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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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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Almost 13 percent — or 772 of 6,004 — of hospitals reporting staffing levels in the U.S. are experiencing critical staffing shortages, according to HHS data posted Jan. 23.
This is about 2 percentage points less than figures released Jan. 20.
A critical staffing shortage is based on a facility’s needs and internal policies for staffing ratios, according to HHS. Hospitals using temporary staff to meet staffing ratios are not counted among those experiencing a shortage.
Meanwhile, almost 22 percent — or 1,305 of 6,004 — of hospitals reporting staffing levels in the U.S. are anticipating shortages in the next week.
About 30 percent of hospitals did not report if they’re currently experiencing shortages, and about 21 percent did not report if they anticipate shortages.
Below are two lists showing current staffing shortages and anticipated shortages.
Percent of hospitals in each state and the District of Columbia experiencing critical staffing shortages, ranked in descending order:
1. Vermont: 58.82 percent
2. West Virginia: 47.62 percent
3. New Mexico: 47.27 percent
4. Wisconsin: 33.33 percent
5. North Dakota: 32.65 percent
6. Arizona: 29.52 percent
7. Michigan: 29.38 percent
8. Kentucky: 29.06 percent
9. South Carolina: 28.05 percent
10. Louisiana: 25.33 percent
11. Georgia: 24.71 percent
12. Indiana: 23.95 percent
13. Nebraska: 22.22 percent
14. Tennessee: 22.14 percent
15. Delaware: 20 percent
16. Pennsylvania: 19.03 percent
17. Minnesota: 17.14 percent
18. Montana: 16.92 percent
19. Washington: 16.5 percent
20. Virginia: 15.24 percent
21. Oklahoma: 13.1 percent
22. New Jersey: 12.5 percent
23. Hawaii: 12 percent
24. Missouri: 10.95 percent (tie)
24. Kansas: 10.95 percent (tie)
26. Wyoming: 9.68 percent
27. Oregon: 9.38 percent
28. Maryland: 9.09 percent
29. California: 8.71 percent
30. Colorado: 8.6 percent
31. North Carolina: 7.69 percent
32. Mississippi: 7.41 percent
33. New Hampshire: 6.67 percent (tie)
33. Rhode Island: 6.67 percent (tie)
35. Nevada: 6.56 percent
36. Arkansas: 5.61 percent
37. Maine: 5.41 percent
38. Alaska: 4.17 percent
39. Illinois: 3.96 percent
40. Idaho: 3.77 percent
41. Florida: 3.56 percent
42. Iowa: 3.17 percent
43. New York: 2.48 percent
44. Texas: 2.36 percent
45. Ohio: 0.86 percent
46. Alabama: 0 percent (tie)
46. District of Columbia: 0 percent (tie)
46. South Dakota: 0 percent (tie)
46. Utah: 0 percent (tie)
46. Connecticut: 0 percent (tie)
46. Massachusetts: 0 percent (tie)
Percent of hospitals in each state and the District of Columbia anticipating critical staffing shortages within the next week, ranked in descending order:
1. Vermont: 70.59 percent
2. Rhode Island: 53.33 percent
3. West Virginia: 52.38 percent
4. New Mexico: 47.27 percent
5. Kentucky: 41.03 percent
6. California: 40.3 percent
7. Alabama: 35.9 percent
8. Tennessee: 35.71 percent
9. Wyoming: 35.48 percent
10. Wisconsin: 35.33 percent
11. Michigan: 33.75 percent
12. Delaware: 33.33 percent
13. Missouri: 32.85 percent
14. North Dakota: 32.65 percent
15. Massachusetts: 32.35 percent
16. Nebraska: 32.32 percent
17. Arizona: 30.48 percent
18. Kansas: 29.93 percent
19. South Carolina: 29.27 percent
20. Oklahoma: 28.97 percent
21. Georgia: 28.82 percent
22. Indiana: 27.54 percent
23. Louisiana: 24.44 percent
24. Mississippi: 23.15 percent
25. Arkansas: 22.43 percent
26. Virginia: 21.9 percent
27. Pennsylvania: 21.68 percent
28. Washington: 20.39 percent
29. New Hampshire: 20 percent
30. Montana: 18.46 percent
31. Maryland: 18.18 percent
32. Minnesota: 17.14 percent
33. New Jersey: 16.67 percent (tie)
33. Alaska: 16.67 percent (tie)
35. Florida: 16.6 percent
36. Colorado: 13.98 percent
37. Idaho: 13.21 percent
38. Illinois: 12.87 percent
39. Hawaii: 12 percent
40. Oregon: 10.94 percent
41. North Carolina: 10.77 percent
42. South Dakota: 9.38 percent
43. Maine: 8.11 percent
44. Utah: 7.14 percent
45. Nevada: 6.56 percent
46. New York: 6.44 percent
47. Iowa: 4.76 percent
48. Texas: 3.54 percent
49. Connecticut: 2.56 percent
50. Ohio: 0.86 percent
51. District of Columbia: 0 percent
January 24, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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Just moments after the Supreme Court ruled against Biden’s vaccine mandate for large employers, ICAN Attorney, Aaron Siri, Esq., joins Del to critique important moments from this monumental hearing.
January 24, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular, Video | 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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It is ironic that even former right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had rejected a Knesset (Israeli Parliament) bill which proposed to give the government greater power to control and suppress online content. This was in 2016, and the bill was introduced by Netanyahu’s Likud party rival, Gideon Sa’ar.
Some analysts argued that Netanyahu had feared that a law aimed at suppressing Palestinian freedom of speech online could be exploited by his enemies to control his own speech and incitement. Now that Netanyahu is no longer in the picture, the bill is back, and so is Sa’ar.
Gideon Sa’ar is currently Israel’s justice minister and deputy prime minister. While his boss, Naftali Bennett, is moving rapidly to expand settlements and to worsen already horrific realities for Palestinians on the ground, Sa’ar is expanding the Israeli military occupation of Palestinians to the digital realm. What is known as the ‘Facebook Law’ is set to grant “Israeli courts the power to demand the removal of user-generated content on social media content platforms that can be perceived as inflammatory or as harming ‘the security of the state,’ or the security of people or the security of the public.”
According to a December 30 statement by the Palestinian Digital Rights Coalition (PDRC) and the Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council (PHROC), Israeli censorship of Palestinian content online has deepened since 2016, when Sa’ar’s bill was first introduced.
In their statement, the two organizations highlighted the fact that Israel’s so-called Cyber Unit had submitted 2,421 requests to social media companies to delete Palestinian content in 2016. That number has grown exponentially since, to the extent that the Cyber Unit alone has requested the removal of more than 20,000 Palestinian items. PDRC and PHROC suggest that the new legislation, which was already approved by the Ministerial Committee for Legislation on December 27, “would only strengthen the relationship between the Cyber Unit and social media companies.”
Unfortunately, that relationship is already strong, at least with Facebook, which routinely censors Palestinian content and has been heavily criticized by Human Rights Watch and other organizations. After examining the numerous allegations of Facebook censorship, Deborah Brown, the senior digital rights researcher and advocate at HRW, concluded that “Facebook has suppressed content posted by Palestinians and their supporters speaking out about human rights issues in Israel and Palestine.”
Facebook’s involvement in Israel’s efforts aimed at silencing Palestinian online voices that call for justice, freedom and end of the occupation, is itself situated in an agreement the company had reached with Israel in September 2016. Then, the Israeli government announced that it had signed an agreement with the social media giant “to work together to determine how to tackle incitement on the social media network.” Within days, the accounts of prominent Palestinian journalists and activists were reportedly being deleted.
Israel’s latest ‘Facebook Law’ does not just pertain to controlling content on Facebook-related platforms, including Instagram and others. According to a Haaretz editorial published on December 29, the impact of this particular bill is far-reaching, as it will grant District Court judges throughout the country the power to remove posts, not only from Facebook and other social media outlets, “but from any website at all”.
Unsurprisingly, Israel’s censorship of Palestinian content is justified under the typical pretense of protecting Israel’s ‘national security’. We all know how Israel interprets this elusive concept to include anything from a Palestinian calling for Israel to be held accountable for its crimes in the occupied territories, to another demanding the end of Israeli apartheid to a third writing a poem. A case in point was the humiliating imprisonment of Palestinian poet, Dareen Tatour. The latter, an Israeli citizen, was thrown in jail in 2015 per court order for writing a short poem entitled “Resist, My People, Resist Them”.
Judging from past experience, undoubtedly, the ‘Facebook Law’ would almost exclusively target Palestinians. Moreover, judging from Israel’s previous successes, many digital and social media companies would comply with Israel’s demands of censoring Palestinians everywhere.
In its January 11 report, the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement – 7Amleh – detailed some of the practices that Israel engages in to monitor, silence, and spy on Palestinians. 7Amleh’s report, entitled ‘Hashtag Palestine 2021’, discusses the increased use of surveillance technologies, especially in the context of a proposed Israeli law that would expand the use of facial recognition cameras in public spaces. It is worth noting that such technologies have already been used against Palestinians at Israeli military checkpoints throughout the West Bank for at least two years.
Moreover, the Israeli Pegasus spyware, which has recently made headlines throughout the world for its use against numerous high-profile figures, has also long been used against Palestinian activists. In other words, Palestine continues to be the testing ground for Israel’s human rights violations of all kinds, whether in new weaponry, crowd control or surveillance.
Expectedly, what applies to Palestinians demanding their freedom online does not apply to Israelis inciting violence and spreading hatred against those very Palestinians. According to the 7Amleh ‘Index of Racism and Incitement’, published last June, during the Israeli war on the besieged Gaza Strip and the subsequent anti-Palestinian violence throughout Palestine in May 2021, “incitement in Hebrew against Arabs and Palestinians increased by 15 times” if compared to the same period of the last year. Much of this has gone unnoticed, and it is hardly the subject of the proposed ‘Facebook Law’ or the sinister activities of the Cyber Unit. For Gideon Sa’ar and his ilk, anti-Palestinian incitement, along with the daily violence meted out against the occupied Palestinians, is a non-issue.
While Israel is permitted, thanks to the deafening silence of the international community, to maintain its military occupation of Palestine, to cement its apartheid and to deepen its control of Palestinian life everywhere, it should not be permitted to expand this matrix of control to the digital realm as well. Civil society organizations, activists and ordinary people everywhere must speak out to bring an end to this mockery.
Moreover, as the Pegasus and the facial recognition surveillance technologies experiences have taught us, what is usually first applied to Palestinians is eventually normalized and applied everywhere else. Israel should, therefore, be confronted in its abuses of human rights in Palestine, because these abuses, if normalized, will become a part of our daily lives, regardless of where we are in the world.
January 23, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, Israel, Palestine |
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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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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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We Want To Be There For People As Friend And Helper
600 Austrian law enforcement officers have written to the Austrian Interior Minister, requesting that proposals for forced vaccination be withdrawn and that prejudice against the unvaccinated be ended.
The letter, written on January 10, was signed by three law enforcement personnel who purport to representing nearly 600 of their coworkers and was written to Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner.
“We do not want to face the population in a threatening manner during what are predominantly peaceful demonstrations which were organized due to the increasing dissatisfaction of the people with politicians,” wrote the authors of the letter.
Numerous protests were held around Austria last weekend, which would include Vienna, wherein approximately 20,000 protesters came to the streets on Saturday to denounce proposals to declare vaccination mandatory for all citizens over the age of 18.
In response to the letter, the Austrian Ministry of the Interior stated that “the people who signed [it] can be assigned a clear political orientation.”
“85% of the 32,000 Austrian police officers have already been vaccinated, that is a clear statement,” the ministry added.
The letter’s authors, on the other hand, refuted this, claiming that they are not affiliated with any political party.
“We are not far-right or far-left extremists, we are not anti-vaxxers … we are a group of several hundred police officers from the whole of Austria … united by our concern for the rule of law, freedom of thought, our fundamental rights, as well as our health,” they wrote.
The authors then issued a series of demands on Interior Minister Karner, the first of which was for him to “ensure that no vaccine mandate, either professional or general, or any other form of indirect forced vaccination be introduced in Austria.”
They subsequently requested that the so-called 3G policy at work be suspended, which restricts accessibility to only those who have gotten immunized against COVID-19, have tested negative for it, or having healed from the disease. Alternatively, the authors advocated for the rule’s abolition or modification into a 1G rule requiring simply a negative test for everybody to assure that “discrimination against unvaccinated colleagues comes to an end.”
Ultimately, the writers requested that they be regarded as allies rather than adversaries of the public.
“We want to be there for the people, as friend and helper,” they wrote.
Since proposals for obligatory vaccination were disclosed, anti-vaccine rallies have been occurring every Saturday in Austria, and they have been mostly peaceful, with only a few incidents of clashes involving policemen and protesters.
January 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism | Austria, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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FILE PHOTO © AP / Susan Walsh
President Joe Biden has suffered another legal setback to his efforts to coerce Americans into getting vaccinated against Covid-19 – this time with a federal court blocking mandated jabs even for employees of his own administration.
US District Court Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown in Texas ruled on Friday that the mandate overstepped Biden’s authority as president. After finding that the plaintiffs will likely prevail at trial, the judge issued a nationwide injunction, meaning the Biden administration will be barred from enforcing its vaccine order anywhere in the US.
The mandate applied to more than 3.5 million federal workers. It provided no option for submitting to regular Covid-19 testing in lieu of vaccination. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday that 98% of government employees had either been vaccinated or sought medical or religious exemptions. “We are confident in our legal authority here,” she said.
Brown disagreed, saying that it was a “bridge too far” for Biden – “with the stroke of a pen and without the input of Congress” – to force millions of employees to undergo a medical procedure as a condition of employment. The judge cited last week’s US Supreme Court ruling striking down Biden’s order requiring private-sector employers to force their workers to get inoculated.
The president clearly has authority to regulate employment policies, Brown said, but “the Supreme Court has expressly held that a Covid-19 vaccine mandate is not an employment regulation.” Interpreting the high court’s ruling in that way could set a significant legal precedent in claims against other employers that force their workers to get vaccinated.
While some private employers, such as Starbucks, have nixed their vaccine mandates in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling, others have said they’ll continue to require vaccination against Covid-19 without any government order. Carhartt, a maker of popular work clothes, is facing a boycott after its decision to double down on forced vaccines angered conservatives.
Brown served on the Texas Supreme Court from 2013 until 2019, when he was appointed by then-President Donald Trump for a federal court judgeship.
January 21, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, Joe Biden, United States |
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