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 (ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine) 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:
- 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. - 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Putting Big Pharma on Trial in the COVID-19 Era, Part 4
The Hypocrisy of “Misinformation”
By Rebecca Strong · February 16, 2022
I find it interesting that “misinformation” has become such a pervasive term lately, but more alarmingly, that it’s become an excuse for blatant censorship on social media and in journalism. It’s impossible not to wonder what’s driving this movement to control the narrative. In a world where we still very clearly don’t have all the answers, why shouldn’t we be open to exploring all the possibilities? And while we’re on the subject, what about all of the COVID-related untruths that have been spread by our leaders and officials? Why should they get a free pass?
Fauci, President Biden, and the CDC’s Rochelle Walensky all promised us with total confidence the vaccine would prevent us from getting or spreading COVID, something we now know is a myth. (In fact, the CDC recently had to change its very definition of “vaccine ” to promise “protection” from a disease rather than “immunity”— an important distinction). At one point, the New York State Department of Health (NYS DOH) and former Governor Andrew Cuomo prepared a social media campaign with misleading messaging that the vaccine was “approved by the FDA” and “went through the same rigorous approval process that all vaccines go through,” when in reality the FDA only authorized the vaccines under an EUA, and the vaccines were still undergoing clinical trials. While the NYS DOH eventually responded to pressures to remove these false claims, a few weeks later the Department posted on Facebook that “no serious side effects related to the vaccines have been reported,” when in actuality, roughly 16,000 reports of adverse events and over 3,000 reports of serious adverse events related to a COVID-19 vaccination had been reported in the first two months of use.
One would think we’d hold the people in power to the same level of accountability — if not more — than an average citizen. So, in the interest of avoiding hypocrisy, should we “cancel” all these experts and leaders for their “misinformation,” too?
Vaccine-hesitant people have been fired from their jobs, refused from restaurants, denied the right to travel and see their families, banned from social media channels, and blatantly shamed and villainized in the media. Some have even lost custody of their children. These people are frequently labeled “anti-vax,” which is misleading given that many (like the NBA’s Jonathan Isaac) have made it repeatedly clear they are not against all vaccines, but simply making a personal choice not to get this one. (As such, I’ll suggest switching to a more accurate label: “pro-choice.”) Fauci has repeatedly said federally mandating the vaccine would not be “appropriate” or “enforceable” and doing so would be “encroaching upon a person’s freedom to make their own choice.” So it’s remarkable that still, some individual employers and U.S. states, like my beloved Massachusetts, have taken it upon themselves to enforce some of these mandates, anyway. Meanwhile, a Feb. 7 bulletin posted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security indicates that if you spread information that undermines public trust in a government institution (like the CDC or FDA), you could be considered a terrorist. In case you were wondering about the current state of free speech.
The definition of institutional oppression is “the systematic mistreatment of people within a social identity group, supported and enforced by the society and its institutions, solely based on the person’s membership in the social identity group.” It is defined as occurring when established laws and practices “systematically reflect and produce inequities based on one’s membership in targeted social identity groups.” Sound familiar?
As you continue to watch the persecution of the unvaccinated unfold, remember this. Historically, when society has oppressed a particular group of people whether due to their gender, race, social class, religious beliefs, or sexuality, it’s always been because they pose some kind of threat to the status quo. The same is true for today’s unvaccinated. Since we know the vaccine doesn’t prevent the spread of COVID, however, this much is clear: the unvaccinated don’t pose a threat to the health and safety of their fellow citizens — but rather, to the bottom line of powerful pharmaceutical giants and the many global organizations they finance. And with more than $100 billion on the line in 2021 alone, I can understand the motivation to silence them.
The unvaccinated have been called selfish. Stupid. Fauci has said it’s “almost inexplicable” that they are still resisting. But is it? What if these people aren’t crazy or uncaring, but rather have — unsurprisingly so — lost their faith in the agencies that are supposed to protect them? Can you blame them?
Citizens are being bullied into getting a vaccine that was created, evaluated, and authorized in under a year, with no access to the bulk of the safety data for said vaccine, and no rights whatsoever to pursue legal action if they experience adverse effects from it. What these people need right now is to know they can depend on their fellow citizens to respect their choices, not fuel the segregation by launching a full-fledged witch hunt. Instead, for some inexplicable reason I imagine stems from fear, many continue rallying around big pharma rather than each other. A 2022 Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports survey of Democratic voters found that 59% of respondents support a government policy requiring unvaccinated individuals to remain confined in their home at all times, 55% support handing a fine to anyone who won’t get the vaccine, and 48% think the government should flat out imprison people who publicly question the efficacy of the vaccines on social media, TV, or online in digital publications. Even Orwell couldn’t make this stuff up.
Photo credit: DJ Paine on Unsplash
Let me be very clear. While there are a lot of bad actors out there — there are also a lot of well-meaning people in the science and medical industries, too. I’m lucky enough to know some of them. There are doctors who fend off pharma reps’ influence and take an extremely cautious approach to prescribing. Medical journal authors who fiercely pursue transparency and truth — as is evident in “The Influence of Money on Medical Science,” a report by the first female editor of JAMA. Pharmacists, like Dan Schneider, who refuse to fill prescriptions they deem risky or irresponsible. Whistleblowers, like Graham and Jackson, who tenaciously call attention to safety issues for pharma products in the approval pipeline. And I’m certain there are many people in the pharmaceutical industry, like Panara and my grandfather, who pursued this field with the goal of helping others, not just earning a six- or seven-figure salary. We need more of these people. Sadly, it seems they are outliers who exist in a corrupt, deep-rooted system of quid-pro-quo relationships. They can only do so much.
I’m not here to tell you whether or not you should get the vaccine or booster doses. What you put in your body is not for me — or anyone else — to decide. It’s not a simple choice, but rather one that may depend on your physical condition, medical history, age, religious beliefs, and level of risk tolerance. My grandfather passed away in 2008, and lately, I find myself missing him more than ever, wishing I could talk to him about the pandemic and hear what he makes of all this madness. I don’t really know how he’d feel about the COVID vaccine, or whether he would have gotten it or encouraged me to. What I do know is that he’d listen to my concerns, and he’d carefully consider them. He would remind me my feelings are valid. His eyes would light up and he’d grin with amusement as I fervidly expressed my frustration. He’d tell me to keep pushing forward, digging deeper, asking questions. In his endearing Bronx accent, he used to always say: “go get ‘em, kid.” If I stop typing for a moment and listen hard enough, I can almost hear him saying it now.
People keep saying “trust the science.” But when trust is broken, it must be earned back. And as long as our legislative system, public health agencies, physicians, and research journals keep accepting pharmaceutical money (with strings attached) — and our justice system keeps letting these companies off the hook when their negligence causes harm, there’s no reason for big pharma to change. They’re holding the bag, and money is power.
I have a dream that one day, we’ll live in a world where we are armed with all the thorough, unbiased data necessary to make informed decisions about our health. Alas, we’re not even close. What that means is that it’s up to you to educate yourself as much as possible, and remain ever-vigilant in evaluating information before forming an opinion. You can start by reading clinical trials yourself, rather than relying on the media to translate them for you. Scroll to the bottom of every single study to the “conflicts of interest” section and find out who funded it. Look at how many subjects were involved. Confirm whether or not blinding was used to eliminate bias. You may also choose to follow Public Citizen’s Health Research Group’s rule whenever possible: that means avoiding a new drug until five years after an FDA approval (not an EUA, an actual approval) — when there’s enough data on the long-term safety and effectiveness to establish that the benefits outweigh the risks. When it comes to the news, you can seek out independent, nonprofit outlets, which are less likely to be biased due to pharma funding. And most importantly, when it appears an organization is making concerted efforts to conceal information from you — like the FDA recently did with the COVID vaccine — it’s time to ask yourself: why? What are they trying to hide?
In the 2019 film “Dark Waters” — which is based on the true story of one of the greatest corporate cover-ups in American history — Mark Ruffalo as attorney Rob Bilott says: “The system is rigged. They want us to think it’ll protect us, but that’s a lie. We protect us. We do. Nobody else. Not the companies. Not the scientists. Not the government. Us.”
Words to live by.
Report on the FDA’s 4/6/22 Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meeting on the selection of future boosters
While the committee got nowhere on the choice of next boosters, there were a few very important reveals
By Meryl Nass, MD | April 10, 2022
Authorizing vaccine for the 6 months to 5 year old group was never mentioned. Can it be that FDA is finally grappling with the awful data, the longterm risks of vaccination, and will turn away from unleashing these vaccines on our youngest kids? Or is there simply too much money at stake, too many promised school mandates, too many done deals behind closed doors?
Important takeaways
1. Many members and presenters agreed that antibody levels (aka titers) are not a valid measure of immunity (they are not a correlate of protection, and there is currently NOTHING measurable in the blood that is considered a valid reflection of immunity). This admission is HUGE, as it reveals that neutralizing antibody titers can no longer be used to authorize or approve COVID vaccines.
2. Therefore the only way to determine vaccine effectiveness is a clinical trial.
3. No one at the meeting (nearly 30 people) ventured a guess as to what strain might cause the next COVID wave. All seemed to agree there would be another wave, but this was just a guess. However, without a variant you can’t make a vaccine and you can’t conduct a clinical trial to see if the vaccine works. And you can’t possibly do this by June, to make vaccine available for the fall, when FDA and the VRBPAC expect it will be needed.
4. Dr. Peter Marks, the director of the FDA’s vaccine division, CBER, admitted that the 4th booster dose authorized last week was a “stopgap measure”– in other words, he claims it was to kick the waning vaccine efficacy can down the road.
5. Claims were repeatedly made that vaccine still protects against severe outcomes and death, but FDA’s lead scientist for this presentation, Doran Fink, admitted that efficacy is also waning for severe outcomes. I’ll say it is.
6. NO data was presented at all regarding strain choice/prediction of what to use as the antigen(s) for a newer vaccine. It was as if everyone just got the idea to begin thinking about this yesterday.
7. It appeared that neither CDC, FDA nor the VRBPAC advisors wanted to take any initiative or responsibility in figuring out what kind of a vaccine comes next (with the exception of Dr. Kim, who did show initiative about prescribing a way forward). I am not sure any of them wanted to find a way forward.
8. Was everyone dancing around the strain/variant choice because in fact no one really wants a newer vaccine, or because no one wanted to be responsible for picking a loser? I could not tell whether this was a deliberate slow-roll as a means of squeezing out of the COVID vaccine disaster, or whether we were watching an agency and advisors who are highly risk-averse but have no problems with the vaccines.
9. The Public Comments from about 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm (about 5 hours into the meeting) were evidence of outstanding work by independent scientists and heart-rending testimonies by the vaccine injured. There were only 2 people who favored vaccines in the group, one a top Moderna scientist (Dr. Rita Das) who did not actually belong there… had FDA begged Moderna to find someone to speak in favor of boosters?
10. The word transparency was used a lot. Which was peculiar since FDA’s COVID vaccine data, deliberations and decisions have been anything but transparent. Even the reason for today’s meeting is murky.
The link below is to my live blog of the all day meeting.
https://live.childrenshealthdefense.org/admin/fda-advisory-committee/fullscreen-chat
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Of course, what the FDA needs to say, no doubt in some slowly unrolling, self-serving fashion, is that:
- The mRNA platform was the best we could do under the circumstances, but it didn’t actually work out that well.
- Coronaviruses are mutating or lab-tating too quickly to be able to vaccinate effectively against them.
- While we still have contracts for 5 or 10 doses per person, we are going to cancel them and try early treatments.
What they won’t way is that these vaccines sickened many thousands, or millions, and the US will now establish clinics to evaluate and treat the injured Americans who did what their government asked of them, cover their medical expenses and pay them disability.
PS. When the Japanese found that the HPV vaccines caused similar severe injuries, about 8 or 10 years ago, clinics were established to take care of the injured.
Research Shows Persons With Vitamin D Levels Under 20 nmol/l Are 18 Times More Likely To Die From Covid!
By P Gosselin – No Tricks Zone – April 8, 2022
In his book “Herdengesundheit” (Herd Health), German physician and molecular geneticist Dr. Michael Nehls says “Vitamin D would have prevented severe cases of disease and also most Covid-related deaths”.
He is convinced: Vitamin D is the game-changer and suggests the simple act of eliminating the great Vitamin D deficits much of the population now suffers would be far more effective than the current COVID vaccines.
Vitamin D is an important factor in our immune system’s ability to ward off viral infections. To illustrate this Dr. Nehls presents here a chart depicting how much higher mortality is in times of low Vitamin D (November to April):
Source: here.
18 times higher mortality risk
Citing a Belgian study and a Heidelberg study, Nehls reports that in the wintertime, when vitamin D levels are well under 50 nmol/l, you have a four times greater chance of dying from COVID, independent of age or preexisting conditions. And prospects become very dire for persons with a Vitamin D level of less than 20 nmol/l, where the risk of mortality in case of a covid infection is 18 times higher!
Statistically, researchers calculated that with a Vitamin D level of 120 nmol/l, a level that Nehls says is our natural level, a zero mortality rate from respiratory viral infections would be nearly achieved.
Much less infectious
Another interesting feature about Vitamin D levels is that the likelihood of testing positive on a PCR test drops more 50% for a person with a Vitamin D level of over 125 compared to a person with 50 nmol/l. That alone would mean having a healthy Vitamin D level would make you far less infectious. Not even the “vaccines” have been able to achieve that:
Percent corona PCR positive vs. Vitamin D level nmol/l. Source here,
Public health gross negligence
In the interview, Dr Nehls says that the government’s failure to make sure the immune system of people stays strong by ensuring healthy Vitamin D levels is “grossly negligent.” Moreover, health authorities are aware that the Vitamin D levels for the general population are far to low, but they choose to do nothing about it.
“A lack of Vitamin D leads to chronic disease” says Nehls. “With chronic disease the most money gets made. I can imagine there’s an interest not to make the recommendation, and that doesn’t apply just to Vitamin D.”
Nehls recommends taking Vitamin K2 along with Vitamin D to avoid possible side effects.
Beware of “cleverly manipulated” studies
Nehls criticizes studies that claim Vitamin D provides no real health benefit, accusing the authors of improperly conducting the studies in order to get a predetermined result. One study, Nehls said, was “very cleverly manipulated in order to encourage people not to bother taking Vitamin D”.
When asked if it would be recommendable to take Vitamin D as a way to treat vaccine injury, Nehls says “absolutely” and that it is urgently advised to have vitamin D levels of 125 nmol/l if you get vaccinated, which he then says wouldn’t be necessary because at that Vitamin D level, the chances of a serious COVID illness are practically zero.
Vaccinated Have Up To SIX Times the Infection Rate of Unvaccinated, NZ Government Data Show
By Amanuensis | The Daily Sceptic | April 9, 2022
New Zealand is a fascinating country – amazing geography, likeable population, and, unlike its neighbour Australia, most of its wildlife isn’t planning on killing you at the slightest opportunity. It is also fascinating with respect to Covid because its population has a very high vaccination rate across all age groups (well, down to five), but up until recently there has been negligible natural immunity to Covid. Because of these two factors, New Zealand was always going to be of interest as soon as Covid arrived properly, if only to see how its vaccination efforts had protected its population.
For those who missed it, since the end of last year New Zealand has had a succession of Covid waves. These started small, but in the most recent wave, taking place during February and March, infection rates were enormous – if we had these infection rates in the U.K. we’d have peaked at approximately 350,000 cases per day (rather than around 200,000). What’s more, it looks like New Zealand exceeded its testing capacity during that wave, suggesting that peak infections were probably even higher. It is relevant to note that during February and March, New Zealand had over 90% of all the cases it has ever had and most of the rest occurred in January – prior to 2022 New Zealand reported very few Covid infections.
So much for the Covid vaccines protecting against infection – but what do the data look like in detail?
Cases
New Zealand is somewhat helpful in that it does publish daily cases, hospitalisations and deaths by vaccine status; somewhat because it doesn’t allow easy access to anything other than the current day’s report. Thankfully, the Wayback Machine ensures that at least some web pages aren’t forever lost to history. These data were collated for dates since mid February 2022 and smoothed with a seven-day moving average to create a time series of Covid cases by vaccine status.
The first time the above graph popped up on my computer screen I had to go and double check all the data sources – and then I triple checked them. The data shown on the graph are notable for several reasons:
- Firstly the obvious one – during the most recent Covid wave there was a much lower infection rate in the unvaccinated, compared with those that had been given one, two or three doses of vaccine. What’s more, this isn’t a small effect – over the period shown approximately:
- 10% of the triple vaccinated in New Zealand were infected.
- 14% of the single vaccinated were infected.
- An astounding 18% of the double vaccinated were infected.
- Yet only 3% of the unvaccinated appear to have been infected.
- The order of the effect is unexpected – for some time in the U.K. the highest case rates have been found in the triple vaccinated, with case rates in the single and double jabbed much lower. In New Zealand the highest rates are seen in the double vaccinated.
- The data for cases in the double dosed appear to have an earlier peak than seen in the data for the unvaccinated, single jabbed and triple jabbed.
- The fall from peak cases to the most recent data point is also interesting. Case rates in the unvaccinated, single dosed and the double dosed have all fallen approximately 45% since their respective peaks, however, case rates in the triple vaccinated have only fallen approximately 20% since their peak. This is rather concerning, as it suggests that we might find that the boosted population maintain a viral reservoir for Covid, ensuring that case rates take much longer to fall to trivial levels and hindering attempts to get society back to a post-Covid normal.
The infections data from New Zealand allow us to estimate the vaccine effectiveness for the Covid vaccines in the absence of natural immunity.
Unadjusted estimates of vaccine effectiveness against infection as at end of March 2022
These data are in contrast to recent data from the U.K., which show one and two doses of vaccine to have a VE of minus-50% to minus-100%, and the booster to have a VE of around minus-300%. While this sounds counterintuitive, it is possible that we’re seeing a complex interplay between a waning of the impact of the vaccine and the impact of additional vaccine doses:
- The U.K. vaccinated early, allowing for the impact of those early vaccine doses to have waned significantly for those choosing not to top-up their ‘protection’.
- The Covid vaccines appear to have a period of approximately two to three months where their impact on the immune system is different than in later periods; this is possibly due to the creation of short-lived IgA (mucosal) antibodies. In the U.K., booster vaccinations were given in autumn 2021, and thus most individuals will have been beyond this period when the Omicron variant’s first wave appeared in December.
In New Zealand, the timescales are very different: those given the booster dose will still be in the two-three month period where short-lived immune responses dominate; those given two doses will be in the proposed period of maximal vaccine negative impact; while those that chose not to accept the offer of a second vaccine dose will be in the period where vaccine effects are waning.
There’s one more point to add for cases in New Zealand, and it relates to the U.K. For months, the UKHSA has been telling us that one possible reason for us seeing far fewer cases in the unvaccinated compared with the vaccinated is because the unvaccinated have natural immunity following high infection rates previously (presumably because the unvaccinated are reckless and didn’t follow lockdown rules – I imagine that they also ride motorcycles too quickly, set off fireworks indoors and play with matches while filling up the car). These data from New Zealand, which at the time had very few individuals previously infected with Covid, show lower case rates in the unvaccinated without any significant levels of natural immunity, contradicting the claim of the UKHSA and eliminating one of its reasons for ignoring the alarming data.
Hospitalisations
Analysis of the hospitalisations data offered by the New Zealand authorities is made complex by there being no stratification of the hospitalisations by age group, and the lack of complete vaccinations data by age. However, U.K. data show that in recent weeks approximately 95% of hospitalisations were in those aged over 60; assuming that this will also hold true for the New Zealand population allows us to offer a indicative analysis of the likely impact for that age group of the vaccines on hospitalisations in the country.
The analysis is also hindered by the data on vaccine coverage for those aged over 60 not differentiating between those that have had only one dose of vaccine and those that are unvaccinated. This might in isolation from other data appear to be ‘sensible’ – after all, the single dosed have the ‘least protection’ as well as ‘the longest time for protection to wane’. However, the data shown in the previous section suggest that the unvaccinated and those having taken a single dose of vaccine are in no way comparable, and that considering them as a single group could lead to misleading conclusions. Nevertheless, that’s the hand that’s been dealt for us.
The data are somewhat surprising. While those given a booster dose of vaccine seem to have lower levels of hospitalisations than found in the group containing the unvaccinated and those given only one dose of vaccine – as might be expected – the double dosed have significantly higher hospitalisation rates.
Also interesting is the trend in the data:
- Hospitalisations in the unvaccinated/single-dosed appear to peak earliest – we have also seen this effect in U.K. data, usually in the form of dire warnings early in each Covid wave that the only people being hospitalised are the unvaccinated, only for the warnings to go quiet later in the Covid wave when the data move in the opposite direction.
- Hospitalisations in those given two doses of vaccine appear to peak towards the end of the period shown.
- Hospitalisations in the boosted population appear to show little signs of slowing down, let alone reducing, over the period in question. Note also that this group saw a fourfold increase over the time period shown, whereas the double dose and single-dose/unvaccinated group both saw a 25% increase, albeit with an intermediate period with higher hospitalisation rates.
It was not possible to properly disentangle the hospitalisations data for the unvaccinated, but the data suggest that in aggregate those having taken two or three doses of vaccine (when the two groups are put together) have approximately 45% lower risk of hospitalisation than the unvaccinated/single-dosed. It is worth noting that in the U.K. data we see higher hospitalisation rates in the single vaccinated in those aged over 60, compared with the unvaccinated. It is possible that the same pattern is found in New Zealand, only ‘covered up’ by the co-mingling of the data. If this is the case then the apparent protection offered by the vaccine in the two or three dose individuals will be somewhat lower than 45%.
Deaths
The mortality data from New Zealand are also complicated because the health authorities lump together into one group all the unvaccinated and those having taken a single dose of vaccine. Beyond that complication, deaths data can be tricky to analyse, because there are such huge differences in death rates from (or with) Covid by age. Fortunately, the mortality data offered by the New Zealand authorities do include deaths by age group, which allows a finer analysis than was possible with the infections and hospitalisations data.
Covid mortality per 100,000 per week, by vaccination status and age
The above table suggests that while those given three doses of vaccine have a decreased risk of death from (or with) Covid compared with the mortality rate in the strange group called ‘unvaccinated or one dose’, the risk of death is greatest in those given two doses of vaccine.
However, it is possible that New Zealand’s data have a similar pattern to that seen in the U.K. (and elsewhere), where dose effects are complicated by the health of those given each vaccine, namely that those closest to death were spared a dose of vaccine, and thus concentrated deaths into the very small number left in the prior dose group. A comparison of the data for ‘unvaccinated or one dose’ with ‘two or three doses’ suggests that the vaccines do still protect against death, but only to a very low degree in younger age groups.
Covid mortality per 100,000 per week, by vaccination status and age
The data above support the use of vaccination to protect against death from (or with) Covid for those aged over 80. On the other hand, the mortality rate in those aged under 60 is very low, and the estimated vaccine effectiveness in protecting against death for those aged under 80 is only approximately 30% – once again, the real-world vaccine effectiveness estimate is rather low. It is also of note that these rather poor figures for the protection offered by the vaccines against mortality come from a country that started vaccination rather late (summer 2021) and where most of the population were only given their booster doses two to three months ago. These data suggest that the vaccines simply do not offer substantive protection against death for newer Covid variants, rather than it simply being a case of waning vaccine protection.
It is also important to note that the data on the benefits of the vaccine in protecting against death shown above should be treated with caution:
- Data on deaths in the unvaccinated and those given a single dose of vaccine are co-mingled; the New Zealand hospitalisation data suggest that death rates might be greater in the single-jabbed.
- The vaccinated appear to have significant increased risk of catching Covid, which contributes to overall risk of serious disease and death.
- These calculations do not include any consideration of the risk of side-effects and complications following vaccination.
Overall mortality
One other aspect of the data coming from New Zealand that is of interest relating to Covid is excess mortality. These data are of interest because New Zealand managed to keep itself more-or-less clear of Covid until the last few months of 2021, and even then case numbers were very low until 2022, with the result that Covid deaths were negligible prior to 2022. With that in mind, its excess death data between the start of 2020 and the end of 2021 are very interesting.
Many countries around the world had a peak in excess deaths in the first quarter of 2020, followed by a significant reduction in deaths into mid 2020. There has been speculation that this pattern was seen because Covid infections in early 2020 killed the most vulnerable, leaving a period in which there were fewer people left to die. However, New Zealand also has this pattern of excess deaths in the first half of 2020 (black data points in the graph above) without Covid infections, suggesting that the reduction in deaths seen in mid 2020 were a result of lockdown. The reason for the excess deaths in New Zealand in the first quarter of 2020 are not at all clear.
Most countries then saw an increase in deaths towards the end of 2020; this has been explained by a resurgence in Covid cases. However, New Zealand saw a similar pattern without Covid infections (red data points). It is possible that this increase was caused by the impact of the reduced healthcare provision during the extreme lockdown – though there are no data to support this supposition. There are reports that the New Zealand healthcare system experienced its busiest summer (January and February) on record with hospitals across the country reaching ‘crisis point’ and several emergency departments at capacity. The cause of this healthcare pressure is unclear, however.
Perhaps the most interesting data in the graph above are seen in 2021. During the first half of 2021 excess deaths slowly reduced from the high seen at the start of 2021 (green data points), perhaps a result of healthcare provision returning to normal. However, around mid-year the trend reversed and excess deaths started to climb again (purple data points). Again, it must be pointed out that there were very few Covid cases in New Zealand at this time, and negligible deaths. Just about the only unusual things occurring in the country at that time were a lack of international travel, restrictions in day-to-day activities for the population and an enormous mass vaccination campaign using novel, under-tested vaccines.
During 2020-2022, there were approximately 2,000 excess deaths in New Zealand, a significant number in a country with a population of five million. We don’t know the proportion that occurred because of lockdown, vaccines or something else; all that we do know is that they weren’t a result of Covid.
Note on data analysis methods. Infection, hospitalisation and mortality data were obtained from the New Zealand Ministry for Health (using Wayback Machine for historical data). Vaccination data were also obtained from the NZ Ministry for Health. Population data were obtained from Stats.govt.nz. Vaccination data were offset by seven days for the infections analysis to account for the Ministry for Health’s definition of vaccine status at infection. An additional seven days offset was applied for hospitalisation, and 14 days for death, to account for the typical timescales of disease progression.
Amanuensis is an ex-academic and senior Government scientist. He blogs at Bartram’s Folly.
The Hypocrisy of Medical Experts
By Vinay Prasad | April 3, 2022
On the one hand, there are many biomedical faculty who are passionately arguing why 2-4 year olds should be forced to wear cloth masks. (NY City is fighting this in the courts). Even though there is no randomized data, even though cloth masks failed in adults (let alone toddlers), even though it contradicts the WHO, even though it fails common sense, we must keep doing this!
On the other hand, doctors post pictures of them attending industry sponsored academic conferences. Getting drinks and partying. Packed in tight rooms. No masks. Praising each other for their work. Drenched in financial conflict of interest and pro-new and pro-costly bias.
How can both these things be true?
We are facing such a health emergency that we have to mask toddlers by force of law AND we can continue to enjoy entirely superfluous medical gatherings that risk viral spread.
Don’t say it’s vaccines.
Because the vaccinated, boosted 50 year old, elevated BMI doc with comorbidities has far higher risk than the healthy, unvax’d 4 year old.
Don’t say it’s about spreading the virus.
Both can spread the virus to others.
Don’t say it’s about the activities, importance.
The adult’s entirely excessive medical conference is less important than the child’s early education.
COVID-19 policy reveals the selfishness of adults, the indifference to kids, and the hypocrisy of medicine. It’s disgusting to witness and history will judge it poorly.
Twitter locks Dr. Meryl Nass twice for linking to academic articles and explaining them
Meryl Nass, MD | April 8, 2022
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From the Archives
How Bill Gates Premeditated COVID Vaccine Injury Censorship
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | March 30, 2021
In 2000, everything about Bill Gates’ public persona changed. He morphed from a hardnosed and ruthless technology monopolizer into a soft, fuzzy and incredibly generous philanthropist when he and his wife launched the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.1
It was a public relations coup. May 18, 1998, the U.S. Justice Department, in collaboration with 20 state attorneys, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.2 At that time, the company was 23 years old and was ruling the personal computer market. The Seattle Times described the fallout from the antitrust lawsuit:3
“The company barely escaped being split up after it was ruled an unlawful monopolist in 2000 for using its stranglehold on the PC market with its Windows operating system to cripple competitors, such as Netscape’s Navigator Web browser.”
How would the world be different today if the company had been split? Yale law professor George Priest described the antitrust lawsuit as “one of the most important antitrust cases of its generation.”4 In 2002, a court settlement placed restrictions on Microsoft to curb some of its practices for five years.
It was later extended twice and then expired May 12, 2011. The lawsuit had a dramatic effect on “the emergence of an entirely new field called IP (intellectual property) antitrust,” Iowa law professor Herbert Hovenkamp told the Seattle Times.5
Later, large sums donated from the foundation made the news multiple times, including $9.5 million to GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines), a second $7.5 million to GAVI and $6.8 million to the World Health Organization in 2017.6
By June 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, the Gates Foundation’s donations totaled 45% of WHO’s funding from nongovernmental sources.7 Once mainstream media’s attention was no longer on Gates’ antitrust activities and focused on the philanthropist actions of the foundation, Gates publicly turned his attention to vaccinating the world, long before COVID-19.8
Event 201: A Preplanned Pandemic
In a deep dive into the Gates Foundation’s charitable donations, The Nation found there were $250 million in grants to companies where the foundation held corporate stocks, including Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Sanofi and Medtronic. The money was directed at supporting projects “like developing new drugs and health monitoring systems and creating mobile banking services.”9 … continue
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