My recent talk to Irish Nurses and Mother’s Group – no punches pulled – please share!
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January 27, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Ireland |
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The New York Times assigned four of their top national political reporters to write a long story about Biden’s First Pandemic Year. The article is an unwitting case study in everything that is wrong with the Biden administration, the public health establishment, and the corporate media.
“Highly respected infectious disease expert(TM)” Rochelle Walensky knows almost nothing about viruses nor infectious disease
From the article:
Dr. Rochelle Walensky was stunned. Working from her home outside Boston on a Friday night in late July, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had just learned from members of her staff that vaccinated Americans were spreading the coronavirus.
Vaccines had been the core of President Biden’s pandemic strategy from the moment he took office. But as Dr. Walensky was briefed about a cluster of breakthrough cases in Provincetown, Mass., the reality sank in. The Delta variant, which had ravaged other parts of the world, was taking hold in the United States. And being vaccinated would not, it turned out, prevent people from becoming infected with the variant or transmitting it.
It was a “heart sink” moment, Dr. Walensky recalled in a recent interview.
I am not a medical doctor nor scientist. But I’ve been warning since April 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 was not a good candidate for a vaccine because it mutates too fast. This was known to everyone who paid even minimal attention to the data. There has never been a successful vaccine for the common cold nor HIV — and SARS-CoV-2 was engineered to have pieces of both of those viruses. And the flu vaccine, depending on the year, is often less than 50% effective (some years the effectiveness drops into the teens or even single digits). All of these vaccines fail for the same reason that coronavirus vaccines are failing — the virus mutates too fast.
Did Rochelle Walensky honestly not know the rate at which this virus was mutating?
It sounds like they never contemplated the possibility that the vaccines might fail.
That also likely means that Walensky has no idea what antibody dependent enhancement is, why it’s a problem, nor does she know how to spot antibody dependent enhancement if it’s happening in the population.
Bougiecrats just execute the plan. They do not think. They just tick boxes. That is not what the U.S. needs in the midst of this crisis.
Fauci is a malevolent force inside the government and he is wrong about everything
We already knew this but the article drives it home:
Fauci pushed for a national vaccine passport system.
Fauci pushed for vaccine mandates for domestic air travel.
Fauci pushed for the vaccine mandates that eventually became the OSHA, CMS, and federal worker vaccine requirements. Thankfully the OSHA vaccine mandate was recently struck down by the Supreme Court and the federal worker mandate was stayed last Friday by a federal judge in Texas.
One reason that the Biden administration was not prepared for the Delta and Omicron variants was because Fauci assured them that “the vaccine push would be able to, for the most part, nullify a Delta surge.”
Fauci is literally the Pandemic’s Wrongest Man Elf.
Six people dictate coronavirus policy for 330,000,000 Americans. Five of the six are completely rotten
Biden’s Pandemic team consists of six people:
Jeff Zients, an economist and former management consultant with no scientific nor medical background;
Xavier Becerra, a lawyer with no scientific nor medical background;
Janet Woodcock, the woman who gave us the opioid epidemic that kills more Americans every year than the Vietnam War;
David Kessler, who is a decent guy (not sure how they let him on the team);
Tony Fauci, who funded the creation of the virus that killed more Americans than all foreign wars combined; and
Rochelle Walenksy, who looks like she’s always on the verge of a nervous breakdown and is clearly unfit for purpose.
This is the point that I keep coming back to again and again:
Would you rather have six captured bureaucrats imposing their diktats on 330,000,000 people? Or would you rather have the one-million professionally-active doctors and 210,000,000 adults in this country using logic and reason to solve this problem using their best judgement?
It is profoundly unAmerican to give six corrupt unelected bureaucrats this much power. And it is absolutely the wrong way to make scientific decisions. No wonder the Biden administration gets everything wrong when it comes to coronavirus.
Ron DeSantis lives rent free inside Biden’s head and he is the reason we do not have a national vaccine passport system
The article states that the Biden administration, in March of 2021, began planning for a national vaccine passport system. We all saw the trial balloons that they floated in the press. But then they scuttled the plan when they saw that Governor DeSantis opposed it and was using it to build opposition to the administration. The Biden administration fears losing to DeSantis in the 2024 election and so they have scaled back their totalitarianism somewhat in hopes of not giving him more ammunition.
The reporters at the NY Times are dumb fascist clowns that have their thumb on the scale for Pharma
The NY Times is one of the best jobs in journalism. And the four senior reporters assigned to this article exemplify the total intellectual and moral collapse of the bourgeoisie.
The first five paragraphs of the article are all about how the vaccine does not stop the Omicron variant. The very next sentence reads,
Mr. Biden and his team have gotten much right, including getting at least one dose of a vaccine into nearly 85 percent of Americans 12 and older…
Did they not read the five paragraphs before about how the vaccine does not work? How is an 85% vaccination rate a success when the vaccine does not actually stop the virus? In fact, the best evidence shows that these vaccines have negative efficacy, something that these crack “reporters” do not seem to realize.
Throughout the article, the reporters chide Biden for not pushing harder for vaccine and mask mandates and more testing. They claim “a chorus of voices inside and outside the government” pushing for such measures — but strangely they never cite any sources by name who are part of this “chorus”. Apparently that’s the script and they are sticking to it regardless of whether they have to manufacture such claims.
Furthermore these stenographers for the cartel never once ask about vaccine effectiveness/risks, the fact that most masks make no difference, and the 90% false-positive rate from tests that their own newspaper reported on in August 2020. I guess they don’t trust the NY Times either.
They are also addicted to the “overwhelmed hospitals” narrative — they just sprinkle it in for a dash of flavor whenever their rhetoric starts to sag. They never question the firing of doctors and nurses with natural immunity and critical thinking skills. Nor do they examine the possibility that vaccine failure and vaccine injury might contribute to whatever patient surges might exist.
They live inside the Pharma-directed metaverse and they have no plans to ever leave or question any of its assumptions.
Conclusion
The reason why RFK Jr., Del Bigtree, Alex Berenson, and Joe Rogan have bigger audiences than the NY Times is because they tell the truth.
The reason why the Biden administration is a complete and total failure is because it is filled with bougiecrats who do not think, they just execute the plan and wait around for their participation trophy.
None of the bourgeois institutions that caused this problem (from the corporate media to the government to the public health establishment) are capable of correcting course based on new data. They are guided by ideology, not facts. The only solution is revolution. Let’s make it happen.
January 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Joe Biden, Rochelle Walensky, United States |
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Now that Covid restrictions are being rolled back, various commentators are declaring victory over the miserable virus. Lockdowns, we are told, worked. Only a fool could argue otherwise.
Devi Sridhar, the Chair of Global Public Health at Edinburgh University, who was formerly an exponent of the Zero Covid strategy of completely eradicating the virus, has recently announced in the Guardian that “delaying and preventing infection as much as possible through this pandemic was a worthwhile strategy. In early 2020, there were few treatments, limited testing and no vaccines. The costs of those lockdowns were big, but the effort to buy time paid off”.
At the other end of the political spectrum, Tom Harwood of GB News says much the same. Lockdown sceptics, he writes in CapX, are “bizarrely claiming victory now that restrictions are coming to an end”. The sceptics, Harwood asserts, ignore the success of vaccines. “There is a blindingly obvious distinction between the need for non-pharmaceutical interventions amongst a non-immune population, verses [sic] one with incredibly high levels of immunity.” He points to a lower death toll from the Omicron variant which appeared after the “stupendously successful vaccine rollout”. In conclusion, Harwood writes that to “deny lockdowns worked to reduce spread is to deny logic”.
Let’s examine the logic. If lockdowns bought time for the rollout of vaccines, then we would expect fewer Covid deaths in places that locked down early and fast. That is the case in Australia and New Zealand, which early in the pandemic sealed their borders against the virus. But the trouble with this policy, as our Antipodean friends are discovering, is the difficulty of exiting. Their policy of national self-isolation has lasted nearly two years, and continues in large measure even after most of their population has been vaccinated.
By contrast, in Europe there is no evidence that lockdowns significantly reduced Covid deaths. Sweden, which never locked down, has the same number of deaths per million as Austria, which did (see chart below). It’s true that Swedish deaths ran higher somewhat earlier than Austria, but this ‘bought-time’ doesn’t appear to have changed the final tally.
The evidence from the United States points to a similar conclusion: the Covid death rate (as a share of the population) in Florida, which largely avoided lockdowns, is slightly below the U.S. national average and far below that of New York, which had (and continues to impose) relatively tough restrictions.
It’s true that mass vaccination has reduced the risk of hospitalisation and death from Covid. But lockdown exponents imply that vaccines alone are responsible for the decline in the infection fatality rate. The evidence from South Africa, whose vaccination rate is around a quarter of the European average (49 doses per 100 people versus 180, or 27%), suggests otherwise.
It appears that either Covid has evolved to become less virulent, as the South African doctors suggested back in December, or South Africa’s population has built up strong natural immunity from prior infection – a possibility overlooked by most commentators. It seems likely that both factors have played a role in reducing the virulence of the disease. Even if lockdowns had succeeded in reducing Covid deaths until the vaccine rollout that wouldn’t necessarily justify their imposition. From the start, lockdown sceptics were concerned about the collateral damage caused by closing down the economy, shuttering schools, neglecting conventional health care and forcing people to isolate in their homes for months on end. They railed in vain against the cruelty of lockdowns: mothers giving birth alone, old people dying alone or left for months without visitors in nursing homes, the damage to children’s education, funerals unattended, small businesses crushed and so forth. Finally, the public appears to be waking up to these cruelties. Hence, the fury at the hypocrisy of Downing Street officials who imposed harsh rules for the nation which they didn’t scrupulously follow themselves.
Then there are lockdown’s immense financial costs. At the time, these could be ignored since governments financed them with interest-free loans from central banks. But all that money-printing is now fuelling inflation that will lead to further immiseration in the coming years. The sceptics argued that lockdowns were never subject to a proper cost-benefit analysis which took social and economic costs into account. That remains the case. Thus, not only has there been no ‘victory’ in the war on Covid – on the contrary, the highly contagious Omicron variant appears to be overcoming all attempts to constrain it – but the argument over lockdowns has yet to be decisively won by either side, so that lockdowns are either accepted as a tool of sound public health policy or roundly condemned as a colossal mistake. The sceptics’ work continues.
Edward Chancellor is a financial journalist and the author of Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation (1998).
January 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | Australia, Covid-19, Human rights, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, UK, United States |
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Compulsively testing and quarantining healthy athletes is even stupider
It’s the last week of the 2022 European Men’s Handball Championship, held this year in Slovakia and Hungary, and the players just can’t stop testing positive for Corona. Iceland, where handball attracts enormous interest, had eleven players sidelined after positive tests last week. Their star goalie, Björgvin Páll Gústavsson, emerged from isolation to play against Croatia yesterday, only to test positive again this morning. It’s back to quarantine for him, as he waits for a PCR confirmation. Nobody is actually too sick to play, but the alternative – spreading Omicron to a bunch of other athletes who will get it one way or another anyway – is unthinkable.
Mass containment is a set of policies that require people to act crazy all the time. Omicron is everywhere; locking up a few athletes isn’t going to slow it down. To that comes the fact that these handball players are all totally healthy; their risk of severe outcome is so low, it’s essentially unquantifiable. And on top of it all, all these precautions plainly do nothing. Everyone is testing positive anyway.
Somehow, it’s always the people at least risk who have to put up with the most Corona nonsense. Kids have spent almost two years alternating between prolonged social isolation and antiseptic prisons once known as schools. Professional athletes are probably the most heavily tested demographic in the world. The lower-risk working-age population bears the brunt of the vaccine mandates, capacity limits, and hygiene rules. Meanwhile, if you’re a sedentary retiree and you don’t care about going to the pub, your life has hardly changed since all this started.
Containment has been denuded of every conceivable goal; not even the people directing the circus can explain why we are doing this anymore. If you ask leading vaccinators like Karl Lauterbach, they’ll tell you it’s because we need to ward off hypothetical future variants – a laughable justification, which will always spring eternal. It’s time to put an end to this. It’s time to stop the testing and the masks and the vaccinating, it’s time for the hystericists to shut up and go home.
January 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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The French Government is introducing a tougher vaccine passport regime today. Now, only vaccination (and not natural immunity or covid tests) will count to allow access to cafes, libraries, sports facilities, and long-distance trains.
The near-hysterical arguments made by the French political class justifying this new pass are strikingly unguarded and reveal the inner dynamics behind the vaccine passport drive. These debates show that vaccines are no longer a simple medical product. Instead, the vaccine has become a way in which states are establishing their authority, and creating a new QR-code citizenship based on regular compliance with medical procedures.
Vaccination has become a test for entry into the civic body. The ‘test’ of the vaccine is not your degree of medical immunity, or the degree to which you stand to suffer personally from COVID-19 infection. (The vaccine pass goes down to the age of 12 in France, while in New York it applies to those aged five and above).
Instead, the new meaning of vaccination is an act of compliance; it is a matter of doing what is asked and expected of you. The French Prime Minister Jean Castex said that the vaccinated have “played the game”, they have done what is asked of them. President Emmanuel Macron said that the vaccinated, “near-totality of people”, have “adhered” or “subscribed” to what they were asked to do. These people are “responsible”. By contrast, it is a “very small” that is “refractory” or “resistant”. They are “irresponsible”, says Macron, and “a irresponsible person is longer a citizen”.
Here, the state claims the right to set conditions for entry to civic life. The question of being part of social life is not a right, but something provisional; it is a permission that is granted by the state. The new gatekeepers of civil society are the waiter at a cafe, the head of a sports club, the door staff at the theatre, who from Monday will not only scan QR codes but check people’s ID cards too.
“To be a free citizen means to be a responsible citizen,” says Macron. “Duties come before rights.” You can only have rights (enter society) once you have done your duty (been vaccinated). The idea that duties come before rights means, at base, that the state comes before the citizen: the citizen only takes his place in society at the behest of the state.
This is not a matter of two shots and you are done. There is an ongoing demand for compliance, whereby your citizenship – and claim to ‘responsibility’ – is continually renewed. France has followed Israel in requiring a booster shot for vaccine passes to remain valid. Currently, you have seven months to get a booster, but this will shorten to four months in February. A French Government guide sets out the exact timetable expected of you: this is a jurisprudence of medically based citizenship. Every injection gives a ‘valid QR card’ that you can use to access social life; if you don’t get the booster in the required window then this QR code will expire. France has also followed Israel with a special offer (available until February 15th) allowing first-time jabbers to “benefit from a valid vaccine pass” after their first dose, so long as they get their second jab within 28 days.
The discounting of natural immunity is very telling. Natural immunity yields a wider spectrum of anti-bodies than vaccination and is likely to confer longer protection against infection and against new variants. And yet natural immunity has no political meaning. It is a strength that your body has gained through its own efforts, without involving the state or wider society. The ‘pass sanitaire’ that had been in operation in France since last summer recognised natural immunity and negative covid tests, alongside vaccination; the new ‘pass vaccinal’ recognises vaccination alone. The French Prime Minister now claims that natural immunity provides “only very little immunity”, while the source of genuine immunity is a “full course of vaccines”. This claim reflects more about the different political value placed upon these two routes to antibodies. One route is deemed “protective”, robust, and the other very weak, as something that “wanes”, only because one has a robust relationship with the state and the other relates to the state “only very little”.
(Indeed, as we saw with the Novak Djokovic saga, natural immunity – and the claim to exemption based on natural immunity – in fact now poses a threat, so dangerous that a person must be imprisoned and deported. Natural immunity poses a threat not to actual public health, but to the new social order based on vaccination that is being built by the Australian government.)
The fetishism of Covid vaccination is at base a fetishism of bureaucracy. The vaccinated person has a pass, they have a QR code; they are on these grounds judged safe. You can feel ‘reassured’ when you are in a public space and everybody has passes on their phones. The unvaccinated person has no card or QR code and therefore they are seen as risky and posing a danger to others. In declining to be vaccinated, they are not merely refusing a medical procedure – with its attendant benefits and risks – but they are refusing to relate to bureaucracy. The absolute power attributed to a vaccine card – to show that someone is safe, to show that they care for others, and are willing to protect themselves and others – owes less to the medical effects of vaccination than to vaccination as an insignia for bureaucracy.
This is why it is repeatedly asserted that only the unvaccinated are infectious. The French prime minister says that the unvaccinated cannot be allowed to go around “infecting others with impunity”. He even claims that the unvaccinated intend to infect others, that they think to themselves, “I’m going to infect others.” This belief persists in the face of sky-high vaccinated case rates; in the face, even, of the Prime Minister’s own recent Covid infection.
There is a long history of blaming dissident elements for infectious disease – as with the expulsion of beggars, Jews and prostitutes from medieval plague towns, or in the nineteenth century the association between cholera and revolutionary urban uprisings. Infectious disease has often been associated with elements outside the system or that cut against social or religious hierarchy. Michel Foucault said that the absolutist state saw the plague as “a form… of disorder”, a disease of “rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder”.
Now too, the unvaccinated are seen as the source of all ills of society. The Italian Prime Minister said that “most of the problems we are experiencing today are due to the fact that there are unvaccinated people”, as he introduced a new tougher vaccine pass for Italian citizens on January 10th. The unvaccinated are even, perversely, presented as the cause of repressive instruments designed by politicians. Emmanuel Macron said that the unvaccinated didn’t merely put other people’s lives at risk, but they also “restricted the liberty of others”, which was “unacceptable”. The French Prime Minister said the unvaccinated “put in danger the life of the whole country and restrict the daily life of the immense majority of French people”.
The eight per cent or so of people who have not been vaccinated in France appear to be the single focus of state authority. Macron recently said that his primary aim was to “piss off the unvaccinated”, and that he will continue to do this “until the end”. In his New Year’s message, he urged the unvaccinated to join the fold, telling them that “all of France is counting on you”, as if the course of the pandemic – indeed the very fate of France – depends upon them agreeing to the jab.
The project of improving national health has been replaced by a project of integrating the population into a bureaucracy by means of health status. The health of the nation has become confused with the proportion of the population that has a valid health pass.
The pursuit of the ideology of vaccination at the expense of health outcomes is shown most vividly in the imposition of vaccination mandates upon healthcare professionals. Here, we see the sheer blindness of sacking of experienced medical staff in the midst of a pandemic on the basis of a vaccine that has no bearing on the risk they pose to patients. It also shows how far the notion of the ‘irresponsible’ unvaccinated person is from the reality, given that healthcare workers have given and contributed more than anyone. In French Guadeloupe, vaccine mandates led to a 30% reduction in staff at the main hospital and the reduction of services to a skeleton operation. The scene there now is colonial: black healthcare staff picketing the hospital were removed by white mobile gendarme units, and now there is an armed police checkpoint at the hospital entrance. Vaccination mandates are a test of allegiance for healthcare professionals. Authorities show that they are prepared to run hospitals into the ground, to risk lives, to protect the ideology.
The vaccine passport is a citizenship test for a morally and politically vacuous age. It is entirely passive – it is the simple act of consenting to a medical procedure, after which you are crowned with a civic virtue. This is a citizenship test that occurs on the level of what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”; that is, it is a question of merely biological existence, rather than a question of how a life is lived. Receiving a vaccine pass is mute; there are no words, there is no oath of allegiance to party, country or leader. You offer your body and receive a QR code in return: this is the nature of the new social contract between citizen and state. “Vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate” is the mantra for reconstituting authority and society in an age where this authority cannot be grounded on a substantial social basis.
The vaccine is being treated as a mystical state or collective substance that incorporates people into the collective body. Vaccination now is like a sacrament, a transubstantiation ritual; through the vaccine we are receiving the body of the state into our body and therefore joining the community.
One casualty in this is vaccination itself. Considered scientifically, a vaccine – as with any drug – is not a protective talisman or means for membership of a community. It is a medical product with particular qualities and uses, and particular side effects and risks. It may be useful for some groups but not others, and in some contexts but not in others. The rational use of a drug is as important as the drug itself, to ensure that it is directed towards the appropriate ends.
The ideological weaponisation of vaccines distorts these cost-benefit judgements. The vaccine is forced upon people who have little or no need of it, such as children and those with natural immunity, while ignoring those who have need of it. (The older and more vulnerable someone is, the less they are affected by vaccine passports.)
This episode is violating the very basis of health and medical ethics. Through vaccination passports and mandates, it has become acceptable to force someone to take a medical treatment, even a treatment that is not really in their medical interest. When Jean Castex boasted that the vaccine passport led to a rise in people getting their first vaccination, the interviewer pointed out “but they were forced”. Castex shrugged. In normal times, medical force is unacceptable; medical force means the Nazis. When France began vaccinating a year ago, it insisted upon consent forms and pre-vaccine interviews to ensure that people were really consenting. Now, the use of force has become entirely acceptable, it has become ethical in fact. It is the duty of the state to get people to do their duty.
And in this, the state is claiming rights over our bodies, the right to say what we put in them and what we don’t. A citizen under the vaccine passport regime is not in fact a citizen at all, but rather a chattel: you sign your body over to the state, and agree to take the latest required treatments in order have your QR code renewed. You sell your rights over your body for the price of drinking a cup of coffee in a cafe.
Josie Appleton is the author of Toxic Sociality – Reflections on a Pandemic and Officious – Rise of the Busybody State. She writes at notesonfreedom.com.
January 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, France, Human rights, Israel |
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As reported last week by The Defender, federal monies from the 2020 and 2021 COVID stimulus bills dramatically reshaped K-12 educational priorities, turning American school officials into lackeys for federal agencies more intent on masking and vaccinating every last child than on supporting meaningful education.
So, too, with the stimulus-induced reshaping of hospital priorities.
In the second half of a January interview on Del Bigtree’s “The Highwire” — “COVID-19: Following the Money” — policy analyst A.J. DePriest reported on the untoward consequences set into motion as a result of COVID funds provided to hospitals.
Managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the federal government allocated a total of $186.5 billion to the Provider Relief Fund (PRF), with two-thirds ($121.3 billion) disbursed as of January 2022.
The first tranche of $50 billion for hospitals and other Medicare providers — “for healthcare-related expenses or lost revenues … attributable to COVID-19” — began flying out the door in April 2020.
Almost immediately, alert doctors and astute journalists warned the Medicare add-on payments built into the relief package created perverse incentives unfriendly to patients’ interests.
As summarized by Dr. Scott Jensen — former Minnesota state senator and current gubernatorial candidate — “anytime healthcare intersects with dollars it gets awkward.”
Nearly two years down the road, the “awkwardness” is increasingly difficult to hide.
In the view of DePriest and many others, HHS’s stimulus slush fund has been every bit as dangerous for hospital patients as the U.S. Department of Education’s handouts have been for the nation’s schoolchildren.
Making out like bandits
Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet and Ali Shultz, J.D., who wrote a widely distributed op-ed in late 2021 for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), summed up the disturbing situation prevailing in hospitals. The AAPS’s professional calling card is its “dedication to the highest ethical standards of the Oath of Hippocrates.”
Not mincing their words, the two argued that Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) payment directives turned hospitals and medical staff into “bounty hunters,” and COVID patients into “virtual prisoners.”
Highlighting the slew of CMS add-ons and other incentives established with the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act — and also the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act (PPPHCEA) — they emphasized the payments hinge on hospitals’ willingness to slavishly follow the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) guidelines “for all things related to COVID-19.”
As itemized by Vliet and Shultz, compliant hospitals garner CMS payments for:
- Each completed diagnostic test (required in the emergency room or upon admission).
- Each COVID-19 diagnosis.
- Each COVID admission.
- Use of the intravenously administered Gilead drug remdesivir (brand name Veklury), which yields a 20% bonus payment on the entire hospital bill.
- Mechanical ventilation.
- COVID-19 listed as cause of death.
Citing a Becker’s Hospital Review breakdown, published in April 2020, of CARES Act payments to different states, DePriest told Bigtree payments ranged from $166,000 per COVID patient in Tennessee hospitals, for example, to far higher payments in states such as North Dakota ($339,000), Nebraska ($379,000) and West Virginia ($471,000).
In addition, for hospitals ascertained to be in COVID “hotspots,” HHS distributed special “high-impact” funds — $77,000 per admission initially, later downsized to $50,000 per admission.
HHS explained it used COVID admissions “as a proxy for the extent to which each facility experienced lost revenue and increased expenses associated with directly treating a substantial number of COVID-19 inpatient admission [sic].
The remdesivir ruse
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spent $79 million developing remdesivir for Gilead, which itself dished out $2.45 million during the first quarter of 2020, to lobby for the drug’s use with COVID patients.
On May 1, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized remdesivir for emergency use in individuals hospitalized with severe COVID illness, and members of an NIH expert panel (many with financial ties to Gilead) added the drug to the agency’s treatment guidelines.
A scant five months later, FDA granted full approval to remdesivir for hospitalized COVID patients over age 12.
The World Health Organization (WHO), in contrast, advised against remdesivir, stating the drug has “no meaningful effect on mortality or on other important outcomes for patients.”
Remdesivir sailed through regulatory hoops in the U.S. despite an abysmal track record of “adverse effects serious enough to kill” any individual hapless enough to take it.
Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. discusses remdesivir’s toxicity in his best-selling book, The Real Anthony Fauci, outlining the lethal problems — multiple organ failure, acute kidney failure, septic shock, hypotension and death — experienced by participants in NIAID’s clinical trial of remdesivir as an Ebola therapy.
When the trial, which compared remdesivir against three other drugs, killed more than half (54%) of the remdesivir recipients within 28 days — the highest mortality rate among the four groups — an oversight board forced the NIAID to end the prong of the study focused on remdesivir.
As if remdesivir alone weren’t bad enough, Vliet and Shultz estimate mechanical ventilation kills anywhere from 45% to 85% of COVID patients. Moreover, NIH’s skimpy treatment guidelines prescribe dexamethasone concurrently with ventilators.
Dexamethasone, often described as a “double-edged sword,” is a highly potent corticosteroid that suppresses the innate immune system.
Like remdesivir, dexamethasone’s potentially significant adverse impacts include kidney damage. Additional side effects include interference with the normal function of other organ systems such as the cardiovascular, digestive, endocrine, musculoskeletal and nervous systems.
Ironically, dexamethasone can also increase the need for mechanical ventilation as well as for blood pressure intervention.
Therapies like these are a large part of why, as Vliet and Shultz note, the U.S. COVID mortality rate is so “shockingly high” compared to the rest of the world.
Remdesivir’s trail of destruction could get worse — on Jan. 21, FDA expanded use of remdesivir to “high-risk” adult and pediatric outpatients (age 12 and older) “for the treatment of mid-to-moderate COVID-19 disease,” permitting administration of the intravenous drug in various outpatient facilities.
FDA’s side effects warnings include possible liver injury and allergic reactions such as “changes in blood pressure and heart rate, low blood oxygen level, fever, shortness of breath, wheezing, swelling …, rash, nausea, sweating or shivering.”
Getting involved and bringing transparency
Referring to the 20% add-on payment that hospitals receive for administering remdesivir to COVID patients, DePriest commented that a “bonus” is a “weird thing to call something when you’re murdering people.”
Journalist Jon Rappoport agreed, preferring to characterize hospitals’ behavior toward COVID patients as “a federally incentivized protocol for murder” — or “cash for death.”
All of the above parties concur that the best-case scenario is to treat COVID early at home and avoid hospitals — “because we know from experience what happens there.”
In cases where hospitalization is unavoidable, DePriest encourages communities to get more involved:
“[W]hen you know these hospitals are doing that, the people of that community need to show up at that hospital en masse and start telling them that you, as a community, are going to be advocating for every single COVID patient that walks through those doors, and you are going to hold that hospital accountable — to their patient bill of rights, to their stated visitation policies — and if your state is not in a state of emergency anymore, there shouldn’t be any reason why patients are medically kidnapped and separated from their families and isolated.
“There’s absolutely no reason for it, but the communities have to get involved and they have to confront these hospitals and tell them, ‘We’re done, you’re not killing any more of us.’”
© 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.
January 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, remdesivir, United States |
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Boris Johnson recently declared an end to the COVID restrictions in the UK. He said, “We will trust the judgment of the English people.”
Why can’t we do that in the US? Isn’t it time to trust the judgment of the American people?
Whether you ask a red or blue pill person, it’s clear that both sides have compelling rationales to end the mandates and the State of Emergency.
Interestingly, the rationale for each side is completely different, but the conclusion is the same. Here’s how they stack up.
Blue pill rationale
- We don’t need mandates for the vaccine or masks because we know they work. No need to sell us! Mandate or not, we will comply.
- We no longer fear those who are not compliant: we are all boosted up the wazoo using safe and effective vaccines with virtually no side effects AND we are wearing N95 or P100 masks at all times. And we always stay 6 feet from any other person. So there is basically no way to infect us.
- We have nothing to fear. Virtually none of us will be hospitalized, and none of us risk death. And the prevalence of Omicron makes our risk even lower.
- We think people who are not compliant are evil and deserve to die. Why force them to take life-saving medical interventions? We are better off as a society if these people are gone. Permanently.
- We trust our doctors to deliver quality medical advice. Our doctors always follow the CDC guidance which has been uniformly excellent. We all should be treated the same, no matter what our medical histories are. If the doctors follow the CDC guidelines, almost nobody dies. All the hospitals are filled with unvaccinated people.
- Just to be safe, we test ourselves every day using antigen tests for COVID. If we have a positive test result, we now have two new safe and effective drugs from the most trusted drug companies in the world so that in the rare chance that we get COVID, we can treat it with nearly 100% success.
Red pill rationale
- Mandates aren’t needed because we won’t comply with them anyway. They just create division and animosity in society. They divide us.
- We don’t fear the vaccinated.
- Cloth, surgical, and N95 masks don’t work so why should we wear them? P100 masks do work, but they are pretty cumbersome and not worth the trouble for a COVID variant that can’t hurt us.
- Social distancing is useless and doesn’t work. The 6 foot rule is not based on any science. Why isn’t it 5.2 feet? Nobody has seen the science justifying 6 feet so we aren’t going to comply with silly non-scientific rules.
- The current COVID vaccines are more likely to kill people than save them. In the Pfizer trial, 24% more people died in the group taking the vaccine! So it’s clear. If the vaccines don’t kill us, they will actually make the pandemic worse because they depress our immune system making us twice as likely to be infected with COVID as well as susceptible to other diseases (like reoccurrence of cancer). They also cause serious side effects. They are the most dangerous vaccines in human history. There is no way we will take them. Mandating them is just going to piss us off and hurt the economy. You will not get us to take them.
- Why would we take a drug that could kill us to prevent a variant that cannot? You’d have to be nuts. We will not comply so the mandates won’t make us.
- The primary variant is Omicron which if it happened today, we’d just ignore it since it is like getting a cold.
- If we get sick, we have very effective early treatment protocols using existing safe repurposed drugs like ivermectin, HCQ, aspirin, vitamin D, NAC, and Prozac. These protocols are 100% successful in preventing death from COVID when given early. We would never use Molnupiravir or Paxlovid; those drugs are both super dangerous.
- We use symptoms to determine if we have COVID. If we are unsure, we can use antigen tests. There is no need to test if we aren’t symptomatic because we know there is virtually zero asymptomatic spread and because the antigen tests almost never work reliably unless you are symptomatic so it’s a complete waste of money to test asymptomatic people. The testing companies don’t want anyone to know that, but we do.
- If we do get sick with COVID symptoms, we stay home and rest.
- Even if we had a truly safe vaccine, those of us who are recovered from COVID wouldn’t need it. A uniform mandate for everyone makes no sense.
- We believe doctors should be allowed to be doctors and that medical care should always be delivered by our healthcare professional we trust to use his professional judgement on our individual case. The CDC guidance is just awful.
January 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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The time has come to terminate the pandemic state of emergency. It is time to end the controls, the closures, the restrictions, the plexiglass, the stickers, the exhortations, the panic-mongering, the distancing announcements, the ubiquitous commercials, the forced masking, the vaccine mandates.
We don’t mean that the virus is gone – omicron is still spreading wildly, and the virus may circulate forever. But with a normal focus on protecting the vulnerable, we can treat the virus as a medical rather than a social matter and manage it in ordinary ways. A declared emergency needs continuous justification, and that is now lacking.
Over the last six weeks in the US, the delta variant strain – the most recent aggressive version of the infection – has according to CDC been declining in both the proportion of infections (60% on December 18 to 0.5% on January 15) and the number of daily infected people (95,000 to 2,100). During the next two weeks, delta will decline to the point that it essentially disappears like the strains before it.
Omicron is mild enough that most people, even many high-risk people, can adequately cope with the infection. Omicron infection is no more severe than seasonal flu, and generally less so. A large portion of the vulnerable population in the developed world is already vaccinated and protected against severe disease. We have learned much about the utility of inexpensive supplements like Vitamin D to reduce disease risk, and there is a host of good therapeutics available to prevent hospitalization and death should a vulnerable patient become infected. And for younger people, the risk of severe disease – already low before omicron – is minuscule.
Even in places with strict lockdown measures, there are hundreds of thousands of newly registered omicron cases daily and countless unregistered positives from home testing. Measures like mandatory masking and distancing have had negligible or at most small effects on transmission. Large-scale population quarantines only delay the inevitable. Vaccination and boosters have not halted omicron disease spread; heavily vaccinated nations like Israel and Australia have more daily cases per capita than any place on earth at the moment. This wave will run its course despite all of the emergency measures.
Until omicron, recovery from Covid provided substantial protection against subsequent infection. While the omicron variant can reinfect patients recovered from infection by previous strains, such reinfection tends to produce mild disease. Future variants, whether evolved from omicron or not, are unlikely to evade the immunity provided by omicron infection for a long while. With the universal spread of omicron worldwide, new strains will likely have more difficulty finding a hospitable environment because of the protection provided to the population by omicron’s widespread natural immunity.
It is true that – despite emergency measures — hospitalization counts and Covid-associated mortality have risen. Since mortality tends to trail symptomatic infection by about 3-4 weeks, we are still seeing the delta strain’s remaining effects and the waning of vaccine immunity against serious outcomes at 6-8 months after vaccination. These cases should decline over time as delta finally says goodbye. It is too late to alter their course with lockdowns (if that were ever possible).
Given that omicron, with its mild infection, is running its course to the end, there is no justification for maintaining emergency status. The lockdowns, personnel firings and shortages and school disruptions have done at least as much damage to the population’s health and welfare as the virus.
The state of emergency is not justified now, and it cannot be justified by fears of a hypothetical recurrence of some more severe infection at some unknown point in the future. If such a severe new variant were to occur – and it seems unlikely from omicron – then that would be the time to discuss a declaration of emergency.
Americans have sacrificed enough of their human rights and of their livelihoods for two years in the service of protecting the general public health. Omicron is circulating but it is not an emergency. The emergency is over. The current emergency declaration must be canceled. It is time.
Authors
Harvey Risch
Harvey Risch is Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Risch received his MD degree from the University of California San Diego and PhD from the University of Chicago. After serving as a postdoctoral fellow in epidemiology at the University of Washington, Dr. Risch was a faculty member in epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Toronto before coming to Yale.
Jayanta Bhattacharya
Jay Bhattacharya, Senior Scholar of Brownstone Institute, is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute.
Paul Elias Alexander
Dr Alexander holds a PhD. He has experience in epidemiology and in the teaching clinical epidemiology, evidence-based medicine, and research methodology. Dr Alexander is a former Assistant Professor at McMaster University in evidence-based medicine and research methods; former COVID Pandemic evidence-synthesis consultant advisor to WHO-PAHO Washington, DC (2020) and former senior advisor to COVID Pandemic policy in Health and Human Services (HHS) Washington, DC (A Secretary), US government; worked/appointed in 2008 at WHO as a regional specialist/epidemiologist in Europe’s Regional office Denmark, worked for the government of Canada as an epidemiologist for 12 years, appointed as the Canadian in-field epidemiologist (2002-2004) as part of an international CIDA funded, Health Canada executed project on TB/HIV co-infection and MDR-TB control (involving India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Afghanistan, posted to Kathmandu); employed from 2017 to 2019 at Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) Virginia USA as the evidence synthesis meta-analysis systematic review guideline development trainer; currently a COVID-19 consultant researcher in the US-C19 research group.
January 23, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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Defending Australian Open Champion Novak Djokovic was deported from Australia, the day before commencement of 2022 tournament play. He entered the country on a visa including a medical exemption based on recent Covid infection. Due to public outry over “special treatment,” his visa was revoked upon arrival in the country, only to be reinstated by a court. It was later revoked by an immigration minister, whose decision was upheld by another court, sending Djokovic packing — potentially for three years.
This draconian act puts Djokovic at a serious disadvantage in his Grand Slam rivalry with Rafael Nadal, who is competing in Australia this year after vocally supporting vaccines. Both champions, along with Roger Federer, currently hold 20 Grand Slam titles. Djokovic was favored to be the first to reach 21, but his decision to remain unvaccinated leaves Nadal alone with that opportunity for now. (Federer is out recovering from surgery.)
Djokovic was technically deported for not being vaccinated, but the decision lacks even a superficial “health and safety” justification. Djokovic already had Covid twice, once in early 2020 and again in December 2021. At the time of his deportation, he had been in Australia for ten days, and tested negative. He’s as healthy as a human being can be — you don’t earn “GOAT’ status in the difficult sport of tennis any other way.
Further proof that Djokovic poses no disease threat to anyone is the fact that this tournament was safely played in January 2021, before vaccines were available for any player or guest. Even if Djokovic had taken the vaccine, he’d be no “safer” in terms of his ability to transmit the virus, as the 100,000 daily cases in highly-vaccinated Australia attest.
Even the government that deported Djokovic didn’t try very hard to frame its decision as the elimination of a health threat. Rather, it stated that Novak could become an “icon of free choice” if allowed to stay. Ironically, he will undoubtedly become that now that he’s made the supreme sacrifice of forfeiting his chance to play in order to openly oppose mandatory vaccination.
It’s not a good look for the Covid Regime if an avowed “anti-vaxxer” dominates the sport. The world audience might start thinking about the relative health status of “unvaccinated” people, particularly since athletes have been experiencing heart trouble all over the world — several already at the Australian Open practice courts.
As it stands, Millions of Australians and others who have already taken the vaccine applaud the government’s decision. They can’t get the vaccine out of their bodies, so the next best thing is to make sure that everyone else has to put themselves into the same spot.
Nevermind the precedent it sets to allow a government to force people to choose between their health and their career. Such Sophie’s choices are normal these days.
The Regime would not have minded Djokovic playing in an unvaccinated state so long as he publicly expressed support for mandatory universal vaccination. He could have easily done this — a hero in Serbia, the wealthy star could have tapped any number of doctors to provide fake certification of vaccination. But that would have violated his principles.
In 2010, an “unwell” Djokovic was collapsing at tournaments, unable to complete strenuous matches. A doctor witnessing his condition on TV got in touch with the athlete, recommending that he eliminate gluten, dairy and processed sugar from his diet. Novak thought it sounded strange but agreed to try, and it’s hard to argue with his results. His 2011 season was one of the best in men’s tennis history. On his new fuel, he was unstoppable. He ended the season with an unbelievable 10–1 record against Nadal and Federer, and compiled a 41-match winning streak.
This experience changed not only the tennis player. It fundamentally changed the man, as Djokovic explains in his book “Serve to Win”:
When it’s not being cared for, your body will send you signals: fatigue, insomnia, cramps, flus, colds, allergies. When that happens, will you ask yourself the questions that matter? Will you answer honestly and with an open mind?
Open-minded people radiate positive energy. Closed-minded people radiate negativity. Eastern medicine teaches you to align mind, body, and soul. If you have positive feelings in your mind — love, joy, happiness — they affect your body… But a lot of people, especially closed-minded people, are led by fear. That and anger are the most negative energies we have. What are closed-minded people afraid of? It could be many things: Fear that they are wrong, fear that someone might have a better way, fear that something has to change. Fear limits your ability to live your life.
Some people at the top feed off of negativity. The way I see it, pharmaceutical and food companies want people to feel fear. They want people to be sick. How many TV ads are for fast foods and medicines? And what’s at the root of those messages? We’ll make you feel better with our products. But even deeper down: We’ll make you fear that you don’t have enough of the things we say you need. It’s crazy — even when you’re completely healthy, they say you need [products] to stay that way.
Here’s a pattern I’d rather embrace: good food, exercise, openness, positive energy, great results. I’ve been living that pattern for several years now. It works better than the alternative.
Djokovic rejects Big food, Big Ag, Big Chemical, and Big Pharma. He doesn’t need them. His practices allow him to be healthy without any of their products — in fact, he’s achieved an elite level of health by actively avoiding their products.
There is no greater threat to the bottom line of these companies than people like Novak Djokovic. He is not scared, he is not anxious, so he can’t be manipulated or sold an easy fix. He can see the path to health takes hard work, and he’s willing to put it in. When they tell him that he can’t be healthy without a vaccine, he laughs in their faces. They can send him packing, but they can never take away his integrity and self-worth.
Novak Djokovic doesn’t want to lie to the public, making it appear as if he agrees with The System’s “path to health.” If he did that, he would get to play his tournament, but he would have millions of lives on his conscience. He’d rather give up his career’s crowning achievement in order to stand in truth. To send people the message: you CAN reject this tyranny. You do NOT have to comply. You can SAY NO, and you will be okay.
It’s easier for him, yes, with his millions of dollars. Healthcare workers on a middle-class salary will have a harder go of it. Military members faced with dishonorable discharge absent vaccination have it worse. But Djokovic has made it easier, at least, for everyone to publicly reject vaccination. If Novak openly rejects this vaccine, they can too, without shame. His very public deportation will hopefully get many people thinking about his approach to health, which if widely understood and adopted, will finally burn the Covid Regime to the ground — once and for all.
Stacey Rudin is an attorney and writer in New Jersey, USA.
January 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Australian, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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I’ve been getting frequent requests for at least the last six months to write about the Novavax covid vaccine. I’ve been resisting, mainly because it’s seemed uncertain whether it would ever actually be approved in the western world. Now that it’s been approved for use in the EU, however, that has changed, and I figure that I can put it off no longer.
I guess the reason so many people are excited about the Novavax vaccine is that it uses a traditional technology that’s been used many times previously, rather than the new-fangled technologies used in the mRNA and adenovector vaccines that have up to now been all that’s available in the US and EU. To many people, that apparently makes it feel inherently safer.
The Novavax vaccine consists of two parts: the Sars-Cov-2 spike protein and an adjuvant (a substance that causes the immune system to realize that a dangerous foreign entity is present, and which thus activates an immune response to the spike protein). So, rather than injecting genetic blueprints in to the body that get cells to make the viral spike protein themselves (as is the case with the four previously approved vaccines), the spike protein is injected directly.
The first country to approve the Novavax vaccine was Indonesia, which approved it for use in November. That means that there is no even slightly long term real world follow-up data available yet. All we have is the preliminary results from the randomized trials. That means we still have no idea about rare side-effects, and won’t for months. Several million people had already received the AstraZeneca vaccine before authorities realized it could cause serious blood clotting disorders, and millions had also received the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines before it became clear that they can cause myocarditis. With that cautionary point having been made, let’s take a look at what the preliminary results from the randomized trials show.
The first trial results concerning the Novavax vaccine appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in May. 4,387 people in South Africa were randomized to receive either the vaccine or a saline placebo. The trial was conducted during the final months of 2020, when the beta variant was dominant in South Africa. Like the earlier covid vaccine trials, the objective of the study was to understand the ability of the vaccine to prevent symptomatic disease, which was defined as symptoms suggestive of covid-19 plus a positive covid test.
The average age of the participants was 32 years and chronic conditions were rare, so this was a group at low risk of severe disease. When this fact is combined with the relatively small total number of participants (for a vaccine trial), there was no possibility that the study was going to say anything useful about the ability of the vaccine to prevent severe disease. So this was really a trial looking at the ability of the Novavax vaccine to prevent the common cold in healthy young people.
Let’s look at the results.
As with the earlier published vaccine trials, data on efficacy was only provided two months out from receipt of the vaccine. At the two month mark, 15 people in the vaccine group had developed symptomatic covid-19, as compared with 29 people in the placebo group. This gives a relative risk reduction of 49% against the beta variant at two months post vaccination, which is disappointing. It’s below the 50% risk reduction that regulators have set as the minimum level required for them to approve a vaccine.
It’s even more disappointing when you consider that efficacy against symptomatic infection likely peaks at two months out from vaccination, and then drops rapidly – that is the pattern that’s been seen with all the other approved covid vaccines, and it’s very likely that the same is true for this vaccine.
Furthermore, the beta variant is long gone. The other approved vaccines appear to have little to no ability to prevent infection from the currently dominant omicron variant (although they do still seem to reduce the risk of severe disease to a large extent). Here in Sweden you are currently just as likely to get covid regardless of whether you’ve been vaccinated or not, but you’re still far less likely to end up in an ICU due to severe covid if you’ve been vaccinated. There’s no reason to assume that this vaccine is any different.
Let’s move on and look at safety. Safety data was only provided for a sub-set of patients, and for the first 35 days out from receipt of the first vaccine dose. What little there was though, was somewhat discouraging, with twice as many adverse events requiring medical attention in the group receiving the vaccine as in the group receiving the placebo (13 vs 6), and twice as many serious adverse events in the group receiving the vaccine (2 vs 1). To be fair though, the small absolute numbers make it impossible to draw any conclusions about safety based on this limited data. So we’ll wait to pass judgement.
Let’s move on to the second trial, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in September. This was a much larger trial than the first, with 15,187 people in the UK who were randomized to either the Novavax vaccine or a saline placebo. Like the earlier study, it was looking at the ability of the vaccine to prevent symptomatic disease. The study ran from late 2020 to early 2021, during a time when the alpha variant was dominant, so the results of the study apply primarily to that variant. 45% of the participants had at least one risk factor that would predispose them to severe disease, and the average age was 56 years.
Ok, so what were the results?
Among participants who received two doses of the vaccine, there were 96 covid infections in the placebo group, but only 10 in the vaccine group during the three month period after receipt of the second dose. This gives an efficacy during the first few months of 90%, similar to what was found in the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine trials. One person ended up being hospitalized for covid-19 in the placebo group, while no-one was hospitalized in the vaccine group – so unfortunately there again weren’t enough hospitalizations to be able to say anything about the ability of the vaccine to prevent severe disease (although it’s pretty clear from this study that even for a relatively high risk group, the overall risk of hospitalization due to covid is low – of 96 people in the placebo group who got covid, only one required hospitalization).
Let’s turn to safety. Safety data is only provided for the period from receipt of the first dose to 28 days out from receipt of the second dose, so we don’t learn anything about the longer term, but at least for that shorter period, there was no signal of serious harm. There were 44 serious adverse events in the vaccine group, and 44 serious adverse events in the placebo group. One person in the vaccine group developed myocarditis three days after receipt of the second dose, which suggests that the Novavax vaccine might cause myocarditis, just like the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines do.
Let’s turn to the final trial, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in December. It was carried out in the United States and Mexico during the first half of 2021. Just as with the previous trial, the results apply primarily to the alpha variant. 29,949 participants were randomized to either the Novavax vaccine or a saline placebo. Like the other two trials, the purpose was to see if the vaccine prevented symptomatic disease, again defined as symptoms suggestive of covid-19 plus a positive PCR test. The median age of the participants was 47 years, and 52% had an underlying condition that would predispose them to more severe disease if infected with covid-19.
So, what were the results?
At 70 days out from receipt of the second dose, 0.8% of participants in the placebo group had developed covid-19, compared with only 0.1% in the vaccine group. This gives a relative risk reduction of 90%, a result that is identical to that seen in the previous trial. Unfortunately, no information is provided on hospitalizations, which I assume means that not one of the 29,949 people included in the study was hospitalized for covid-19, so, just as with the earlier trials, it’s impossible to tell if the vaccine results in any meaningful reduction in hospitalizations.
At 28 days post receipt of the seond dose, 0.9% of participants in the vaccine group had suffered a serious adverse event, compared with 1.0% of participants in the placebo group. That is encouraging.
Ok, let’s wrap up. what can we conclude about the Novavax vaccine after looking at the results of these three trials?
First, we can conclude that it effectively protected people from symptomatic covid due to the alpha variant at two-three months post vaccination (which of course tells us nothing about how effective the vaccine is after six months or a year). That information is now mostly of historical interest, since alpha is long gone and we’re living in the era of omicron. If the Novavax vaccine is similar to the four previously approved vaccines, then it’s likely useless at preventing infection due to omicron.
Second, it’s impossible to conclude from these trials whether the Novavax vaccine results in any reduction in risk of hospitalization due to covid, for the simple reason that not enough people ended up being hospitalized. Having said that, my guess would be that it probably does protect against hospitalization and need for ICU treatment, just as the other approved vaccines do. At its heart, it’s doing the same thing as they are – generating an immune response to the spike protein found on the original Wuhan covid variant, and the overall trial results are very similar to the trial results for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.
The overall safety data suggests that the vaccine is pretty safe, with serious adverse events being balanced between the vaccine group and the placebo group. Rare side-effects are however not detectable in randomized trials with a few tens of thousands of participants. For that longer term follow-up with much larger numbers of people is necessary. So it’s currently impossible to know whether the Novavax vaccine can cause myocarditis, like the mRNA vaccines, or blood clotting disorders, like the adenovector virus vaccines, or some other type of rare adverse event entirely. It’s therefore impossible to say at the present point in time whether it will turn out to be more safe, or less safe, or equivalent to the already approved vaccines.
January 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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Letter to Mr William Wragg, MP
18th January 2022
Mr William Wragg, MP
Chair of the Public Administration & Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC)
Dear Mr Wragg,
Re: Ethical concerns arising from the Government’s use of covert psychological ‘nudges’ in their COVID-19 communications strategy
We are writing to you as a group of psychological specialists and health professionals to highlight our major ethical concerns about the deployment of covert behavioural-science techniques (commonly referred to as ‘nudges’) in the Government’s COVID-19 communications strategy. Our view is that the use of these behavioural strategies – which often operate below people’s conscious awareness and frequently rely on inflating emotional distress to change behaviour – raises profound moral questions. In light of these pressing concerns we respectfully request that, in your role as chair of the Public Administration & Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC), you instigate a comprehensive inquiry into the acceptability of using these strategies on the British people as a means of promoting compliance with public health directives.
Background
The appetite for using covert psychological strategies as a means of changing people’s behaviour was boosted by the emergence of the ‘Behavioural Insights Team’ (BIT) in 2010 as ‘the world’s first government institution dedicated to the application of behavioural science to policy’ (1). The membership of BIT rapidly expanded (2) from a seven-person unit embedded in the UK Government to a ‘social purpose company’ operating in many countries across the world. A comprehensive account of the psychological techniques recommended by the BIT is provided in the Institute of Government document, MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy (3), where the authors claim that their strategies can achieve ‘low cost, low pain ways of nudging citizens … into new ways of acting by going with the grain of how we think and act’.
Since its inception in 2010, the BIT has been led by Professor David Halpern who is currently the team’s chief executive. Professor Halpern and two other members of the BIT also currently sit on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) (4), a subgroup of SAGE that advises the Government on its COVID-19 communications strategy. Most of the other members of the SPI-B are prominent British psychologists who have expertise in the deployment of behavioural-science ‘nudge’ techniques.
It is important to emphasise that the use of behavioural science in this way represents a radical departure from the traditional methods – legislation, information provision, rational argument – used by governments to influence the behaviour of their citizens. By contrast, many of the ‘nudges’ delivered by the BIT are – to various degrees – acting upon us automatically, below the level of conscious thought and reason.
The ‘nudges’ of concern
The BIT and the SPI-B have encouraged the deployment of many techniques from behavioural science within the Government’s COVID-19 communications. However, there are three ‘nudges’ which have evoked most of our alarm: the exploitation of fear (inflating perceived threat levels), shame (conflating compliance with virtue) and peer pressure (portraying non-compliers as a deviant minority) – or “affect”, “ego” and “norms”, to use the language of the MINDSPACE document.
AFFECT/FEAR
Aware that a frightened population is a compliant one, a strategic decision was made to inflate the fear levels of all the British people. The minutes of the SPI-B meeting (5) dated the 22nd March 2020 stated, ‘The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent’ by ‘using hard-hitting emotional messaging’. Subsequently, in tandem with a subservient mainstream media, the collective efforts of the BIT and the SPI-B have inflicted a prolonged and concerted scare campaign upon the British public. The methods used have included:
- Daily statistics displayed without context: the macabre mono focus on showing the number of COVID-19 deaths without mention of mortality from other causes or the fact that, under normal circumstances, around 1600 people die each day in the UK.
- Recurrent footage of dying patients: images of the acutely unwell in Intensive Care Units.
- Scary slogans: for example, ‘IF YOU GO OUT YOU CAN SPREAD IT, PEOPLE WILL DIE’, typically accompanied by frightening images of emergency personnel in masks and visors.
EGO/SHAME
We all strive to maintain a positive view of ourselves. Utilising this human tendency, behavioural scientists have recommended messaging that equates virtue with adherence to the Covid-19 restrictions and subsequent vaccination campaign. Consequently, following the rules preserves the integrity of our egos while any deviation evokes shame. Examples of these nudges in action include:
- Slogans that shame the non-compliant: for example, ‘STAY HOME, PROTECT THE NHS, SAVE LIVES’.
- TV advertisements: actors tell us, ‘I wear a face covering to protect my mates’ and ‘I make space to protect you’.
- Clap for Carers: the pre-orchestrated weekly ritual, purportedly to show appreciation for NHS staff.
- Ministers telling students not to ‘kill your gran’.
- Shame–evoking adverts: close-up images of acutely unwell hospital patients with the voice-over, ‘Can you look them in the eyes and tell them you’re doing all you can to stop the spread of coronavirus?’
NORMS/PEER PRESSURE
Awareness of the prevalent views and behaviour of our fellow citizens can pressurise us to conform and knowledge of being in a deviant minority is a source of discomfort. The Government has repeatedly encouraged peer pressure throughout the COVID-19 crisis to gain the public’s compliance with their escalating restrictions, an approach that – at higher levels of intensity – can morph into scapegoating. The most straightforward example is how, during interviews with the media, ministers have often resorted to telling us that the vast majority of people are ‘obeying the rules’ or that almost all of us are conforming. However, in order to enhance and sustain normative pressure, people need to be able to instantly distinguish the rule breakers from the rule followers; the visibility of face coverings provides this immediate differentiation. The switch to the mandating of masks in community settings in summer 2020, without the emergence of new and robust evidence that they reduce viral transmission, strongly suggests that the mask requirement was introduced primarily as a compliance device to harness normative pressure.
Ethical questions
Compared to a government’s typical tools of persuasion, the covert psychological strategies (outlined above) differ in both their nature and subconscious mode of action. Consequently, we believe there are three main areas of ethical concern associated with their use: problems with the methods per se; problems with the lack of consent; and problems with the goals to which they are applied.
First, it is highly questionable whether a civilised society should knowingly increase the emotional discomfort of its citizens as a means of gaining their compliance. Government scientists deploying fear, shame and scapegoating to change minds is an ethically dubious practice that in some respects resembles the tactics used by totalitarian regimes such as China, where the state inflicts pain on a subset of its population in an attempt to eliminate beliefs and behaviour they perceive to be deviant.
Another ethical issue associated with these covert psychological techniques relates to their unintended consequences. Shaming and scapegoating have emboldened some people to harass those unable or unwilling to wear a face covering. More disturbingly, the inflated fear levels will have significantly contributed to the many thousands of excess non-COVID deaths (6) that have occurred in people’s homes, the strategically-increased anxieties discouraging many from seeking help for other illnesses. Furthermore, a lot of older people, rendered housebound by fear, may have died prematurely from loneliness (7). Those already suffering with obsessive-compulsive problems about contamination, and patients with severe health anxieties, will have had their anguish exacerbated by the campaign of fear. Even now, when all the vulnerable groups have been offered vaccination, many of our citizens remain tormented by ‘COVID-19 Anxiety Syndrome’ (8), characterised by a disabling combination of fear and maladaptive coping strategies.
Second, a recipient’s consent prior to the delivery of a medical or psychological intervention is a fundamental requirement of a civilised society. Professor David Halpern (the BIT Chief Executive and prominent member of SPI-B) explicitly recognised the significant ethical dilemmas arising from the use of influencing strategies that impact subconsciously on the country’s citizens. The MINDSPACE document (9) – of which Professor Halpern is a co-author – states that, ‘Policymakers wishing to use these tools … need the approval of the public to do so’ (p74). More recently, in Professor Halpern’s book, Inside the Nudge Unit, he is even more emphatic about the importance of consent: ‘If Governments … wish to use behavioural insights, they must seek and maintain the permission of the public. Ultimately, you – the public, the citizen – need to decide what the objectives, and limits, of nudging and empirical testing should be’ (p375).
As far as we are aware, no attempt has yet been made to obtain the public’s permission to use covert psychological strategies.
Third, the perceived legitimacy of using subconscious ‘nudges’ to influence people may also depend upon the behavioural goals that are being pursued. It may be that a higher proportion of the general public would be comfortable with the government resorting to subconscious nudges to reduce violent crime as compared to the purpose of imposing unprecedented and non-evidenced public-health restrictions. Would British citizens have agreed to the furtive deployment of fear, shame and peer pressure as a way of levering compliance with lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccination? Maybe they should be asked before the Government considers any future imposition of these techniques.
The position of the British Psychological Society
The British Psychological Society (BPS) is the leading professional body for psychologists in the UK. According to their website (10), a central role of the BPS is, ‘To promote excellence and ethical practice in the science, education and application of the discipline’. [Our emphasis]. Mindful of their important position as the guardian of ethical psychological practice, on the 6th January 2021 46 psychologists and therapists (including many of the signatories of the present letter) wrote to the BPS (11) raising the ethical questions outlined above.
A month later, on the 5th February 2021, a reply (12) was received from Dr Debra Malpass (Director of Knowledge and Insight at the BPS) which failed to directly address our ethical concerns and was, in our view, evasive and disingenuous. Dr Malpass’s response included questioning whether the strategies deployed by Government psychologists were actually covert, stating that the role of specific psychologists had not been evidenced, and expressing how ‘incredibly proud’ the BPS was about the ‘fantastic work done by psychologists throughout the pandemic’.
Dissatisfied with this initial reaction, we contacted the BPS again to question whether our expressed concerns had actually been considered by their ethics committee. We received a brief reply from Dr Malpass on the 16th February 2021 informing us that our initial letter would be considered at their next BPS Ethics Committee on the 1st March; we understood this to be an admission that the covert psychological strategies recommended by psychologists had yet to be scrutinised in regards to their ethical acceptability.
By 12th March, and not having received any further communication from the BPS, we prompted them again. On the 23rd March a message was received from Dr Roger Paxton (Chair of the BPS Ethics Committee) apologising that ‘owing to a very full agenda and an oversight’ no discussion about our concerns had taken place but that they would be included on the agenda of their June meeting.
On the 30th June, and not having received any further communication from the BPS, we prompted them again. On the 1st July we received a response (13) from Dr Paxton, comprising three paragraphs, informing us that the issues we raised had been considered and that their ethics committee had endorsed all previous BPS responses. In this communication, Dr Paxton acknowledged that he had received a large number of recent emails raising the same issues, but rejected our ethical concerns arguing that the strategies referred to were ‘indirect’ rather than covert, the application of psychology in this instance fell outside the realm of individual health decisions (so informed consent was not an issue), levels of fear within the general population were proportionate to the objective risk posed by the virus, and the psychologists’ role in the pandemic response demonstrated ‘social responsibility and the competent and responsible employment of psychological expertise’.
We believe the BPS responses to our ethical concerns about the deployment of covert psychological strategies throughout the COVID-19 pandemic have been defensive and disingenuous. Also we believe the BPS is impeded by a major conflict of interest on this issue in that several members of the SPI-B are also influential figures within the BPS. As such, the impartiality of the BPS in addressing the ethical issues we raised is highly questionable.
Finally, it is worth noting that serious concerns about the Government’s use of behavioural science have previously been raised in relation to other spheres of government activity. An All Parliamentary Group Report (APGR) (14) analysing the recommendations of the Morse Report (15) (a Treasury-commissioned review into the Loan Charge, published in December 2019) found that the distress evoked in those people targeted by behavioural insights may, in some instances, have led to victims taking their own lives. In the words of the APGR:
‘HMRC continue to apply pressure to taxpayers by using 30 behavioural insights in communications, something that has been cited in one of the seven known suicides of people facing the Loan Charge’.
In further recognition of the suffering and anguish associated with these ‘nudge’ techniques, the APGR recommends:
‘An independent assessment and suspension of HMRC’s use of behavioural psychology/behavioural insights in light of the ongoing suicide risk to those impacted by the Loan Charge’.
Clearly, a truly independent and comprehensive evaluation of the ethics of deploying psychological ‘nudges’ on the British people – during public health campaigns and in other areas of government – is now urgently required. We respectfully ask the PACAC to consider performing this important role.
Co-Signatories
Psychology/therapy/mental health
- Dr Gary Sidley (M.Sc., ClinPsy, PhD) Retired Consultant Clinical Psychologist
- Ms Jen Ayling (UKCP registered counsellor) Psychotherapeutic Counsellor
- Dr Faye Bellanca (DClinPsy) Clinical Psychologist
- Dr Christian Buckland ((PsychD) Psychotherapist
- Alison Burnard (Dip Gestalt Therapy) Gestalt Psychotherapist
- Daran Campbell (PG Dip Counselling) Substance Misuse Practitioner
- Dr Tom Carnwath (FRCPsych, FRCGP) Consultant Psychiatrist
- Dr Maria Castro Romero (DClinPsy) Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology
- Gillian England (PG Dip Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapy) Cognitive Behavioural Therapist
- Dr Elizabeth English (M.Phil, DPhil) Mindfulness Teacher & Trauma Therapist
- Mr Patrick Fagan (M.Sc.) Chief Scientific Officer, Capuchin Behavioural Science
- Dr Tracey Grant Lee (DClinPsy) Chartered Clinical Psychologist
- Andy Halewood (Advanced M.Sc. in Counselling Psychology) Chartered Psychologist
- Sue Parker Hall (CTA, MSc, PGCE) Psychotherapist
- Andrew D Harry (RPP PTP) NLP Master Practitioner
- Mrs Nicole Harvey (B.Sc, Pg Dip) Mental Health Practitioner/CBT Therapist
- Ms Julie A Horsley (Advanced Diploma in Counselling) Counsellor/Therapist
- Dr Richard House (MA, Ph.D, C.Psych. AFBPsS) former Senior Lecturer in Psychology
- Emma Kenny (MA Counselling, Advanced Diploma Counselling) Media Psychologist & Psychological Therapist
- Rachel Maisey (MA, PGCE, PgDip Counselling) Integrative Counsellor
- Jane Margerison (PG Dip Integrative Psychotherapy, RMN) Psychotherapist
- Kate Morrissey (Advanced Diploma in Counselling, MA Social Work) Counsellor
- Lucy Padina (Diploma in Psychology, Advanced Diploma in the Management of Psychological Trauma) Independent Consultant & Registered Social Worker
- Carolyn Polunin (M.Sc.) Integrative Psychotherapist
- Dr Livia Pontes (DClinPsy) Clinical Psychologist
- Dr Kate Porter (DClinPsy) Clinical Psychologist
- Ian Price (M.Sc. Organisational Behaviour) Business Psychologist
- Dr Bruce Scott (B.Sc., PhD) Psychoanalyst
- Professor David Seedhouse (PhD) Honorary Professor of Deliberative Practice
- Deborah Short (MA Gestalt Psychotherapy) Psychotherapist
- Ms Deborah Sharples (B.A. [Hons] Social Work) Mental Health Social Worker
- Susan Sidley (RMN) Retired Psychiatric Nurse
- Dr Angela Smith (DClinPsy, PhD) Psychology Lead
- Dr Helen Startup (DClinPsy, PhD) Consultant Clinical Psychologist
- Dr Dov Stein (MA, MB, BCh, BAO DCH Dobs) Consultant Psychiatrist & Psychotherapist
- Dr Zenobia Storah (DClinPsy) Child & Adolescent Clinical Psychologist
- Professor Ellen Townsend (PhD) Professor of Psychology
- Sarah Waters (BA, Dip Counselling & Therapy) Psychotherapist
- Dr Alice Welham (MA, DClinPsy, PhD) Clinical Psychologist
- Dr Damian Wilde (DClinPsy) Highly Specialist Clinical Psychologist
Other health professionals
- Mr John Collis (PGCert in Advanced Practice, BSc [Hons] Nursing, BA [Hons] Retired Nurse Practitioner
- James Cook (Bachelor of Nursing [Hons], Master of Public Health [MPH]) Registered Nurse
- Dr Clare Craig (BM, BCh, FRCPath) Consultant Pathologist
- Dr David Critchley (BSc, PhD) Clinical Pharmacologist
- Roisin Dargan-Peel (MA) Former Registered General Nurse, Midwife & Health Visitor
- Mr Paul Goss (MCSP, HCPC, KCMT) Clinical Director & Chartered Physiotherapist
- Dr Ros Jones (MD, FRCPCH) Retired Consultant Paediatrician
- Mrs Alison Langthorne (RGN) Staff Nurse
- Jenna Leith (RGN) Advanced Nurse Practitioner
- Dr Sam McBride (MB, BCh, MRCP, FRCP, FRCEM) Clinical Gerontologist
- Mrs Julie Noble (M.Sc, RN) Senior Forensic Nurse Examiner & Advanced Practitioner
- Mrs Christine Mary Proctor (RGN) Former Registered General Nurse
- Dr Annabel Smart (MBBS, BSc, DFSRH) Retired General Practitioner
- Nat Stephenson (B.Sc Audiology) Paediatric Audiologist
- Dr Helen Westwood (MBChB, MRCGP, DCH, DRCOG) General Practitioner
January 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights, UK |
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Now Backed by More Than 17,000 Doctors and Medical Scientists Around the World
Following Dr. Robert Malone’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, more physicians and medical scientists have joined with their colleagues from around the world in signing the Physicians Declaration. Now with more than 17,000 signatures confirmed through a rigorous validation process, these physicians and scientists are represented by Dr. Malone as he speaks at the march to Defeat the Mandates on Sunday, January 23 in Washington, D.C.
The over 17,000 signers to the declaration have reached consensus on three foundational principles:
- Healthy children should not be subject to forced vaccination: they face negligible risk from covid, but face potential permanent, irreversible risk to their health if vaccinated, including heart, brain, reproductive and immune system damage.
- Natural Immunity Denial has prolonged the pandemic and needlessly restricted the lives of Covid-recovered people. Masks, lockdowns, and other restrictions have caused great harm especially to children and delayed the virus’ transition to endemic status.
- Health agencies and institutions must cease interfering with the physician-patient relationship. Policymakers are directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, as a result of institutional interference and blocking treatments proven to cure at a near 100% rate when administered early.
Led by Dr. Malone and staying loyal to the Hippocratic oath, the declaration’s signers have resisted financial inducements, threats, unprecedented censorship, and reputational attacks to remain committed first to patient health and well-being. After 23 months of research, millions of patients treated, hundreds of clinical trials performed and scientific data shared, and after demonstrating and documenting their success in combating COVID-19, the 17,000+ physicians and medical scientists who signed the declaration support the core principles Dr. Malone and many other doctors have been speaking out about since late last year.
The 17,000+ signatures of the declaration are authentic and must pass a screening process before being officially identified as signing the declaration. Signatories are required to supply their affiliation and a link to their medical organization, facility, or profile. Nurses, non-MD practitioners and non-medical scientists are removed from the list signatories, as are duplicate entries and “bot” emails. The emails of the signatories have been separately and repeatedly tested and verified by a 3rd-party provider.
As the number of signatures to the declaration continues to rise, we have published a select group of world famous, highly credentialed physicians and scientists who authored the declaration. Many other doctors who have spoken out against the corruption, censorship and hypocrisy by authorities have been threatened, fired, censured, lied about, intimidated, and harassed – all while saving patients’ lives daily. Never has the public been forced to become lab rats, for a vaccine 5 years away from adequate testing, violating basic principles of informed consent. Moreover, the medical and scientific evidence on the efficacy and safety of the COVID- 19 vaccine do not support mandating its use for anyone, especially healthy children.
January 23 March on Washington
The over 17,000 signers of the declaration will be represented on Sunday, January 23, when Dr. Malone stands with fellow doctors and scientists on stage in Washington DC, as part of the Defeat the Mandates march Sunday, January 23, 2022. At the Lincoln Memorial, they will be joined by a wide range of featured guests for a series of inspiring talks and musical performances. Join us!
About the Global COVID Summit
Global Covid Summit is the product of an international alliance of doctors and scientists, committed to speaking truth to power about Covid pandemic research and treatment.
Thousands have died from Covid as a result of being denied life-saving early treatment. The Declaration is a battle cry from physicians who are daily fighting for the right to treat their patients, and the right of patients to receive those treatments – without fear of interference, retribution or censorship by government, pharmacies, pharmaceutical corporations, and big tech. We demand that these groups step aside and honor the sanctity and integrity of the patient- physician relationship, the fundamental maxim “First Do No Harm”, and the freedom of patients and physicians to make informed medical decisions. Lives depend on it. More information here: https://globalCovidSummit.org
An events page is available to alert you to upcoming Summits and other events, most prominent of which is the January 23 March on Washington, an “American Homecoming” to protest overreaching medical mandates.
But you can also view some amazing video from past summits including Florida and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Please spread the word about this site – it’s important!
Remember – if you are a physician, nurse, medical scientist or medical care professional, please wear a white coat to the march (or carry it). Let’s all work to make this march peaceful in solidarity for all those marching around the world.
January 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Solidarity and Activism | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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