and perhaps many other diagnoses have been.

As if there wasn’t enough bad vaccine news, there was information from the Medicare database that FDA posted last July, but it only recently got attention. FDA revealed that heart attacks, pulmonary emboli, disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC, a life-threatening, bleeding plus clotting disorder) and ITP (another bleeding disorder) were related to the Pfizer vaccination in Medicare beneficiaries. FDA promised to study this rigorously, but instead remained silent, and subsequently has never denied the relationship.

And then there is ivermectin. So many ivermectin stories have been leaking into the popular press. Tennessee’s legislature made ivermectin essentially an over-the-counter drug last week. New Hampshire’s house voted in favor of this as well, while the NH Senate is now taking it up. Kansas and several other states gave healthcare providers an immunity guarantee for the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for COVID. Kansas also strengthened religious exemptions, effectively undermining school vaccine mandates.

Coupled with stories about lawsuits against hospitals for refusing to supply ivermectin to dying relatives, like this one, people are finally realizing there is probably something to this drug, and they have been cheated. They were given a shot that barely works, is unsafe, and they were stopped from getting the good drug. And what if they lost their business to the lockdowns? There must be a lot of anger simmering by now. I imagine the Great Reset cabal must be worried about this, and has decided to loosen its grip for the moment and hopefully let off some citizen steam.

There is more surprising vaccine news. While many institutions are still imposing mandates (and we need to find out what $ carrots were given to universities and other entities to impose illegal mandates of experimental vaccines) in other, surprising places the mandates are disappearing. Out west in Woke Land, the Washington state Department of Health said it would not require COVID vaccines to attend school after all. Despite Gavin Newsom’s 2021 executive order mandating vaccines for school kids as soon as they are licensed, California’s Department of Health has just done the same thing that Washington’s did: killed the COVID vaccine mandate for the 2022-23 school year.

This is why I am convinced the ship is turning. Those states’ health departments take their orders from CDC and DC. I do not think FDA is going to be issuing any more fake licenses for COVID vaccines. [I say fake because a) the vaccines do not meet licensure criteria, and b) after issuing the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines licenses for adults, neither licensed product has been distributed in the US for actual use.] The unvaxxed kids will be spared. Hallelujah!

During the April 6, 2022 Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meeting, which I live-blogged and summarized, both briefers and committee members acknowledged that the neutralizing antibody titers that have been used as a surrogate for immunity in order to issue EUAs, were in fact not valid surrogates.

This had been obvious for awhile, but a recent Israeli study in healthcare workers made it crystal clear. While neutralizing antibody titers rose tenfold after a fourth vaccination, by 2 months out the Pfizer vaccine had only 30% efficacy against infection, and the Moderna vaccine had only 11%. So the high antibody titers were, in fact, meaningless.

This is really important, because Pfizer and Moderna have been relying on titers to get their vaccines okayed for the younger age groups, those below 16 and 18 respectively. They don’t have data showing the vaccines are actually reducing cases by 50% or more, which is the standard FDA said was necessary. They don’t have data showing that the vaccines prevent serious cases or deaths, another standard.

Up until now, FDA accepted titers in lieu of actual efficacy results from clinical trials to issue its EUAs for children–but with the recent VRBPAC admissions, which must have been planned in advance (otherwise why did multiple people at the meeting discuss it as settled fact when they had never mentioned it before?) FDA can no longer do so.

Another thing that happened at the VRBPAC meeting was that Peter Marks, the head of FDA’s Center for Biologics and highest FDA official there, said that if a new type of COVID vaccine is developed for the next booster, then the current vaccines would no longer be used, because it would be too confusing (according to STAT). I believe this was another effort to prepare us for the demise of the current mRNA vaccines.

The fall of the vaccines means the fall of the vaccine passports. This ought to slow down the imposition of CBDCs and all-digital money for a bit. If we don’t have to show our vaccine certificate to go shop, eat, etc., (and people stop being fearful of catching something from each Other) people will be a lot less inclined to “show their papers” to go about their lives. It’s our job to explain over and over that this was how the Nazis maintained control.

Here I read the tea leaves

If there is a new vaccine waiting in the wings, FDA and its briefers were not telling us about it at the VRBPAC meeting, which was the time to do so. For right now, I think the current crop of vaccines and the vaccine passports are going away. I don’t think the authorities anticipate another severe COVID wave in the foreseeable future… as most people now have Omicron immunity. The COVID fear will dissipate.

The original Wuhan strain appeared out of nowhere. No natural progenitor could be found. And the original Omicron strain appears to have also originated in a lab. If I was a member of the Great Reset cabal, I would be quite hesitant about releasing yet a third lab-engineered virus on the population. Because millions of people will be looking for one, and it won’t take long before its laboratory provenance is discovered. Then the pitchforks might really come out.

On the other hand, I do believe the cabal has bet the farm on their Reset, they can’t go back, and they are simply moving on to another means of accomplishing it besides COVID.  The over-the-top WHO Treaty/Constitution and its amendments designed to assume sovereignty over the world in the event of a pandemic is an ambitious Plan B.

But I don’t think it will fly. Too many people know the WHO was wrong about virtually everything regarding management of this pandemic, not to mention the 2009 swine flu. And then there was that little matter of WHO undertaking the SOLIDARITY Trial, in which WHO officials deliberately poisoned over 1,000 COVID patients with excessive doses of hydroxychloroquine and in many cases failed to obtain signed informed consents. The WHO could be liable for manslaughter.

Will Russia and China really agree to give up their sovereignty to Tedros? China, maybe. Brazil? India? Indonesia? Japan? Nigeria? Can all of their leaders, and their local power centers, have been sufficiently corrupted to turn over their nations to the cabal? I think that could be a stretch.

I suspect the cabal will try their best to get a legal OK to take over the world with the upcoming WHO pandemic treaty, but it won’t fly. Too many people already know about these plans.

After the WHO, the cabal will move on to something else, Plan C. Climate catastrophe? Aliens? I’m guessing it will be a few years before we get hit with another nasty bug. By then maybe the fiat currencies will have finally crashed, and the cabal won’t have as tight control of the reins. By then, Fauci, Walensky, Biden, Macron, Johnson, Trudeau, Draghi will hopefully be unpleasant memories.

I am not thinking we will all sing kumbaya. I expect a good deal of misery as the cabal pushes all the levers at its disposal.

The Shanghai city and port closure (China’s largest city and the world’s largest port) seems to me a deliberate attempt to interfere with worldwide transit of goods and to reduce food availability. The Chinese know how to treat COVID. They make the drugs and herbs. There is no need for them to lock down.

We are finally understanding that all these awful government policies were deliberate — intended to cement control over and impoverish us. But maybe we can start to build something a whole lot better.

We are shaking loose of the educational indoctrination system, the ruination of our foods, the user-unfriendly and health-damaging healthcare system. We are starting to grasp that our governments acted with malice aforethought to stupefy and eventually enslave us.

People are breaking free and taking responsibility for their future. Where I live, people are learning self-sufficiency skills, creating home-schooling coops, building greenhouses and growing food. The migration to the countryside was deliberate.

A better life? It just takes everybody waking up. Despite all the acrimony we have faced, the time is ripe to help our fellows see things clearly. We have to love them, help them, meet them where they are at. Maybe it is just to talk about the Gridiron dinner. Or ivermectin. They won’t get it in a day. But keep trying. It is our only solution.

April 17, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Does Covid-19 Contain Genetic Sequences From Snake Venom?

By Guy Hatchard | April 14, 2022

An article in Scientific American back in January 2020 reported:

“Snakes—the Chinese krait and the Chinese cobra—may be the original source of the newly discovered coronavirus that has triggered an outbreak of a deadly infectious respiratory illness in China this winter.”

The article originated from a Chinese authored paper published in the Journal of Medical Virology on 22 January 2020 entitled Cross-species transmission of the newly identified coronavirus 2019-nCoV and said:

“Our findings suggest that 2019-nCoV has most similar genetic information with bat coronavirus and most similar codon usage bias with snake.“

The essence of the article was the supposition that Covid-19 made its way from snakes to bats and then to the Wuhan wet market, expressed as follows:

“An origin-unknown homologous recombination may have occurred within the spike glycoprotein of the 2019-nCoV… The squared euclidean distance indicates that the 2019-nCoV and snakes from China have the highest similarity in synonymous codon usage bias compared to those of bat, bird, Marmota, human, Manis, and hedgehog”

This idea subsequently gained little traction, because of the improbability of such a train of interspecies transfer, and because public discussion of its conclusions was vigorously suppressed by fact checkers.

The suggestion of the authors to do more research disappeared from view. It has been largely forgotten until now.

Were Some of These Recombined Genetic Sequences From Snakes?

Recent discussion of the origin of the Covid-19 spike protein has suggested that it could be the result of recombinant techniques in the laboratory which joined a number of genetic sequences together as part of research to develop deadly pathogens, and then investigate possible cures.

A paper published in F1000Research entitled Toxin-like peptides in plasma, urine, and faecal samples from COVID-19 patients in April 2020 concluded that:

“The presence of toxin-like peptides… suggests a possible association between COVID-19 disease and the release in the body of (oligo-)peptides almost identical to toxic components of venoms from animals…. The presence of these peptides opens new scenarios on the aetiology of the COVID-19 clinical symptoms observed up to now, including neurological manifestations.”

What are Some of the Neurological Effects of Snake Venom?

A study published in 2002 entitled Cardiac Involvement in Snake Bite” reports:

“Myocardial involvement is seen on occasions and may rarely contribute to morbidity and mortality. ECG changes are usually transient but when persistent they are attributed to direct myocardial damage due to the toxin.”

Other reported neurological effects of snake bite include:

  • pro and anticoagulant activity leading to ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke,
  • muscle paralysis through inhibition of neuromuscular transmission leading to respiratory failure.

All of these neurological, thrombotic, and cardiac effects are similar to reported adverse effects of both Covid infection and mRNA vaccination.

Is Covid-19 a Recombination of a Virus and a Toxin?

mRNA vaccines specifically train the human physiology to produce the suspect spike protein. Did this expose vaccine recipients to a toxin? It appears this might be the case.

In which case, the essential design of the mRNA vaccine would have been a grave error. It was training the physiology to produce a toxin.

These discussions are speculative. We now know that early genetic sequences of Covid-19 appear to have been suppressed by NIH on the instructions of the Wuhan Virology Lab.

Was the genetic similarity between snake genetics and Covid-19 too explosive to admit, whether they came from snakes or not? Certainly, this possibility should have been investigated vigorously.

It might have led to an understanding of the origins of Covid, but more importantly, it might have led to more effective treatments for Covid.

It might also have shed light on the source of the wide range of neurotoxic effects of both Covid and mRNA vaccination.

Whatever the eventual conclusion of further investigative research: biotechnology experimentation to research and develop pathogens and toxins must stop now. It amounts to a ticking time bomb.

April 16, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

The worst of Covid advertising

The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | April 16, 2022

Advertising / propaganda played a massive part in keeping citizens compliant and afraid. Quite frankly, advertising companies should feel ashamed with the amount of societal manipulation they caused in exchange for government coin.

Early on in the pandemic, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in the UK called for an increase in the perceived threat of Covid by using hard-hitting emotional messages. However, it has since been revealed that government contracts and messages were in place weeks before lockdowns were even suggested.

These adverts were produced in collaboration with behavioural scientists, trying to nudge people to do what they wanted using tactics that operate below the level of awareness.

The UK spent over £240 million on these adverts in 2020 and up to £320 million in 2021. Obscene amounts of money. To put this in context, the government spent £46 million on advertising “Get Ready for Brexit” in 2019, the biggest spend since the second world war.

I have posted some of the worst images from the UK below. They made people feel guilty, ashamed, worried that they would kill people and angry against those who did not precisely follow the rules.

April 16, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

How Dangerous Are Masks for Children?

BY PAUL ELIAS ALEXANDER | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | APRIL 15, 2022

Our public health agencies such as the CDC and NIH, and television medical experts seem unable to address key health messages that could have a dramatic effect in reducing risk of severe sequelae in higher-risk populations such as the minority and African-American population to the scourge of SARS-CoV-2.

These agencies and media echo chambers squandered many opportunities to inform the public on simple yet very effective messaging (vitamin D supplementation, obesity control, early treatment etc.) that could have reduced morbidity and saved lives. They continue to. Not just for Covid-19, but for many other illnesses.

For example, obesity emerged as a potent super-loaded risk factor behind age in the harmful sequelae and a human target for SARS-CoV-2 in most studies, in addition to being elderly, frail and having comorbid conditions. Being younger with comorbid conditions also placed one at risk.

We knew this data very early on, maybe one month post-March 2020 yet the CDC etc. failed to either read the data, understand the data, or act on the data. It would have behooved our agencies to have addressed these risks in large-scale education programs for the populace and especially by calling for a reduction in body weight and particularly for the minority sub-groups (African-Americans).

In a similar light, studies showed that vitamin D supplementation for African-Americans has been associated with a lowered risk of severe disease and mortality from SARS-CoV-2. So the evidence was there; just the action by health agencies was absent.

Early ambulatory outpatient treatment with successful combination and sequenced antiviral agents, corticosteroids, and anti-clotting therapeutics should be used (and should have been used) widely to help the people at risk. The African-American community is aware that “Covid (is) a killer for the obese: like pouring gasoline on top of a fire.”

Unfortunately, more than two years into the pandemic, the manifest issue of public health education and sound policy decisions remain absent and aloof, given the erratic and confusing responses from the health and governing officials.

Now we face another looming concern: the potential danger of the chlorine, polyester, and microplastic components of the face masks (surgical principally but any of the mass-produced masks) that have become part of our daily lives due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Emergent reports, albeit nascent and anecdotal but nevertheless vitally important (and will be clarified and defined in time) regarding the manufacture of masks, where, “many of them (face masks) are made of polyester, so you have a microplastic problem… many of the face masks would contain polyester with chlorine compounds… if I have the mask in front of my face, then of course I inhale the microplastic directly and these substances are much more toxic than if you swallow them, as they get directly into the nervous system.”

A very recent 2022 British publication (Jenner et al. Detection of microplastics in human lung tissue using μFTIR spectroscopy) focused on polypropylene that is a component of the face masks and reported that such “microplastics were identified in all regions of the human lungs using μFTIR analysis.” Furthermore, “polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate fibres were the most abundant.” Researchers concluded that inhalation was “a route of MP exposure.” And that this study “is the first to report MPs within human lung tissue samples, using μFTIR spectroscopy.”

There were also early reports of toxic mold, fungi, and bacteria that can pose a significant threat to the immune system by potentially weakening it. Of particular concern to us is the recent report of breathing in synthetic fibers in the face masks. This is of serious concern.

“Loose particulate was seen on each type of mask. Also, tight and loose fibers were seen on each type of mask. If every foreign particle and every fiber in every facemask is always secure and not detachable by airflow, then there should be no risk of inhalation of such particles and fibers. However, if even a small portion of mask fibers is detachable by inspiratory airflow, or if there is debris in mask manufacture or packaging or handling, then there is the possibility of not only entry of foreign material to the airways, but also entry to deep lung tissue, and potential pathological consequences of foreign bodies in the lungs.”

Reports are that “Graphene is a strong, very thin material that is used in fabrication, but it can be harmful to lungs when inhaled and can cause long-term health problems.”

There is a risk of potential inflammatory/fibrotic lung diseases because we are inhaling these materials in the masks now for two years with more duration to come and no end in sight. These substances might also be highly carcinogenic. Not just for us as adults but we must be very concerned about the risks especially to our children since they depend on us as mentors and guides for their decision-making.

These blue surgical masks pervade our lives. They remain ubiquitous. “Health Canada issued a warning about blue and gray disposable face masks, which contain an asbestos-like substance associated with “early pulmonary toxicity.” The warning is specific to potentially toxic masks distributed within schools and daycares across Quebec. Health Canada (and full praise to them)….“discovered during a preliminary risk assessment that the masks contain microscopic graphene particles that, when inhaled, could cause severe lung damage.”

Reports are and were that “for a while now, some daycare educators had expressed suspicion about the masks, which were causing children to feel as though they were swallowing cat hair while wearing them. We now know that instead of cat hair, children were inhaling the equivalent of asbestos all day long.”It appears to be a substance known as graphene.

What is indeed alarming is that “the SNN200642 masks that were being used all across Canada in school classrooms had never been tested for safety or effectiveness.” This is indeed a catastrophic failure by the regulators as these surgical face masks are linked to early pulmonary toxicity.

What is indeed frightening is that all of these blue and similar surgical face masks cause plastic fiber inhalation and the outcomes could be devastating, especially to our children. Yet it has pervaded and persons making Covid policy decisions do not seem to care about the harmful implications. These face mask plastics will degrade very slowly over time and as such, in the lungs it may remain and just build up to dangerous levels.

We do not even know what is an ‘acceptable’ level, for there should be none. There is debate that the immune system can attack such foreign objects, thus driving prolonged inflammation which may lead to diseases such as cancer. And reused masks which pervade our daily lives, and based on our personal experiences, do produce more loosened fibers.

Dr. Richard Urso showed us just how dangerous these are by putting them under a microscope, revealing the melt-blown polypropylene plastic. Some masks even contain fiberglass and this is very dangerous as we know to inhale. We as parents make these decisions; we have to step back and question many of these decisions we are making that seem suboptimal. If it does not seem right, then you have to push back and question and demand the science, demand the data from these seemingly untethered experts.

We certainly did not get (across the last two years) and are not presently getting the due diligence and protection from public health experts, the relevant health agencies, and policy makers that we need.

Moreover, the mass media seems incapable of doing the investigative type of journalism to fully inform the populace on what the public needs to know. We close by reiterating the warning in the JAMA publication that “Face masks should not be worn by healthy individuals to protect themselves from acquiring respiratory infection because there is no evidence to suggest that face masks worn by healthy individuals are effective in preventing people from becoming ill.”

Every act has a consequence, and there is always risk. It is therefore imperative to weigh the consequences before embarking on a specific course of action. These are risk management decisions especially for parents and not because a Dr. Fauci type tells you to do something means that it is accurate or necessary. Just consider the nonsense we heard about double masking where he said use them one day only to then retract on another day.

Children come with a potent innate immune system that works tremendously well. At the same time and similarly, their immune systems are still being developed, and we have forced lockdowns, school closures, and masking on a developing child. We have no prior experience on the subsequent outcomes pertaining to children’s development, health, and well-being.

We may be faced with catastrophic consequences of what we did to our children over the last two years of unsound Covid restrictive policies, and allowed government technocrats to force these upon them. These are matters too important to nonchalantly disregard.

Dr. Paul Alexander is an epidemiologist focusing on clinical epidemiology, evidence-based medicine, and research methodology. He has a bachelor’s in epidemiology from McMaster University, and a master’s degree from Oxford University. He earned his PhD from McMaster’s Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact. Paul is a former WHO Consultant and Senior Advisor to US Department of HHS in 2020 for the COVID-19 response.

April 15, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

The Face Mask Cult

The Daily Sceptic | April 13, 2022 

There follows a post by Hector Drummond, a former academic who worked in risk, who says when he came to research his new book The Face Mask Cult on the effectiveness of masks against COVID-19 the evidence was threadbare.

In 2021 I decided to write an FAQ on all aspects of Covid, lockdowns and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). I started with face masks, as they seemed to be the easiest issue to deal with, thinking that the whole mask situation could be summed up in five to six pages. After a few days work I had twenty pages of text, and another twenty pages of reminder notes on further aspects of face masks that I needed to consider and research. Those notes ballooned out in the next few weeks, and I realised that the use of face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 was a far bigger topic than I had appreciated, and would require substantial amounts of writing, and months of research and literature-reading.

It took until the next year before I decided I’d written enough on the topic. I had read an enormous number of scientific papers and other articles on masks, and gone through some of them with a fine-tooth comb (see Part 3 of the book, for instance). I had spent considerable time analysing, synthesising and rewriting, and my short FAQ article had become a comprehensive 400-page book that tackled all aspects of the issue, as well as a unique resource with its extensive scientific literature review section.

In all my researches I failed to come across very much in the way of convincing evidence that masks work. The papers that were supposed to show that they did all turned out to be poor pieces of science. None were randomly-controlled peer-reviewed trials. Some were observational studies, with inadequate controls for dealing with the possibility of faulty or biased recollection. Some were ‘modelling’ studies, in which a computer program was used to ‘model’ the effect of face masks on disease spread. Modelling studies are generally hopeless at providing any confirming evidence for the effectiveness of face masks as they require the modellers to make assumptions about how effective the masks are when writing their programs. Some were mannequin studies, in which a dummy in a lab with artificial breathing functions, rather than a real person in the real world, was used. Some were simply tests of the porosity of various materials in regard to salt aerosols.

Most studies ignored the issue of face mask gaps, despite it being well-known in the field that gaps around the sides of masks will let such large amounts of virions in and out that any effect that the masks do have will be completely negated. (This is why medical institutions require ‘fit tests’ for masks – not that fit tests are very reliable, as I explain in the book.)

Even these dubious studies that claimed to show an effect for masks didn’t show much of an effect. The less wild ones would typically claim that the cloth masks would stop 5% to 15% of virions, but they never presented any reason to believe the further claim that was often made that this would cause a 5% to 15% reduction in cases, or a 5% to 15% reduction in deaths. The closest such studies got to doing so was when an author would occasionally speculate, in an airy fashion, that if the disease in question’s R0 rate happened to be close to 1.0, then maybe widespread mask use (assuming masks had some small effect) would be enough to push the R0 rate below 1.0, in which case the disease would die out, although of course even if all their assumptions were true and masks did push the disease’s R0 rate below 1.0 it doesn’t follow that the disease would die out anytime soon. It could well be that the disease’s R0 rate would quickly come back over 1.0 again as soon as we stop masking, and so in order to stop the disease spreading again we would have to wear masks for years on end, or even indefinitely.

But what about all those government reports written by distinguished scientists assuring us that there were now truckloads of research proving that masks work? This is perhaps the most shocking part of the whole face mask con. The 2020 DELVE report and its updates, the 2020 Royal Society report, and the 2022 Department for Education’s Evidence Summary were disgraceful pieces of misinformation, as I show in detail in the book. Even more shocking, perhaps, is the fact that there have been so many acts of wrongdoing in the last two years that the scientific butchery committed in these reports is completely unknown to the general public. The fact, for instance, that the Royal Society’s report relied heavily upon a low-grade Chinese study, written in Chinese only, and published in an obscure Chinese journal, which reported fantastically unrealistic results, is never even going to briefly flit through the mind of the average person, because the average person will never come across any reference to this shameful affair in the mainstream media.

I felt vindicated as I put the finishing touches to the book when several prominent advocates of masks, such as Trish Greenhalgh, Jeremy Howard and many others, started to admit that cloth masks were useless. Not that they wanted us to stop wearing masks – they now wanted us to move onto medical-grade respirator masks, like N95s and FFP2s, as Germany required. Needless to say, these mask fanatics didn’t bother to mention that Germany’s stringent mask policy has been a complete failure.

The book I finished up with is a serious corrective to the endless propaganda we have been fed about masks. It lays out the case against masks in detail, considers the harms done by mask-wearing (harms which are usually ignored by scientists and governments), closely examines many claims made about masks by both sides, and backs it all up with an enormous number of references to the scientific literature. Whenever anyone who wants you to wear a mask says, “Follow the Science”, just show them this book and say, “I already did”.

You can buy the book here in paperback and on Kindle.

April 15, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

The question MSM should be asking about Partygate

The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | April 14, 2022

Partygate, as the name suggests, concerns parties and in particular parties in Downing Street during lockdowns. For those who don’t know no. 10 Downing Street is where the current Prime Minister works and resides, in this case, Boris Johnson. Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, lives and works next door at number 11. Number 10 may look small from the outside but actually comprises of more than 100 rooms.

From March 2020, the UK had a number of lockdowns and until recently some form of restrictions in place. As with most countries, many of these restrictions included who you could and couldn’t visit or numbers of people allowed indoors or outdoors.

It has since transpired that whilst authoring and implementing all of these draconian rules, along with the harsh penalties if the rules were broken, Boris, his wife Carrie, Rishi and other staff at Downing Street had at least 12 parties. At least 50 penalty notices are being handed out to Boris, Carrie, Rishi and others.

The MSM is focussing on Boris breaking the rules and lying when asked if he had broken them. However, the question they should be asking is:

Why was the government desperately trying to scare the public about Covid when they themselves weren’t scared in the slightest?

Were they so stressed and tired of it all that they were happy to risk their lives just to have a few parties or did they know, the whole time, that Covid would mainly kill the elderly and vulnerable so they themselves were perfectly safe. Or perhaps they knew of the potential dangers a lab made virus could pose but had access to an already prepared inhibitor which targeted the spike protein?

If the correct answer is that they knew Covid was not as deadly as being made out, then the MSM should be investigating why they continued to scare the public. Where did the idea come from? Why was it pushed so hard if they knew it was rubbish? Why was no cost/benefit analysis undertaken and if it was why did they continue to destroy the economy?

Another anomaly, which verges into conspiracy theory territory, is why was Boris Johnson partying after he came out of intensive care less than a month previously? Surely you would take it easy for a while after such a big scare? Even if Boris wasn’t bothered, staff would have been shell shocked and scared for their own safety? Politicians and Journalists voiced rumours at the time but they were quickly retracted.

Come on MSM, step up and ask the correct questions.

April 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , | Leave a comment

6 Double Standards Public Health Officials Used to Justify COVID Vaccines

Madhava Setty, M.D. | The Defender | April 13, 2022

We are not only in an epidemiological crisis, we also are in an epistemological crisis. How do we know what we know? What differentiates opinion from a justified belief?

For nearly two years, the public has been inundated by a sophisticated messaging campaign that urges us to “trust the science.”

But how can a non-scientist know what the science is really saying?

Legacy media sources offer us an easy solution: “Trust us.”

Legions of so-called “independent” fact-checking sites that serve to eliminate any wayward thinking keep those with a modicum of skepticism in line.

“Research” has been redefined to mean browsing Wikipedia citations.

Rather than being considered for their merit, dissenting opinions are more easily dismissed as misinformation by labeling their source as untrustworthy.

How do we know these sources are untrustworthy? They must be if they offer a dissenting opinion!

This form of circular reasoning is the central axiom of all dogmatic systems of thought. Breaking the spell of dogmatic thinking is not easy, but it is possible.

In this article I describe six examples of double standards medical authorities have used to create the illusion their COVID-19 narrative is logical and sensible.

This illusion has been used with devastating effect to raise vaccine compliance.

Rather than citing scientific publications or expert opinions that conflict with our medical authorities’ narrative — information that will be categorically dismissed because it appears on The Defender — I will instead demonstrate how, from the beginning, the official narrative has been inconsistent, hypocritical and/or contradictory.

1. COVID deaths are ‘presumed,’ but vaccine deaths must be ‘proven’

As of April 8, VAERS included 26,699 reports of deaths following COVID vaccines.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officially acknowledges only nine of these.

In order to establish causality, the CDC requires autopsies to rule out any possible etiology of death before the agency will place culpability on the vaccine.

But the CDC uses a very different standard when it comes to identifying people who died from COVID.

The 986,000 COVID deaths reported by the CDC here are, as footnote [1] indicates, “Deaths with confirmed or presumed [emphasis added] COVID-19.”

If a person dies with a positive PCR test or is presumed to have COVID, the CDC will count that as COVID-19 death.

Note that in the CDC’s definition, a COVID fatality does not mean the person died from the disease, only with the disease.

Why is an autopsy required to establish a COVID vaccine death but not to establish a COVID death?

Conversely, why is recent exposure to SARS-CoV-2 prior to a death sufficient to establish causality — but recent exposure to a vaccine considered coincidental?

2. CDC uses VAERS data to investigate myocarditis yet claims VAERS data on vaccine deaths is unreliable

On June 23, 2021, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices met to assess the risk of peri/myocarditis following COVID vaccination, especially in young males.

This was the key slide in this presentation:

The observed risk of myocarditis is 219 in about 4.3 million second doses of COVID vaccine in males 18 to 24 years old.

The CDC is fine with using VAERS data to assess risk of myocarditis following vaccination — yet the agency rejects all but nine of the 26,699 reports of deaths following the vaccines.

Why does the CDC trust the peri/myocarditis data in VAERS but not the data on deaths?

One reason may be because the onset of myocarditis symptoms is closely tied to the time of vaccination.

In other words, because this condition closely follows inoculation the two events are highly correlated and suggestive of causation.

For example, here is another slide from the same presentation:

The majority of cases of vaccine-induced peri/myocarditis suffered symptoms within the first few days after injection. As explained above, this is highly suggestive of a causative effect of the vaccine.

A recent study in The Lancet included a similar graph, taken directly from VAERS, on deaths following vaccination:

Once again, the event (death) closely follows vaccination in the majority of cases.

As we regard the two graphs above we should acknowledge that the temporal relationship between the injection and the adverse event is suggestive of causation but does not stand as proof of such.

However, it is also important to note that if the vaccination caused the deaths, that is exactly what the plot would look like.

It should be clear that the CDC has no justification for dismissing VAERS deaths if the agency is willing to accept reports of myo/pericarditis from the very same reporting system.

3. CDC pushes ‘relative risk’ for determining vaccine efficacy, but uses ‘absolute risk’ to downplay risk of adverse events

In Pfizer’s Phase 3 trial, nine times more placebo recipients developed severe COVID than those vaccinated during the short period of observation. This constitutes a relative risk reduction of 90%.

This seemed an encouraging finding and was used as a major talking point to compel the public to accept this experimental therapy despite the absence of any long-term data.

However, the risk of a trial participant contracting severe COVID (Table S5) was 1 in 21,314 (0.0047%) if they were vaccinated.

If they received the placebo, the risk was still only 9 in 21,259 (0.0423%).

The vaccine reduced the absolute risk of contracting severe disease by 0.038%.

Mainstream media and the CDC never mentioned the minuscule reduction in absolute risk of contracting severe COVID by getting inoculated.

Moreover, with 0.6% of vaccine recipients in the trial suffering a serious vaccine injury (one that results in death, medical or surgical intervention, hospitalization or an impending threat to life), approximately 16 serious adverse events will result for every serious case of COVID prevented by vaccination.

However, when it comes to risk of myo/pericarditis, the CDC states, “Myocarditis and pericarditis have rarely been reported, especially in adolescents and young adult males within several days after COVID-19 vaccination.”

The CDC further states, “While absolute risk remains small, the risk for myocarditis is higher for males ages 12 to 39 years…”

In other words, the risk of adverse events is being considered in absolute terms, not relative.

The CDC presentation slide above (Table 1) indicates the relative risk of contracting myo/pericarditis in males 18 to 24 is 27 to more than 200 times higher than expected in (unvaccinated) young men that age.

When assuaging the public’s fear around vaccine-induced myocarditis, the CDC finds it useful to cite absolute risk — yet when promoting the efficacy of the vaccine, the CDC emphasizes relative risks.

This double standard has been quietly and masterfully employed to reduce vaccine hesitancy and encourage compliance.

4. FDA requires randomized control studies for early treatment medications — but not for boosters

The CDC reports that as of April 8, 98.3 million Americans had received a COVID booster.

On March 29, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized a second booster for the immunocompromised and adults over age 50.

These authorizations were made not because of solid evidence the boosters are effective but rather to remedy the fact that the primary vaccine series has been widely shown to have waning efficacy within a few months.

As reported by The Defender, Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s vaccine division, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, admitted the fourth booster dose approved last week was a “stopgap measure” — in other words, a temporary measure to be implemented until a proper solution may be found in the future.

Despite the lack of solid evidence, the FDA continues to recommend and authorize boosters.

Yet when it comes to early treatment options, the agency holds medicines — including those the agency has already licensed and approved for other uses — to a different standard.

In this CNN interview from August 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warns people not to take ivermectin for COVID because “there is no clinical evidence that this works.”

With regard to hydroxychloroquine, Fauci said, “We know that every single good study —  and by good study, I mean randomized control study in which the data are firm and believable — has s shown that hydroxychloroquine is not effective in the treatment of Covid-19”, as reported by the BBC on July 29, 2020.

Where, then, are the randomized control studies in which the data are firm and believable that show boosters are effective at preventing COVID?

There aren’t any. None have been done.

As of today, the FDA still refuses to authorize the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID despite hundreds of studies that demonstrate significant benefits (ivermectinhydroxychloroquine) in prevention as well as early and late treatment.

The double standard here is blatant. There are no randomized control studies that show boosters are effective in preventing COVID.

Nevertheless, these experimental therapies have the FDA’s blessing while inexpensive, highly effective safe and proven medicines are ignored despite the enormous evidence that supports their use.

5. FDA uses immunobridging to justify Pfizer shots for young kids, but rejects antibodies as indicative of immune protection from COVID

Immunobridging is a method of inferring a vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing disease by assessing its ability to elicit an immune response through the measurement of biochemical markers, typically antibody levels.

The FDA asserts the presence of SARS-COV-2 antibodies is not necessarily indicative of immune protection from COVID.

Moreover, the FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biologics Product Advisory Committee reached a consensus last week that antibody levels cannot be used as a correlate for vaccine effectiveness.

Their decision is consistent with the CDC’s executive summary of a science brief released on October 29, 2021:

“Data are presently insufficient to determine an antibody titer threshold that indicates when an individual is protected from infection.”

Nevertheless, the FDA used immunobridging as a means to justify authorization of the Pfizer vaccine to children ages 5 to 11, as explained in The Defender here and here.

Because there were no deaths or serious cases of COVID in the pediatric trial, the FDA chose to reject its own position (and that of its advisory committee) regarding antibody titers as a correlate for vaccine efficacy.

6. Causation must be proven for vaccine injuries, but correlation suffices for proving vaccine efficacy

When it comes to vaccine injuries the public is often reminded that correlation does not equal causation.

In other words, just because an injury was preceded by inoculation doesn’t mean the vaccine caused the injury.

But what constitutes causation in medicine? A mechanism of action needs to be identified and pathological studies must confirm this mechanism while eliminating other potential causative factors. Causation can be proven only on a case-by-case basis.

Proving causation requires an enormous burden of proof in medicine.

For example, does smoking cause lung cancer? The answer is yes, it can. That doesn’t mean that it will.

However, when it comes to the benefit of medical intervention, such as a vaccine, causation does not have to be established. Correlation suffices.

In the COVID vaccine trials, fewer vaccinated people contracted COVID than unvaccinated ones. Yet there were those who received the vaccine who contracted the disease anyway.

To be fair, this is how all new medical interventions are evaluated. The benefit doesn’t have to be caused by the vaccine in the strictest sense, there just has to be a correlation between vaccination and a relative protective effect.

The more often this happens, the more confident we can be that the outcome wasn’t simply a coincidence.

Likewise, when it comes to assessing the harm of medical intervention, the most sensible outcome to consider is mortality. After all, what would be the point of introducing a vaccine that prevented some deaths while causing more?

Nevertheless, this is, in fact, what we have done with the Pfizer product. The interim results from the Phase 3 trial demonstrated that all-cause mortality in the vaccinated cohort was higher than in the placebo.

This glaring problem gets brushed aside because there were two deaths from COVID in the placebo arm versus just one in the vaccinated cohort, allowing the vaccine manufacturer to claim a 50% efficacy in preventing this outcome.

However, if we attribute a protective benefit to the vaccine in preventing this one fatality, we must also conclude that the vaccine was responsible for the extra death when considering mortality from all causes.

Doing otherwise would be applying yet another double standard.

How the pandemic could have played out differently

To summarize how devastating the use of these double standards in crafting the “safe and effective” narrative was, let’s look at how different the situation would be if we had adopted the opposite standard:

  1. There would have been an extremely low number of deaths from COVID. Very few, if any, autopsies have definitively confirmed that a fatality was caused by SARS-CoV-2. If confirmation by autopsy is the standard, there have been essentially zero deaths from COVID during the pandemic.
    On the other hand, if we presume the deaths registered in VAERS are in fact vaccine-induced fatalities — similar to how the CDC presumed many deaths from COVID — we can affirm there have been more than 26,000 vaccine deaths.
  2. Using absolute risk reduction as a measure of efficacy, vaccines would have been widely rejected as ineffective, providing only a 0.038% risk reduction for contracting severe COVID.
  3. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine would have been readily available for people who got COVID. And for those who got the vaccine but got COVID anyway, these medicines would have been a great alternative to boosters, which wouldn’t have been approved due to the lack of a single randomized control study proving they work.
  4. No children between the ages of 5 and 11 would have received this risky, experimental vaccine as it wouldn’t have been authorized for this age group — because Pfizer’s pediatric trials did not demonstrate any meaningful outcomes in children ages 5 to 11.
  5. The Pfizer vaccine would no longer be in use because interim data demonstrated that all-cause mortality is higher in the vaccinated.

Madhava Setty, M.D. is senior science editor for The Defender.

April 14, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Sweden Saw Second Smallest Increase in National Debt Out of All EU Countries

By Noah Carl | The Daily Sceptic | April 13, 2022

In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, almost every country in the world had a major recession. As this map from the IMF shows, most countries in Europe saw GDP decline by more than 3%, the only exception being Ireland (which in any case has an unusual way of counting GDP).

Despite this, unemployment in the EU only increased by a modest 1.2 percentage points, rising from 6.6% to 7.8% by the third quarter of 2020. One reason why unemployment didn’t rise more during months of lockdown is that governments spent unprecedented sums of money on furlough and other wage-support schemes.

In other words, they paid people to sit at home all day. For example, The U.K.’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme paid furloughed workers 80% of their previous salary, up to a cap of £2,500 a week.

While such wage-support schemes had the benefit of preventing large rises in unemployment, they had the cost of being extremely expensive. Data published by the ONS in January of this year show just how expensive.

The chart below shows change in general government gross debt (as a percentage of GDP) in percentage points from the fourth quarter of 2019 to the third quarter of 2021:

Many countries saw absolutely huge increases in debt. Over just seven quarters, Spain’s debt grew by 26 percentage points, Italy’s by 21 percentage points, and Greece’s by 20 percentage points. The UK wasn’t far behind, logging an increase of 18.7 percentage points.

At the other end of the spectrum, Ireland’s debt grew by less than one percentage point, while Sweden’s grew by only 1.2 percentage points. Of course, Sweden’s strong performance comes as no surprise, given it was the only major European country that didn’t lock down in the spring.

As I noted previously, The Economist ranked Sweden third in a league table of 23 rich countries for overall economic performance during the pandemic. And we know this didn’t come at the cost of Swedish lives – the country actually saw negative excess mortality between January of 2020 and June of 2021.

To compare European countries in a comprehensive way, I plotted change in general government gross debt against age-adjusted excess mortality. (Data were not available for Germany, Ireland, Norway and Switzerland.)

Taking into account both metrics, Sweden was one of the best overall performers in Europe, along with Luxembourg, Denmark and Finland. And it was by far the best performer among countries with a population over 10 million.

By contrast, Eastern European countries and large Western European countries – almost all of which had strict lockdowns – did poorly on both metrics. So lockdown was harmful to the public finances, with little corresponding benefit in terms of reduced mortality.

April 13, 2022 Posted by | Economics | , , | Leave a comment

A picture is worth a thousand words, inflation was ready to go

The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | April 13, 2022

A post on what is maybe the most obvious thing in the world but most can’t see, ignore or don’t want to talk about.

M1 money supply in the US since the ‘60s. It’s amazing how M1 money supply predicts Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and increases six fold, two years early.

Grrrrrr, I’m so angry that Putin has caused all this inflation. Sorry, I forgot to take my ‘triggered’ pills, I’m so easily triggered these days. As Neil points out below, the area highlighted in red should read Trump/Biden.

The inevitable, and only just beginning, conclusion.

Never stop telling the people that overreacted on Covid that their shrieking has caused today’s pain. Otherwise, it will just happen all over again. They selfishly got caught up in thinking about their own mortality without thinking about the complexity of the situation and the consequences that follow.

Government loans were necessary to support low income workers who were being denied a living by the wealthy laptop class but the economy should never have shut down in the first place. Moreover, much of the printed money was fraudulently taken by the wealthy who know how to game the system. I personally have heard many stories of loans being taken out to buy second homes or other assets and this is just the small scale stuff.

And if your argument is “it was necessary to save lives” then predominantly the lives that you saved were the elderly who you trapped and scared witless in their homes or care home rooms. They eventually died anyway, because that is life and what happens when you are old, but instead of happily enjoying those extra 6 months you gave them, they were forced to be alone with maybe the occasional zoom call if they were lucky.

As I’m typing I’m thinking back to a conversation I had with a doctor friend in early March 2020. He asked me if I was worried about dying from the virus. I said that I was more worried about what this is all going to do to the economy to which he replied that I need to get my priorities right.

April 13, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Real James Bond villains wear cardigans

Bill Gates, the WEF, and the WHO are not done with us. It’s time we were done with them.

el gato malo – bad cattitude – april 13, 2022

in history as in literature, a special place of contempt is held for the grand vizier, the guy behind the throne, the power behind the power. it’s a position of great influence but zero accountability, especially if you can subvert the ruler you puppet past the point of being able to scapegoat you.

buying or leading a politician and getting goodies is a process as old as politics, probably older as it was likely the reason the first politician was elected in the first place…

but the truly discerning james bond villain level vizier, well, they just go right ahead and buy their own NGO’s. that’s how you take over the world. space lasers and earthquake machines may be cool, but real conquest usually banal.

get to about the 1 minute mark in this video where you can hear bill speak about talking to donald trump in the white house.

trump asks about looking into some of the ill effects of vaccines.

gates tells him “that’s a dead end, that would be a bad thing, don’t do that.”

this is not a man giving well intentioned advice.

this is a man covering up a crime committed in the service of crony capitalism.

the gates foundation has a longstanding relationship with vaccines that is more than a little sketchy. they were pushing oral polio vaccines in africa LONG after they were known to be unsafe and had actually become the leading cause of polio in the world.

“The Gates Foundation is a leading funder of oral polio vaccination in Africa and around the world, having dedicated nearly $4 billion to such efforts by the end of 2018. As discussed in Forbes in May 2019, Gates has “personally [driven] the development” of new oral polio vaccines and plays a “strategic role beyond funding.”

the US uses ONLY injected IPV polio vaccines. both the US and the EU discontinued use of orals because of side effects including actually causing polio.

A year ago, news outlets briefly shone a light on the fact (a fact that makes public health officials squirm) that oral polio vaccines are causing polio outbreaks. With reports streaming in throughout 2019 regarding the circulation of vaccine-derived polioviruses in numerous African and Asian countries, a CDC virologist confessed, “We have now created more new emergences of the virus than we have stopped.”

… there were 400 recorded cases of vaccine-derived polio in more than 20 countries worldwide.

(author’s note: that’s ~3X the total of all natural polio cases worldwide and of those, only 29 occurred outside of pakistan and 100% of those were in afghanistan. this vaccines caused multiples more polio than the virus itself)

This week, the same story is making the same headlines, with the WHO’s shamefaced announcement that the oral polio vaccine is responsible for an alarming polio outbreak in Sudan—“linked to an ongoing vaccine-sparked epidemic in Chad”—with parallel outbreaks in a dozen other African countries. In fact, between August 2019 and August 2020, there were 400 recorded cases of vaccine-derived polio in more than 20 countries worldwide. Ironically, WHO disclosed this “setback” barely a week after it declared the African continent to be free of wild poliovirus—which has not been seen in Africa since 2016. While African epidemiologists cheerily claim that these outbreaks can “be brought under control with further immunization,” and Sudan prepares to launch a mass polio vaccination campaign, WHO is warning that “the risk of further spread of the vaccine-derived polio across central Africa and the Horn of Africa” is high.

but gates kept pushing them in africa anyway, probably because so many of his pals owned the production and that’s what the gates foundation does. that’s what all these guys do. big business and billionaires are not friends of free markets. they want sure things and it’s cheaper to twist and break arms and buy mandated markets than to compete on a fair playing field.

i have (on excellent, direct authority from a personal friend who i trust implicitly and who spoke directly to the folks involved) the following story about the gates foundation in india:

gates himself came in to speak with the health ministers. he offered them a vaccine for a disease they already had one for. they told him, “no thank you, we already have that one covered.” he told them “well, you need to switch to this vaccine or there will be no gates foundation investment for india.” the one he wanted them to switch to was owned by a “friend of his.” this story was relayed by extremely liberal folks who literally run vaccine programs in india. they heard this conversation directly and have no reason to lie. they were horrified. it was a pay to play stick up. (they still declined)

this is not the sort of conflict of interest that’s helpful in a guy telling the president not to look into vaccine issues. it also stands testament to his morality and inclination. bill gates is as amoral as he is rich. always has been. much of microsoft was stolen from his less machiavellian partners.

i’m presuming this interview above and the discussion with trump were pre-covid because it’s never mentioned and had this been post covid, i find it hard to believe that it would not have been, but it seems more apropos now that ever. obviously, the conflicts of interest certainly did not stop back then and vaccine ill effects are looking like quite the hot topic just now.

and gates is, as ever, right smack in the middle of the dirtiest, most profitable part of it.

it was september 2019. SARSCOV-2 was still not really on the radar. according to many, there was not even an outbreak yet.

that same month, billy made a large investment in a company called bioNtech to allegedly pursue HIV and tuberculosis vaccines. if memory serves, he bought about 1/3 of the company which was entirely preclinical in infectious diseases at the time. they were mostly a phase 1-2 oncology company. this looks like a sweetheart valuation.

obviously, this became a very big deal in a very big hurry. it was their mRNA payload that was licensed by pfizer for their vaccine, a product that went on to be the most profitable drug per unit time in human history. (and possibly the most profitable altogether) bioNtech minted money.

lots of things about this investment have long smelled fishier than a sushi bar dumpster.

but then a funny thing happened with a now vexingly familiar cast of characters.

(read more HERE)

even months later in january 2020, folks like osterholm were still buying the “no signs of human to human transmission” line.

yet somehow, 4 months earlier (and who knows when the due diligence started. might have been 6 or more), gates was putting his money right on the one obscure square that would pay out 100 to one. at a company with near zero footprint in infectious disease. for a virus no one was focused on. whose genetic code would not (allegedly) be initially characterized for 4 more months.

then, in the same odd, sudden miracle that got moderna the NIH science they licensed for their vaccine, bioNtech also had a product and pfizer jumped to license it.

alone, having a wargame for the war that had, unbeknownst to most, already started, might raise eyebrows, but it might also be a coincidence.

but when the folks coming to that wargame have been making big bets on the kinds of weapons that that precise (and only that precise) sort of war would use, well, one might start to sharpen the points on one’s pointy questions.

just what was informing what here?

this idea that “mRNA is magic and you can develop a vaccine in weeks” is complete nonsense. it’s never been true and the rest of the mRNA vaccine timelines stand testament to it. no other vaxx has been forthcoming.

this HAD to have been in the works for a significant period beforehand.

the fix appears to have been deeply in here. somebody was getting some VERY early looks at some tech to vaccinate against a virus no one else even had a copy of. the awareness not just of the pathogen, but the way to code for its spike protein and the impending pandemic seems to have been loose in certain circles long before the rest of us were told.

the NIH seeded moderna. i still do not have confirmation on where bioNtech got theirs, but i have a hunch and it rhymes with “silly plates” and that this might explain the sweetheart deal.

there is really only one story that makes sense to me here on covid origins, and that story is this:

NIH funded eco health alliance run by daszak and in cahoots with folks like baric colored outside the lines with fauci’s grant money. they, in collaboration with the wuhan institute of virology hotwired the hell out of covid viruses from bats engaging in gain of function work WAY outside of safe limits. this was not a weapon. it was work on inoculation. that was daszak’s longstanding focus. we’ll probably never know what happened in wuhan, but the breadcrumbs here are AWFULLY provocative and the sudden appearance of 2 mRNA vaccines, one with the NIH folks that funded EHA at the WIV, one with bioNtech, looks like an offshoot of it. (lots of detail HERE and HERE on the breadcrumbs)

wrapped up in this from the very beginning were load of the WEF gang (who had just run an oddly timely pandemic wargame for a disease an awful lot like covid) and the WHO.

billy gates is neck deep in both, a charter member of the cool kids crony capitalist table at davos and a top funding source for the WHO, donating more than 10% of its budget. it’s clearly a great investment for him as it poops golden eggs in terms of early information and hard sell opportunities for poor countries. it’s a seat at every table that makes you look like a philanthropist while in reality being a lead pipe wielding coercive corporatist.

gates is not a good guy.

he’s a sociopathic nerd with the most unsavory of associates.

and he knows how to play the crony capitalist game with the absolute best of them. the gates foundation has become a barely veiled international influence organization masquerading as a charity.

between gates and china, the WHO will dance to whatever song the two play. and oh, how they will dance.

remember this gem? (i do)

this was a big part of what got the out of control abandonment of 100 years of science based pandemic guidelines rolling.

“hey, let’s throw all the science, data, and history out the window and copy a terrifying authoritarian regime with a human rights record that would make myanmar blush!”

yeah, well, we all remember how THAT worked out…

but this is government. it’s worse than government, it’s trans-national organizational government. these are the people who invented “failing up” where the bigger your screw ups, the higher you get promoted. (if you doubt me, look at who runs the IMF and the world bank some time…)

and so, despite having cheer led for nothing uty pseudoscience, failure, and human ruin, the current plan being put forward is, wait for it, “hey, let’s give the WHO massive, unaccountable globalist powers!”

of course, this was clearly the plan all along if you were paying attention.

note the direct parrot of the WEF “build back better” taking point.

this gang sees every crisis as a chance to try to grab control of the world. and they are at it again.

In a consensus decision aimed at protecting the world from future infectious diseases crises, the World Health Assembly today agreed to kickstart a global process to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, said the decision by the World Health Assembly was historic in nature, vital in its mission, and represented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to strengthen the global health architecture to protect and promote the well-being of all people.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on the many flaws in the global system to protect people from pandemics: the most vulnerable people going without vaccines; health workers without needed equipment to perform their life-saving work; and ‘me-first’ approaches that stymie the global solidarity needed to deal with a global threat,” Dr Tedros said.

they will also force licensing, break patents, and drive health policy at the highest levels.

but here’s the full blown worst of it:

The World Health Organization (WHO) has contracted German-based Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Systems to develop a global vaccine passport system, with plans to link every person on the planet to a QR code digital ID.

Indeed, despite the minuscule threat posed by new variants and dubious-at-best vaccine efficacy, the WHO is adamant that a global QR code-based vaccine passport system is vital for all future health emergencies, not just COVID.

“COVID-19 affects everyone. Countries will therefore only emerge from the pandemic together. Vaccination certificates that are tamper-proof and digitally verifiable build trust. WHO is therefore supporting member states in building national and regional trust networks and verification technology,” says unit head of the WHO’s Department of Digital Health and Innovation Garrett Mehl.

“The WHO’s gateway service also serves as a bridge between regional systems. It can also be used as part of future vaccination campaigns and home-based records.”

got that? this one is going to be digitally verifiable and global. nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, universal, mandatory, trans-national, and administered by an agency completely unaccountable to you and beholden to proven kleptocrats, authoritarians, and crony corporatists. they are basically a subsidiary of china and gates inc.

they will not get any better or more honest next time.

we’re talking about taking one of the most corrupt, captured, and incompetent agencies in the history of bureaucratic bloviation and giving them the keys to the world crisis machine and to an electronic health passport that will be your right to travel and work and eat out and shop and who knows what else. this is the cornerstone of an international social credit system. wait until they add your ESG score and your carbon footprint.

giving this team universal chicken little rights and direct links at highest levels to public policy is bad enough. letting them enable fine grained access into permission to have anything resembling a life will have you eating bugs and tweeting what you’re told faster than you can say #grasshoppers #yummy!

they promised you that in the future you’d have no privacy and own nothing and that you’d been happy.

guess which two promises they’re going to keep?

and government will fall all over themselves to help and to outsource the imposition of the infinite personal tracking and permissioning they have so long salivated over under the pretext of pandemic preparedness. (oops, look, another trojan framing of subjugating masquerading as safety. told you these were EVERYWHERE…)

this is not going to be acceptable or even tolerable.

this group should be disbanded, not granted greater remit.

and they are not done, because the power behind these thrones is ever hungry.

you might be thinking “wow, that was awful” but they are all thinking “wow, that was surprisingly easy. i wonder what we could do if we had some time to get set up beforehand and really run the table?”

these are not good people.

they do not have noble aims nor your best interests at heart.

they are a global aristocracy of surpassing ruthlessness telling scare stories so they can mandate alleged solutions.

they tell you it’s about saving you.

it isn’t.

read the fine print.

follow the money.

the super rich do not like to guess. they do not like to be surprised by trends. it is far more certain and therefore more profitable to force you to buy that which they are selling. the public health grift and the climate grift are all one grift: use government and trans-government to frighten and force people into buying the needless products that you’re going to produce for them.

small investors talk their book. titanic investors force you to buy it.

  • if it’s a vaccine, mandate it and bar all useful therapeutics from market.
  • if it’s a windmill, kill nuclear and inflict absurdist carbon taxes.
  • never let any of it be properly assessed.
  • use fear to drive compliance and compliance to drive mandate.

they will sell you your own collar and leash and demand your gratitude for having done so.

and if you don’t wake up pretty soon, they’re going to get it from you. by force. and you will be powerless to stop it.

the confluence of a global health passport and central bank digital currencies is an extinction level event for personal liberty and privacy.

and make no mistake: gates wants it. the WEF wants it. and most western governments want it.

but they also know that you do not want it. so they need a pretext and a plan and a pile of boring, technocratic yammering to hide it behind. they learned from last time. they saw the cracks we squirmed through and how we got away. and they do not plan to let it happen again. the next one will be air tight. they’ll have the WHO ready to both be able to declare a global emergency and impose ready made verified global digital ID using that fear as a pretext.

if you let them get these pieces into place, you are NOT going to like the endgame.

this has reached the email length limit. check the substack page for an addendum.

April 13, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Testing Mania: Illogical and Harmful

BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | APRIL 12, 2022

This adapted excerpt is from Dr. Scott W. Atlas’ bestselling book, A Plague Upon Our House, published by Bombardier. 

By the time I arrived at the end of July 2020, the administration had already developed a massive testing capacity from scratch. Nearly a million tests per day were being conducted. The effort was led by Admiral Giroir, who was assigned the thankless task of overseeing that project.

I understood why the VP was so excited when he had displayed that simplistic chart on my first visit. And over the next weeks the administration continued to successfully facilitate and distribute tens of millions of point-of-care PCR tests and, later, rapid antigen tests. This was a significant accomplishment, but it was clear from the beginning that the White House did not understand how or when to use testing. To my thinking, it was a response to political pressure more than anything else.

From my very first meeting in the Oval Office back in July and again over subsequent meetings, President Trump expressed great frustration about testing. It was easy to see why. You could not turn on the news, even the most superficial talk show, without the lead story admonishing the administration for “the lack of testing.” For months, the country had been inundated with that message—not just from public health types who had now become household names, but from every pundit, talk show host, and news anchor. It became pure groupthink. Celebrities who had no understanding or expertise at all were now stridently opining about the unquestionable urgency of massive, widespread, on-demand testing.

Reminiscent of stock market frenzies, esoteric technical terms that had formerly been unknown to the public like “contact tracing” now became common parlance. Testing for this virus had turned into a national, indeed, international obsession. And to me, that obsession was not just misguided, it was harmful, creating more fear, more frenzy, more irrational policies. Yes, testing was an essential tool in the pandemic. And yes, months before I was involved in any way in Washington, there had been a failure to develop and deliver enough tests when they were needed the most. But by the time I came to DC at the end of July, a massive capacity to test had been quickly developed. The problem now was that it was not being leveraged to save lives. Schools and businesses were closed; people were cowering in their homes. Meanwhile, older people kept dying by the thousands.

Criticizing the administration about testing was more than a natural extension of that obsessive mindset. It was low-hanging fruit for the president’s political opponents. There had been almost no preexisting testing capacity from the outset, so naturally it would take some time to meet the challenge. The obsessive demand for testing rapidly escalated into a hyperpartisan issue. I remembered Pelosi’s mantra—“test, test, test; trace, trace, trace!”—as if she, or any politician for that matter, had any understanding of the appropriate testing policy. She was not alone, though. That mantra was echoed on every news network, regardless of political leaning. No dissenting opinion was even visible to most Americans.

That political heat provoked the expected reaction in the White House. Long before my arrival, testing became Priority Number One. Beyond an important public health policy question, it was an election season, and a contentious one at that. This environment elevated testing into the priority of the president’s closest counselors, his political advisors at the highest levels, and operationally, therefore, the vice president’s Task Force. Presumably, like all politicians, the president was politically motivated, too.

The conflict, the misjudgment about issues like testing and other advice coming out of the Task Force, occurred when the president was swayed too much by his political advisors instead of believing in his own common sense. That advice matched the message of the Task Force, especially that coming from Redfield and Birx, whose decision-making background was tied almost exclusively to testing. That was one of the many problems stemming from the HIV backgrounds of Birx and Redfield. SARS2 had already spread to millions, and it spread by breathing in close proximity; the role and practical application of testing in a virus like HIV couldn’t have been more different. In the end, it was easy to see how the advice to the president was to focus on testing.

Understandable for everyone, that is, except the president. He never agreed, because to him it made no sense. He couldn’t understand why we would test people who were not sick. It was as simple as that. President Trump talked to me privately in the Oval Office about many different things, but almost always, our discussions came back to the subject of testing. The president spoke very bluntly and resorted to common sense rather than any data. He knew nothing specific about the medical rationale for testing. He went with his gut feeling and placed no filter on stating his opinions.

“Why are we testing healthy, younger people? Why don’t we just test sick people?” he would ask.

“And if we test more, we find more cases. But those people aren’t sick!” he would point out, exasperated, echoing what he said many times to the press.

And that seemed rather straightforward, on its face. His point was simple logic—test and you shall discover “cases,” especially with COVID, since a large number, maybe half or more, of infections were asymptomatic. He was also correct that in clinical medicine, the definition of a “case”—a patient—is not generally based on a test seeking out something in a healthy, asymptomatic person.

That is not how medicine is practiced, a point I tried to explain time and again to the Task Force troika of doctors. I had that perspective, because I am a doctor who has been an expert for decades on the significance of diagnostic tests showing abnormalities without symptoms. And wasn’t it also important to consider that the overwhelming majority of people did not have a serious illness, even when symptomatic? As for mildly ill patients with COVID, “standard of care” for them was strict isolation, with or without testing. 

Testing, though, was the way—the only way—to find infected people who had no symptoms. In high-risk settings, contagious people with asymptomatic infections would be critical to find, no doubt. But the goal, the rationale for testing, became a key point of confusion and disagreement. We needed to protect high-risk people, absolutely. The question was how. We knew who was at risk, so there were two alternatives: 1) indirectly protecting the “vulnerable” by confining and locking down everyone else, or 2) doing everything to protect high-risk people directly.

By the time I set foot in the White House, the nation, with few exceptions, had already been using the Birx-Fauci lockdown restrictions—the indirect strategy—for months. Why was there no admission that the lockdown strategy did not work? It undeniably failed to protect the elderly. Nursing home deaths were piling up, comprising up to 80 percent of total deaths in some states—and in the meantime the lockdown policy was destroying everyone and everything else. Einstein may or may not have said it, but everyone knew it: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Yet the strategy was to continue doubling down on the failed lockdowns that were devastating to so many, especially those outside the “elite.” Reality was being denied, and that remains the case today. Regardless, the answer to the failure, the available tool for those all-in on stopping all cases, was more testing!

Unbeknownst to the White House, several top epidemiologists and infectious disease experts had opined that massive testing of healthy people in settings that were not high-risk was not appropriate at this stage of a pandemic. That was apparent to me from months of lengthy discussions with leading epidemiologists at Stanford and elsewhere. There were already tens of millions of Americans who had been infected; even the CDC estimated a tenfold larger number compared to the confirmed number, as verified by early studies on SARS2 antibodies.

Contact tracing was also “futile” at this point, as Dr. Bhattacharya later wrote in a paper I distributed at a Task Force meeting. Contact tracing was a tool for newly emerging pandemics, new outbreaks perhaps. Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta, a world-renowned epidemiologist, repeatedly stressed the lack of logic in mass testing at this stage and the irrationality of focusing on cases by positive tests. Moreover, PCR tests were detecting virus fragments or dead virus in people who were not even contagious. Yet no one in the Task Force would even entertain this discussion.

The question about the role of testing was fundamental. It wasn’t simply surveillance for the purpose of knowledge—testing was the key to a strategic policy. It was not enough to consider testing through the limited prism of an epidemiologist, the way Birx and Fauci did (even though they, like me, are not epidemiologists). In medical practice, if you referred a patient with low back pain to a neurosurgeon, the most likely outcome was surgery. That’s exactly why I always referred patients to neurologists first—they had more perspective. Some might think of the adage “to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Testing was the main tool in the epidemiology toolbox, their only tool, really. That was very limiting in defining its role in overall policymaking.

At this juncture, the testing was not being done to yield statistically valid surveillance information—a legitimate use of testing in the midst of a pandemic. This was diagnostic testing, with broad-reaching policy aims. In this pandemic, a positive test was a major driver of the policy of quarantining and isolating healthy people with low-risk profiles—shuttering businesses, closing schools— in short, a key to locking down the country. That’s why health policy experts like myself with a broader scope of expertise than that of epidemiologists and basic scientists are needed. Because no one with a medical science background who also considered the impacts of the policies was advising the White House. That lack of perspective was the main source of the tunnel-vision focus on preventing the spread of infections to the exclusion of all other considerations.

It was baffling to me, an incomprehensible error of whoever assembled the Task Force, that there were zero public health policy experts and no experts with medical knowledge who also analyzed economic, social, and other broad public health impacts other than the infection itself. Shockingly, the broad public health perspective was never part of the discussion among the Task Force health advisors other than when I brought it up. Even more bizarre was that no one seemed to notice.

The president clearly understood that testing healthy people for a disease that did not make them sick made little sense and would only lead to confining them. I agreed with that common sense view, although with important exceptions, and sitting in the Oval Office I explained the absurd extension of the logic of “test, test, test.” What was the “necessary” number, anyway? One million per day? Not even close. One hundred million per day? Nope. How about everyone in the country—330 million per day, every day.

Even if you could accomplish that goal, the tests themselves were only a snapshot in time. Seconds later, any given person could become infected. So 330 million per day, every fifteen minutes—maybe that would satisfy the testing mania! No matter how many tests were performed, there would never be enough.

The need for increased testing, but in a smarter, more targeted way, still needed to be explained to the president. And I did just that, repeatedly, whenever I had a chance—in concise, short doses. As always, he listened intently. But he had no time or patience for a detailed presentation. That is one reason why we got along well. I was capable of speaking succinctly, articulating the bottom line. More importantly, he knew I spoke directly, no BS.

From day one, I always reminded myself—if, and whenever, the president of the United States asks for my opinion, I am going to give it.

No holds barred—otherwise, what was I there for? Even on my very first visit to the Oval Office, when he complained about wide-spread testing, I bluntly told him, “You are a hamster on a wheel,” knowing that others in the room would probably recoil at hearing that. But President Trump knew it, even repeating the phrase later himself.

There was, I explained, a more nuanced approach to the policy of testing. There were serious reasons to test, important reasons to actually increase testing, but in a strategic way. The question was how to leverage that testing capability to have the most impact—to save the most lives and to facilitate reopening the country, which was the right goal from both a health perspective and the president’s stated policy.

I thought my approach was obvious. This was simple logic, and it reiterated exactly what I had written months before: let’s focus testing on where it really mattered, and increase it. High-risk environments, where high-risk people lived and worked. Nursing homes, a tinderbox of risk for its elderly, frail residents, were an obvious target. Knowing that cases were brought in by the staff, they needed to be tested, and tested far more frequently, perhaps every day. I also pushed for more point-of-care tests in places independent-living seniors frequented, like senior centers; visiting nurses taking care of seniors at home; and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), where high-risk faculty members were more concentrated.

While the president understood and fully supported this, he remained frustrated, as did I, because his most trusted advisors didn’t fully sign on to a strategic approach to testing. At one point he offhandedly remarked, “You’ll have to convince my son-in-law of that.” Naturally, Kushner and everyone else had been deferring to Fauci and Birx on all things medical. To make matters worse, the Fauci-Birx testing strategy was not merely unfocused; their strategy bizarrely prioritized more testing in the lowest-risk people and the lowest-risk environments—students and schools—while letting the deaths continue in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, where a once-per-week schedule was assumed to be effective.

Politics seemed to be the main driver of those in the inner circle advising the president—that was their job. But the politics were irrelevant to me. The frenzy about testing everyone, everywhere, at all times, including low-risk people in low-risk settings, was incorrect, illogical, and harmful.

The funny thing was that while almost everyone assumed the president was only making excuses, somehow covering up for an “inadequate” testing capacity, there were valid reasons to use testing very differently in order to maximize its benefits. Despite the clamor of the “experts” in the public sphere, and almost the entire media narrative pushing the opposite view, the president happened to be correct. Instead of massively testing everyone on demand, testing should be leveraged to do what everything should have been geared toward in the first place—protecting the high-risk, saving lives, and opening society up as soon as possible.

What was most remarkable to me from the inside was that even though the president expressed his points about testing very clearly, and many top epidemiology experts agreed, the COVID Huddles and other strategic operations were run in a different world. The messaging, the public events, the operational strategy, and the communications team pushed ahead with a focus on producing and delivering more testing to low-risk environments, schools, and communities. Reminiscent of Catch-22, when 150 million antigen tests became available weeks later, I was asked by several people in the COVID Huddle, “Well, now that we have these tests, what do we do with them?”

Scott W. Atlas, M.D., is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health care policy at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and a fellow at Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom.

April 13, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

If Hospitals Are Currently Under Pressure, They Only Have Themselves to Blame

By In-house doctor | The Daily Sceptic | April 10, 2022

There follows a guest post by our in-house doctor, a former senior NHS medic, who says the latest ‘perfect storm’ causing pressure on the health service in parts of the country is more a self-induced squall.

In the middle of last week, several NHS Trusts issued warnings about the acute strain their services were under. The South Central Ambulance Service went so far as to declare a critical incident – normally reserved for a situation in which demands on the service exceed the capacity to manage those demands. I was surprised that so many NHS bodies spread over a wide geographical area issued public warnings about their failure to cope at the same time. Statements referred to high demand on services (hardly news) and lacked any specific detail about critical capacity constraints. Accordingly, the Daily Sceptic asked me to interrogate the available data to work out the extent to which a Covid resurgence might be responsible for the latest ‘perfect storm’ to hit the NHS.

Graph 1 shows daily admissions of Covid positive patients from the community. Admissions have risen in the last few weeks, but seem to be tailing off. Data from Graph 1 have been the subject of hysterical articles in the mainstream press implying the latest Omicron BA.2 subvariant may be triggering a new wave of acute Covid infections. It’s not sensible to interpret Graph 1 as a stand-alone figure without considering contextual information from other datasets.

Graph 1

Graph 2 for example shows information from the Primary Diagnosis dataset. Regular readers will recall this set shows the numbers of patients admitted suffering from acute Covid compared to the patients testing positive for Covid but admitted for another condition. The grey line shows the ratio is gradually falling – in other words the headline figures in Graph 1 are misleading, because nearly 60% of those patients are not actually ill with Covid but admitted for other reasons.

Graph 2

Graph 3 shows the numbers of patients testing positive for Covid in intensive care departments. The rise in cases seen in Graph 1 since the beginning of March 2022 is absent – so although there are more hospital inpatients testing positive for Covid than at the end of February, they are not ending up in critical care. Further, the data from the most recent ICNARC report reveal that the latest tranche of Covid ICU patients have lower oxygen requirements and better respiratory ratios than the cohort from this time last year – in other words, they are not as acutely ill.

Graph 3

Graph 4 is very instructive. It shows the average length of stays of Covid patients up to the end of December 2021. This data was released in March and unfortunately is only complete up to the end of 2021, but it is reasonable to infer that current length of stay is unlikely to be worse now than in December of 2021, due to increased availability of new monoclonal antibody drugs which reduce disease severity for the highest risk patients. Graph 4 expresses average length of stay as the mean average (blue bars) and the median average (orange bars). Both these averages are steadily reducing with the median length of stay being down to four days by the end of December 2021. For the information of statistically curious readers, the median average in this case is probably more representative of the situation as the mean average can easily be skewed to the upside by a small number of very long-stay patients.

Graph 4

Overall, from the available Covid-specific patient data, we see a rise in total positive Covid tests on admission from the community, but fewer than half of these patients are symptomatic for Covid. Very few patients are ill enough to need ICU care and the length of stay for acutely ill Covid patients continues to fall. The vast majority require a few days of supplementary oxygen, intravenous steroids and monoclonal antibody infusion (or other adjunctive therapies) before being fit to discharge. So where is the problem?

Last week Saffron Cordery, deputy CEO of NHS providers, commented that staff absences played a part in the current crisis. Graph 5 shows the data for Covid related staff absences up to March 2nd (the latest figures released) – they don’t seem to have changed much lately and were on a downward trend since the turn of the year. It’s possible they may have started to increase again, but the figures are not yet released for public scrutiny.

Graph 5

My personal suspicion is that Graph 6 shows the main issue causing trouble in hospitals. Graph 6 shows the number of patients in hospitals deemed medically fit for discharge. It is shown as a stacked bar chart, so the blue bar represents the patients who actually were discharged and the orange bar shows patients who were fit for discharge but had to remain in hospital for administrative reasons (often referred to as ‘bed blocking’). Readers will readily notice the ‘weekend effect’ in the figures, and that about 11,000 patients per day are in hospital when they are fit to be discharged – about 10% of the total NHS bed stock.

Graph 6

Over two years into the pandemic, the NHS does not yet seem to have solved fundamental administrative problems in relation to patient flow through the system. I am also aware from personal communication with colleagues that most NHS trusts are still imposing unnecessary Covid protocols which add to the time taken to complete basic episodes of care such as routine operations. This reduces efficiency still further in a healthcare system not renowned for operational efficiency in the first place.

Speaking about the latest crisis, Mark Ainsworth, Director of Operations at the South Central Ambulance Service, said declaring a critical incident meant it could focus its resources on the neediest patients.

Discharging medically fit patients from hospital and exercising a modicum of common sense when compiling Standard Operating procedures might achieve the same effect.

April 11, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment