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A Pandemic is Not a War

By Steve Templeton | March 11, 2022

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 | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

The Most Objective Evidence Shows No Indication That Covid Vaccines Save More Lives Than They Take

By James D. Agresti | Just Facts Daily | March 2, 2022

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.

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 | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Pharma now kills more Americans every year than the Axis powers did in all of World War II

This is normalized, monetized, and usually publicly-funded

By Toby Rogers | March 13, 2022

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 | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Health Officials End Reporting COVID-19 Deaths

By DR. Joseph Mercola | March 11, 2022

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 | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

COVID Restrictions May Be Winding Down, But Global Control Is Ramping Up

The Defender | March 10, 2022

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 | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

German Anaesthesiologists: “We will not treat Russian and Belarusian citizens. Our solidarity is with the Ukrainian people!”

eugyppius – March 11, 2022

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 | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

What Can the Stanford Prison Experiment Tell Us about Life in the Pandemic Era?

BY DANIEL NUCCIO | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | MARCH 9, 2022

Late in the summer of 1971, a young man was taken from his home in Palo Alto, California. Then another. And another. Nine in all, they were each spirited away. Eventually brought to a place with no windows and no clocks, they were stripped and they were chained. They were costumed in dress-like gowns. They were given numbers to be used in place of their names. Minor pleasures were redefined as privileges, as were such basic acts as bathing, brushing one’s teeth, and using a proper toilet when one pleased.

In essence, they had become the playthings of the nine other young men who now kept them in that windowless place. Uniformly dressed in khakis pants and shirts, along with large reflective sunglasses, wearing whistles around their necks and brandishing clubs, these nine other young men could have been their classmates, their co-workers, their friends had they met in another place or time, but instead now possessed near absolute control over them, often exercising it for no other purpose than to humiliate and emasculate, to remind their prisoners of their subordinate state.

These uniformly dressed young men in khakis and sunglasses were the guards of the “Stanford County Prison.” They were acting at the behest of Dr. Phillip G. Zimbardo.

The research that Zimbardo carried out that August would go on to become one of the most renowned and most infamous studies in the history of psychology.

As the story is told in most introductory psychology texts, Zimbardo set out to study the power of situational forces and social roles on identity and behavior. To do this, he randomly assigned seemingly normal college students with no criminal history or mental illness to the role of guard or prisoner in a simulated prison, providing little to no instruction.

However, due to the spontaneous and increasingly sadistic actions of the guards and the extreme emotional breakdowns of the prisoners, Zimbardo had to call off the experiment prematurely – but not before making some important discoveries about how social roles and oppressive environments can alter the psyches and actions of normal people in pathological ways.

Zimbardo’s own descriptions of his work tend to be somewhat more grandiose, sometimes bordering on a telling of a Greek myth or biblical tale, a story of something surreal, or as Zimbardo once put, something “Kafkaesque.”

The way the story is presented in the transcript of a slideshow put together by Zimbardo, all who entered that mock prison he constructed seemingly drifted into a dream. The minds of those who stayed too long fractured. Soon, everyone who remained began to metamorphose into nightmarish vermin.

Fortunately though, the good doctor was awakened by the pleas of a young man, who, in the midst of a mental breakdown, begged not to be released so he could prove he was a good prisoner. This is when Zimbardo knew it was time to bring the world he had created to an end.

Critics, however, have questioned many aspects of Zimbardo’s telling of the tale and its often uncritical, albeit less dramatic, retelling in psychology texts.

Only a third of the guards actually behaved sadistically. Some of the prisoners may have faked their emotional breakdowns for early release after being led to believe that as volunteer prisoners they were not permitted to leave the pretend prison.

But perhaps the most damning critique is that from the beginning, Zimbardo, who took on the role of prison superintendent, made it clear that he was on the side of the guards. He did this along with his undergraduate warden, who had researched and designed a rudimentary dormroom version of the simulation three months prior for a project in one of Zimbardo’s classes. He provided the guards with detailed instructions for how to manage the prisoners at the start, then continuously pressed them to be tougher on the inmates as the Stanford experiment went on.

In a documentary, Zimbardo acknowledged that, although he forbade the guards from hitting the prisoners, he explained to them they could instill boredom and frustration. Video from orientation day shows the charismatic professor in his prime instructing his guards, “We can create fear in them, to some degree. We can create a notion of arbitrariness, that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system.”

Some participants later admitted to leaning into their assigned roles deliberately. Given that Zimbardo was paying them $15 per day for their participation, he was essentially their boss at their summer job.

Despite these additional details though, it remains difficult to deny that Zimbardo’s study can tell us something important about human nature.

Maybe like the pre-teen boys with whom Muzafer Sherif played Lord of the Flies in the summers of 1949, 1953, and 1954, the young men of Stanford County Prison came to internalize the identities associated with their arbitrarily assigned groups, but here in an environment intelligently designed for oppression and with a pre-established social hierarchy.

Maybe like the seemingly normal Americans Stanley Milgram instructed to deliver what they thought were increasingly painful shocks to forgetful learners in an alleged memory experiment, they were just obeying authority.

Maybe they simply knew they were getting paid by the day and wanted this arrangement to continue.

Maybe it was a combination of the above.

In the end though, at least a portion of guards and prisoners acted in accordance with their arbitrarily assigned roles, with perhaps members of both groups accepting the authority of those above them, even if it meant behaving with casual cruelty or accepting degradation.

The Current Experiment: Year One

In the early days of the Pandemic Era, our superintendents and wardens took control over all aspects of daily life. They costumed us in masks. Minor pleasures, as well as basic acts such as spending time with family and friends were redefined as privileges. They created fear. They instilled boredom and frustration. They created a notion of arbitrariness, that our lives were totally controlled by them, by the system. We were their prisoners. We were their playthings.

In the early days of the Pandemic Era, there weren’t true guards or arbitrary groupings beyond authorities and prisoners – at least not any with which many truly came to identify.

We had actual law enforcement who could be said to have acted as guards in some places, following the orders of the superintendents and wardens, arresting lone paddle boarders and harassing parents for letting their children have playdates. Yet, most people throughout much of the United States, at least, never quite experienced that level of direct tyranny.

Early on we had the designations of essential and nonessential, but no one really knew what those categories meant. No one derived real power or status from them.

The only distinctions that could be said to have meant anything for Year One of the Pandemic Era were obedient and dissident, masked and unmasked, good prisoner and bad prisoner, although even these lost some meaning by virtue of the fact they were impermanent and fluid and that revealing one’s affiliation was generally a matter of personal choice.

The obedient granted themselves the occasional indulgence, meeting up with romantic partners and taking off their masks in the company of intimates. The unmasked reluctantly donned the symbol of their oppression when required. No one had to state their cognitive dissonance.

It was not until the Covid vaccines became available that more meaningful groups began to emerge.

The Current Experiment: Year Two

As the Covid vaccines became widely available, the objective groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated took shape and it was clear which group our superintendents and wardens favored from the start.

Sometimes they provided direct instructions. Sometimes they did not. But, in locations and institutions where their power was strongest, our superintendents and wardens encouraged and coerced their prisoners to be part of the favored group, allowing them to earn back such privileges as education, employment, and minor pleasures from the lives they once lived. They also made it clear that no one could fully rise from their present state until virtually everyone chose to do so.

Before long presumably normal people came to support vaccination requirements for travel, work, and education.

Some, however, seemed to go a step further and began to fancy themselves as guards.

As in the Stanford County Prison, physical violence was out of the question. So was the kind of pushing, shoving, and nighttime raids Sherif observed among the arbitrarily divided boys chosen for his summer camps. However, various forms of ostracism were deemed fully acceptable, if not encouraged and condoned.

Most explicitly this came in the form of those newly deputized guards who, acting in an official or professional capacity, obediently enforced the orders of our superintendents and wardens, turning unvaccinated patrons away from restaurants, having unvaccinated doctors removed from hospitals, putting unvaccinated pilots on indefinite unpaid leave.

Yet, more subtly, it also took the form of a kind of casual cruelty within families, offices, and schools.

Loved ones required one another to show proof of vaccination to attend weddings and holiday gatherings.

Those who had received medical or religious exemptions from employers and universities with vaccine mandates had, in some places, supervisors that barred them from certain corners of their workplaces and co-workers and classmates, who long ago stopped masking and social distancing around one another, reminded them to keep their distance and demanded that before entering a room they stand in the doorway and give those present time to mask up.

Although maybe not sufficient to foment the kind of alleged breakdowns noted by Superintendent Zimbardo at the Stanford County Prison, at least in the short term, it does not take much to imagine how such day-to-day humiliations could erode one’s sense of belonging or meaning. Long-term, it would seem only natural for such constant reminders of one’s subordinate state to engender feelings of depression, alienation, and worthlessness.

A considerable body of research on ostracism and social exclusion would suggest such feelings would be only natural.

Additional work in the area indicates that those that have been ostracized, to some degree, come to see themselves and their social aggressors as losing elements of their human nature, changing into cold and rigid things lacking agency and emotion.

In other words, our modern prisoners, with time, come to see themselves and their guards as metamorphosing into nightmarish vermin.

Future Directions: Year Three

As time passes though, it is becoming increasingly clear that the effectiveness of the Covid vaccines is not quite what was initially promised.

Numerous studies from California, Israel, Ontario, and Qatar, along with others, have consistently shown that fully vaccinated individuals can still contract and presumably transmit SARS-CoV-2, especially following the rise of the Omicron variant.

Hence the basis for ascribing any real meaning to the groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated, or at least any real meaning from which the former could be granted or derive some form of social or moral superiority over the other, has been demolished.

Subsequently it would only make sense that these groupings dissolve.

Yet, research has shown that people still find meaning in even the most meaningless groupings even when there is no objective reason to do so.

After a year of our superintendents and wardens publicly impugning the unvaccinated as a literal and figurative blight on society standing in the way of a return to normalcy, it is even more understandable that some continue to find meaning in these designations.

Thus, even as some cities and companies drop vaccine mandates, not all have been willing to return the same rights, now termed privileges, to both vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.

Additionally, the family, friends, co-workers, and classmates of some unvaccinated individuals still experience no qualms about behaving with casual cruelty towards them. Some unvaccinated individuals are even still willing to accept their casual degradation.

Maybe like the pre-teen boys with whom Muzafer Sherif played Lord of the Flies, these modern guards and prisoners have come to internalize their new identities, but in an environment intelligently designed for oppression and with an implied social hierarchy.

Maybe like the seemingly normal Americans, Stanley Milgram instructed to deliver what they thought were increasingly painful shocks to forgetful learners in an alleged memory experiment, they are just obeying authority.

Maybe they are trying to do their part to please their superintendents and wardens in the hope of earning some imagined reward.

Maybe it is a combination of the above.

A Final Lesson from Superintendent Zimbardo

Given the world in which we have been living for the past two years, despite the numerous flaws critics have found in both Zimbardo’s work, as well as Zimbardo the man and Zimbardo the legend, it would seem that both he and other members of social psychology’s golden age can still tell us a lot about how social roles, oppressive environments and powerful authorities can alter the psyches and actions of normal people in pathological ways.

But perhaps one of the last lessons Zimbardo can teach us is more a reminder of something George Orwell wrote in 1984 : “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past”.

Throughout his career Zimbardo appears to have actively worked to write his own myth and influenced the fields of psychology and criminal justice for decades.

Hence, perhaps as long as those who worked to give social or moral meaning to the groupings of vaccinated and unvaccinated are allowed to write the myth of how the public policies and interpersonal behaviors that followed contributed to delivering us to our returning semblance of normalcy, the more likely we will be to continue to have a society of guards and prisoners who act with casual cruelty and accept degradation as we move forward into the future.

Daniel Nuccio holds master’s degrees in both psychology and biology. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in biology at Northern Illinois University studying host-microbe relationships. He is also a regular contributor to The College Fix where he writes about COVID, mental health, and other topics.

March 10, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Who Changed the Scientific Conclusions of a Paper that Could Have Saved Millions? At Last, We May Have a Name.

FLCCC Alliance | March 8, 2022

This is a scandal of immense proportions that warrants an immediate investigation.

First, let’s set the stage:

— Over one year ago, there were ample peer-reviewed, randomized controlled trials that provided strong evidence on ivermectin’s efficacy as a treatment for COVID in every disease phase.

— A paper considering these many studies was written by lead author Dr. Andrew Hill at the University of Liverpool for the World Health Organization’s COVID Guideline Development Group. Hill was an early and vigorous proponent for ivermectin. His paper showed that ivermectin could reduce deaths by 75% if used throughout the world.

— Inexplicably, just days before its publication, the paper appeared on a pre-print server, with its conclusions changed. Instead of concluding that ivermectin—one of the world’s safest and most inexpensive drugs— should be rolled out globally, it now concluded that more studies on ivermectin were needed before it could be recommended worldwide. Given the totality of scientific evidence for ivermectin, it was a stunning—actually shocking—reversal by Dr. Hill.

—In an urgent Zoom call to Dr. Hill initiated by Dr. Tess Lawrie, Director of the Evidence-based Medicine Consultancy, Dr. Hill admitted to her that one of his study’s sponsors, Unitaid, had a say in the conclusions of his paper. But he would not divulge the name(s) of those who altered the paper’s conclusions.

But now, “The Digger” on Substack (aka producer/director Phil Harper) has revealed the name of the person who could have edited the paper’s conclusions—which led to the WHO’s non-recommendation of the use of ivermectin. That decision could have led to the unnecessary deaths of millions across the world.

GASP.

Mr. Harper studied the PDF of the paper, wanting to learn the identity of its “ghost” author. “The hope was that some artifact on the PDF would reveal something, maybe a font was different, maybe there was a hidden comment, maybe some tracked changes had been saved to the document,” said Harper. “None of those lines of inquiry came to anything.”

Then it came to him. Was it in the PDF’s metadata? “Sometimes it’s the most obvious of things,” Harper writes. “The ‘v1_stamped’ version of the paper did indeed have metadata. It even had author information inside the metadata. Expecting to see Andrew Hill listed as the author, instead, I saw a name I recognized. Andrew Owen.

“Unless someone used his computer, Andrew Owen has his digital fingerprint on the Andrew Hill paper.”

Professor Andrew Owen is the person who allegedly edited the critical Andrew Hill paper on Ivermectin. He was also in receipt of consultancy fees from pharmaceutical companies with competing products.

As it turns out, Andrew Owen is a Professor of Pharmacology & Therapeutics and co-Director of the Centre of Excellence in Long-acting Therapeutics (CELT) at the University of Liverpool. He is also scientific advisor to the WHO’s COVID-19 Guideline Development Group. Just days before Dr. Hill’s paper was to be published, a $40M grant from Unitaid, the paper’s sponsor, was given to CELT —of which Owen is the project lead. “The $40 million contract was actually a commercial agreement between Unitaid, the University of Liverpool and Tandem Nano Ltd (a start-up company that commercializes ‘Solid Lipid Nanoparticle’ delivery mechanisms)— for which Andrew Owen is a top shareholder,” says Harper.

Furthermore, Harper writes that, “Andrew Owen is prolific in the art of receiving money from pharmaceutical companies. He’s received research funding from ViiV Healthcare, Merck, Janssen, Boehringer Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline, Abbott Laboratories, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Tibotec, Roche Pharmaceuticals and Bristol-Myers Squibb.”

GASP.

Read the entire essay HERE. In it, Harper reveals much, much more. This is just the latest in a series of postings on ‘The Digger’ exposing the machinations and the backdoor wheeling and dealing to prevent ivermectin from saving lives so that other, more profitable (and scientifically proven more dangerous) designer drugs could take center stage and make bank.

March 9, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Forget About Covid, They Say

BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | MARCH 9, 2022

Earlier this year, a phrase was trending because Bari Weiss used it on a talk show: “I’m done with Covid.” Many people cheered simply because the subject has been the source of vast oppression for billions of people for two years.

There are two ways to be over Covid.

One way is to do what the memo from the consultants of the Democratic National Committee suggested: declare the war won and move on. For political reasons.

Deaths attributed to Covid nationally are higher now than they were in the summer of 2020 when the whole country was locked down. They are also higher now than during the election of November the same year. But today we are just supposed to treat it for what it is: a seasonal virus with a disparate impact on the aged and frail.

Rationality is back! In that sense, it’s good to forget about Covid if it means living life normally and behaving with clarity about what does and does not work to mitigate a virus. The Democrats decided that the hyper-restrictionist ways were risking political fortunes. Hence, the line and the talking points needed to change.

Another way to get over Covid is to forget completely about the last two years, especially the astonishing failures of compulsory pandemic controls. Forget about the school closures that cost a generation two years of learning. Forget that the hospitals were largely closed to people without a Covid-related malady. Forget about the preventable nursing-home deaths. Forget that dentistry was practically abolished for a few months, or that one could not even get a haircut.

Forget the stay-at-home orders, the church and business closures, the playground and gym closures, the bankruptcies, the travel restrictions, the firings, the crazed advice for everyone to mask up and physically separate, the record drug-related deaths, the mass depression, the segregation, the brutalization of small business, the labor-force dropouts, the forced stoppages of art and culture, and the capacity limits on venues that forced weddings and funerals to be on Zoom.

Forget about a closer look at the bogus mathematical models, vaccine trials, the circumstances behind the Emergency Use Authorizations, the adverse effects, the inaccuracies of the PCR test, and misclassification of deaths, the billions and trillions of misdirected funds, the division of all workers between essential and nonessential, and the millions who were forced to get jabs they did not want.

Forget about the possibility of a lab leak, the role of China, the deadly use of ventilators, the neglect of therapeutics, the near-banning of all talk of natural immunity, the overselling of the vaccine, the lost religious holidays, the lonely deaths due to the blocking of loved ones from hospitals, the censorship of science, the manipulated and hidden CDC data, the payments to the major media, the symbiotic relationship between government and Big Tech, the demonization of dissent, and the abuse of emergency powers.

Forget how health bureaucracies headed by political appointees took over the task of regulating nearly the whole of life, while messaging the country that freedom just doesn’t matter much anymore!

Who precisely benefits from this method of being “over Covid?” The unrepentant hegemon that gave us this disaster to begin with. They want to be in the clear. They don’t just desire to be exonerated; they don’t want to be judged at all. They want to be unaccountable. The best path toward that end is to foster public amnesia.

I don’t just mean the Democrats. This calamity all began under a Republican president who still retains folk-hero status. Plus all Republican governors except one (Kristi Noem of South Dakota) bought into the initial lockdowns. They don’t want to talk about it either.

There is a vast machine extant that desperately wants everyone to forget. Not even forgive, just forget. Don’t think about the old thing. Think about the new thing instead. Don’t learn lessons. Don’t change the system. Don’t uproot the bureaucracies or examine why the court system failed us so miserably until it was too late. Don’t seek more information. Don’t seek reforms. Don’t take away powers from the CDC and NIH, much less Homeland Security.

Meanwhile, we live amidst a crisis without precedent. It affects health, economics, law, culture, education, and science. Nothing has been left untouched. The end of travel augmented every preexisting international tension. The wild government spending and the monetary accommodation of the ballooning debt, in addition to supply chain breakages, are all directly responsible for record levels of inflation. It’s much easier to blame Putin than it is to look at the failed policies of the US and many other governments in the world.

There are so many remaining questions. My own estimate is that we know about 5% of what we need to know to make sense of this whole disaster. What precisely were Fauci, Collins, Farrar, Birx, and the whole gang doing in February 2020 when they weren’t looking for early treatments?

Why did so many prominent epidemiologists completely reverse their stated views on lockdowns? They flipped from being largely skeptical of coercive measures on March 2, 2020, to fully embracing the most egregious measures only a few weeks later. Moreover, there was clearly a conspiracy emanating from the top to smear dissenting scientists who later said that the lockdowns were causing vastly more harm than good. The people behind the Great Barrington Declaration were targeted by government and media for professional ruin.

When did the vaccine companies get rolled into the mix and under what terms? We need to know the when and why of the questioning and denial of natural immunity. Who was involved in this egregious and wholly inaccurate attempt to stigmatize those who rejected the vaccine? Where were the trials for generic therapeutics that the NIH is supposed to fund?

Why in general did an entire establishment choose panic, lockdown, and mandate over calm and the traditional practice of public health?

I have my own questions. What were the conditions and the messages that led the New York Times to use its podcasts and printed pages (February 27 and 28, 2020) to spread absolute panic? This institution had never done this before in any previous pandemic. Why did it choose this path even weeks before Fauci and Birx started lobbying Trump to pull the trigger?

To put a fine point on it: how much money was involved?

What we need is a full timeline with every detail for two years. We need reparations for the victims. We need to take powers away from hundreds and thousands of leading politicians, scientists, public health officials and media executives.

What changed pandemic panic to a new calm is the force of public opinion. God bless the protestors, polls, and truckers. That is a great improvement but there is a long way to go to rekindle the love of liberty that can protect us next time. It’s not about left and right. We need a new understanding of public health, bodily autonomy, and essential liberties.

Some people want global amnesia and otherwise no change in the regime, no follow-up, no investigations, no connecting dots, no justice, no answers to burning questions.

And consider this. If we are so over Covid, why are people still being fired for not being vaccinated, including people with superior natural immunity? Why have the fired not been rehired? Why the masks on planes, trains, and buses? Why the continued quarantine rules? Why the restrictions on international travel? Why are children still forced to cover their faces? Why must everyone who wants to see a Broadway play be forced to cover up their smiles?

The remnants of restrictions, mandates, and impositions are there to serve as a reminder of the prevailing ruling-class attitude toward their policy choices. There are no regrets. They have done everything right. And they still have their thumb on you.

That is intolerable. By all means, forget about Covid and live life as normally as possible in defiance of those who live to foster fear. But, never forget the disastrous Covid restrictions that created such destruction. We cannot let anyone off the hook, much less pretend that the policy disaster that created billions of personal tragedies never happened.

The world we live in today – with worse health, economic dislocations, demoralized and undereducated children and youth, segregations and censorships, the unquestioned ubiquity of rules manufactured by the undemocratic administrative state, the instability and fear that comes with no longer trusting the system – is a far cry from the one that existed only a few years ago. We need to know why, how, and who. There are millions of questions that cry out for answers. We must have them. And we need to work to recover, rebuild, and insure it will never happen again.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. 

March 9, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Instead of Admitting Mask Mandates Harm Kids, CDC Lowers Expectations for Speech Development

By Maija C. Hahn, M.S., CCC-SLP | The Defender | March 7, 2022

Last month, the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) issued new developmental language standards for American children. The updated guidance states that a 2-and-a-half-year-old child is now expected to say only 50 words.

As an autism specialist and American Speech-Language-Hearing Association-certified speech-language pathologist, I am appalled the CDC would quietly lower long-held pediatric language expectations by normalizing significant language delays as “the new normal.”

I have worked in hospitals, schools and clinics, and have been the lead director in developing autism programs and centers in multiple states.

I am considered an expert in pediatric development of speech, language, communication, oral motor function and swallowing, and an expert in providing appropriate treatment approaches and protocols when such functions are “abnormal.”

For 25 years, I have been an advocate for early identification and treatment because research shows the earlier a child is identified, the better their treatment outcomes will be.

Now the CDC wants to normalize delayed speech and language skills in American children, depriving them of early identification and treatment.

This will inevitably adversely impact our children’s future successes in school, in relationships, in their communication and in their self-esteem, leaving them to possibly face years more of speech and language therapy and educational support.

What is “normal?”

Children over age 2 are expected to have huge verbal vocabularies. They should have a word for almost everything in their environment.

Two-and-a-half-year-olds are expected to be using multiple 2+word to 3+word phrases and even merging into full sentences.

If the CDC is seeing a significant decrease in pediatric language acquisition, agency officials need to be asking why — instead of simply changing the standard expectations.

Yet this isn’t new for the CDC. The CDC has been changing IQ standards and student testing outcomes for years. American children are getting dumber and dumber, with more learning disabilities, and more health issues (54% of American children suffer from  a chronic disease … but I will save that for another article.)

The CDC needs to just stop with this nonsense of making abnormal = normal, and start looking into what is negatively affecting our children’s development.

Let’s start by asking: Why the sudden change in speech and language in 2021-2022?

We can only assume the national implementation of mask mandates for the past two years has much to do with our current situation.

I have been screaming from the rooftops for the last two years that masking is inappropriate and harmful.

The American Speech and Hearing Association wrote letters to the CDC expressing concern about the potential negative impact of masks on speech and language, but unfortunately, the CDC didn’t waiver.

Apparently, the CDC felt such harms didn’t outweigh the disinformation agenda that masks stop the spread of SARS-COV-2. (There are decades of scientific research demonstrating masks don’t stop the spread of aerosolized viral particles.)

Here is how mask-wearing affects speech and language development:

Seeing and hearing: Children learn through watching and hearing. Masking hinders both of these learning modalities. Children need to see the mouths of their parents, teachers and peers.

Furthermore, masked peers and teachers impede aural learning. Speech and language development is significantly impacted when a child cannot see or hear all of the speech sounds being muffled by mask wearers. The developmental speech and language window is vital in developing appropriate communication skills and can impact a child’s education for years.

Mouth breathing: Children under 5 are transitioning from a suckling swallowing pattern to an adult swallow. This swallowing transition is important and sets up a child to have functional and appropriate speech and swallowing and even influences the oral structures and growth of the jaw and mouth.

A mask may impede this transition in multiple ways. Masks reduce oxygen intake and often cause the wearer to breathe from the mouth instead of the nose in order to take in as much oxygen as possible. Mouth breathing in pediatric oral development is very problematic, and often speech-language pathologists spend years working with patients attempting to remedy this problem.

Mouth breathing leads to a low tongue resting position, which is the precursor to many speech, articulation and swallowing disorders. Mouth breathing can even cause jaw malformations and long-term oral and swallowing dysfunction that only surgical reconstruction can rectify.

Furthermore, children with special needs, as those with speech and swallowing disorders and dysfunction, are severely impeded with mask mandates and this could set them back for a lifetime of therapy and more aggressive and invasive therapies in their future.

Compliance: Developing toddlers and children typically do not have the self-awareness or discipline to safely don and doff a mask, nor keep from cross-contaminating the mask by touching surfaces and not touching their mask.

If the reason to wear a mask is to prevent cross-contamination of COVID-19, I believe the mere placement of a mask on a child will increase the likelihood of viral transmission. A mask is simply a prompt to have the child touch his or her face more frequently.

Hygiene: Young children are still developing proper oral resting postures and swallowing and therefore often drool. They also do not often blow their noses and their phlegm comes forward out of their nares (nostrils or nasal passages). These bodily fluids would quickly contaminate a mask.

Keeping a child in a moist, warm, contaminated mask is unhygienic and places the child at greater risk of bacterial and fungal infections, some of which can be contagious to others, such as impetigo, which can cause significant health risks.

Special Education and Disabilities: The harms on our special needs populations have been even more remarkable, setting these children up for longer recovery and treatments and potentially a lifetime loss of better outcomes.

On top of the harms mentioned above, requiring a child with sensory processing disorder or neurological deficits to wear a mask has created behavioral and emotional problems in many children and increased the burden on families and the child’s educational program.

Still to this day, children and families of special needs who are unable to tolerate a mask have been deprived of access to medical care and therapies, as well as travel in planes, trains, buses, subways or taxis.

The CDC’s mask mandates have severely affected an entire generation of American children and we are just now beginning to see the long-term consequences. Kids who were born in the era of COVID-19, have no idea what a world without masks is — we should expect to see even greater speech and language deficits in these children in the coming months and years.

Our kids need to see and hear their communication partners within vital developmental timeframes. They need to breathe freely and live without fear of germs or killing grandma.

Mask mandates on our population are inappropriate and unethical. Shame on the CDC for implementing such unscientific measures and then quietly changing pediatric language standards to cover the harms they have caused.

What else will the CDC soon be redefining as “normal”? 

If your child is not using at least 50 words by 24 months, or cannot be understood by 3 years old, please consult a speech-language pathologist.

And please … take the mask off your child and their communication partners.

Maija C. Hahn is an advocate and activist for health reform, Christian values, American exceptionalism, constitutional freedoms and truth. She is the Westside Regional Director for Michigan for Vaccine Choice.

© 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 9, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

FORMER W.H.O. CONSULTANT EXPOSES TAKEDOWN OF IVERMECTIN

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | March 3, 2022

Del sits down for a one-on-one with the former W.H.O. consultant & research scientist, Tess Lawrie MD, PhD, who was a critical part of the Ivermectin trials over a year ago with overwhelmingly positive conclusions. See data and recorded personal zoom calls that reveal how a key review was attacked from within, keeping the safe, life-saving drug out of the hands of millions of dying Covid patients for more than a year.

March 9, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Data Show FDA Process for Emergency Authorization of Pfizer, Merck COVID Pills Not Based on Science

By John Droz, Jr., M.S. | The Defender | March 7, 2022

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December 2021 granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to two COVID-19 early treatment oral drugs: Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck’s molnupiravir.

This was a major milestone, as until then, there were no FDA-endorsed pharmaceutical pill options for people diagnosed with COVID-19.

The standard medical therapy for a newly diagnosed person was: Go home, rest, drink water and go to the hospital if things get dire.

Now, after almost two years, people diagnosed with early stages of COVID-19 can be prescribed a pill!

As background, there are three stipulations a drug must meet in order to obtain EUA from the FDA:

  • There must be an emergency.
  • The treatment in consideration must be safe and offer 50% efficacy.
  • There must not be an alternative available treatment that is safe and effective.

Pfizer and Merck oversaw clinical trials that attempted to prove their products were safe and effective. In the letters of authorization issued to Pfizer and Merck, the FDA outlined what tests were done, what the results were, what some of the limitations and concerns are, etc.

The FDA then generated more detailed advisories to healthcare providers (doctors) for Paxlovid and molnupiravir. These documents give more specifics about use restrictions (e.g., not to children), potentially adverse effects of each drug (e.g., not to be used by pregnant women, etc.), potential conflicts with other drugs (quite a few), etc.

Here are four key points to consider regarding the Paxlovid and molnupiravir data:

  • The tests were conducted by the pharmaceutical companies themselves (not an unbiased entity).
  • No long-term testing was done on either of these drugs (the trials lasted a few months).
  • The effects on patients with many other diseases (e.g., Parkinson’s) were not evaluated and remain unknown.
  • The reported effectiveness of each drug (hospitalization or death: 88% and 30%) are relative not absolute. (See this explanation about this important point.)

OK, kudos to the FDA for giving consumers some early treatment options for dealing with COVID-19. It’s especially good that they are non-hospital, take-at-home therapies.

However, the question remains: How do these FDA-endorsed drugs compare to other over-the-counter (OTC) and non-patented drugs — especially ivermectin (IVM) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) — that are reported to have some early treatment effectiveness against COVID-19?

As a scientist (physicist) I try to be careful in analyzing data, to not only be accurate but to present it objectively and understandably.

In that light, see this table where I juxtapose Paxlovid and molnupiravir to IVM, HCQ and three OTC drugs: curcumin, Vitamin D and zinc. The comparisons made are based on about 20 COVID-19 factors (effectiveness, safety, cost, etc.).

Comparison of Major COVID-19 Early Treatment Oral Pharmaceuticals

Click here to increase the size of the chart and access the hyperlinks.

COVID chart

6 takeaways from comparison of Paxlovid and molnupiravir to IVM, HCQ, and OTCs

  • Pfizer’s Paxlovid is reported to have very high effectiveness.
  • HCQ and the curcumin have effectiveness comparable to Paxlovid.
  • Merck’s molnupiravir has very low effectiveness.
  • IVM, Vitamin D and Zinc have effectiveness far superior to molnupiravir.
  • Paxlovid and molnupiravir have more serious side effects than the others.
  • Paxlovid and molnupiravir cost considerably more than the non-patented options.

Are Pfizer and Merck oral treatment EUAs legal? 

Remember, federal law stipulates that an EUA can not be granted unless: “There is no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the product for diagnosing, preventing, or treating the disease or condition.”

The data in this analysis indicate there are “adequate and available alternatives for treating” COVID-19. If the data are accurate, then these EUAs have questionable legality.

Adequate and available alternatives for treating COVID-19 do, in fact, exist — the FDA has no scientific justification for ignoring IVM, HCQ, Vitamin D and zinc.

Further, if these FDA-issued EUAs for Paxlovid and molnupiravir violate federal statutes, a closer examination of the FDA’s COVID-19 vaccine EUAs seems warranted.

If the Pfizer and Merck EUAs are legal, then why haven’t HCQ and IVM also been given EUAs?

Considering the six takeaways listed above — plus the fact, as noted in the above table, that there have been successful HCQ and IVM studies much larger (~10x) than those done for Paxlovid and molnupiravir — exactly why has the FDA not issued EUAs for IVM and HCQ?

The comparative in Table 1 adequately demonstrates there is no justification for the FDA’s refusal to grant EUAs to IVM and HCQ.

If the FDA had granted EUAs for HCQ and IVM a year ago, hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths would have been prevented.

What FDA policy, procedure or precedent took priority over preventing hundreds of thousands of American deaths?

What about monoclonal antibody therapies?

Let us now expand our comparisons to include current monoclonal antibody therapies:

Comparison of Major COVID-19 Early Treatment Pharmaceuticals

Click here to increase the size of the chart and access the hyperlinks.

Early treatment chart

Note that the four key points identified above, regarding the Paxlovid and molnupiravir data, all apply here.

Some of the main takeaways from this comparison are:

  • Sotrovimab has the highest effectiveness — but the least amount of data.
  • HCQ and curcumin have effectiveness comparable to the bamlanivimab+ and casirivimab+ combinations.
  • The first FDA EUA given to bamlanivimab turned out to be a mistake (as health issues were discovered).
  • All the monoclonals have more serious side effects than the non-EUA options.
  • All the monoclonals cost considerably more than the non-EUA options.
  • All the monoclonals have much less safety data than the non-EUA options.

Again, this comparison shows that IVM, HCQ, curcumin, vitamin D and zinc compare very favorably to all of the early treatments that received EUA from the FDA.

John Droz, Jr. is an independent North Carolina physicist.

© 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 8, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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