The Bundestag passes a new Infection Protection Act
As I wrote a few weeks ago, the legal basis for our current regime of unnecessary restrictions and interference in the everyday lives of German citizens expires after tomorrow, but Corona cannot be allowed to end in Germany. The past few weeks have seen fraught negotiations within the coalition government to draft a new Infection Protection Act and continue the circus.
Today, after acrimonious debate, the Bundestag voted in the new legislation. It provides two tiers of ongoing Corona regulation:
1) Automatically and at all times, “basic protection” measures will be available to the federal states. These allow the state governments to impose mask mandates upon local transit and healthcare facilities, and to impose testing requirements on healthcare facilities and schools. Of course, they will all do so. Mask mandates will also continue in long-distance trains and in aeroplanes.
2) State governments will be allowed to impose additional restrictions, including vaccination and testing requirements for restaurants and public events, in the case of so-called “hotspots.” Anytime you encounter English vocabulary in German law, it is a sign of bad things. A vote of the state parliament is necessary to declare a hotspot and these additional restrictions.
The federal states are allowed a transitional period to continue current rules, but this ends on 2 April.
The press is starting to fill with vile articles about the “freedoms” that will be returning to us. The thing is, that these are not freedoms anymore. They have become temporary, seasonal privileges, which can be removed anytime political pressure builds on the state parliaments. A softening of the rules makes things more comfortable in the shorter term, but it extends the political half-life of the Corona regime substantially.
Despite all the crazy discussion in the press and from individual politicians, vaccine mandates appear to be dead in Germany; only about a third of the Bundestag support a universal mandate for adults.
That’s not as good as it sounds: A lot of other members of parliament want mandate-adjacent requirements that are also bad. Andrew Ullmann, from the FDP, has gained some support for his scheme of mandatory vaccine information sessions rather than mandatory vaccination. I agree that forced lectures from ignorant low-level bureaucrats are preferable to forced medical procedures, but the whole scheme also makes me find Andrew Ullmann even more loathsome than I did before.
In case you thought Ullmann was just trying to reach a compromise to ward off the vaccinators, he’s also open to mandates for the 50+ crowd, so he’s not your friend.
Meanwhile, the CDU (and CSU), who are not in government, propose setting up a creepy “vaccination register” so the vaccinators know who to pressure. They want vaccine mandates maybe possibly for certain at-risk groups and for certain professions.
Of 736 Bundestag members, a mere 50 support a resolution against mandatory vaccination, primarily from the FDP and the AfD.
March 18, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Germany, Human rights |
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this data is still badly wrong, but i have some real concerns about who we are allowing to “fix” it and how unsupervised they will be as they do so
of all the insanity around covid that took what would literally have been a baddish flu year would have passed with little comment or historical import and turned it into a mass hallucination of apocalypse, defining “covid death” as a death not “from covid as a proximate cause” but rather as “death from any cause if you had had a positive PCR test for covid in the previous 28-30 days” carries a special pride of place.
many of us stood up and screamed about this right from the beginning.
it made zero sense. nothing else is counted this way (for a reason) and the confluence of doing so with the staggeringly unprecedented mass testing of healthy people with overclocked PCR tests run at a 40 or higher Ct that was so over-amplified that it lacked any clinical relevance whatsoever and was probably kicking out 70-90% rates of non-clinical positivity was madness.
once this disastrous definition was put in place, apocalypse was assured.
but “the experts” ran with it, defended it, and treated as unarguable truth that “800k+ americans died from covid.” but they didn’t. it was not even close.
and now that the panic they drove has ended and further deaths are “inconvenient” they are starting to walk it back over what they claim was a “coding error.”
these charts are telling.
the one on the left is from BEFORE the one on the right.
historical deaths dropped 72k.
huh.
it’s a start, but this is still a glaring, whopping overstatement.
now do “died from, not merely in proximity to a positive PCR sample for” covid and let’s see what happens.
my bet is that you drop the count by another ~70%.
here’s some fun math:
the average person probably has (to be conservative) 2 episodes a year in which they would, at a 40 Ct, test positive for the common cold. this does not mean you were sick, felt sick, were contagious, or any of that. it just means “you had enough viral genetic material in your mucus that someone using 1 trillion X amplification on it before looking for it could find it.”
let’s say these periods last 3 days and if you die in the 28 days following, this gets called a “common cold death” just as we did for covid.
this gives you something on the order of 62 days a year when getting hit by a car would still get counted as “cold death” just as in covid.
that’s ~17% of the year. (and these times will tend to overlap with peak winter seasons when more people die anyhow, but let’s ignore that.)
- about 2.9 million people die in the US annually.
- 17% of 2.9 million is 493,000.
starting to see the problem?
adjust this for higher rates of positive viral tests for the old and infirm who are also more likely to die and this really blows out.
- 53% of US covid deaths were in the 6.9% of population over 75 years old and 75% were in over 65s’.
- only about 8% of deaths were in the 39% of the population under 30.
the number of people who “tested positive for covid” was likely overstated by 70-90% when considering who had actual clinical covid and was sick/contagious.
even the NYT figured this out.
and yet the folks at CDC have not, until recently, even tried to address this. this will have had a proportional effect on reported “covid deaths.”
and now they are seeking to erase them and claiming “coding.”
and i do not trust this one whit.
the CDC have not been straight with us from the beginning and have been pushing definitions they knew to be wrong and studies on interventions, especially masking, that were clear, undeniable fraud.
and i fear we are in for more of the same because the CDC are completely, hopelessly politicized and compromised and their federal paymasters need to ensure that 2 things happen:
- that non-pharmaceutical interventions look like they worked
- that the vaccines they pushed so hard and got so wrong worked
and neither is true.
but i doubt that they will let that stop them. i have spoken many times about how the epidemiology grift is just the climate grift played at 50X fast forward.
many of the tactics and praxis of running and manipulating the scare to grab for cash, prominence and power have been the same and i expect this to remain so. it’s the same playbook.
so let me show you a trick play that has been all too common in climate and that i suspect we’re about to see run here:
when the data goes against you, change the data.
in climate, this has gone on for decades. they literally go back and change the past, cooling the warm periods of the 1930’s and adjusting current temperatures up. bingo, bango, instant warming trend and “unprecedented highs.”
this wonderful gif from steven goddard makes the process clear. and this was LONG before the east anglia “climategate” scandal and the 100 other times they have been caught adulterating data. it’s rife to the point that you pretty much cannot trust anything in the space. i found this so hard to believe i actually once went and checked the paper records myself to comp them to those in the databases. it’s true. they literally inverted the slope of the curve from the 1930’s to 2000 by fiddling the data.
and if you think they will not play this game on covid, i must sincerely ask you: “what movie have you been watching for the last 2 years?”
the fix is about to be in. “adjustments” are going to be applied selectively to make masks look like they worked and vaccines look like they reduced overall societal hospitalization and deaths from covid.
the US data is about to be turned into propaganda.
will this spread globally? who knows? it certainly did in climate. i don’t think this crowd is any nobler and the incentives are the same.
the same people who overstated this situation so aggressively are going to be the ones “fixing” the data to make sure it’s correct.
the same people who pushed and mandated draconian responses that have failed so spectacularly are going to be the ones “adjusting” the data that allows us to assess those outcomes.
we’re already caught them lying who knows how many times.
it is not a conspiracy theory to expect them to lie again.
it is a conspiracy theory to claim they’ll be honest this time.
i recommend grabbing all the data you can now and storing it. the presumption it will be available in unaltered form in the future may not be a good one.
honestly, tracking the changes to the dataset may be the only way to see if the CDC is playing it straight and they look to be disappearing past references already.
this is probably a worthwhile project for some of the datahawks.
March 18, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, United States |
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The New York State Health Department “misled the public” regarding Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes and failed to account for over 4,000 deaths, according to a report from the New York state comptroller.
The report, released on Tuesday, claimed that “instead of providing accurate and reliable information during a public health emergency, the Department conformed its presentation to the Executive’s narrative” and presented data in a way which “misled the public.”
In a footnote, the report clarified that “the Executive” referred to, among others, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and his staff. Cuomo resigned as governor in August 2021 due to sexual misconduct allegations. Before his resignation, critics repeatedly accused Cuomo of covering up Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes.
Deaths in New York nursing homes weren’t accurately reported, according to Tuesday’s release, and the Health Department allegedly “understated the number of deaths” by “as much as 50%.” Whether this was an error or “a deliberate decision” is uncertain, the comptroller declared.
One way in which the New York State Health Department allegedly misled the public was by changing the criteria to only report deaths which occurred in-home, excluding the many deaths of nursing home residents which occurred in hospitals and elsewhere.
“All told, for the nearly 10-month period from April 2020 to February 2021, the Department failed to account for almost 4,100 lives lost due to COVID-19,” the report said.
March 16, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception | Covid-19, Human rights |
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This week has seen several timely reminders that the Covid narrative is not done. It may have lost its number 1 spot at the top of the “news” charts, but it’s not dead. It’s just resting.
While the big red numbers at the top of every front page are now casualties instead of “cases”, the pandemic is simmering on the backburner and can be brought back to boil at a moment’s notice.
In China they are reporting huge spikes in “cases”, numbers not seen since the halcyon days of March 2020. Millions of Chinese citizens are already back on lockdowns, many now need police permission to travel from one province to another.
Giant multinationals are halting production for the near future at least, with the BBC warning that:
The lockdowns have raised concerns that crucial supply chains may be disrupted.
Yes, more supply chain disruption. Just like the war.
Funny how that works out.
It’s not just China either, according to Bloomberg Europe is seeing a “Covid Resurgence” after a “rushed exit” from restrictions, with Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands all reporting spikes in cases.
Germany’s “Covid resurgence” comes just days before the government’s emergency powers are due to expire, and just as they are planning to ease all restrictions.
Funny how that works out.
The alleged “resurgence” is the work of a not one but two “new” variants.
Firstly, Deltacron is back. They’re calling it a “new variant”, but the truth is the recombinant virus was first “discovered” back in early January.
At the time, mainstream articles questioned whether it even existed or was just a lab error.
They’ve decided it definitely does exist now.
The Huffington Post covers this story with the headline:
Why Everyone’s Talking About The Deltacron Variant Again
Why indeed. It’s a real puzzler.
Perhaps aware that “Deltacron” sounds like a villain from Transformers, they’re also pushing another new variant: “Omicron BA.2”.
Now, while that name definitely isn’t silly, it also isn’t very catchy – so they’ve got a cool scary sounding name for it too: “Stealth Omicron”.
It’s called “stealth omicron”, because it’s lacks markers that can be picked up on by PCR tests, meaning testing positive for this strain of the virus will look just like testing positive for the other strains.
Oh, and this variant isn’t actually new either, it was first discovered back in December, to very little fanfare.
But that was then, and this is now, and now experts are “worried”, apparently.
The press are already reporting that it might be the “most infectious disease on Earth”
Meanwhile, Pfizer’s CEO has said that the new variants mean people will need a 4th shot of their vaccine.
Funny how that works out.
All this just serves as a reminder that the Covid story is still there, and they can (and probably will) bring it back whenever they want. Maybe the very moment Ukraine and Russia agree on a peace deal.
Game of Thrones famously used to alternate their season finales, in an odd-numbered season the show would end with a shocking plot twist, and in even numbered seasons it would be an epic battle.
Maybe this will be our new reality, lurching from pandemic to war to pandemic to war, and around and around.
A perpetual cycle of different grand narratives, linked only in their shared consequences: More power for them, less freedom for us.
Funny how that works out.
March 16, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Covid-19, Human rights, Ukraine |
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At least 10 million people worldwide have died from pandemic, but not COVID infection
The subject of excess deaths during the pandemic, meaning deaths more than prior years, has received much attention. Now comes an analysis by medical establishment researchers, funded by Bill Gates and published in the premier establishment medical journal – The Lancet. An establishment publication commented positively on the article.
Before explaining what was intentionally omitted, here are the key findings.
The study covered the initial two years of the COVID pandemic, 2020 and 2021. It estimated excess mortality from the COVID-19 pandemic in 191 countries and territories, and 252 subnational units for selected countries. Global deaths directly attributed to COVID-19 reached 5.9 million, yet estimates put excess deaths during this period at a staggering 18.2 million. In other words, about 12 million people probably died from causes other than COVID infection. Something that the public health establishment should be held accountable for.
At the country level, the highest numbers of cumulative excess deaths due to the pandemic were estimated in India 4·07 million, the USA 1·13 million, Russia 1·07 million, Mexico 798 000, Brazil 792 000, Indonesia 736 000, and Pakistan 664 000. Note that the figure for the USA was about 300,000 greater than the CDC official number of deaths related to COVID infection through 2021.
Among countries, the excess mortality rate was highest in Russia 374·6 deaths per 100 000 and Mexico 325·1 per 100 000, and was similar in Brazil 186·9 per 100 000 and the USA 179·3 per 100 000. The highest estimated excess mortality rate from COVID infection was in Bolivia at 734.9 deaths per 100,000, followed by Bulgaria, Eswatini, North Macedonia, and Lesotho. Iceland had the lowest excess mortality rate 47.8 per 100,000. Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, and Taiwan had negative excess mortality rates, meaning fewer people died than in pre-pandemic years.
The study noted: “Our estimates of COVID-19 excess mortality suggest the mortality impact from the COVID-19 pandemic has been more devastating than the situation documented by official statistics. Official statistics on reported COVID-19 deaths provide only a partial picture of the true burden of mortality.” In other words, something other than the virus is to blame for millions of deaths.
An interesting finding was that studies from several countries including Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands, suggest COVID-19 infection was the direct cause of most excess deaths, most likely because these nations maintained a more open society than other countries.
The study did recognize that there was likely underreporting in some places of direct deaths due to COVID infection.
The key goal in excess death studies is explaining deaths not resulting from COVID infection, and this usually means collateral or indirect deaths from how the pandemic was managed or, more correctly, mismanaged. So many people died from the many impacts of economic lockdowns, inability to get regular medical care, suicides and illegal drug use, for example.
Most interesting in this very detailed study was absolutely no consideration of deaths associated with COVID vaccines. Data from the US, UK and European Union indicate at least several hundred thousand deaths. Many more in other global locations could easily bring the total to several million, especially recognizing that millions of adverse health impacts from vaccines likely will keep explaining deaths for quite some time.
But the study had a very positive view of the benefits of COVID vaccines: “the development and deployment of SARS-COV-2 vaccines have considerably lowered mortality rates among people who contract the virus and among the general population. As a result, we expect trends in excess mortality due to COVID-19 to change over time as the coverage of vaccination increases among populations and as new variants emerge.” This, obviously, is an establishment view of the COVID vaccines despite a large medical literature with an opposite view.
Also interesting was the detailed analysis for states in India that totally ignored what is now widely known. Namely, that a number of states, especially Uttar Pradesh, used ivermectin to successfully wipe out the pandemic.
Death numbers in a number of other nations were also surely reduced by wide use of ivermectin. But this study had no interest in examining this.
US excess deaths
There are reasons to think that the excess death data for the US was an undercount. Various insurance industry officials have spoken about very high death rates not due to COVID infection in working age people. CDC data shows the Millennial generation suffered a “Vietnam War event,” with more than 61,000 excess deaths in that age group in the second half of 2021, according to an analysis by Edward Dowd a former Wall Street executive who made a career of crunching numbers to make big-dollar investment decisions. The Millennials, about ages 25 to 40, experienced an 84% increase in excess mortality in the fall, he said, describing it as the “worst-ever excess mortality, I think, in history.”
Along this same line is this: According to the CEO of OneAmerica, a national life insurance corporation headquartered in Indiana, deaths are up 40% in the third quarter of 2021. These deaths are primarily non-COVID deaths among workers aged 18 through 64. “We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said. The data is consistent across every player in that business. What the data is showing to us is that the deaths that are being reported as COVID deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age people from the pandemic. It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.”
Conclusions
The massive number of all pandemic deaths shows how totally ineffective all actions by governments and public health groups, as well as the medical establishment, have been. It has all been one gigantic pandemic blunder.
Even if there was some undercounting of COVID infection deaths, there probably was at least 10 million pandemic deaths in the two years covered in this study that can and should be blamed on a number of ineffective and unnecessary public health actions. Where is the accountability for these non-infection deaths?
Considering the enormous number of COVID vaccine shots given globally there also should be no praise for them saving lives. In some countries like the US with high rates of vaccination there were still high COVID deaths. What must always be emphasized is that the use of ivermectin and various non-vaccine protocols could have prevented nearly all COVID infection deaths.
March 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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Before ‘The Science’ flipped in the spring of 2020, the consensus among Western epidemiologists was that community masking doesn’t affect the spread of respiratory pathogens like influenza. As Jonathan Van Tam said on April 3rd 2020, “there is no evidence” to support the general wearing of face masks.
Although masks might block large droplets in close-contact settings like hospitals, and thereby slightly lower the risk of transmission, they can’t block airborne particles – which simply go through/around them, and then remain aloft for minutes or even hours.
As a result, large indoor setting like supermarkets, transit stations or classrooms soon fill up with airborne particles – even if everyone’s wearing a mask.
A new Spanish study strongly supports the pre-Covid conventional wisdom that masks don’t stop transmission of respiratory pathogens. The study uses quite a powerful design, which makes its results all the more convincing.
Ermengol Coma and colleagues analysed data on a large cohort of Spanish children aged three to eleven, whom they followed for the first term of the school year from September to December of 2021. During this period, there was a mask mandate in place for children in primary school (aged six and up) but not for those in pre-school (aged three to five).
Hence the researchers compared outcomes between children aged five (who were not subject to the mandate) and those aged six (who were subject to the mandate).
This constitutes a relatively well-controlled comparison, given that the two groups differ by only one year in age. In other words, since six-year olds are only one year older than five-year olds, you wouldn’t expect the rate of transmission to differ much between them for reasons other than the mask mandate.
The researchers estimated the incidence of Covid, the secondary attack rate and the R number separately for the two groups. If mask mandates work, you’d expect all these quantities to be higher among the five-year olds. However, the researchers found no statistically significant differences between the two groups.
What’s more, they found a strong positive association between measures of transmission and age across all the age-groups in their sample. In other words, transmission was higher among older age-groups, despite the fact that these groups were subject to the mask mandate, whereas the younger ones weren’t.
Ermengol Coma and colleagues’ findings suggest that mask mandates do essentially nothing to reduce the spread of Covid. And given that masks plausibly impede both learning and social interaction, on top of being uncomfortable, there’s no good reason for children to wear them. Indeed, the fact that they were ever made to is a scandal.
March 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights |
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A number of people have said it, but — and I feel it, actually: I’m a wartime president. This is a war. This is a war. A different kind of war than we’ve ever had.
-Donald Trump, Former President of the United States
We are at war. All the action of the government and of Parliament must now be turned toward the fight against the epidemic, day and night. Nothing can divert us.
-Emmanuel Macron, President of France
This war – because it is a real war – has been going on for a month, it started after European neighbors, and for this reason, it could take longer to reach the peak of its expression.
-Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, President of Portugal
We are at war with a virus – and not winning it.
-Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General
We must act like any wartime government and do whatever it takes to support our economy.
-Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
The president said this is a war. I agree with that. This is a war. Then let’s act that way, and let’s act that way now.
-Andrew Cuomo, Former Governor of New York
You get the picture. Leaders at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic really wanted us to think of ourselves as combatants possessing a civic duty to fight an insidious, unseen enemy. They wanted us to think that victory was possible. They wanted us to understand that there would be casualties, and collateral damage, and to steel ourselves for the inevitable enactment of broad and unfocused policies that would keep us safe, no matter the cost.
This isn’t all that surprising in hindsight. Politicians love to use war as a metaphor for just about every collective enterprise: the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on cancer. They understand that war provides an incomparable motivation for people to make sacrifices for the greater good of their countries, and when they want to harness some of that motivation, they pull out all the metaphorical stops.
Leaders have been searching for a “moral equivalent of war” for a very long time. The idea was introduced by psychologist and philosopher William James in a speech at Stanford in 1906 that has been credited for inspiring the creation of national projects such as the Peace Corps and Americorps, both organizations aspiring to “enlist” young people into meaningful, non-military service to their country:
I spoke of the “moral equivalent” of war. So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time, of skillful propagandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities.
People are willing to do things during a war that they wouldn’t be willing to do during peacetime. During World War II, it was impossible that German bombers would reach the middle of the United States, yet citizens in the U.S. Midwest practiced blackouts to demonstrate their commitment to defeating an enemy they had in common with people far away. People that actually had to sit in the dark at night to be safe.
This was what leaders using war metaphors were asking from their citizens at the start of the pandemic:
The war metaphor also shows the need for everyone to mobilize and do their part on the home front. For many Americans, that means taking social distancing orders and hand washing recommendations seriously. For businesses, that means shifting resources toward stopping the outbreak, whether in terms of supplies or manpower.
However, it wasn’t just social distancing and handwashing—leaders were asking for cooperation for a complete lockdown, a complete suspension of normal life for a short, yet vague and undefined period of time. There was no thought to how this would actually stop a highly contagious virus, or how people would be expected to return to normal life when the virus hadn’t completely disappeared. There wasn’t a desire to mobilize the engines of democracy for war. Instead, there was a mandate to shut them down. Economic production wasn’t maximized, it was minimized.
I was skeptical of the ability of shutdowns to do much good from the beginning, and was very much afraid that panic and overreaction would have serious consequences. I didn’t use war metaphors because it never occurred to me that they would be in any way helpful. Yet when I advocated trying to minimize collateral damage by allowing people who were less vulnerable to severe disease to resume their lives, others criticized that I was for “surrendering to the virus”. The use of war metaphors wasn’t just limited to leaders, but had quickly spread to the broader population.
Some international leaders tried to resist the temptation to use war metaphors, but ultimately failed. After telling the Canadian House of Commons that the pandemic wasn’t a war, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau couldn’t resist: “The front line is everywhere. In our homes, in our hospitals and care centers, in our grocery stores and pharmacies, at our truck stops & gas stations. And the people who work in these places are our modern-day heroes.” Trudeau later also couldn’t resist using extreme measures normally reserved for wartime to quell a protest led by the very truck stop heroes he had once glorified.
War metaphors have their uses, as explained by sociologist Eunice Castro Seixas:
Indeed, the findings of this study show how, within the context of Covid-19, war metaphors were important in: preparing the population for hard times; showing compassion, concern and empathy; persuading the citizens to change their behavior, ensuring their acceptance of extraordinary rules, sacrifices; boosting national sentiments and resilience, and also in constructing enemies and shifting responsibility.
“Constructing enemies and shifting responsibility” would play an important role later on in the pandemic, when extreme and damaging measures didn’t work and politicians resorted to blaming their own citizens for failing to cooperate with damaging and unsustainable measures.
Some academics, like anthropologist Saiba Varma, warned that:
Analogising (sic) the pandemic to a war also creates consent for extraordinary security measures, because they are done for public health. Globally, coronavirus curfews are being used to mete out violence against marginalised (sic) people. From the history of emergencies, we know that exceptional violence can become permanent.
It was obvious that working class and poor individuals would be disproportionally harmed by draconian COVID measures, and that the wealthy, or Zoom class might actually benefit:
We have, for example, already witnessed how people in already quite privileged positions are the ones who have the ability to work from home, which means that they also have more potential to act according to health recommendations, while others run the risk of being dismissed from their work or of their businesses going bankrupt. Then, there are those in positions identified as socially important functions that cannot choose to avoid risks, particularly in the care sector, where the risk of infection is the largest and shortages of protective equipment exist. Last, not everyone has the resources that are required to participate in pandemic self-governance (knowledge of how and when to shop, having people who can help you, the hospital closest to you having enough respirators, etc.).
The authors to the above article, Katarina Nygren and Anna Olofsson, also commented on the criticism of “lax” pandemic response measures in Sweden, noting how the pandemic response in Sweden was vastly different from that of most other countries in Europe because it emphasized personal responsibility rather than relying on government coercion:
Thus, the Swedish strategy to manage Covid-19 has been largely based on the responsibility of the citizens who receive daily information and instructions for individually targeted self-protection techniques by the Public Health Agency of Sweden’s website and press conferences held by state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, and other representatives of the government. They continue to underline the importance of all citizens playing their part to stop the virus from spreading and avoiding the enhancement of law enforcement’s restrictions on citizens’ rights as long as possible.
With recommendations rather than prohibitions, the individual becomes the unit of decision making towards whom claims of liability are directed if he or she does not manage to act ethically according to social expectations. This kind of governing of conduct, which has been characteristic of the Swedish risk management strategy during the pandemic thus far, targets the self-regulating individual in terms of not only trust but also solidarity. This type of governing was explicitly made by the prime minister in his speech to the nation on the 22nd of March (speeches that are extremely rare in Sweden) in which he particularly emphasized individual responsibility not only for the sake of personal safety but for the sake of others.
The Swedish Prime Minister, Stefan Löfven, used precisely zero wartime metaphors in his March 22, 2020 speech to the nation about the COVID pandemic and the response of the Swedish government. Within the next few months, the Swedish response was, rather predictably, viciously attacked by other leaders and media outlets for its failure to conform to the rest of the reflexive lockdown-mandating world. Yet the Swedish strategy has overall not resulted in much higher deaths, currently 57th in COVID deaths per million inhabitants, well below many of its critics.
There were only a few other notable exceptions in the metaphorical blitzkrieg of war imagery by world leaders in their early pandemic speeches. Another was German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who said of the pandemic, “It is not a war. It is a test of our humanity!” The reluctance of a German leader to use a war metaphor for something that is clearly not a war is both understandable and admirable.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was contemptuous of lockdowns and refused to use war imagery in his speeches, making it quite clear that pandemic deaths had no easy collective solution, only hard choices: “Stop whining. How long are you going to keep crying about it? How much longer will you stay at home and close everything? No one can stand it anymore. We regret the deaths, again, but we need a solution.” Not surprisingly, he was widely condemned for these comments.
Interestingly, much of the analysis and criticism of the use of war metaphors for the early pandemic response came from left-leaning outlets, like Vox, CNN, and The Guardian, where journalist Marina Hyde wrote:
As the news gets more horrifyingly real each day – and somehow, at the same time, more unmanageably unreal – I’m not sure who this register of battle and victory and defeat truly aids. We don’t really require a metaphor to throw the horror of viral death into sharper relief: you have to think it’s bad enough already. Plague is a standalone horseman of the apocalypse – he doesn’t need to catch a ride with war. Equally, it’s probably unnecessary to rank something we keep being informed is virtually a war with things in the past that were literally wars.
An article in Vox warned of the consequences of too much power in the wrong hands:
A war metaphor can also have dark consequences. “If we look at history, during times of war, it’s often been the case that war is accompanied by abuses of medicine and the suspension of widespread ethical norms,” Keranen said, citing Nazi use of medicine or other public health trials that have been conducted on prisoners and war resistors over the years. “Especially now, we need to be on guard for this with the clinical trials and other product development that we’re undergoing, so that in our haste to ‘fight’ the disease with a military metaphor, we’re not giving away our fundamental ethical concepts and principles.”
“Giving away our fundamental ethical concepts and principles” is arguably exactly what happened in many western nations, yet hard-hitting and often accurate criticism from left-leaning media outlets speaking out against the pandemic as a war view had all but gone silent sometime after November 3rd, 2020. Coincidently, the conflation of a pandemic public health response with a military one has all but been erased by an actual war when Russia invaded Ukraine. An actual war tends to bring perspective back to places where it has been lost rather quickly.
With two full years of hindsight, it’s clear that lockdowns were a disaster and that mandated measures caused more harm than benefit, yet this has not prevented leaders from declaring victory, crediting their own brave and resolute leadership for saving millions of lives and routing the viral enemy. However, SARS-CoV-2 isn’t a real enemy—it doesn’t have an intention other than to exist and spread, and it won’t agree to an armistice. Instead, we will have to live with the virus forever in an endemic state, and skip the victory parades.
There’s no evidence that calling the pandemic what it truly was—a global natural disaster, admitting our limitations for “defeating” it, and calling on people to stay calm and avoid acting in irrational fear, would’ve resulted in a worse outcome. It’s more likely that the collateral damage of broad and unfocused responses would have been avoided in a pandemic-as-disaster scenario. There would be no need to view leaders as military commanders or experts as heroes or high priests of absolute truth. Rather, the humble and rational response that Sweden’s leaders enacted and the proponents of the Great Barrington Declaration proposed will be remembered as the least damaging among many others that resulted in failure and defeat on the metaphorical battlefields of public health.
Steve Templeton, PhD. is an Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine – Terre Haute.
March 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights |
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Overview
Medical journals and textbooks are clear that the only way to accurately determine the life-or-death impacts of medical treatments is by measuring “all-cause mortality” in “randomized controlled trials.” Clinical lingo aside, this is simply the number of deaths in studies where people are randomly assigned to receive or not receive a certain treatment.
Though widely ignored in media coverage of Covid-19 vaccines, medical journals describe all-cause mortality in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as:
Beyond the fact that death is the most severe and clearest health outcome, the reason why this measure is more vital than any other is because RCTs control for every possible confounding factor, including those that are not obvious. Thus, a clinical research methods guide states that RCTs are the “gold standard” for research because they provide “a rigorous tool to examine cause–effect,” which “is not possible with any other study design.”
Combined with the use of a placebo so that people don’t alter their mindsets or behaviors as a result of knowing they received the treatment, quality RCTs ensure that any significant difference in the total number of deaths among the people who receive and don’t receive a treatment is, in fact, caused by the treatment. This eliminates subjective judgments about the root causes of death, which is a major point of contention with C-19 vaccines.
Unlike other data which can be easily manipulated through statistical tampering, all-cause mortality in RCTs is straightforward and solid. If an RCT is large enough and properly conducted, a simple tally of all deaths among people who receive and don’t receive a treatment proves whether the treatment saves more lives than it takes.
Underscoring all of the above facts, medical textbooks and journals explain that:
- RCTs are “the pinnacle in clinical design.”
- RCTs are “the best way to study the safety and efficacy of new treatments.”
- “the act of randomisation in a large” RCT “balances participant characteristics (both observed and unobserved) between the groups, allowing attribution of any differences in outcome to the intervention.”
In this case, the “intervention” is FDA-approved Covid vaccines, and the “outcome” is death. That vital data was gathered in RCTs involving 72,663 adults and older children for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. However, the FDA presented these results in a place and manner likely to be overlooked, and no major media outlet has covered them.
The results reveal that 70 people died during the Moderna and Pfizer trials, including 37 who received Covid vaccines and 33 who did not. Combined with the fact that half of the study participants were given vaccinations and the other half were given placebos, these crucial results provide no indication that the vaccines save more lives than they take.
Accounting for sampling margins of error—as is common for medical journals and uncommon for the media—the results demonstrate with 95% confidence that:
- neither of the vaccines decreased or increased the absolute risk of death by any more than 0.08% over the course of the trials.
- the vaccines could prevent up to two deaths or cause up to three deaths per year among every 1,000 people.
Importantly, those results:
- apply to adults and older children averaged as a group, and the vaccines’ benefits and risks can vary considerably for each individual.
- don’t apply beyond the timeframes of the studies, which were limited to several months.
- don’t apply to people who were excluded from the studies, including those who are severely ill, previously had Covid-19, or have an immune disorder like HIV.
- don’t apply to the currently dominant SARS-CoV-2 variant (Omicron).
Just Facts asked four Ph.D. scholars with contrasting views about Covid vaccines and who specialize in the disciplines addressed in this research to critically review it. Among those who did so, they assessed it as follows:
- Jessica Rose, Ph.D. in Computational Biology, Postdoctorate in Molecular Biology, Postdoctorate in Biochemistry: “I rarely have nothing to say when I read something with regard to corrections, but this is accurate and well written.”
- Rodney Sturdivant, Ph.D. in Biostatistics, Director of the Statistical Consulting Center at Baylor University: “The facts, so well laid out in this article, are a call for a very careful review and more study before future shots are recommended. All statisticians and scientists should be demanding better from the FDA.”
The FDA’s Diversion
Despite the import of all-cause mortality, the FDA completely ignored this measure in its press releases announcing approvals of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Moreover, the FDA presented the all-cause mortality figures 20+ pages into technical documents alongside the following statements that distract from their implications:
- Pfizer: “From Dose 1 through the March 13, 2021 data cutoff date, there were a total of 38 deaths, 21 in the Comirnaty [vaccine] group and 17 in the placebo group. None of the deaths were considered related to vaccination.” (Emphasis added.)
- Moderna: “There were 32 deaths during the blinded phase of the study: 16 deaths in the vaccine group, and 16 in the placebo group. None of the unsolicited AEs [adverse events] leading to death were considered vaccine-related.” (Emphasis added.)
Those statements are highly subjective and divert naive readers from the fact that only the total number of deaths in each group can determine whether the vaccines save more lives than they take. This is precisely why medical journals call all-cause mortality the most “objective,” “relevant,” “significant,” and “important” outcome—not deaths considered related to the treatment.
Again, RCTs eliminate the need for subjective judgments like the FDA made in those statements. This is especially important for vaccines since there are untold ways in which they can alter the risk of death beyond direct effects like preventing Covid-19 or causing cardiac events, embolisms, fevers, and seizures.
For example, many fatal car accidents are triggered by fatigue, and the Pfizer and Moderna RCTs found that 70–72% of subjects under the age of 55 reported “fatigue” after receiving the vaccine. There is no objective way to account for all such risks and benefits except by measuring all-cause mortality in RCTs.
Even with direct connections, determining whether a vaccine contributed to a death is often inconclusive. As explained in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research, “when diseases and deaths occur shortly after vaccination with an mRNA vaccine, it can never be definitively determined, even with a full investigation, that the vaccine reaction was not a proximal cause.”
Likewise, the British Medical Journal reported in January 2021 that the Norwegian Medicines Agency investigated the deaths of 13 “very frail elderly patients” which occurred “shortly after receiving” the Pfizer C-19 vaccine and “concluded that common adverse reactions of mRNA vaccines, such as fever, nausea, and diarrhea, may have contributed to fatal outcomes in some of the frail patients.” Yet, the medical director of the agency stated, “There is no certain connection between these deaths and the vaccine.”
Measuring all-cause mortality in RCTs removes that uncertainty, which makes the FDA’s diversion and the media’s failure to report these results all-the-more troublesome.
Inferior Studies
While downplaying and ignoring the most objective data, media outlets, government agencies, and large corporations have touted studies that are rife with assumptions and plagued by fatal flaws. For a prime example, more than 100 such entities publicized the results of a study from the Commonwealth Fund which estimated that C-19 vaccinations prevented about 279,000 deaths and 1.25 million hospitalizations in the U.S. by the end of June 2021.
Those figures were calculated by comparing “observed” Covid-19 trends to a “model,” a type of study design that “rests upon a host of simplifying assumptions” and “cannot be fully” representative of the real world, as admitted by a medical journal that published a similar study.
Another class of subpar study results uncritically parroted by the media comes from “observational studies.” These are studies which observe the outcomes of people “in the wild” who have not been randomly assigned a certain treatment. As a medical journal explains, such studies can “rarely” determine the effects of a treatment because a host of other factors are at play.
For instance, observing the death rates of people who are vaccinated and unvaccinated against C-19 cannot prove whether the vaccines are more helpful than harmful because the odds of death are impacted by numerous factors like these:
- People who are deathly ill or even temporarily ill tend not to get vaccinated, a phenomenon described in medical journals as “healthy vaccinee bias.”
- Older people—who are more likely to die than younger people—have much higher C-19 vaccination rates than younger people.
- Immunocompromised people—who have conditions like cancer and HIV that increase their risk of death—are “plausibly more likely to be offered and seek vaccination” because they are very vulnerable to C-19.
Researchers commonly use statistical techniques to “control” for such variables, but these methods cannot rule out the possibility that other factors are at play. Also, the techniques used to perform such analyses are prone to pitfalls.
The root weakness of observational studies is that they can only measure associations, and association does not prove causation. Although commonly taught in high school math, this vital fact of medical and social science is routinely ignored by commentators, journalists, Ph.D.’s, and government agencies like the CDC.
Highlighting the necessity of measuring all-cause mortality and the fact that observational studies cannot match the reliability of RCTs:
- a 2013 article in JAMA Internal Medicine documents that 80% of “traditional RCTs” measure “mortality, a hard and important end point.”
- a 2018 paper in the European Heart Journal compares RCT and non-RCT studies on drugs to prevent heart failure and finds that:
- the observational studies routinely conflict with the RCTs.
- “it is not possible to make reliable therapeutic inferences from observational associations.”
- RCTs “clearly remain the best guide to the treatment of patients.”
- a 2005 paper in JAMA Internal Medicine presents a “systematic review of randomized controlled trials” on treatments for people hospitalized with uncommon types of pneumonia and reports, “Although mortality is the most significant outcome in a potentially lethal infection, all studies chose clinical failure as their primary outcome. This end point is subjective and should be studied with care. Our review clearly demonstrates its potential for bias.”
- the medical book Principles and Practice of Clinical Research documents that:
- “while consistency in the findings of a large number of observational studies can lead to the belief that the associations are causal, this belief is a fallacy.”
- “a well-designed” RCT “overcomes the major weaknesses of all other types of study designs….”
- a commentary published by the British Medical Journal in October 2020 explains:
- “Sixty years after influenza vaccination became routinely recommended for people aged 65 or older in the US, we still don’t know if vaccination lowers mortality” because “randomised trials with this outcome have never been done.”
- “Observational studies with results in both directions can be cited, and without definitive randomised evidence the debate will go on.”
- “Unless we act now, we risk repeating this sorry state of affairs with Covid-19 vaccines.”
None of this means that models and observational studies are clinically useless. They can illuminate paths for additional research, and in rare cases where their results are mathematically and logically overwhelming, they can estimate the effects of a treatment. However, their results should be taken with a grain of salt, especially if there are RCTs to the contrary.
Underpowered?
Some may argue that the Moderna and Pfizer RCTs were “underpowered,” a medical term for clinical trials that don’t enroll enough participants to detect an effect. However, Moderna enrolled more than 30,000 people in its RCT, Pfizer enrolled more than 40,000, and an additional 10 deaths in the Pfizer vaccine group—or only 0.05% of the vaccinees—would have shown with 95% confidence that the vaccine costs lives on net.
Moderna and Pfizer could have made their RCTs larger, leaving little doubt as to whether the vaccines save more lives than they take, but the companies chose not to do this. In September 2020 after months of people “campaigning for greater openness,” Covid vaccine manufacturers released important information about the designs of their RCTs. Summarizing these plans, the British Medical Journal reported that the studies were not designed to “determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus” or “detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths.”
Explaining why Moderna chose to construct a study that couldn’t determine if its vaccine saves lives, Tal Zaks, the company’s chief medical officer claimed that “too many would die waiting for the results before we ever knew” if the vaccine “prevents mortality.” He also declared that it would cost $5–10 billion dollars to conduct a trial big enough to measure the impact on death and said:
I think the public purse and operational capabilities and capacities we have are rightly spent not betting the farm on one vaccine, but, as Operation Warp is trying to do, making sure that we’re funding several vaccines in parallel.
The first of those excuses is transparently false, as Moderna could have included more participants in the study at the same time. It is also self-contradicting, as Zaks can’t know if “too many would die waiting” if he doesn’t know that the vaccine “prevents mortality.” Furthermore, C-19 vaccine study results are reviewed on a rolling basis, allowing people to act on the available data without waiting for the final results.
Zak’s second excuse is belied by the fact that the U.S. government has enacted six “Covid relief” laws with a total cost of about $5.3 trillion, or 530 times Zaks’ upper-end estimate. Including the money spent by other nations, a handful of $10 billion studies is a relative drop in the bucket.
Larger studies would have narrowed the sampling margins of error and provided more resolution about whether the vaccines save more lives than they cost, but even the current studies are large enough to show with 95% confidence that the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines did not decrease or increase the absolute risk of death by any more than 0.08% over the course of the trials.
Longer-Term Effects
All studies have their limitations, and a major one of the Moderna and Pfizer RCTs is that most of the participants were enrolled for only several months after their second dose of the vaccine. For Moderna, this period was a median of four months, and for Pfizer, it was an average of 3.3 months.
Here again, this weakness of the studies is a direct result of choices made by the vaccine manufacturers. That’s because Pfizer and Moderna began removing people from their RCTs through a process called “unblinding” as they became eligible to receive the vaccines under “local recommendations.”
Those decisions were made in defiance of guidance issued by a global association of 24 healthcare regulatory agencies called the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities. This group includes the FDA and its counterparts in Canada, Australia, China, France, Germany, Mexico, Japan, Nigeria, India, and other nations.
In a statement released in November 2020, this international coalition of government agencies made the following points (and others) about why longer-term RCTs are necessary for C-19 vaccines:
- “To determine that the benefit of a vaccine outweighs its potential risk, regulators need robust and convincing evidence of the safety and efficacy that is obtained from well-designed randomised and controlled trials.”
- “Thus, continued evaluation of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated” participants “for as long as feasible will provide invaluable information.”
- Such information includes but is not limited to “additional and more precise information on longer-term safety,” “potential risks of vaccine-induced enhanced disease,” and “whether protection against Covid-19 disease wanes over time.”
- “Therefore, unless maintaining participants in their randomised treatment groups (vaccinated or control) after a vaccine is approved is clearly infeasible, we recommend that clinical trials should proceed as initially planned with a follow-up of at least one year or more from completion of assigned doses.”
Pfizer and Moderna flouted that guidance, and the journal BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine reported in July 2021 that “placebo controlled follow-up, originally planned for 2 years in many trials, was eliminated after a few months, when manufacturers began offering vaccine to placebo recipients within weeks of receiving emergency use authorisations.”
Decisions to hastily end the RCTs also:
- hindered their ability to detect any effects of herd immunity as the broader society became vaccinated.
- prevent everyone from knowing with certainty how the vaccines protect against recent SARS-CoV-2 variants because the trials ended before Delta became common and before Omicron emerged.
- have proven to be ill-advised given that a wide range of studies are finding that the immunity conferred by the current C-19 vaccines wanes over time, such as:
Since all of those are observational studies, they don’t have the surety of RCTs and are therefore tentative. This is precisely why Dr. Doran Fink, Deputy Director of the FDA’s Division of Vaccines and Related Products Applications, warned at an FDA committee meeting in October 2020:
Once a decision is made to unblind an ongoing placebo-controlled trial, that decision cannot be walked back. And that controlled follow up is lost forever.
Medical ethics require that RCTs be barred or ended if they would undoubtedly harm people. Thus, some allege that the RCTs should have been shortened based on their findings that the vaccines have large and statistically significant effects on reducing the risk of severe Covid-19. The Pfizer RCT, for example, found that the vaccine decreases the incidence of severe Covid-19 among people aged 16 and older by 70.9% to 100.0% (with 95% confidence).
However, those results don’t account for any side effects of the vaccines or whether their benefits wane over time. Moreover, the all-cause mortality data provided no indication that the vaccines were saving more lives than they cost.
What the RCTs Can’t Reveal
One of the most dangerous errors in medicine is interpreting the results of studies more broadly than the evidence warrants. This is called “overgeneralizing,” and academic works on applied statistics warn that “researchers in the behavioral and social sciences almost always want to make inferences beyond their samples,” but this practice “is always risky,” especially when the study subjects are “drastically different” from the people to whom the results are applied.
Media outlets often foster such deadly misinterpretations by failing to report the limits and caveats of studies. A prime example is the main Pfizer and Moderna RCTs that yielded the all-cause mortality data and the widely trumpeted results that the vaccines are more than 90% effective in preventing Covid-19. Beyond the fact that the RCTs were limited to several months, both of them excluded people:
- who are very vulnerable to C-19, like those who are severely ill or have certain immune disorders.
- who are highly resistant to Covid-19 because they previously had the disease and now have natural acquired immunity to it.
Thus, it is extremely important to realize that even though the Covid vaccines did not decrease or increase the absolute risk of death by any more than 0.08% over the course of the RCTs, this only applies to the pre-Omicron era and generally healthy adults who don’t yet have naturally acquired immunity.
Moreover, that result is merely an average, and the benefits and risks of the vaccines could vary widely depending upon factors like weight, age, sex, and a host of other variables. For instance, the risk of being harmed by Covid-19 greatly declines at younger ages, while the major known risks of the vaccine increase.
Summary
On February 5, 2022, President Biden tweeted, “Here’s the deal: Unvaccinated individuals are 97 times more likely to die compared to those who are boosted.” This claim—which Biden did not support but seems to be a gross distortion of a bogus statistic from CDC director Rochelle Walensky—clashes with the most objective, relevant, and important evidence on this matter.
That evidence consists of two large RCTs for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which were the FDA’s main basis for approving them. These studies involved 72,663 generally healthy adults and older children in the pre-Delta/Omicron era who didn’t yet have naturally acquired immunity to C-19. After half of the subjects were randomly given a vaccine and the other half a placebo, 37 people died who received a vaccine, and 33 died who received a placebo.
On a superficial basis, these figures suggest that the vaccines increased the relative risk of death by 13%. However, the death rate in both groups was so small (0.1%) that the difference between them is statistically insignificant. More specifically, the results demonstrate with 95% confidence that:
- neither of the vaccines decreased or increased the absolute risk of death by any more than 0.08%.
- the vaccines could prevent up to two deaths or cause up to three deaths per year among every 1,000 people.
In short, the strongest available evidence shows no indication that the mRNA Covid vaccines save more lives than they take. However, the benefits and risks of the vaccines can vary greatly for each individual.
March 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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This is normalized, monetized, and usually publicly-funded
Let’s talk about the big picture of Pharma’s war against humanity. It is happening throughout the developed world but for the purposes of this article I will focus on data from the U.S.
🚩 FDA-approved drugs, when used as directed, kill about 100,000 Americans every year. (Gøtzsche, 2013, p. 259).
🚩 Hospital errors kill another 100,000 to 150,000 Americans every year. (Makary & Daniel, 2016).
🚩 Opioid overdoses killed 75,693 Americans last year (CDC, 2021).
🚩 Coronavirus shots killed an estimated 150,000 Americans in 2021 (Kirsch, Rose, and Crawford, 2021).
🚩 A gain-of-function virus created in a bioweapons lab in Wuhan, China funded by Tony Fauci killed 350,831 Americans in 2020 and another 615,387 Americans since the introduction of Covid-19 shots in Dec. 2020. About 90% of those fatalities could have been prevented with early treatment. But the regulatory agencies and the medical establishment blocked access to early treatment in order to create the market for deadly Covid-19 shots.
To put this in perspective — in World War II, the Nazis, the Royal Italian Army, and the Imperial Japanese Army killed 405,399 Americans in the space of four years.
In the last two years, Pharma, the corrupt medical establishment, and the captured regulatory agencies are killing about twice that many Americans each year.
That’s what we are up against.
So the problem is not a few bad actors (although there are plenty of those). The problem is that the entire system is rotten:
🚩 The pharmaceutical industry makes terrible products. Political capture is more profitable than innovation, so that’s what they do. The captured regulatory agencies — FDA, CDC, NIAID, NIH — engage in data laundering to make pharmaceutical products appear better than they are. Iatrogenic fatalities are just the tip of the iceberg. Pharmaceutical products also cause cancer, disability, and chronic illness.
🚩 Profit-driven hospitals with their military hierarchy and cult-like work practices are dangerous places.
🚩 The pharmaceutical industry is committing genocide via opioids in economically depressed towns throughout the rust-belt and Appalachia — because it is profitable to do so and because they see poor people as undesirable and expendable.
🚩 The pharmaceutical industry has engaged in genocide via the childhood vaccination schedule since they received liability protection in 1986 — because creating chronic illness in kids is their core business model.
🚩 Under the guise of Covid, the pharmaceutical industry has expanded the genocide to all Americans and people throughout the developed world — by blocking access to effective treatments and injecting people with dangerous genetically modified substances.
🚩 All of bourgeois society — academia, the media, the medical and scientific establishment, government, and Wall Street — conspire to cover up these crimes that now impact nearly every American family in some way.
When we take power we must dismantle this system, prosecute those who created it, and build a decentralized alternative based on actual health.
March 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, NIAID, NIH, United States |
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Data is the foundation of scientific analysis. Without data, researchers are left unable to draw conclusions, which leaves public health experts unable to accurately make recommendations. But that appears to be exactly what the CDC1 and Health and Human Services (HHS)2 are doing. The CDC is hiding data and the HHS is no longer collecting data, which one U.S. official has called “incomprehensible.”3
Since the World Health Organization announced a pandemic, multiple organizations began tracking data, including the number of people who were sick with COVID-19, in the hospital with or had died from it. As I have written, later the number of “cases” was reported. These were people who had a positive PCR test and did not necessarily have symptoms.
Whistleblowers working with attorney Thomas Renz, who is investigating hospital abuses,4 have reported that hospitals are incentivized to admit PCR positive patients, prescribe remdesivir,5 place patients on ventilators and include COVID on death certificates. All told, some believe hospitals could receive up to $100,000 for each patient who meets all the incentivized criteria.6
Of course, “fact” checkers immediately jumped on that claim in an effort to “debunk” what they call “false” information.7,8 But they simply contradicted themselves in the “fact” checking by changing the semantics of how COVID deaths are counted and rewording of how hospitals are compensated for COVID patients from “paid more” to receiving a “bump” in payment. So what’s the difference? They’re still getting paid more for COVID patients.
In analyzing this, it’s important to look at how data of all sorts are collected on you and everyone else in the world. For example:
Nearly everything people do is digitally recorded, analyzed and extrapolated for decision making. You leave a digital footprint each time you use your smartphone or computer. One study showed digital cookies may have lifetimes up to 8,000 years.9 In 2010, it was estimated there were 2 zettabytes (ZB) of data created.10
To put this into perspective, it would take 184 million football fields of 1 GB thumb drives laid end to end to contain the information. Data is so important that the organization that appears to be leading The Great Reset — the World Economic Forum — is also interested in data and estimates there would be 44 ZB of data collected in 2020.11
So, with all that in mind, in a world where data is king12,13,14 the HHS decision to hide COVID-19 data begs the question: What do they want to hide? Are they stopping the flow of data, as opposed to hiding data like the CDC, to reach the same end, where the data are not available for examination and analysis?
HHS Ends Hospital COVID Death Reports
January 6, 2022, the HHS announced15 changes to the reporting requirements for hospitals and acute care facilities. The new guidelines note “The retirement of fields which are no longer required to be reported,” which include the “previous day’s COVID-19 deaths.”
However, according to one news report, the guideline did not receive public attention until January 14, 2022, when it was tweeted by Dr. Jorge Caballero,16 who asked why the government no longer wanted these daily reports beginning February 2, 2022. By January 28, 2022, just like they did with the report on COVID-19 hospital reimbursements, fact-checkers were busy posting viral social media posts claiming Caballero’s conclusions were not correct.
Yet, as I mentioned, the announcement was published on the HHS website — so how could it be false? You can go to the website17 and read it for yourself. Under the section, “The retirement of fields which are no longer required to be reported,” it says: “previous day’s COVID-19 deaths.” So how could fact-checkers “debunk” that?
To create a fact check that claimed this was “false,” the fact-checkers simply changed the headline. So, while the HHS publicly announced they would no longer require hospitals to report deaths from COVID-19, fact-checkers reported the U.S. government was not ending daily COVID death reporting.
MSN18 fact-checkers reported that Nancy Foster from the American Hospital Association had suggested the change could “streamline data collection.” Yet, the HHS system used direct reporting from ICD medical diagnosis codes entered into the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system.
In an emailed statement, Foster reported that she believes the HHS was no longer collecting data because they were receiving comprehensive data from public health agencies, including death certificates reported to the National Center for Health Statistics and used by the CDC in its death data reporting. Despite supporting the HHS decision, the agency did not respond to a request by MSN on the reason for the change.
HHS had worked with major electronic medical records (EMR) manufacturers, so 85% of hospital reporting was programmed into their computer, and you can’t get more streamlined than that. January 2021, Alex C. Madrigal, co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project,19 wrote:20
“In a series of analyses that we ran over the past several months, we came to nearly the opposite conclusion of other media outlets. The hospitalization data coming out of HHS are now the best and most granular publicly available data on the pandemic. This information has changed the response to the pandemic for the better.”
An unnamed federal health official spoke with a reporter from WSWS,21 calling the move to stop reporting COVID-29 hospital deaths “incomprehensible.” The official added, “It is the only consistent, reliable and actionable dataset at the federal level. Ninety-nine percent of hospitals report 100% of the data every day. I don’t know any scientists who want to have less data.”
CDC Is Hiding Data on Booster Shots
February 20, 2022, The New York Times 22 reported that the CDC has not published large parts of the data they collected during the COVID pandemic. In fact, most of the information they collected in the past year on hospitalizations has not been made public.
The CDC published data on the effectiveness of the COVID-19 boosters in people younger than 65 in early February 2022. However, as The New York Times points out, the data did not cover individuals from 18 to 49 years old.23 This also is the group least likely to benefit from the genetic therapy shot, since CDC data24 demonstrate they have some of the lowest rates of severe disease and death.
The New York Post 25 notes that the FDA overruled an expert advisory committee and the CDC overruled their own experts to promote the boosters for all age groups. After ensuring the boosters would be open to all people, the CDC then did not release much of the data despite pleas from scientists.
A look at the published data for those 50 to 65 years shows the booster reduces the risk of death from 4 in 1 million to 1 in 1 million. Further analysis shows that 75% of the additional three people out of 1 million who are helped by the booster shot have at least four comorbidities.26
Unfortunately, since the CDC has not released the raw data, U.S. scientists have had to rely on Israeli data. One study27 published in The New England Journal of Medicine gathered information from 4.6 million people 16 years and older who had received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine. They then compared severe illness and death between those who had had a booster dose and those who had not.
The data showed the group of individuals from 16 to 29 years had zero deaths whether they were boosted or not boosted. Likewise, the group from 30 to 39 years had one death whether they were boosted or not boosted. In fact, the difference in death rate did not rise until the participants were 60 to 69 years, at which point the non-boosted group had 44 deaths and the boosted group had 32 deaths.
In addition to the number of deaths rising in the boosted and non-boosted groups, the percentage of people in those age categories also declined, much like you would find in the general population where the death rate rises as people age.
CDC Claims Data May Be Misinterpreted
Kristen Nordlund is a spokeswoman for the CDC. In her comments to The New York Times,28 she said the data are being slowly released since, “basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.” Another reason she cited was the information may be misinterpreted to mean the vaccines are ineffective.
Nordlund gave a third reason for not releasing the data, saying that the data they have is based on 10% of the U.S. population, which the Times reporter points out is the same sample size used to track influenza each year. Jessica Malaty Rivera is an epidemiologist. She spoke with the Times, saying,29 “We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years.”
She went on to say, “We are at a much greater risk of misinterpreting the data with data vacuums, than sharing the data with proper science, communication and caveats.” In an opinion piece, Staten Island Advance’s Tom Wrobleski characterizes the CDC’s decision, writing about what has happened to most people who have been willing to speak out:30
“We’re told to have faith in the CDC, in Dr. Anthony Fauci, in all the experts who are trained to handle public health crises. But we can’t have trust if vital information is withheld from us.
Because then it becomes a case of, “Shut up and do what we say. We’re the experts. You don’t need to know how we come to our decisions. We know what’s best.” And if you question the received wisdom, you’re suddenly a dangerous person. You’re likened to a terrorist. You’re told you want people to die. You get banned from social media.
If you dare protest, you can have your bank account frozen and your vehicle insurance suspended, as we saw during the Freedom Convoy protest in Canada. You can get trampled by police on horseback.
Withholding information only makes people more skeptical. It breeds suspicion. Or mere doubt. The CDC needs to do better if it wants our trust.”
The Jab Is Deadlier Than COVID if You’re Under 80
With the end of the HHS COVID death reporting system, the only means of tracking COVID deaths will now rely on the collection of data from death certificates at the state level. However, as the unnamed official told the WSWS reporter:31
“… deaths are reported by the counties/states but the process is very slow and many coroners are actually not wanting to cite COVID as the reason, while hospitals rely on diagnoses.”
This last part of the sentence may refer to the hospital incentives for a COVID diagnosis, which increases the potential it would be listed in the ICD codes that were communicated to the HHS. Although the CDC and HHS would like the data to remain hidden, a cost-benefit analysis32 by Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., and independent researcher Kathy Dopp revealed the jab is deadlier than the infection in anyone under the age of 80.
The analysis looked at publicly available official data from the U.S. and U.K. for all age groups and compared all-cause mortality to the risk of dying from COVID-19. Seneff and Dopp wrote:33
“As of 6 February 2022, based on publicly available official UK and US data, all age groups under 50 years old are at greater risk of fatality after receiving a COVID-19 inoculation than an unvaccinated person is at risk of a COVID-19 death.
All age groups under 80 years old have virtually no benefit from receiving a COVID-19 inoculation, and the younger ages incur significant risk. This analysis is conservative because it ignores the fact that inoculation-induced adverse events such as thrombosis, myocarditis, Bell’s palsy, and other vaccine-induced injuries can lead to shortened life span.”
Their analysis is upheld by OneAmerica’s announcement34 that the death rate in working-age Americans from 18 to 64 years in the third quarter of 2021 was 40% higher than prepandemic levels. This finding is stunning since one of the most reliable data points we have is all-cause mortality.
It is a very hard statistic to massage since people are either dead or they’re not. Their inclusion in the national death index database is based on one primary criterion — they’ve died — regardless of the cause. As noted in a (not peer-reviewed) study led by scientist Denis Rancourt, who looked at U.S. mortality between March 2020 and October 2021:35
“All-cause mortality by time is the most reliable data for detecting true catastrophic events causing death, and for gauging the population-level impact of any surge in deaths from any cause.”
Other Insurance Companies Recording Similar Results
Other insurance companies that are citing higher mortality rates36 include Hartford Insurance Group, which announced mortality increased 32% from 2019 and 20% from 2020 before the shots. Lincoln National also reported death claims have increased 13.7% year over year and 54% in quarter 4 compared to 2019. Funeral homes are posting an increase in burials and cremations in 2021 over 2020.37
Similar numbers are also being reported in other countries. A large German health insurance company reported38,39 company data were nearly 14 times greater than the number of deaths reported by the German government. The insurance data are gathered directly from doctors applying for payment from a sample of 10.9 million people.
Despite mass injection campaigns, Silicon Valley software engineer Ben M. (@USMortality) revealed that in the 13 weeks before November 28, 2021, about 107,700 seniors died above the normal rate, despite a 98.7% vaccination rate.40
He also used data from the CDC, census.gov and his own calculations to show excess deaths rising in Vermont, even as the majority of adults have been injected. “Vermont had 71% of their entire population vaccinated by June 1, 2021,” he tweeted. “That’s 83% of their adult population, yet they are seeing the most excess deaths now since the pandemic!”41
It is easy to see why the HHS and CDC would like to hide these numbers from scrutiny. It is becoming more difficult to ignore with each passing day that the infection didn’t kill the number of people health experts claimed and the vaccine is killing far more than the virus.
Sources and References
March 12, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, Covid-19, United States |
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During 24 harsh months of lockdowns, masking, mandates and segregation, the establishment media are trying to spin as “unintended” the serious and often life-threatening fallout from those policies — whether vaccine injuries, economic devastation, spiking child suicidality or the increase in babies and toddlers in need of speech therapy.
The most strenuous form of critique the media seem able to muster is to tell policymakers to apologize for “getting COVID wrong.”
Early on, Children’s Health Defense and other independent voices forcefully called out the government’s sub-rosa agenda as a deliberate, multisectoral effort spearheaded by central bankers and billionaire technocrats to ensnare the world in a global control grid — in other words, modern-day digital slavery.
Viewed from this angle, the “separate mind-boggling events” of the past two years “line up as sequential moves on a worldwide chessboard.”
Restrictive COVID policies and strange central bank maneuvers were no accident but rather the tools of a planned economic takedown of the most vibrant and independent segments of the economy, notably the small “retail, arts and entertainment, personal services, food services and hospitality businesses” that, together with other small business sectors, have “pretty much driven most economic activity throughout our known history.”
The takedown, amounting to what organizations such as Oxfam called “economic violence,” permitted the “biggest asset transfer ever.”
Even before this purposeful economic havoc, the developed world’s richest denizens were living at least 10 to 15 years longer than the world’s poorest.
When experimental injections were added in December 2020 to the mix of COVID interventions, the takedown began taking on even more gruesome dimensions.
Discussing far-reaching vaccine fraud allegedly perpetrated by Pfizer, acting in cahoots with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, former BlackRock investor Edward Dowd has said:
“I think this is the greatest crime ever committed because most of the frauds I’ve been involved with are financial frauds where money’s lost; This has killed and maimed people.”
On March 1, shortly after a board member of German insurance company BKK ProVita expressed public alarm at the widespread killing and maiming — noting that Germany’s federal health agency was underreporting COVID vaccine injuries by a factor of 10 — the executive was summarily fired.
Prominent physician Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, who blazed a hopeful trail with his inexpensive and successful COVID treatment protocol, bluntly characterized the toxic jabs as instruments of “premeditated first-degree murder and genocide.”
Empty words and gestures
Of late, policymakers seem to have decided it’s time for some crocodile tears — and also time to make a show of putting a few COVID restrictions on hold.
For example, consider the recent remarks by Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Walensky said health officials “had perhaps too little caution and too much optimism” about the COVID shots.
For those paying attention, there can be little doubt these words and gestures are less about a policy one-eighty than about window dressing and distraction — as well as perhaps a clever move to “undercut” the momentum of the People’s Convoy currently demanding an end to all emergency measures.
As Jon Rappoport warned, “Although some governments … are lifting COVID restrictions and mandates, we should remember they still hold the power to re-impose those measures at the drop of a hat — for any reason they cook up.”
The key takeaway of the last two years, Rappoport clarified, is that governments’ COVID actions were expedient political decisions — designed to “advance tyranny” — and had “nothing to do with science or morality.”
New York City’s recent actions exemplify the duplicity of the policy rollbacks and the steady behind-the-scenes march of the control agenda. Remember — officials there willingly spent two years gutting the city’s famed restaurants, other small businesses and cultural institutions.
Now, while announcing an easing up of restrictions out of one side of his mouth, the new mayor fired almost 1,500 unvaccinated municipal workers, is insisting on continuing to mask 3- and 4-year-olds (defying widespread parental objections) and is advising businesses they “can still choose to require proof of vaccination.”
Maryland is another jurisdiction that has been indifferent to the distress caused by its policies, ignoring, for example, a leading trade group’s warning that politicians’ capricious on-again, off-again restrictions — promoted as protecting “well-being” — would permanently close four in 10 of the state’s restaurants.
In the state’s largest city, the Baltimore government is suddenly reopening some government services and lifting masking edicts. Yet at the same time, the prominent Baltimore Sun is beating the drum for joint COVID and influenza vaccine mandates.
In thinly veiled praise for coercion and segregation, the Sun argued, “employers and municipalities can certainly require flu vaccinations in order to engage in certain activities.”
Policy hypocrisy is also alive and well internationally. While the World Health Organization (WHO) issues parameters for “carefully relaxing the rules” — parameters so narrow as to be meaningless — Italy and China (the two countries that set the global precedent for lockdowns) are fining individuals who decline mandated interventions or denying them entry to workplaces, restaurants, stores, banks and post offices.
Vaccine passports and digital identities — full speed ahead
As Off-Guardian’s Kit Knightly noted on March 1, “Covid might be dying, but vaccine passports are still very much alive.”
In late February, Knightly also pointed out that the WHO, ominously, is working on an “international treaty on pandemic prevention and preparedness” that would invest the global health organization with the authority to preempt national sovereignty in the management of future pandemics and health challenges.
In a five-part series, Corey Lynn of Corey’s Digs outlined many disturbing implications of the push for vaccine passports. Falsely marketed as a “convenience,” the “passports” eventually will encompass far more than just vaccination records:
“From education to health records, finances, accounts, travel, contact info, and more, will all be linked to your QR code, along with biometrics and fingerprints, then stored on the Blockchain.”
The longer-term aim, said Lynn, is to achieve “full power and control,” down to the individual level, of spending, taxation, education, transportation, food, communications and healthcare, among other domains.
As writer Cherie Zaslawsky sees it, globalists “seek to enslave humanity worldwide in their long-dreamed-of totalitarian utopia. That’s utopia for them — as the ruling class that owns the world and everything in it — and dystopia for We the People.”
Knightly’s March 1 commentary drew readers’ attention to SMART Health Cards — “a covert federal vaccine passport” — rolled out in roughly half the country thus far, including in red states that previously had paid lip service to banning vaccine passports.
Overseen by the Vaccine Credential Initiative (VCI), SMART Health Cards are intended to “issue, share, and validate vaccination records bound to an individual identity” as well as store “other vital medical data.”
A late February article in Forbes boasted that more than 200 million Americans can already “download, print or store their vaccination records as a QR code.”
VCI was created by the federally funded MITRE Corporation (an MIT spin-off), which receives an estimated $2 billion a year from U.S. taxpayers to develop advanced surveillance technology, among other dubious national security pursuits.
MITRE received a $16.3 million CDC contract “to help construct an efficient game plan for the country during the health crisis,” and also spearheaded U.S. Department of Homeland Security efforts to “coordinate” responses among the nation’s mayors and governors.
Members of VCI’s public-private coalition include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, the Mayo Clinic, and the California and New York state governments, as well as “other health and tech heavyweights.” Additional organizations are contributing to the initiative as “data aggregators” and “health IT vendors.”
As an inner-circle member of VCI, New York State has been in the vanguard in building out a digital identity infrastructure intended to be interoperable (able to exchange or assemble data) “throughout the United States and abroad.”
New York’s “Digital Identity” policy, conveniently updated in July 2020, stipulates that citizens, businesses and government employees who conduct online business with the state must go through an “identity vetting” process that could involve authentication via “smart card” or “biometrics.”
Refuse totalitarian tyranny
Almost immediately after the COVID shots began being rolled out, Dr. Mike Yeadon, at one time a chief scientist and vice president at Pfizer, began protesting the push to inject children.
Yeadon also denounced vaccine passports, describing the apps as a sly vehicle for implementing “illegal, medical apartheid” and totalitarian tyranny.
In a more recent talk, Yeadon emphasized that the QR codes’ global interoperability will translate into 24/7 tracking of every person “in that moment, in that spot, down to the individual level.”
To impress upon the public the dangers of allowing a vaccine passport system to take hold, Yeadon described what it would mean to become an “out-person:”
“One example: Your VaxPass pings, instructing you to attend for your 3rd or 4th or 5th booster or variant vaccine. If you don’t, your VaxPass will expire & you’ll become an out-person, unable to access your own life.”
Fortunately, the globalists’ stark vision is becoming increasingly apparent to many members of the public, who are coming to understand, as Ron Paul said, that “authoritarian politicians will always lie to the people to protect and increase their own power.”
Mainstream media outlets also have begun openly worrying that “parents have a long memory when it comes to how their children have been treated.”
And, although it may not seem like it, governmental decisions “ARE affected by what citizens do or don’t do,” said Rappoport, arguing that it’s no time to “let up on pressure.”
The bottom line at this critical juncture is simple — rather than be lulled into complacency (or distraction) by the latest propaganda, just say no and don’t comply.
Don’t wear a mask. Don’t get tested. Don’t accept toxic jabs. And don’t download any QR codes or any other tools (no matter how “convenient”) that allow the build-out of digital tyranny.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
March 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States, WHO |
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Remember Ortrud Steinlein, director of the Ludwig Maximilians-Universität Clinic for Human Genetics? She’s the one who declared that, “due to the serious violation of international law by the autocrat Putin, who is obviously mentally disturbed,” she would be “refusing to treat Russian patients.”
Well, that wasn’t an isolated case. It now looks like various Munich physicians got together and worked out this informal sanctions regime among themselves. A few days ago a similar announcement from a private Munich clinic came to light, dating from around the same time and bearing exactly the same message (only in more inflammatory terms):
Munich, 4 March 2022
Dear Colleagues:
We strongly condemn the invasion of the Russian army with the help of the Belarusian government. Russia is not only attacking Ukraine militarily without any justification – this country also threatens Europe, this country threatens our freedom and democracy.
Therefore, from now on and until further notice, we will not treat Russian and Belarusian citizens.
You can save yourself the trouble of registering.
There will be no exceptions, just as Covid-19 and Mr Putin make no exceptions.
In case of doubt, we will dismiss the patients on the day of surgery.
This also applies to patients who have already registered.
Our solidarity is with the Ukrainian people and our measures are the consequences of the military invasion of the Russian army!
After an uproar, the clinic posted a bright-red apology on their website (and also on Facebook):
The reaction to our letter has greatly affected us and made us think. Our intention was to express sympathy with the Ukrainian people and, as other companies have done, to cut business ties with Russia and send a message of support. This idea was not thought through in its entirety at the time. Some have justly criticised the force of our letter, and we accept this criticism in full. Far be it from us to discriminate or exclude patients on the basis of their origin. We apologise for creating this impression. We will continue to treat Russian and Belarusian patients without hesitation.
As a sign of our solidarity, we are donating 10,000.00 Euros to Doctors Without Borders to support their mission in Ukraine.
Wonder of wonders, their aversion to treating Russians didn’t run that deep after all. As soon as it earned them derision, and failed to gain them any virtue points, they were happy to go back to anaesthetising Russians along with everybody else.
Of course, these three lunatics mention Corona in the course of justifying their lunacy. As I said earlier, Corona has politicised the medical profession, and we are seeing what happens when doctors start to think they have special political responsibilities. And all of those deep philosophical debates we had, about the freedom that doctors enjoy to refuse to treat the unvaccinated, are now bearing fruit.
March 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | Covid-19 |
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