Free Covid Tests To Be Axed – There Goes The Scamdemic
By Richie Allen | February 15, 2022
I have been saying for nearly two years now, that if asymptomatic people stopped taking covid tests, then the scamdemic would end immediately. The UK government will announce next week, that if people want to continue to test themselves for covid, they will have to pay for it themselves. In theory, that should be game over.
According to The Times today:
Under proposals being finalised in Whitehall, healthy adults would no longer be eligible to order free lateral flow tests on the NHS. There are also plans to scale back PCR testing, with one option being to limit its availability to older adults and people considered to be clinically vulnerable.
The changes, which will be announced after months of speculation, will be announced as part of the government’s Living Safely With Covid strategy, which is due to be published next week. The new strategy could come into effect as soon as next month.
Ministers are facing pressure from the Treasury to reduce the multibillion-pound cost of continuing coronavirus testing on the NHS, with Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, understood to be calling also for the end of most PCR testing for people with Covid-19 symptoms.
The cost of living is skyrocketing. My guess is that most people who have been testing themselves regularly, won’t be as quick to order the tests when they have to pay for them out of their own pockets.
That will put a huge dent in the daily case numbers. In theory, that should be the end of the scam. I say in theory, because who knows what they are holding up their sleeves.
A Brave New World Without Rights: Ending Mandates Does Not Strip Government of the Ability to Do This Again
By Julius Ruechel | February 9, 2022
The ongoing Truckers for Freedom convoy in Ottawa has triggered a shockwave that is reaching all around the world. Even as our authoritarian federal regime continues to double down on measures and threatens to use brute force tactics against peaceful protesters, many provinces are nervously beginning to lay out a timeline for ending mandates.
But there is something important missing from the conversation surrounding the end of mandates. If the mandates are simply dropped today without calling out the underlying legal and ethical fallacy that was used to justify them, government overreach will have become normalized. We will be left without the legal protections to stop them from doing this to us again after the truckers go home. All it will take to put us back in a cage is for the government to point at the next wave, the next virus variant, or the next non-Covid emergency. We will have normalized that our rights, our freedoms, our bodily autonomy, and even access to our lives are conditional privileges, subject to opinion polls and technocratic impulses, and that they can be withdrawn again at any time, “for our safety.”
In March of 2020, in violation of the principles embedded in our constitutions, governments around the world convinced citizens to give their leaders and public institutions the authority to overrule individual rights in order to “flatten the curve.” That impulse went unchallenged under the false assumption that human rights violations could be justified as long as the benefits to the majority outweighed the costs to the minority. By accepting this excuse for overriding unconditional rights, we transformed ourselves into an authoritarian police state where “might makes right”. That is the moment when all the checks and balances in our scientific and democratic institutions stopped functioning.
Liberal democracy was built around the principle that individual rights must be unconditional. In other words, they are meant to supersede the authority of government. Consequently, individual rights (such as bodily autonomy) were meant to serve as checks and balances on government power. They were meant to provide a hard limit to what our government can do to us without our individual consent.
If the government cannot override your rights to bend you to its will, then it will be forced to try to convince you by talking with you. That forces government to be transparent and to engage in meaningful debate with critics. Your ability to say NO, and to have your choice respected, is the difference between a functioning liberal democracy and an authoritarian regime.
The natural instinct of fearful people is to control those around them. Unconditional rights force people to negotiate voluntary participation in collective solutions. Thus, unconditional rights prevent the formation of echo chambers and provide an important counter-weight to rein in uncontrolled panic. When no-one has the option to use the brute force of State power to force others to submit to what they think is “the right thing to do”, then the only path forward is to keep talking to everyone, including to “fringe minorities” with “unacceptable views”. When we allow rights to become conditional, it is virtually a certainty that during a crisis, panicked citizens and opportunistic politicians will give in to their worst impulses and trample those who disagree with them.
Unconditional individual rights prevent governments from taking unwilling citizens on crusades. They prevent scientific institutions from transforming themselves into unchallengeable “Ministries of Truth” that can double down on their mistakes to avoid accountability. They ensure that the checks and balances that make science and democracy work do not break down in the chaos of a crisis. In the heat of an emergency when policy decisions are often made on the fly, unconditional rights are often the only safeguards to protect minorities from panicked mobs and self-anointed kings.
If we allow our leaders to normalize the idea that rights can be switched off during emergencies or when political leaders decide that “the science is settled”, then we are giving the government terrifying and unlimited power over us. It gives those who control the levers of power the authority to turn off access to your life. That turns the competition for power into a zero-sum game: the winners become masters, the losers become serfs. It means you can no longer afford to allow the other side to win an election, at any cost, nor agree to a peaceful transfer of power, because if you lose the winning team becomes the master of your destiny. And so, a zero-sum game of brutal power politics is set in motion. Unconditional individual rights are the antidote to civil war. Liberal democracy collapses without them.
Withdrawing mandates because “the Omicron variant is mild” or because “the costs of continuing the measures outweigh the benefits” does not undo what has been normalized and legitimized. If the legitimacy of mandates is not overturned, you will not be going back to your normal life. It may superficially look similar to your life before Covid, but in reality you will be living in a Brave New World where governments temporarily grant privileges to those who conform with the government’s vision of how we should live. You will no longer be celebrating your differences, cultivating your individuality, or making your own free choices. Only conformity will enable you to exist. You will be living under a regime in which any new “crisis” can serve as justification to impose restrictions on those who don’t “get with the program” as long as mobs and technocrats think the restrictions are “reasonable”. You will no longer be the master of your own life. A golden cage is still a cage if someone else controls the lock on the door.
Politicians and public health authorities MUST be forced to acknowledge that mandates are a violation of civil liberties. The public MUST be confronted by the fact that liberal democracy ceases to exist without the unconditional (inalienable) safeguards of individual rights and freedoms. The public MUST recognize that science ceases to function when mandates can be used to cut off scientific debates. Our governments and our fellow citizens MUST be made to understand that unconditional rights are especially important during a crisis.
If the legal and ethical fallacies that were used to justify mandates are not called out as inexcusable violations of our constitutional rights, we will have inadvertently normalized the illiberal idea that, as long as someone in a lab coat says it’s okay, this can be done to us again, at any time, whether to fight the next wave of Covid, to take away freedoms to fight “climate change”, to seize assets to solve a government debt crisis, or simply to socially engineer outcomes according to whatever our leaders define as a “fairer and more equitable world”.
How we navigate the end of mandates determines whether we win our freedom or whether we allow our leaders to normalize a Brave New World with conditional rights that can be turned off again during the next “emergency”.
~
They Are Still Defending Lockdowns
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | February 13, 2022
Fifteen years ago, writers schooled in computer science began to imagine various totalitarian schemes for pandemic control. Experienced public health officials in 2006 warned that this would lead to disaster. Donald Henderson, for example, went through
Still, a decade and a half later, governments all over the world tried lockdowns anyway. And sure enough, since April of 2020, scholars have observed that these lockdown policies haven’t worked. The politicians preached, the cops enforced, citizens shamed each other, and businesses and schools did their best to comply with all the strictures. But the virus kept going with seeming disregard for all these antics.
Neither oceans of sanitizer, nor towers of plexiglass, nor covered mouths and noses, nor crowd avoidance, nor the seeming magic of six feet of distance, nor even mandated injections, caused the virus to go away or otherwise be suppressed.
The evidence is in. Restrictions are not associated with any particular set of virus mitigation goals. Forty studies have shown no connection between the policy (egregious violations of human liberty) and the intended outcomes (diminishing the overall disease impact of the pathogen).
You can forget about “causal inference” here because there is an absence of correlation of policy and outcomes at all. You can do a deeper dive and find 400 studies showing that the impositions on basic freedoms did not achieve the intended result but instead produced terrible public-health outcomes.
The two years of the hell into which hundreds of governments simultaneously plunged the globe achieved nothing but economic, social, and cultural destruction. Very obviously, this realization is shocking, and suggests a crying need for a reassessment of the power and influence of the people who did this.
This reassessment is happening now, all over the world.
A major frustration for those of us who have denounced lockdowns (which goes by many names and takes many forms) is that these studies have not exactly rocked the headlines. Indeed, they have been buried for the better part of two years.
Among the ignored studies was a December 2020 examination of light and voluntary measures (discouraging large gatherings, isolating the sick, generally being careful) vs. heavy and forced measures. This piece by Bendavid et al. observes some effects on spread from light measures but nothing statistically significant from heavy measures such as stay-at-home (or shelter-in-place) orders.
We do not question the role of all public health interventions, or of coordinated communications about the epidemic, but we fail to find an additional benefit of stay- at-home orders and business closures. The data cannot fully exclude the possibility of some benefits. However, even if they exist, these benefits may not match the numerous harms of these aggressive measures. More targeted public health interventions that more effectively reduce transmissions may be important for future epidemic control without the harms of highly restrictive measures.
The most recent meta-analysis from Johns Hopkins University (Jonas Herby of the Center for Political Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark, Lars Jonung of Lund University, and Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins) seems to have achieved some measure of media attention. It focuses in particular on the effects of heavy interventions on mortality, finding little to no relationship between policies and severe disease outcomes.
The attention given to this meta-analysis seems to have annoyed the small cabal of academics who still defend lockdowns. A website called HealthFeedBack blasted the methods of the study while citing biased sources and not seriously grappling with the results. This lame effort has been thoroughly smashed by Phil Magness.
Also seeking to reverse the bad press against lockdowns, the Science Media Centre, a project that appears mostly funded by The Wellcome Trust (Britain’s major funding source for epidemiological studies), published a rebuttal of this paper by top lockdown proponents.
Among the comments were those of Oxford’s Seth Flaxman, a major figure in this realm, who is not trained in biological science or medicine but computer science with a specialization in machine learning. And yet it has been his work that has most often been cited in defense of the idea that lockdowns achieved some good.
In opposition to the JHU study, Flaxman writes:
Smoking causes cancer, the earth is round, and ordering people to stay at home (the correct definition of lockdown) decreases disease transmission. None of this is controversial among scientists. A study purporting to prove the opposite is almost certain to be fundamentally flawed.
See how this rhetoric works? If you question his claim, you are not a scientist; you are denying the science!
These sentences are surely penned out of frustration. The first time in modern history or perhaps all of history when nearly all governments undertook “ordering people to stay home” (which amounts to a universal quarantine) to “decrease disease transmission” was in 2020.
To say that this is not controversial is ridiculous, since such policies had never before been attempted on this scale. Such a policy is not at all like an established causal claim (smoking increases cancer risk) nor a mere empirical observation (the earth is round). It is subject to verification.
There are plenty of reasons one might expect disease transmission to be higher in enclosed spaces with sustained close contact, such as homes, versus shops or even well-ventilated concert settings. As Henderson himself said, it could result in putting healthy non-infected people in close settings with infected people, worsening disease spread.
Indeed, by December of 2020, the governor’s office of New York found that “contact tracing data shows 70 percent of new COVID-19 cases originate from households and small gatherings.” It was also true with New York hospitalization: two thirds of them had contracted Covid at home.
“They’re not working; they’re not traveling,” Cuomo said of these recently hospitalized coronavirus patients. “We were thinking that maybe we were going to find a higher percent of essential employees who were getting sick because they were going to work — that these may be nurses, doctors, transit workers. That’s not the case. They were predominantly at home.”
That Flaxman would still claim otherwise after all experience shows that he is not observing reality but inventing dogma from his own intuition. Flaxman might say that he is sure that transmission might have been higher had people not been ordered to stay home, and there might be settings in which that is true, but he is in no position to elevate this claim to the status of “the earth is round.”
In addition, even under ideal conditions, reduction in disease transmission might only be short-term, kicking the can down the road. A glance at the wild infection increases of Winter 2021 suggests that. The orders might result in worse outcomes overall, due to all that such an order implies for people’s lives. Turning people’s homes into their own jails, in other words, has a downside for the quality of life. And surely that must factor into any social welfare analysis of pandemic policies.
Finally, it is not possible to order everyone to stay home, not even for a day or two. The groceries have to get to the store or be delivered to homes and apartments. People have to staff the hospitals. The electrical plants still need staff. Cops still have to be on the beat. There is literally no option available to “shut down” society in real life as versus in computer models.
Stay-at-home orders in real life become a class-protection scheme to keep high-end laptop professionals shielded from the virus while imposing the burden of exposure on people who have no option but to be out and about. In other words, the working classes are effectively forced to bear the burden of herd immunity, while the rich and financially secure stay safe and wait for the pandemic to pass.
For example, early in the pandemic, the messaging of the New York Times was to instruct its readers to stay home and get their groceries delivered. The paper knows its reader base well: it did not suggest any of them actually deliver groceries! As Sunetra Gupta says, “Lockdowns are a luxury of the affluent.”
And what, in the end, is the point of the stay-home orders? For a widespread virus such as this one, everyone will eventually meet the virus anyway. Only once the winter wave of 2021 finally swept the Zoom class did we start to see a shift in media messaging that 1) there is no shame in sickness, and 2) perhaps we need to start relaxing these restrictions.
The dogma that ordering people to stay home – for how long? – always reduces the spread comes not from evidence but from Flaxman-style modeling plus a remarkable capacity to ignore reality.
Lockdown policies are easily marketed to political players who might get a power rush from the exercise. But, in the end, Henderson’s prediction was correct: these interventions turned a manageable pandemic into a catastrophe.
It’s a sure bet, however, that lockdown proponents will be in denial at least for another decade.
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.
Covid and the death of medical ethics
By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | February 12, 2022
FROM our unique perspective in New Zealand there is probably no more twisted tale of the pandemic than the transformation of medical ethics. Due to our closed borders, NZ has so few Covid cases (18,000 at the time of writing) and almost no Covid deaths (53), that our pandemic medical history so far has been largely about isolation, vaccination and testing.
The political history of the pandemic has been about control of our borders, the creation of fear, and public assurances of the absolute safety of mRNA vaccines. In contrast, the official count of adverse effects of Pfizer Covid vaccination stands at 50,000 and the death toll at 130-plus. Both these figures are known to be huge underestimates. The excess all-cause non-Covid deaths during the vaccine rollout has been reliably measured at 2,000-plus.
Despite this, booster shots are being heavily advertised and mandated. At no point has there been any admission of our lack of knowledge of the long-term effects of mRNA vaccination. Certainly there is increasing evidence of harm from the jab. For example, data from the US military points to massive rises in disease rates including a threefold rise in cancers. There has been a concerted effort to keep this story out of the mainstream media. The cover-up is almost a bigger story than the actual data.
Along with reports of vaccine injury, a steady stream of papers published recently are beginning to elucidate very worrying mechanisms underlying vaccine injury. Initial expectations were that after stimulating spike protein production sufficiently to induce an immune response, mRNA genetic sequences in the vaccines would dissipate rapidly, and therefore safely. A study published in the journal Cell on January 24 shows that the mRNA sequences can persist in lymph node germinal centres for weeks causing greater spike havoc than Covid infection itself.
The official reports of vaccine adverse effects in NZ are running at 30 times the rate of reported injuries from previous flu vaccines. The fact that this has not rung alarm bells is incomprehensible. The fact that the government has persisted with its saturation advertising announcing the safety and necessity of Covid vaccination is doubly concerning. It is apparent from the failure to investigate alarming data that the practice of medical ethics has transformed to become almost unrecognisable.
A common framework used when analysing medical ethics is the ‘four principles’ approach postulated by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress in their textbook Principles of Biomedical Ethics. It recognises four basic moral principles, which are to be judged and weighed against each other, with attention given to the scope of their application. The four principles are:
Autonomy – the patient has the right to refuse or choose his or her treatment. This is rooted in society’s respect for individuals’ ability to make informed decisions about personal matters with freedom.
Beneficence – a practitioner should act in the best interest of the patient and family. In other words, healing is the aim of medicine.
Non-maleficence – not to be the cause of harm. Many consider this should be the primary consideration, that it is more important not to harm your patient than to do him good, which is part of the Hippocratic oath that doctors take.
Justice – concerns the fair distribution of scarce health resources, and the decision as to who gets what treatment.
In practice, however, many treatments carry some risk of harm. In some circumstances, for example in desperate situations where the outcome without treatment will be grave, risky treatments which stand a high chance of harming the patient could be justified. This is because the risk of not treating is also very likely to do harm. So the principle of non-maleficence (non-harm) is not absolute, and balances against the principle of beneficence (doing good). This has particularly affected debates around the promotion to doctors by drug companies of strong narcotics such as Oxycodone which is highly addictive and whose overuse commonly leads to respiratory failure and death.
It can readily be appreciated that the debate around how to apply ethics to medical practice has some grey areas and deficiencies. Medical misadventure is now the third-leading cause of death in the USA. Has this led to an acceptance of risk which should in fact be avoided? In large part the rules applied to drug approval are very strict. Double blind trials are required. Lengthy periods of assessment are mandated. Deaths following treatment are investigated and usually trials are suspended when these occur. Generally for vaccinations, assessment takes around ten years and two deaths per million recipients would be the maximum allowed in a finally approved product.
In contrast, the pre-approval trial periods for Covid-19 vaccines have been of the order of six months. The critical assessments of secondary effects have not been undertaken. These are aimed to check that general health outcomes for trial participants such as cardiac conditions and cancers do not exceed population norms. Note the US military data here. Clearly serious injury and deaths associated with Covid-19 vaccinations have exceeded the traditional limits by a massive margin. Moreover outcomes reported cover a wide range of conditions. Have professional medical bodies raised the alarm? No. Why?
Initially there were reports that Covid-19 was a very serious illness with mortality rates as high as 5 per cent. Figures as high as 180,000 deaths in NZ were predicted.
This alarmist assessment rapidly dissipated. Published studies put mortality rates well under 1 per cent and there was a realisation that serious Covid outcomes and deaths primarily occurred among those who were already seriously ill or physically weak due to other causes including advanced age. During the early months of 2021, it was also apparent that mRNA vaccines waned in effectiveness rapidly and did little to stop transmission. The only principles of medical ethics that seemed still to be appropriate were those of justice and beneficence. Reports suggested that Covid vaccination reduced the severity of illness; might it not be beneficial to the individual and save our over-stretched health service from becoming overwhelmed by unvaccinated Covid patients, thereby helping patients requiring treatment for other conditions? Despite doubts about the outcome data and mounting evidence of vaccination harm, the answer given to this by the NZ government was a big YES. It decided to mandate vaccination to the extent that the unjabbed would lose their right to employment. It thereby overruled the first principle of medical ethics, autonomy orpatient choice, a degree of coercion which ensured vaccination rates in NZ rose above 90 per cent among those eligible.
The Health Forum NZ is a Facebook, Telegram and MeWe site with 50,000-plus members which has served as a meeting and information place for the vaccine-injured. NZ has a population of 5million so HFNZ members comprise 1 per cent of the population. HFNZ has received reports of 600-plus deaths proximate to vaccination. More than 300 of these have been investigated and confirmed by the voluntary group NZ Doctors Speaking Out on Science.
The most common among the thousands of reports of vaccine injury are chest pain, arrhythmia, shortness of breath and persistent extreme fatigue and debility. Sometimes these develop as cardiac events, clotting, stroke and death. There are many experiences of patients being assured that they were over-anxious and being sent home with an aspirin, only to suffer immediate complications necessitating hospital admission. Sometimes sufferers find that the doctor is uninterested and dismissive when he hears that the injury followed vaccination.
Our government decided early on not to take the reporting of adverse effects following vaccination seriously. It denied repeated requests to make reporting adverse events mandatory with the result that there is no way of knowing the extent of vaccine injury. The health authorities already knew that the voluntary had a history of catching only 5 per cent of adverse events. Their decision flouted the most important principle of medical ethics – do no harm. It also enabled the government and the whole medical establishment to avoid any public discussion of adverse events. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern arranged for the hurried deletion of over 30,000 reports of adverse events from her Facebook account.
Why did our authorities do this? The government opted for a stand-alone vaccination strategy because it believed assurances of safety and efficacy from Pfizer. Almost immediately, and before any decision on mandates, we found out vaccine effectiveness waned rapidly and did little to reduce transmission, directly contradicting Pfizer trial results. The government and the Ministry of Health switched arguments – ‘millions of people have received the vaccine worldwide so it must be safe and effective’, a vacuous argument from a scientific point of view. Almost a hundred thousand people were prescribed thalidomide before it was realised that it was unsafe.
The medical ethics criteria of public good and patient well-being are not usually weighed in the absence of considerations of maleficence and autonomy. Thus the stance of the government, to sweep vaccine injury under the carpet, departed radically from previous ethical practice. This kind of departure has previously been entertained only in times of war when the threat to the nation is judged to be sufficient to mandate military service call-up and tolerate the inevitable heavy casualties of conflict. This condition was of course not met in any way by the Covid pandemic.
The mounting numbers of individuals reporting vaccine injuries should have rung alarm bells to a point that detailed investigation of their extent became a priority. Instead and inexplicably, hiding their occurrence rose to the top of the government’s agenda. Jacinda Ardern lashed out at a journalist asking questions about the death of a 17-year-old girl who had a stroke immediately following vaccination, labelling the journalist as irresponsible and denying any relationship with vaccination before there had been any time to assess causation. A few medical professionals were disciplined for raising similar questions. This was enough to discourage any public consideration of the ethics involved.
The government decided further to reverse ethical practice. Dr Ashley Bloomfield, Director General of Health, has personal responsibility for granting vaccine exemptions to those injured by the first shot. In almost all cases, he refuses exemptions including among those hospitalised and still ill, even when there is supporting documentation from specialists.
Now that extensive research has concluded that the outcomes for Omicron patients are similar for both the vaccinated and unvaccinated, there is no longer a valid scientific argument for justice and beneficence. All ethical arguments for mandates are moot, but why is there still no move to protect individuals from the adverse effects of vaccination?
As mounting evidence has been ignored, government decisions verge towards the criminal. There are floundering attempts by the media to label mandate protesters as variously Right-wing extremists and uneducated Luddites. The arguments in support of mandated vaccination are still being presented to the public through strident political rhetoric unsupported by science publications. The government must realise that there are serious scientific and ethical failings involved. It must mount an honest attempt to change the debate from politics to science, and adjust public policy accordingly. At this stage, anything less is culpable.
RIP Freedom of Speech
In lockstep in multiple countries
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | February 12, 2022
As with so many things that are happening at the moment, the attack on free speech is happening in multiple countries at the same time.
Firstly in the UK.
A draft Online Safety Bill was first presented to Parliament in May 2021 but has been strengthened in the last few weeks. Originally the draft Bill focussed on large web companies but the government has recently announced that more changes would be made and new criminal offences added.
One of these new offences would be spreading Covid-19 disinformation under a crime of sending a false communication. This offence would be committed if a person sends a communication they know to be false with the intention to cause non-trivial emotional, psychological or physical harm. The maximum sentence is 51 weeks.
The average person might think it is reasonable to imprison somebody for communicating something they know to be false with the intention to cause harm. However, what is “false” and what is “harm”? The last few years have shown us that these are now very subjective topics. Information that was true in 2019 became false in 2020 and is starting to be true again in 2022. A truth that is communicated to somebody who believes it to be false may cause them emotional or psychological harm. Intention is necessary for the crime to take place but if something is deemed to be false and deemed to cause harm then it could be argued that if the person who communicated the information, knew the information was on the “harmful list” then intention was there.
And who is deciding what information is false? The government? That almost sounds like a punchline to a joke. We’ll just end up with news articles such as the one below – Sponsored by the UK Government (see the text in blue).
The Bill was already censorial enough, making online companies remove content which was deemed to be harmful but not illegal. As we have seen in recent times, corporations’ misinformation policies have been arbitrary enough, which will only worsen with governments deciding what is true and what is false. Now, in a step one-removed from pre-crime, these companies will be made to proactively “prevent people being exposed in the first place”.
The government press release on the strengthening of this bill says that “to proactively tackle the priority offences, firms will need to make sure the features, functionalities and algorithms of their services are designed to prevent their users encountering them and minimise the length of time this content is available. This could be achieved by automated or human content moderation, banning illegal search terms, spotting suspicious users and having effective systems in place to prevent banned users opening new accounts”.
In almost Orwellian double-speak the press release says the Bill “will better protect people’s right to free expression online”. What this means is, it will better protect people’s free expression of government approved material. It continues by saying “it will have to be proven in court that a defendant sent a communication without any reasonable excuse and did so intending to cause serious distress or worse, with exemptions for communication which contributes to a matter of public interest”. So the government says something is a matter of public interest (e.g. vaccines) and suddenly intention doesn’t have to be proven.
Please sign this online petition to remove requirements that specifically target lawful speech from the Bill.
Next to the US.
At almost the same time, the US sent out a bulletin “Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland”.
This states that “the United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence”.
According to the bulletin, “the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions” has “increased the volatility, unpredictability, and complexity of the threat environment”.
Key factors contributing to the current heightened threat environment include “widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19”.
Furthermore, “as COVID-19 restrictions continue to decrease nationwide, increased access to commercial and government facilities and the rising number of mass gatherings could provide increased opportunities for individuals looking to commit acts of violence to do so, often with little or no warning. Meanwhile, COVID-19 mitigation measures—particularly COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates—have been used by domestic violent extremists to justify violence since 2020 and could continue to inspire these extremists to target government, healthcare, and academic institutions that they associate with those measures”.
So in a step up from the UK’s response, the US is labelling individuals who produce any MDM as terrorists. Obviously, any language that incites violence is unacceptable but to confuse people encouraging unrest with those discussing whether Ivermectin could help save lives is completely unacceptable.
And finally in Canada.
Again, as if in lockstep, Justin Trudeau is trying to revive his controversial Internet legislation bill. Once known as Bill C-10, to fool those unintelligent Covid deniers, it has been changed to Bill C-11.
There are concerns that the legislation could be used to censor social media. The government have denied this but experts hold the opposite view. Who to believe, hmmm? The Toronto Sun reports that Trudeau is using the current national tensions as a smokescreen to let them slip in unpopular pieces of legislation. Never let a good crisis go to waste!
When we remove freedom of speech and censorship of controversial topics becomes common place, we turn into a dangerous society. Not only can authors be imprisoned for airing their views but, just as importantly, debate becomes restricted resulting in truths being hidden and novel and radical ideas supressed.
But if they can’t censor you, maybe they’ll just give you a morality pill so you don’t produce the stuff in the first place!
The extraordinary story of how patient access to COVID treatments were denied
Eventually involving witch hunts of physicians who dared to treat patients
By Meryl Nass, MD | February 11, 2022
In 2020, I compiled a list of over 50 ways authorities and pharma companies in multiple countries stopped the use of the chloroquine drugs for COVID. This was (and is) a stunning collection,which has been widely read and reproduced on many websites. When you read it, you are astounded to learn that all the US (and many international) public health agencies took many different actions to increase deaths and destruction from COVID and prolong the pandemic. “Avoiding the Trump drug” served as a great cover story. Taking hydroxychloroquine for COVID was equated to drinking bleach.
But here’s the kicker: the authorities knew all about chloroquine and other treatments for COVID before there was a COVID… because they had figured it out for the 2002 SARS epidemic and the 2012 MERS epidemic, both caused by related coronaviruses. But they hushed it up.
Five CDC (US government) scientists published a paper, along with three Canadian government scientists, showing that chloroquine was an effective drug against SARS coronaviruses, in 2005. European scientists had shown the same thing in 2004.
Here is the CDC paper:
and here is its conclusion:
It looked very promising for both prevention and treatment of the first SARS. After all, it has been used for many decades both to prevent and to treat malaria. (I took it for prevention, and later for treatment, 50 years ago.)
Nine years later, In 2014, scientists in Tony Fauci’s NIAID showed the same thing. Not only did chloroquine work in vitro against the MERS coronavirus, but dozens of existing drugs, which could have been tested in patients as soon as the pandemic started, were also effective against SARS and MERS coronaviruses.
Here is the paper from Fauci’s NIAID:
And this is what the NIAID authors said:
Here we found that 66 of the screened drugs were effective at inhibiting either MERS-CoV or SARS-CoV infection in vitro and that 27 of these compounds were effective against both MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV. These data demonstrate the efficiency of screening approved or clinically developed drugs for identification of potential therapeutic options for emerging viral diseases and also provide an expedited approach for supporting off-label use of approved therapeutics.
Just in case you think these papers were flukes, two unrelated groups of European scientists found essentially the same thing. The 2014 European paper was published back to back with the NIAID paper above. I have cited the 2004 European paper elsewhere, and these citations can also be found in Bobby Kennedy’s book The Real Tony Fauci, which according to Amazon has now sold over 800,000 copies. Please read it. OTOH, If you are seeking misinformation on COVID, I’d recommend Fauci’s own book, Expect the Unexpected.
I have to repeat myself, because the information is so shocking and I don’t want you to miss it: our governments already knew of options for treating COVID before it appeared, but instead of immediately trying these already identified, safe, cheap, and available repurposed drugs, and offering early treatments, they did everything they could to stop people obtaining the chloroquine drugs. Look up the articles I linked to above. Read my long article on this suppression. Or the two articles I wrote here and here about how patients were administered borderline lethal doses of hydroxyhcloroquine to give the drug a black eye. Check the links. Verify that what I have just written is correct. Human beings planned and carried out these medical crimes against humanity. Who are those humans? What are they doing now?
This has to be be investigated and justice attained, to prevent such crimes from happening to patients ever again.
The “Why?” and “How could this be?!!” requires people to take a huge leap in order to understand the world we live in. Many don’t have the fortitude to dissect their world view and rebuild it in accord with the facts that have spilled out over the last two years.
But I am about to present some more facts that I hope you can assimilate into your understanding of the world. It might require a stiff drink, or perhaps some chocolate. Whatever it takes, read on, as it might save your life or someone else’s.
Ivermectin
Ivermectin had not been identified in the studies I mentioned above as a potentially useful coronavirus drug.
But some people knew it was likely to work in early 2020, because the French MedInCell company, supported by Bill Gates, was working on an injectable (which would make it patentable) version of ivermectin for COVID, issuing a press release about this on April 6, 2020 and an informational paper on April 23, 2020. There was a brief run on the veterinary drug at this time in the US, according to an FDA warning issued on April 10, 2020, indicating some people knew it might be an effective COVID treatment and were acquiring it. But there was not a lot of buzz and sales did not take off at that time.
Here is what FDA said on April 10, 2020:
FDA is concerned about the health of consumers who may self-medicate by taking ivermectin products intended for animals, thinking they can be a substitute for ivermectin intended for humans… Please help us protect public health by alerting FDA of anyone claiming to have a product to prevent or cure COVID-19 and to help safeguard human and animal health by reporting any of these products
In December 2020, a full eight months later, Ron Johnson held a Senate hearing that was focused on ivermectin’s benefits for COVID. Intensive care specialist Dr. Pierre Kory, originally a New Yorker, gave a particularly compelling speech. People began paying attention to the drug. YouTube then removed Kory’s speech–censoring a Senate hearing!
I think the authorities were initially scared to repeat the same tricks with ivermectin they had used to beat down the chloroquine drugs. And because ivermectin has efficacy late in the disease as well as at the start, and is not toxic at several times the normal dose, some of the tricks used against chloroquine (giving it too late in the disease course or overdosing patients) simply would not work with ivermectin. The authorities kept quiet.
But then ivermectin’s popularity started exploding. CDC published a report in late August showing that ivermectin prescriptions had quadrupled in a month, and the drug was now selling at 25 times the pre-COVID rate.
IVERMECTIN PRESCRIPTIONS SOLD by WEEK, 2019-21
Apparently this terrified the powers-that-be. What if the pandemic got wiped out with ivermectin? It worked too well! Would that be the end of vaccine mandates, boosters, vaccine passports and digital IDs? The end of the Great Reset? Something had to be done, and fast. It had to be big. It had to be effective. They couldn’t simply take the drug off the market; that would require a long process and a paper trail.
What to do? There was probably only one option: Scare the pants off the doctors. Loss of license is the very worst thing you can do to a doctor. Threaten their licenses and they will immediately fall into line. You can’t get a prescription if there is no doctor to write it.
The method had been tested in the Philippines.
The powers-that-be could also scare the pharmacies. This required stealth. No paper trails. Intimidation was required, backed by a one-two punch: actually suspending doctors’ (annd maybe pharmacists’) licenses. You couple that with a huge media offensive, and threats from an industry of medical “non-profits.” You suddenly invent “misinformation” as a medical crime, studiously failing to define it. You make people think the legal prescribing of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine is a crime, even though off-label prescribing is entirely legal under the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.
Did Fauci give the order? Walensky? Acting FDA Commissioner Woodcock? It was probably some combination, plus the public relations professionals managing the messaging and the media.
Here’s what happened.
1. Senator Ben Ray Lujan (D, NM) and several other Senators introduced the “Health Misinformation Act” in July 2021 because “misinformation was putting lives at risk,” he said. A huge supporter of COVID vaccinations, the 49 year old Senator suffered a stroke on February 1, 2022.
2. The pharmacies suddenly could not get ivermectin from their wholesalers. No reason was given except ‘supply and demand.’ But it seemed the supply was cut off everywhere. Ivermectin was dribbled out by the wholesalers, a few pills a week per pharmacy, not enough to supply even one prescription weekly. Some powerful entity presumably ordered the wholesalers to make the drug (practically) unavailable. With no shortages announced. I called the main manufacturer in the US, Edenbridge, and was told they were producing plenty.
Hydroxychloroquine had been restricted in a variety of ways, determined by each state, since early 2020. It had also been restricted by certain manufacturers in 2020. Suddenly, in September 2021, it too became considerably harder than it already was to obtain.
3. In late August, CDC sent out a major warning about ivermectin, but only gave 2 examples of anyone having a problem with the drug: one person overdosed on an animal version and one overdosed on ivermectin bought on the internet. This should not have been news. However, pharmacists and doctors read between the lines and knew this was code for “verboten.” Almost all stopped dispensing ivermectin at that time. It should be of interest to everyone that our health agencies now speak in coded messages to doctors and pharmacies, presumably to avoid putting their threats on paper and being accountable for them. What a way for government to do business.
4. Also last August, various “nonprofit” medical organizations started issuing warnings, in concert, regarding doctors prescribing ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, and spreading misinformation, especially about COVID vaccines. These organizations included the Federation of State Medical Boards, the American Medical Association, the American Pharmacy Association, and several specialty Boards. Here is an example of the AMA’s language:
“A handful of doctors spreading disinformation have fostered belief in scientifically unvalidated and potentially dangerous “cures” for COVID-19 while increasing vaccine hesitancy…”
These organizations told doctors they could lose their licenses or board certifications for such “crimes.” Mind you, none of these so-called nonprofit organizations has any regulatory authority. Nor do I believe they have any authority to claw back a Board Certification. They were blowing smoke. And they were probably paid to do so. Who paid?
5. Over the course of 3 days at the end of August, national media reported on 4 doctors in 3 states whose Boards were investigating them for the use of ivermectin.
Hawaii’s Medical Board went after Hawaii’s chief medical officer:
The Hawaii Medical Board has filed complaints against Maui’s top health official and a Valley Isle physician following reports that they backed COVID-19 treatments that state and federal health agencies advise against.
They really wanted to make an example by going after the state’s chief medical officer, who had had the guts to treat COVID patients. Clearly the orders are coming from high up on the food chain.
Here were some of the other August headlines about doctors who legally prescribed a fully approved drug off-label:
6. The Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) is an organization that assists 71 state and territorial medical boards with policies, training, etc. Members pay dues and the organization accepts donations. It has its own foundation, too. Its President earns close to $1,000,000/year, not bad for a backwater administrative job at an organization headquartered in Euless, Texas. After the FSMB instructed its members that misinformation was a crime, somewhere between 8 and 15 of its member boards began to take action. (Media have reported that 8, 12 or 15 boards of its 71 member Boards did so, according to the FSMB, which is closely monitoring this.)
7. On February 7, 2022 the Department of Homeland Security issued its own dire warning about the spread of misinformation, disinformation and a neologism, malinformation.
“The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence. Mass casualty attacks and other acts of targeted violence conducted by lone offenders and small groups acting in furtherance of ideological beliefs and/or personal grievances pose an ongoing threat to the nation.
Thus it appears that Misinformation and Disinformation have been selected to play an important role in a newly developing narrative, as the Pandemic restrictions and narrative come to an end.
8. I presume the majority of the 71 Medical Boards’ attorneys knew something about the Constitution, knew that every American has an inalienable right to freedom of speech, and simply ignored the FSMB’s exhortation to go after misinformatin spreaders. The Maine Board, however, went along. Three doctors in Maine have recently had their licenses suspended or threatened for writing waivers for COVID vaccines, spreading misinformation, and/or prescribing ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. (All three of which are legal activities for doctors.). But Boards have broad powers to intervene, and are shielded from liability as agents of the state. So they went after a chronic Lyme doctor several years ago, who found, as expected, that it would be too onerous to fight back, and he gave up his license.
9. Here is what the Board claims about me:
“The board noted that Ivermectin isn’t Food and Drug Administration “authorized or approved” as a treatment for COVID-19 in the suspension order.”
“The board said that her continuing to practice as a physician “constitutes an immediate jeopardy to the health and physical safety of the public who might receive her medical services, and that it is necessary to immediately suspend her ability to practice medicine in order to adequately respond to this risk.”’
I am 70 years old, and my medical practice was set up as a service, so that everyone could access COVID drugs who wanted them. My fee was $60 per patient for all the COVID care they needed.
I am sure the Board had calculated that given all the above, I would not challenge the Board’s suspension and would simply surrender my license, since it would probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight the Board’s actions in court.
On the day my license was suspended, there was massive national publicity about my case. The story was on the AP wire, covered from the San Francisco Chronicle to the Miami Herald. And for some reason, it was not behind the usual paywall. The Hill, Newsweek, the Daily Beast and many other publications all ran hit pieces about me.
I realized that my situation was bigger than just a Maine issue: it had been selected to serve as an example to physicians nationwide who might be thinking for themselves and prescribing early treatment for COVID. Once I realized I was to be made an example of, as part of a national purge of doctors who think independently, I decided to fight back. Fortunately, Children’s Health Defense is helping with my legal expenses, which is what allows me to mount a strong attack against the bulldozing of free speech, patient autonomy and the doctor-patient relationship. Please join me in the fight!
Lawmakers take heat for flip-flopping on mask mandates
RT | February 10, 2022
Republican lawmakers have slammed their Democratic opponents for suddenly speaking in favor of lifting mask mandates, especially in schools, saying that the switch is just an attempt to boost their chances in the midterm elections.
Democrat-led New Jersey, New York, California, Oregon, Connecticut, and Delaware announced plans to roll back their mask requirements on Tuesday and Wednesday, with Illinois soon expected to join them.
The issue has been a major bone of contention between the two rival American parties during the pandemic. The Democrats have always defended face coverings as an essential measure to stop the spread of Covid-19, while the Republicans insist that the measure is of little use, especially for students, who face a much lesser risk of serious coronavirus infection due to their young age.
“I’d love to see whatever internal polling went around the Democrat Party last week – it’s certainly no coincidence that Democrat-run states are dropping mandates as fast as they can,” Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., told the Daily Mail about the plans by Democratic governors to lift their mask requirements.
Hern was fully backed by Rep. Lisa McClain, R-Mich., who claimed that “the Democrats continually follow the political science instead of the actual science.”
“We’ve known for months that masking has been detrimental to our children. The science hasn’t changed in the last several months, the only change has been the overwhelming uproar over government mandates,” she said.
Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz, said it was “no surprise” that the Democrats have now decided to give up on mask mandates. “They had every intention of using Covid mandates to their advantage – especially when it comes to the polls – and have perfected playing politics in our everyday lives.”
However, Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., suggested that the switch will likely be too little, too late. “Democrats forced masks on kids for two years and now they’re hoping that the rest of America will suddenly forget.”
The midterm elections, scheduled to take place in the US in November, are expected to be a tough test for the Democratic Party. Last month, a poll by Gallup revealed that 47% of Americans identified themselves as Republicans, compared to 42% as Democrats. The news figures contradicted the historic trend of Democrats outnumbering GOP supporters in the country.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said earlier this week that the number of cases and hospitalization in the US was still “too high” to think about lifting Covid-19 restrictions, adding that it continued to endorse universal masking in schools.
On Tuesday, CNN’s medical analyst, Dr. Leana Wen, who has always been a strong supporter of mask mandates, urged the CDC to follow the example of the Democratic states and lift the curbs.
“The CDC has already lost a lot of trust and credibility. This is their time to rebuild and remove restrictions as quickly as they were put in,” she argued.
Wen defended her new stance on face coverings by claiming that “circumstances have changed. Case counts are declining. Also, the science has changed.”
She faced a harsh backlash online, with prominent journalist Glenn Greenwald, who was among the critics, insisting that behavior like Wen’s was the reason behind the public loss of trust in what the medical experts have to say.
“As others noted, there is nothing in The Science™ that changed to justify Dem politicians suddenly ending mask mandates. All that changed is the political fear they have. Conflating ‘The Science’ with politics like this is a key reason many lost trust in public health experts.”
The UK wants to criminalize “misinformation” online as its own health service gets caught posting falsehoods
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | February 11, 2022
Less than a week after the UK proposed criminalizing the posting of some types of “knowingly false” information online, England’s National Health Service has taken down a social media video over inaccurate information.
Last week, NHS England posted a video on its Twitter account with more than half-a-million followers to promote vaccination in kids.
The video claimed that 1% of children will be hospitalized because of Covid, 136 kids in the UK had died because of Covid, and 117,000 children have “long Covid.”
The video went viral attracting comments and retweets from some of the most popular influencers in the health category.
But some, including Dr. Robert Hughes, a clinical research fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, questioned the accuracy of the data.
“As both a parent and scientist who has been involved in research on symptom duration and severity of covid in children, the cited statistics didn’t make sense to me,” Hughes wrote in an article in UnHerd. “The idea that 1% of children with Covid are hospitalized for it didn’t pass the ‘sniff test.’”
The video also shared the story of a kid aged 11 that was suffering from long Covid. According to Hughes, the story contradicted the vaccination guidance in the UK, as it does not even recommend vaccination for that age group.
Additionally, there is not yet any substantial evidence to support that the vaccine prevents long Covid.
Hughes also notes that NHS England was silent when he and others questioned the accuracy of the data.
“Several people agreed with me, sharing their working for why these numbers are at best long outdated, may be orders of magnitude out, and risk undermining confidence in vaccine communications and uptake.
“But others seemed to dig in, praising both the content and tone of the messaging when challenged, and directing the discussion into an important, but different, one about the merits of extending Covid vaccination to children rather than the need for accurate and honest communication about vaccination,” Dr. Hughes wrote for UnHerd.
Hughes contacted the Office of the Statistics Regulator about the numbers. The Statistics Regulator agreed that it was important that the NHS provides accurate figures.
“It is important that figures provided by NHSE&I are accurate and reliable,” the Office of the Statistics Regulator said. “In this case the claim made in the video fell short of these expectations – we contacted NHSE&I and it acknowledged that the data were historic and had methodological shortcomings. We are therefore glad that the content has now been removed from Twitter.”
Before its removal, the video had already been widely shared.
Featured Video
Israel and the Palestinians — It’s about Mind Over Matter
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Review
The Greatest Threat to World Peace? A Review of Daniele Ganser’s ‘USA: The Ruthless Empire’
Review by Marilyn Langlois | November 10, 2023
If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
If you scoff at the notion that the US, a republic founded on principles of freedom and democracy, has morphed into a world empire, perpetrating assassinations, coups d’état, acts of terror and illegal warfare . . .
If you want to promote peace but haven’t yet explored deceptive events that precipitate US warmongering . . .
. . . here is a volume that will clear the air and paint an honest picture of the significant, not-so-rosy impact US foreign policy and actions have had in the world around us.
USA: The Ruthless Empire, by Swiss historian and peace researcher Daniele Ganser, is the newly published English language translation of his book Imperium USA, originally written in German and published in 2020. Here is a summary of key points — including some lesser-known ones — along with remedies for a more peaceful future, that are covered in the book. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Putting Nukes in Finland Won’t Make Country Safer, Finnish Politician Cautions
- Ukrainian drone strike kills worker at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant
- What the West Hides About Soviet Role in De-Colonization
- Villains of Judea: Douglas Feith
- US pension fund invests hundreds of millions in weapons firms supplying Israel
- US bill to grant Americans serving in Israeli army same rights as US troops
- What a president, a movie star, a congressman, and a cell phone all dared to say
- ‘An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership’: Merz
- Pakistan Throws Open Its Gates for Iran’s Transit Trade to Third Countries
- Iran to charge ships passing Strait of Hormuz in rial: Lawmaker
- If Americans Knew
- Israel escalates in Gaza: killing, torture, hunger – Daily Update
- Six Months into Gaza Ceasefire, Setting the Record Straight About Aid
- ‘Silent suffering’: Why children in Gaza are losing their ability to speak
- In Gaza, 17,000 infections linked to rodents and external parasites – Daily Update
- Lobby group taking journalists on propaganda tours of Israel
- The Shattered Figure of Jesus Is Not an Exception. It’s a Pattern
- Israel’s idea of ceasefire includes killing 21 in one day – Daily Update
- Christians in Israel and Palestine, past and present
- Israel eager to restart Iran war, Gaza genocide – Daily Update
- Meet the Top “Content” Producers Linked to Canary Mission
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
- New Study: No Linear Warming Or Glacier Retreat Along Northern Antarctic Peninsula Since 1980s
Aletho News 