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How Israel’s ‘Facebook Law’ Plans to Control All Palestinian Content Online

By Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle | January 22, 2022

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 | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

The Monumental Sacrifice of Novak Djokovic

BY STACEY RUDIN | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | JANUARY 17, 2022

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

Ethical concerns arising from the Government’s use of covert psychological ‘nudges’

Health Advisory and Recovery Team | January 20, 2022

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

600 Austrian Police Demand Government To Cancel Vaccine Mandate

We Want To Be There For People As Friend And Helper

GreatGameIndia | January 20, 2022

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 | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism | , , | Leave a comment

Court deals Biden another blow on vaccine mandates

FILE PHOTO ©  AP / Susan Walsh
RT | January 21, 2022

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 | Civil Liberties | , , , | Leave a comment

Saying No: The Winter of My Non-Consent

The prerogative to refuse medical intervention is a basic human right

By Claire O’Driscoll | OffGuardian | January 21, 2022

As parents with young children will attest, the most frequently uttered word your toddler will use is not ‘mama’ or ‘dada’, or any word you desperately want them to say, but the word ‘no’.

At around 2 years, this word will issue from your child’s mouth at an astonishing and infuriating rate. ‘Yes’ isn’t any real competition in the pantheon of formative words for a two-year-old.

It would seem that this right to refuse is hard-wired into us, long before we develop a sense of self or begin to retreat into that private, internal landscape that becomes so important as we move away from childhood and into our teenage years.

So important is this formative word, that it has become enshrined in our laws and our culture. The right to refuse, to say ‘no,’ is the mark of a civilised, democratic society.

We had the Nuremberg trials and the civil rights movement. We said ‘no more’ and ‘never again’ to segregation, apartheid, eugenics and forced medical experimentation.

Any society that historically abused these most fundamental of human rights has been paraded in front of us (and rightly so) as a cautionary tale of what ‘not’ to do and what should ‘never’ be repeated.

In more recent history, the citizens of Northern Ireland said ‘no’ to sectarian violence and voted for the Good Friday Agreement; we said ‘no’ to homophobia and the awful violence that was perpetrated against our gay citizens.

We said ‘no’ to misogyny, sexism, ageism. We said ‘no’ and ‘never again’ to the horrific crimes perpetrated against children by those who chose to abuse their power and authority within the Catholic Church.

In fact, we said ‘no more’ to the historical interference of church within the State. We legalised contraception and divorce. Let us not forget that divorce only became legal here in 1995, a fact that often shocks those international students I teach Irish history to. And even in 1995, the ‘yes’ vote in the divorce referendum was only narrowly won with 50.3% voting in favour and 49.7% against.

This separation of church and state in an Irish context is perhaps best exemplified by the 2018 abortion referendum. Whatever your opinions may be on this subject, Irish people voted ‘yes’ for a woman’s right to say ‘no’ to a pregnancy. “My body, my choice” became the mantra of the pro-choice movement.

This referendum was won by a much larger majority than the divorce referendum of 1995, with 66.4% voting ‘yes’ to the legalisation of abortion, dealing perhaps the final blow to any significant influence the Catholic Church might have had in matters of state.

In the ever-changing world of today’s identity politics and its fluid nomenclature, it’s now ok to say ‘no’ to the gender you were born with and ‘no’ to the gender specific pronouns others label you with. I have learnt that words like ‘sex change’ or even ‘gender realignment’ are considered offensive to many trans citizens and that ‘gender confirmation’ is the appropriate description to use.

My point is that the right to say ‘no’ to something you fundamentally disagree with or which you feel is threatening to your person or liberty or identity is absolutely sacrosanct.

Or at least I thought it was, until now.

I have chosen not to participate in the Irish state’s Covid 19 injection programme.  I am not going to try and convince anybody of the merit of my reasons. I know they are sound reasons, and my decision not to participate is not based on right wing, crazy conspiracy theories as the mainstream media repeatedly and disimulatively asserts, but on many months of research: reading and listening to epidemiologists, virologists and medical doctors with different specialities (from both sides of the argument).

It is not a decision I have taken lightly, and that decision to say ‘no’ has changed my life and affected my relationships with those around me so dramatically I barely recognise it anymore.

Since July 2021 I have become persona non grata. I got my first taste of what this feels like while on holiday in Wexford at the end of last summer. Myself and my brother were refused entry into a rural pub after a long walk during which we’d worked up quite an appetite. It was both embarrassing and humiliating.

Now I can’t go into bars, restaurants, cafes, nightclubs, cinemas, theatres or even a gym to get a bit of exercise. Arranging to meet a friend in winter in Ireland is challenging to say the least.

Dublin’s hospitality is no longer extended to all citizens

Last Christmas, the twinkling lights on Grafton Street felt like a personal rebuke. I walked the streets, permitted the luxury of spending money in crowded shops, but not allowed to take a load off by sitting down and having a coffee.

I ended up getting a takeaway sandwich and eating it standing up outside, alone in the cold on Grafton Street, until I was joined by a homeless man who convinced me to buy him some cigarettes.

And it got me thinking. I am not trying to compare my situation with the horrific life of somebody living on the streets in our capital. I do have a home, and I’m not alienated from my family (as so many homeless people so sadly are), but it gave me a small taste of what it must be like: the exclusion, the judgement, the physical moving away from you, as if you’re unclean or diseased in some way.

But luckily our free, democratic and liberal society would surely never discriminate against or encourage discrimination against its citizens for a personal medical decision?

Let’s just recap what our global leaders have been saying recently, shall we?

In France, president Emmanuel Macron says if you are unvaccinated you are “not a citizen” and that he wants to “piss (you) off.”

In America, Joe Biden advises parents to keep kids away from the unvaccinated and asserts that “this continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

In Canada, Justin Trudeau blames lockdowns on the unvaccinated and claims that this group is “extremist”, “racist” and “misogynist” (this coming from a man who thought dressing up in blackface was hilarious in his student days).

Justin Trudeau (pictured above) claims the unvaccinated are racists

In Australia, Michael Gunner (Northern Territory Chief Minister) says that “work is not a reason to leave the home for the unvaccinated.”

And we all know how the world’s number one tennis player has been treated in Australia: leaving his detention centre (ahem ‘hotel’) to go to work was clearly not a good enough reason for him either.

I suppose Leo Varadkar’s remark that the 5% of the population who are not vaccinated are causing “a lot of the trouble” is relatively mild in comparison.

What is beyond dispute at this stage is that the State and mainstream media have been systematically encouraging (and applauding) vitriolic discrimination against Irish citizens for what should be a personal and private medical decision.

In March of last year, barrister and chairman of the ICHR (Irish Council of Human Rights), Tracey O’Mahony, initiated an email campaign to encourage Irish citizens to lobby Irish MEPs to vote against digital green certificates on the basis that they were unconstitutional and would potentially cause serious divisions among the population.

Irish MEPs received at that time an unprecedented number of emails from concerned citizens. Yet, we were portrayed in Irish mainstream publications such as the Irish TImes as crazed, right-wing lunatics, somehow intent on preventing others from being able to travel freely, while the same outlets totally ignored the very real human rights violations the introduction of these passes would mean.

Hindsight is a great thing as they say, so I can’t help but include a quote from MEP Billy Kelleher, who voted in favour of the digital green certificates. This is taken from his response, on 24th March 2021, to my email, which of course is a bulk response to all those who lobbied him:

Those who do not want to be vaccinated are free to choose to do so. However, for those that do choose to be vaccinated, we need a system that is secure and robust to allow those who have chosen to be vaccinated to travel unhindered.

In terms of the vaccine certificate, it should not be used for domestic purposes i.e.allowing access to gyms, restaurants etc. It should only be used for international travel purposes where a country requires an incoming traveller to prove they have been vaccinated in order to avoid a mandatory quarantine period.

So here we are, ten months later, and the use of the vaccine certificate for domestic purposes looks here to stay.

Perhaps I can look forward to being banned from public transport or a fine for every month I’m unvaccinated; locked down again and told not to leave my house; maybe my next holiday will be spent in an internment camp for the unvaccinated like in Australia, or maybe just prison. Who knows?

(Forgive me if I am not reassured by the recent vague comments made by Leo Varadkar about this matter).

Recently the ICHR published an online survey to find out if people have suffered any form of discrimination, since March 2020, arising from the Covid 19 pandemic. In only 2 weeks, 26,472 people responded.

If the Government’s figures are correct (the unvaccinated adult population of the Republic of Ireland is claimed to be somewhere between 5% – 7% by official sources), this means that between 10-14% of the unvaccinated adult population in the State responded to this survey.

The results are shocking and damning: 83.62% of those who participated (that’s 19,201 people) said they had experienced some form of discrimination arising from their health status.

Nearly 95% of respondents (22,243 people) said they believed discrimination in the provision of, or access to, goods and services has been on the rise since March of 2020, while 96% believed that discrimination based on health status has become more acceptable in this country since March 2020.

Nearly 90% (21,097 people) answered “yes” to the question “Has the prospect of being discriminated against prevented you from going about your daily life, since March of 2020?”

As Tracey O’Mahony notes in her analysis of the survey:

The government response to the pandemic has created an entirely new category of discrimination based on a person’s health immunistation status (and that) the evidence gathered through this survey suggests that it has become a virtuous act to seek out the personal medical information of strangers through uncomfortable and public interrogation.”

She says a lot more and I strongly urge anybody reading this to both read the survey and listen to Tracey O’Mahony’s astute and powerful analysis of it.

However, it is the personal descriptions of suffering that people who responded to the survey provide that for me had the biggest effect, and I’m so glad that a snapshot of these were included. It is alarming the number of references that are made to suicidal thoughts arising as a direct result of the discrimination people have experienced both personally and towards their families, and how that has seriously and negatively affected the mental health of their children.

So to read Fintan O’Toole’s article (O’Toole writes for both The Irish Times and The Guardian)  from the 11th December 2021  in which he cruelly labels “The three anti-vaccine types” as “an ascending order of purposeful malignancy: the egoists, the paranoiacs and the fascists”, really puts into context the level of prejudice encouraged by the mainstream media in relation to those who are being punished by the state for a personal medical choice.

I shall repeat those words again: “purposeful malignancy,” as though we are a cancerous scourge that needs to be removed from society. That is the kind of language usually reserved for paedophiles, rapists, serial killers or war criminals.

O’Toole begins by stating that:

Vaccine sceptics form an objective threat to society, undermining the effectiveness of public health measures and, when they get sick with the virus whose existence they do not believe in, putting a dangerous burden on the hospital system.”

O’Toole, who has often championed various issues related to identity politics, seems to have no problem labelling and othering those who make a different decision about what is best for their health to his own.

I don’t think incitement to hatred is an unfair or inaccurate description of what O’Toole is saying and I think it is absolutely disgraceful that the Irish Times ever chose to publish this bigoted diatribe. So much for ‘we’re in this together.’ It’s now abundantly clear that we most certainly are not.

I and many others like me are sick to the teeth of being scapegoated and blamed for everything.  We did not cause this crisis and we are not responsible for its continuation.

Even Doctor Fauci has admitted that a “fully vaccinated” individual with a “breakthrough infection” has a similar viral load (the concentration of infection present in the throat or nose) to an unvaccinated individual who contracts Covid-19.

In early 2021, Leo Varadkar said,

The vaccine passports don’t yet stack up scientifically or medically because we just don’t know at this stage what extent vaccines reduce transmission.”

Despite the fabulous claims made back then on behalf of Covid-19 vaccines, we know now that they do not stop transmission.

Bill Gates let this information slip during an interview with Jeremy Hunt last November, and CDC director Rochelle Walensky confirmed it last week.

Yet the vaccine certificate system remains in place, with absolutely no justification for its existance other than to coerce people into getting inoculated.

It seems to me that a person’s worth, measured in 2021 by one’s immunisation status, is now determined solely by one’s willingness to comply with the arbitrary and ever changing demands made by the State.

And that, in spite of no evidence that the domestic use of vaccine certificates offers any kind of benefit to the wider community, the act of receiving a Covid-19 vaccine is considered in and of itself the most noble of civic acts; one so righteous, in fact, that only those who have performed it are now permitted  the full benefits of Irish citizenship.

Masked up with useless pieces of cloth on our faces, kept two metres apart at all times, obediently following ridiculous yellow lines on the floor as if the whole world has become one giant institution and we, in turn, institutionalised.

The constant and neurotic testing of ourselves when we have so much as a hint of a sniffle (or our smartphones pinging to tell us we’ve been in ‘close contact’ with somebody else who has); the excited waiting with bated breath to see if that antigen or lateral flow test is positive or negative. The abject horror of realising all the shops have run out of our precious tests. What have we become? When will this ever end?

It ends with one little word: no. No to it all and never again. So keep having the courage to say it.  Keep repeating it like a two year old having a hissy fit. Don’t allow anybody to bully you or shame you, and call out anybody who thinks they can. No matter how powerful or influential they may be, you still have the power to tell them no.

January 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

How Billions in COVID Stimulus Funds Led to Dangerous, Tyrannical Policies in U.S. Schools

The Defender | January 20, 2022

In a January interview on Del Bigtree’s “The Highwire” —“COVID-19: Following the Money” — policy analyst A.J. DePriest, a member of the grassroots Tennessee Liberty Network, shared the group’s jaw-dropping findings about the undue influence of federal relief monies on school and hospital policies.

In this article, The Defender covers how federal money affected schools. We will cover the impact of federal money on hospitals in a separate article to follow.

In 2020 and 2021, Congress passed trillions in COVID-related stimulus through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations (CRRSA) Act and the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act.

Sizeable portions of those funds went to schools.

Digging into the education allotment, the Tennessee network discovered public, charter and nonprofit private schools in the U.S. received nearly $190.5 billion during three rounds of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding (called ESSER I, II and III).

One of DePriest’s disquieting take-home messages is that this education lucre came with major strings attached — federal strings that are persuading ignominious school board members to adopt policies unfavorable and even dangerous to student health and well-being.

While DePriest characterized the stimulus bonanza as a “BIG carrot” for cash-strapped schools, that assessment may be too generous. If one examines the disturbing conditions attached to the U.S. Department of Education’s (DOE’s) dazzling largesse, the government billions seem closer to a godfather-like “offer they can’t refuse.”

The $190 billion ‘carrot’

The size of the federal “carrot” increased with each ESSER iteration. The $1.9 trillion ARP package alone assigned state educational agencies and school districts a whopping $122 billion (ESSER III).

On Jan. 18, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) crowed about its disbursement of the final chunk of ESSER III monies, claiming the funds were “critical” for addressing “recent challenges” such as the putative and much-ballyhooed Omicron variant.

In Tennessee, the state’s initial take from ESSER I was nearly $260 million, but ESSER II quadrupled that amount to over $1.1 billion. By ESSER III, Tennessee’s educational haul had reached almost $2.5 billion.

The school district encompassing Memphis received roughly three-quarters of a billion dollars, DePriest noted, while Nashville schools pocketed a cool half a billion.

Schools and COVID vaccines

In DePriest’s view, there’s a catch that explains why school boards in every state have been so coldly unresponsive to parental pleas to unmask their children and abandon other COVID restrictions.

The catch is that federal generosity for state educational agencies is contingent on states proving to DOE (in reports submitted twice a year through fall 2023) they are meeting requirements synced with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) “safety recommendations.”

The CDC’s aggressive “recommendations” include:

  • Enforcing “universal and correct wearing of masks”
  • Physically modifying schools to facilitate “distancing”
  • Ensuring “respiratory etiquette” and handwashing (likely with carcinogenic sanitizers)
  • Implementing strenuous cleaning protocols to maintain “healthy facilities”
  • Facilitating contact tracing, “in combination with isolation and quarantine”
  • Conducting testing (both screening and diagnosis), helped along by additional resources from a federal-CDC-Rockefeller Foundation partnership to “ensure that all schools can access and set up screening testing programs as quickly as possible”
  • Coordinating with state and local health officials
  • Engaging in “efforts to provide vaccinations to school communities”

In its Jan. 18 press release, DOE took pains to emphasize that expanding access to vaccinations is “critical” for “safely reopening schools and sustaining safe operations.” And it furnished two ominous illustrations of how its stimulus monies are supporting vaccination efforts on the ground.

First, DOE noted, the Vermont Agency of Education is partnering with other statewide agencies “to vaccinate all Vermonters, including eligible students.” DOE approvingly stated that three-fourths of 12- to 17-year-olds in Vermont already received at least one dose.

DOE also considered the Hawaii Department of Education’s hosting of dozens of vaccination clinics for students, staff and “school communities” to be exemplary.

Further evidence of the feds’ hold over schools comes from the fact that some school districts have already taken steps to mandate COVID shots for some or all K-12 students, even in advance of formal U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval.

Weaponizing HVAC systems?

More than 40% of school districts plan to spend some of their ESSER funds on “improvements” to heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems.

This raises a potential red flag in light of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authorization in February 2021 — through a slippery “Public Health Emergency Exemption” — of a potentially hazardous, nanoparticle-based “air treatment” called Grignard Pure.

Dispersal of the chemical, authorized for indoor use in public spaces, occurs primarily “in-duct” via HVAC systems.

EPA’s authorization allows for Grignard Pure’s use in indoor spaces “when adherence to current public health guidelines … is impractical or difficult to maintain.”

As examples of spaces where the chemical’s use is permitted, the agency lists government facilities, healthcare facilities, food processing facilities and public transit.

EPA’s definition of “government facilities” does not appear to include schools, but the agency does admit to studying use of “air treatment technologies” on school buses.

A senior EPA scientist conceded last August, “how safe [the technologies] are, particularly for sensitive populations such as children, is not fully understood.” Given the experimental use of “air treatments” on school buses, it would behoove parents to query schools’ motives for upgrading their HVAC systems.

Moreover, though EPA initially green-lighted Grignard Pure in just two states (Georgia and Tennessee), it added four more states — Maryland, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Texas — last July.

The manufacturer’s website indicates that applications for Public Health Emergency Exemption are pending in another 15 states.

Nor does EPA’s vaguely worded list of indoor spaces seem to preclude use of the chemical in facilities not on that list. For example, Grignard Pure’s CEO is openly publicizing his product’s use in religious spaces, and a member of the company’s engineering steering committee elatedly stated last year, “There’s no limit to where we can use it!”

St. Simons Presbyterian Church in Georgia paved the way for church use, with the facility’s HVAC vents, which “run the length of both sides of the sanctuary’s ceiling,” apparently having been deemed ideal for spritzing congregants during services. This generates “a light haze [that] comes from the air vents and settles over the sanctuary.”

According to news accounts, the Georgia church’s pastor views Grignard Pure as “an added layer of safety,” a fact that the church emphasizes in its weekly bulletins. The pastor also is considering using the chemical-dispensing system during flu season.

Health risks associated with triethylene glycol

As The Defender previously reported, Grignard Pure’s supposedly virus-killing active ingredient is triethylene glycol (TEG), a chemical whose prior claim to fame was its use in theatrical fog machines.

Shortly before EPA reached its upbeat decision to approve TEG, the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) recommended against TEG’s use as a virucide due to its limited effectiveness and “potential health effects for those exposed over a long period of time.”

After WWII and in the early 1950s, there was an attempt to deploy TEG for “air disinfection” purposes in school settings. However, “wartime and post-war authors would not have had access to much of the toxicological and health data now available for this chemical,” said the UK SAGE group.

These data show “a number of potential acute health effects,” including respiratory tract irritation in case of inhalation.

A Berkeley, California lab — the Indoor Air Quality Scientific Findings Resource Bank — recently expressed multiple concerns about TEG in relation to air disinfection.

The indoor air quality experts cautioned, “careful attention should be given to dosage of triethylene glycol in indoor settings in order to minimize potential health effects caused by chemical exposure,” particularly in light of evidence of health effects with repeated exposure.

The Berkeley group also warned “TEG could react with other indoor chemicals” — including common disinfectants — “leading to additional and perhaps unexpected adverse health effects,” including toxic effects on human airway epithelial cells.

In light of these “uncertainties about TEG dosing, chemical mixtures, and health risks,” they suggested TEG should be viewed as a “lower priority” option.

In similar comments about the use of TEG “or other similar chemicals” for air disinfection (p. 23), SAGE wrote in November 2020:

“There is currently no strong evidence that using a continuous spray chemical in the air will be an effective control against SARS-CoV-2 transmission. … [T]here is no precedent for such an approach to be used as a continuous spray in an occupied space for infection control. Cleaning the air by spraying it with a chemical is a misnomer – it is simply swapping one contaminant for another.”

TEG’s cousin polyethylene glycol (PEG)

As The Defender reported a year ago, TEG is a chemical cousin to and sometime-component of polyethylene glycol (PEG), a synthetic, nondegradable polymer of questionable biocompatibility.

PEG is known to be associated with adverse immune responses, including anaphylaxis.

Both the Pfizer and Moderna COVID jabs use PEG to make their mRNA “carrier systems” work, and the compound is also present in numerous other drugs and consumer products.

Up to 72% of the U.S. population may have anti-PEG antibodies — including an estimated 8% with highly elevated levels — that could lead to life-threatening anaphylactic reactions. Research is needed to assess potential TEG-PEG cross-reactivity.

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) in August 2020 first sounded the alarm about the risks of PEG in COVID shots, pointing out that well before COVID, PEG had already been flagged, including by Moderna itself, for its potential to trigger immediate hypersensitivity reactions.

CHD was so concerned about the potential for anaphylaxis that it followed up with a letter to the FDA on Sept. 25, 2020, outlining the need for critical safeguards for Moderna clinical trial participants.

Those concerns have since been borne out by repeated reports of PEG-linked anaphylaxis that began surfacing concurrent with the two mRNA vaccines’ rollout.

Resistance is NOT futile

In mid-August, Tennessee’s governor issued an executive order giving parents ultimate decision-making authority over their children’s masking behavior at school.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona evinced no compunction about immediately chastising the governor and his education commissioner for taking matters into their own hands.

In a letter dated two days later, Cardona wrote that the Tennessee governor’s action was “at odds with the school district planning process embodied in the U.S. Department of Education’s. . . interim final requirements,” pointedly adding that CDC safety recommendations include “universal and correct wearing of masks.”

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey on Jan. 14 that the Biden administration is prepared to take back Arizona’s relief funds — and also withhold future federal aid — due to the state’s active discouragement of school mask mandates.

Yellen offered no explanation as to why the Treasury Department, rather than DOE, was issuing the warning.

In response, Ducey emphasized Arizona’s focus on “things that matter” — math, not masks. Attorney General Mark Brnovich urged Yellen to rescind the threat, arguing that Treasury is “trying to overstep its constitutional bounds” by dictating how the state should run and fund its schools.

These types of intimidation tactics are also evident at the school-district level, prompting parents’ growing frustration.

Rather than continue to beg for mask lenience, DePriest reminds parents they have every right to confront school board members about the feds’ cash-in-exchange-for-obedience arrangements.

“They’re getting the money to mask your kids. It has nothing to do with health and safety,” DePriest said.

As evidenced by the quadrupling of homeschooling since the beginning of COVID, many families have simply had it. However, for parents for whom homeschooling is not an option, there is every reason to push local school boards to address their student-unfriendly behavior more transparently.

Here are a handful of possible questions and actions:

  1. Borrowing DePriest’s no-nonsense wording, a first step is to ask, “How much money are you taking from the federal government to commit this egregious, tyrannical behavior on our kids?” If school board members profess not to know, prepared citizens can easily present them with the financial information listed here.
  2. As one state describes it, “The governance of local school boards by democratically-elected individuals remains at the heart of two vital United States structures: the public education system and democracy itself.” Remind school board members that when they put politics and financial arm-twisting ahead of their relationship with the public and the students they are supposed to serve, they are engaging in a fundamental betrayal of trust and ethics.
  3. Emphasize to school board members that the damage caused by COVID restrictions has far outweighed any threat from the illness, turning schools into “a physically, spiritually, and emotionally unsafe place” for children. Moreover, none of the restrictions are genuinely evidence-based.
  4. Continue to present school board members with evidence about the experimental COVID injections’ dangers (see sample talking points here).
  5. Ask schools whether they are planning for or engaging in HVAC “improvements.” If yes, ask them to describe the purpose of the “improvements” and whether schools intend to use HVAC systems to disseminate unsafe chemicals. Tell them EPA is doing research on “air treatments” in school buses, and let them know about the risks — both known and hypothesized — of chemicals like TEG.
  6. Finally, for officials who claim that their hands are tied, A.J. DePriest has a ready solution: Tell them to “give the money back”!

© 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 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

SCOTUS failed to debate the key Constitutional issues raised by the OSHA and CMS cases

Decided on narrow technical grounds to appease certain powerful institutions

By Toby Rogers | January 18, 2022

I am grateful to the U.S. Supreme Court for granting a stay that blocks enforcement of the OSHA vaccine mandate and disappointed that they split the baby in half by allowing the vaccine mandate to continue for healthcare workers in facilities that receive funding from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). As the Babylon Bee noted, now “healthcare workers are the only people who can’t make decisions about their own health.”

What initially seemed like a heavyweight boxing match between two radically different worldviews was decided on narrow technical grounds and the larger Constitutional issues were mostly avoided.

I understand why the Supreme Court wanted to make the narrowest possible ruling — they do not want to be seen as making law and they do not want to get too far out front on any issue lest they risk the credibility of the court. The problem with this approach is that if we are not going to debate the big issues at the Supreme Court, then where exactly are these debates going to take place? They are not happening in the media (completely captured), nor Congress (completely captured), nor within medical societies (completely captured). So how, as a society, are we supposed to come to clarity about a new and novel virus and how best to respond to it if we are never allowed to have a robust public debate about it in any venue?

In this article I want to try to walk through some of the big issues left unaddressed by the Supreme Court’s narrow rulings in these cases.

No findings of fact and no Jacobson

Jeff Childers at Covid & Coffee wrote the best initial take on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in the OSHA and CMS mandate cases.

Childers notes that there were no real findings of fact — the three Democratic appointees gestured toward the claims submitted by OSHA and HHS and left it at that and the six Republican appointees did not make any attempt at determining the facts at all. This is very strange. Findings of fact are a standard part of any trial. And here we have a new, novel, and likely man-made virus; several vaccines that have never worked in humans before; and unprecedented vaccine failure and yet neither side wanted to discuss the facts!? In the highest court in the country? Even though one cannot make rational decisions about these matters in the absence of facts? We’ll return to this issue below.

Childers also points out that there is no mention of Jacobson v. Massachusetts in either decision. Jacobson is the 1905 case regarding a state vaccine mandate that has been used incorrectly ever since to justify all sorts of heinous state actions including forced sterilization of poor women. See analysis from former NYU law professor and current President of Children’s Health Defense Mary Holland, Esq. (here) and (here) for further explanations of why Jacobson was wrongly decided and how it has been misinterpreted.

Childers seems to suggest that the Democratic appointees did not want to cite Jacobson because that would acknowledge that this power rests with the states (not the federal government). Republican appointees may not have wanted to mention Jacobson because, well it’s not quite clear. Perhaps they think it was wrongly decided and want to overturn it but the court is hesitant to overturn precedent too often lest they be seen as activist and illegitimate — and they are likely to overturn precedent in the pending abortion decisions (Texas and Mississippi) so perhaps they are saving their powder for that battle.

I want to add three important issues to the conversation:

A product under Emergency Use Authorization cannot be mandated

In the U.S., the FDA has granted Emergency Use Authorization for three coronavirus vaccines.

21 U.S. Code § 360bbb–3 clearly states that medical products under Emergency Use Authorization cannot be mandated and a federal district court has confirmed this.

The FDA has only given so-called “full approval” to Pfizer’s Comirnaty coronavirus vaccine which is used in Europe and is not available in the U.S.

Pfizer claims that the European and U.S. formulations of their coronavirus vaccines can be used interchangeably but the courts have rejected this assertion.

If the Supreme Court wanted to rule on narrow technical grounds, it should have rejected the mandates because they clearly violate the rules in connection with Emergency Use Authorization of medical products.

However, as I explain below, all vaccine mandates are unconstitutional, regardless of their FDA status.

The Constitutional rights of the individual

Across two majority opinions, one concurring opinion, and three dissents (44 pages in all) there is no mention of the Constitutional rights of individuals. This is very strange. The question at hand was whether the federal government, acting through unelected bureaucratic agencies can force 84 million private sector workers and 10 million healthcare workers to have a sharp metal object plunged into their body that will inject a genetically modified substance that hijacks the RNA inside individual cells for an uncertain period of time with unknown short- and long-term health impacts. And not a single member of the Supreme Court had anything to say about the Constitutional rights of individuals? In a country built on the notion of individual freedoms? Really? What’s going on!?

It appears that the Democratic appointees to the court (Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer) did not want to acknowledge a constitutional right to privacy and bodily sovereignty because then they would have had to reject both mandates. As Naomi Wolf points out a Constitutional right to privacy and bodily autonomy has been the bedrock principle of liberal jurisprudence for the last 50 years and so it is more than a little odd that the three liberal justices suddenly pretended that they had never heard of this idea. But worshipping the golden calf of vaccines has become the only issue in the Democratic imagination and so apparently all other principles be damned. When it comes to injecting toxic substances into the peasants, Democrats want the federal government to be all-powerful, never mind what they said before about “My body, my choice.”

Republican appointees to the court (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett) however do not want to acknowledge a Constitutional right to bodily sovereignty or privacy because they are likely to curtail such rights in their upcoming decisions in the two abortion cases (regarding Texas Senate Bill 8 and the Mississippi law that blocks abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy). Said differently, regardless of how they might feel about individual rights in this case, when it comes to abortion, Republicans want the state to have the power to make these decisions rather than individuals.

It is not my intention here to weigh in on the abortion debate but rather to point out that no one on the court is looking out for our rights as individuals. I suppose one could argue that Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch are at least aware of the fact that vaccines involve some risks and that individuals have rights — but their reasoning was indirect and between the lines (writing that one could not remove a vaccine at the end of the workday or that vaccination could not be undone rather than saying that individuals have sovereignty over their own bodies). In these rulings none of the nine justices are being consistent in their judicial philosophy.

This glaring omission of any discussion of individual liberties is apparent in the concurring opinion from Justice Gorsuch in the OSHA case (that was joined by Justices Thomas and Alito). He writes:

The central question we face today is: Who decides?… The only question is whether an administrative agency in Washington, one charged with overseeing workplace safety, may mandate the vaccination or regular testing of 84 million people. Or whether, as 27 states before us submit, that work belongs to state and local governments across the country and the people’s elected representatives in Congress.

Given this menu of options, I’m glad that Gorsuch (and 5 other justices) came down on the side of the states and Congress. But this is the wrong menu. Neither an administrative agency in Washington nor state and local governments and Congress should decide this matter. Vaccination is a matter that can only be decided by individuals weighing their potential individual risks and benefits. Mandatory one-size-fits-all medicine is, by definition, tyranny and savage barbarism because every individual body is unique. And no level of government has the right to trespass my body. This is not complicated and it is strange that no one on the court stood up for these fundamental individual rights.

Arguments from authority and so-called experts are a logical fallacy. SCOTUS wants to sidestep this thorny problem but they should not

This is a return to the issue mentioned above about the absence of any real findings of fact in this case. It is very important and I have not heard others comments on it thus far. My argument has two steps to it:

1. The problem of deferring to institutions. It appears that the Supreme Court decided this case based on the institutions involved, not the Constitutional principles. In the OSHA case the majority noted that 27 states and a majority of the U.S. Senate were on record as opposing this workplace mandate. And in the CMS case, the majority (Roberts and Kavanaugh were in the majority on both cases) noted that the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association were on record as supporting the mandate for healthcare workers and the plaintiffs were not a well-recognized institutional body. So it seems that they just weighed up the power of the various institutions in each case and gave the victory to the more powerful institutions. That is politics — not justice — and it is the wrong way to decide the case.

2. The problem of deferring to experts. In their dissent in the OSHA case, Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan speak to the question of “Who decides?” Writing about the Supreme Court they argue:

Its Members are elected by, and accountable to, no one. And we “lack[] the background, competence, and expertise to assess” workplace health and safety issues. South Bay United Pentecostal Church, 590 U. S., at ___ (opinion of ROBERTS, C. J.) (slip op., at 2). When we are wise, we know enough to defer on matters like this one. When we are wise, we know not to displace the judgments of experts, acting within the sphere Congress marked out and under Presidential control, to deal with emergency conditions.

It is preposterous to claim that anyone at OSHA or CMS are “experts” on these matters because this is a new and novel virus (so it is unclear who has the correct answers at this point) and these agencies, like all bureaucracies in D.C., are captured by industry.

But I want to make a larger point. It is not just Democrats who do this. Oh heavens me, I could not possibly decide such weighty scientific matters, let’s leave it to the experts is a standard flex by politicians of both political parties and judges across the country — and it is entirely wrong.

Nothing in the Constitution supports this approach. The Seventh Amendment to the Constitution articulates the right to trial by jury. The founders of this country wanted legal matters decided by everyday citizens — as a check against corruption. The Constitution did not envision a society of technocrats making decisions on behalf of society. The founders were well aware of the fact that power corrupts everyone and so they returned decision-making on matters of fact to ordinary citizens. In a democracy, no one can side-step their individual responsibility to evaluate the evidence for themselves. If the matter is over the heads of U.S. Supreme Court Justices then it must be left to individuals to decide — rather than giving totalitarian powers to bureaucrats.

But it’s more than that. From a scientific and medical perspective, institutions and “experts” tell you nothing about the data. It’s the wrong epistemology. Institutions and “experts” tell you about the politics surrounding the data, they do not necessarily tell you if the data is more likely to be correct than not.

Respondents should have to make their case publicly in ways that everyone can understand and they should have to present their data for the entire society to comb through if they wish. The notion that we are going to contract out the findings of fact to unelected bureaucrats who are almost always captured by the pharmaceutical industry is an affront to democracy and entirely unscientific. It would be extremely beneficial for society for us to have these scientific debates out in the open — in the courtroom, in the digital public square, and in our living rooms — so that as a society we can grow, learn, and sort out fact from fiction. The idea of leaving these matters to captured technocrats has been catastrophic for public health and it must stop.

Furthermore, it’s not like these justices even believe this flex themselves. The so-called Special Masters on the vaccine court include a former tax specialist, a military judge, and a sex crimes prosecutor — these people are not scientific experts — and yet they decide thousands of vaccine injury cases involving intricate matters of science and medicine. So on the one hand, the Supreme Court (and lots of elected officials) claim that they could not possibly decide weighty scientific matters and then they punt to people who know even less than them (corrupt bureaucrats or Special Masters) — entirely bypassing the system set up by our founders — ordinary citizens, on juries, using common sense and reason.

It is time for the U.S. to return to the founding principles of individual liberty and trust in the common sense and reason of individual citizens. If you don’t believe in that then you don’t believe in democracy.

Conclusion

The OSHA case now returns to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Some legal analysts think OSHA may withdraw the rule rather than continue with a case that it is expected to lose.

The CMS case returns to the Fifth and Eighth Circuit courts where legal analysts believe that the challenges to the CMS mandate will be dismissed.

But the enormous Constitutional issues remain. I think there is ample opportunity for the Fifth and/or Eighth Circuit courts to re-examine the government’s shoddy reasoning in the CMS case. I also think citizens should come together to fund new litigation to defend the Constitutional right to bodily autonomy for all Americans, including the healthcare workers who are under assault by the CMS rule right now.

Both the OSHA and the CMS mandates are clearly unconstitutional. The First (freedom of speech), Fourth (freedom to be secure in my person…), Seventh (right to trial by jury), and Fourteenth (equal protection under the law) Amendments to the Constitution can all be used to strike down this totalitarian government overreach. Any honest examination of the scientific evidence will reveal that coronavirus shots do not work as claimed and the risks outweigh the benefits. If the courts are wise, they will leave these decisions up to individuals acting within their conscience as sovereign citizens.

January 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

Germany’s Interior Ministry accuses Google and Apple of inciting “conspiracy theories” for allowing Telegram

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | January 21, 2022

Germany seems determined to try to undermine Telegram under the fairly absurd pretext that among its hundreds of millions of users are also some “extremists” (same logic applies to the whole of the internet – so will Berlin try to heavily regulate *that* as well?)

And the definition of “extremist” and “radical,” as mentioned in reports about the latest push to get Telegram to cooperate – or else – also includes people who have been unhappy with extreme and radical Covid restrictions.

But given the apparent financial independence of the company that develops the messaging app, the suppression bid doesn’t seem like it will be a straight-forward task.

Judging by the news coming out of Germany now, the route the Interior Ministry would prefer to take is roundabout – to possibly get an uncooperative Telegram banned on the two biggest app stores, those operated by Google and Apple, and thus severely limit its exposure to users.

However, this doesn’t make sense either – because a dedicated “dangerous right-wing extremist” or “conspiracy theorist” would surely find out how to sideload Telegram, and march on.

But by removing the app from the most widely used official app stores, it is those hundreds of millions of everyday users in search of secure and private ways to communicate, without any malicious actors – be they governments or hackers – interfering, who would suffer the most.

For that reason, when Germany’s Interior Minister Christian Pegel recently spoke about the need to get Telegram “cooperating” with law enforcement in order to suppress extremism and threats of violence – or Berlin will pressure Google and Apple – what it really comes down to is trying to put another brick in the ongoing “war on encryption” wall.

Among the members of the security/encryption purist community, Telegram is not even regarded as the best solution – but the benefits provided by this messaging app overall as a secure and privacy-friendly alternative to mainstream competitors still far outweigh any of its flaws. As a result Telegram has seen a strong uptake in recent years.

In Germany, Facebook’s WhatsApp and Messenger are both shedding users, Signal is holding steady – but behind Telegram, that has been growing.

Related: Germany considers attempting to ban Telegram after it became popular with Covid restriction opponents

January 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Join the global rally for freedom

By Kathy Gyngell | TCW Defending Freedom | January 20, 2022

THIS Saturday, January 22, will see another worldwide freedom rally. It starts at 1pm in London and other UK cities as well as globally.

To find the details of where, please join the Together Declaration’s Telegram Channel for updates. The Together organisers will be in London and will have placards available on the day. You can find the details on Twitter @togetherdec and on Instagram: @togetherdeclaration […]

Please continue to share Together links to drive their message home. They are doing a vital campaigning and lobbying job. It’s essential that we all keep pushing to end all restrictions on January 26 and to insist on the revocation of an end to all vaccine mandates and coercion.

Together ask us to use the following hashtags in our Twitter communications:

#WorldWideDemo

#StandTogether

and to follow their news and share it on the following platforms:

Twitter: @togetherdec

Instagram: @togetherdeclaration

Facebook

TikTok

LinkedIn

YouTube

GETTR

Gab

Telegram

January 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism | , , | Leave a comment

Yohan Tengra Exposes the Public Health Mafia in India

Corbett • 01/19/2022

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

How does the global public health mafia direct the health policy of nations around the world? In today’s conversation, James talks to Yohan Tengra of the Awaken Indian Movement to discuss Tengra’s article breaking down the Indian Covid-19 Task Force and how its members’ conflicts of interest relate to the decades-long takeover of India’s public health system.

Watch on Archive / BitChute / Minds / Odysee or Download the mp4

SHOW NOTES:
Yohan Tengra: AnarchyForFreedom.in / AwakenIndiaMovement / Telegram channel

Who Is Bill Gates?

India’s Covid-19 Task Force & “Experts” Exposed : Conflicts of Interest in Our Public Health System

HPV vaccine deaths: Parliament panel indicts PATH, health officials

Govt cancels FCRA licence of top public health NGO

NITI Aayog Launches Behaviour Change Campaign

A State of Fear: How the UK Weaponized Fear by Laura Dodsworth

Swedish company showcases microchip that can download COVID-19 passport status

Fact Check: Polio Vaccines, Tetanus Vaccines, and the Gates Foundation

Demonetization and You

January 21, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

Covid-19 vaccines and treatments: we must have raw data, now

Data should be fully and immediately available for public scrutiny

Peter Doshi, senior editor, Fiona Godlee, former editor in chief, Kamran Abbasi, editor in chief | BMJ | January 19, 2022

In the pages of The BMJ a decade ago, in the middle of a different pandemic, it came to light that governments around the world had spent billions stockpiling antivirals for influenza that had not been shown to reduce the risk of complications, hospital admissions, or death. The majority of trials that underpinned regulatory approval and government stockpiling of oseltamivir (Tamiflu) were sponsored by the manufacturer; most were unpublished, those that were published were ghostwritten by writers paid by the manufacturer, the people listed as principal authors lacked access to the raw data, and academics who requested access to the data for independent analysis were denied.1234

The Tamiflu saga heralded a decade of unprecedented attention to the importance of sharing clinical trial data.56 Public battles for drug company data,78 transparency campaigns with thousands of signatures,910 strengthened journal data sharing requirements,1112 explicit commitments from companies to share data,13 new data access website portals,8 and landmark transparency policies from medicines regulators1415 all promised a new era in data transparency.

Progress was made, but clearly not enough. The errors of the last pandemic are being repeated. Memories are short. Today, despite the global rollout of covid-19 vaccines and treatments, the anonymised participant level data underlying the trials for these new products remain inaccessible to doctors, researchers, and the public—and are likely to remain that way for years to come.16 This is morally indefensible for all trials, but especially for those involving major public health interventions.

Unacceptable delay

Pfizer’s pivotal covid vaccine trial was funded by the company and designed, run, analysed, and authored by Pfizer employees. The company and the contract research organisations that carried out the trial hold all the data.17 And Pfizer has indicated that it will not begin entertaining requests for trial data until May 2025, 24 months after the primary study completion date, which is listed on ClinicalTrials.gov as 15 May 2023 (NCT04368728).

The lack of access to data is consistent across vaccine manufacturers.16 Moderna says data “may be available … with publication of the final study results in 2022.”18 Datasets will be available “upon request and subject to review once the trial is complete,” which has an estimated primary completion date of 27 October 2022 (NCT04470427).

As of 31 December 2021, AstraZeneca may be ready to entertain requests for data from several of its large phase III trials.19 But actually obtaining data could be slow going. As its website explains, “timelines vary per request and can take up to a year upon full submission of the request.”20

Underlying data for covid-19 therapeutics are similarly hard to find. Published reports of Regeneron’s phase III trial of its monoclonal antibody therapy REGEN-COV flatly state that participant level data will not be made available to others.21 Should the drug be approved (and not just emergency authorised), sharing “will be considered.” For remdesivir, the US National Institutes of Health, which funded the trial, created a new portal to share data (https://accessclinicaldata.niaid.nih.gov/), but the dataset on offer is limited. An accompanying document explains: “The longitudinal data set only contains a small subset of the protocol and statistical analysis plan objectives.”

We are left with publications but no access to the underlying data on reasonable request. This is worrying for trial participants, researchers, clinicians, journal editors, policy makers, and the public. The journals that have published these primary studies may argue that they faced an awkward dilemma, caught between making the summary findings available quickly and upholding the best ethical values that support timely access to underlying data. In our view, there is no dilemma; the anonymised individual participant data from clinical trials must be made available for independent scrutiny.

Journal editors, systematic reviewers, and the writers of clinical practice guideline generally obtain little beyond a journal publication, but regulatory agencies receive far more granular data as part of the regulatory review process. In the words of the European Medicine Agency’s former executive director and senior medical officer, “relying solely on the publications of clinical trials in scientific journals as the basis of healthcare decisions is not a good idea … Drug regulators have been aware of this limitation for a long time and routinely obtain and assess the full documentation (rather than just publications).”22

Among regulators, the US Food and Drug Administration is believed to receive the most raw data but does not proactively release them. After a freedom of information request to the agency for Pfizer’s vaccine data, the FDA offered to release 500 pages a month, a process that would take decades to complete, arguing in court that publicly releasing data was slow owing to the need to first redact sensitive information.23 This month, however, a judge rejected the FDA’s offer and ordered the data be released at a rate of 55 000 pages a month. The data are to be made available on the requesting organisation’s website (phmpt.org).

In releasing thousands of pages of clinical trial documents, Health Canada and the EMA have also provided a degree of transparency that deserves acknowledgment.2425 Until recently, however, the data remained of limited utility, with copious redactions aimed at protecting trial blinding. But study reports with fewer redactions have been available since September 2021,2425 and missing appendices may be accessible through freedom of information requests.

Even so, anyone looking for participant level datasets may be disappointed because Health Canada and the EMA do not receive or analyse these data, and it remains to be seen how the FDA responds to the court order. Moreover, the FDA is producing data only for Pfizer’s vaccine; other manufacturers’ data cannot be requested until the vaccines are approved, which the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are not. Industry, which holds the raw data, is not legally required to honour requests for access from independent researchers.

Like the FDA, and unlike its Canadian and European counterparts, the UK’s regulator—the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency—does not proactively release clinical trial documents, and it has also stopped posting information released in response to freedom of information requests on its website.26

Transparency and trust

As well as access to the underlying data, transparent decision making is essential. Regulators and public health bodies could release details27 such as why vaccine trials were not designed to test efficacy against infection and spread of SARS-CoV-2.28 Had regulators insisted on this outcome, countries would have learnt sooner about the effect of vaccines on transmission and been able to plan accordingly.29

Big pharma is the least trusted industry.30 At least three of the many companies making covid-19 vaccines have past criminal and civil settlements costing them billions of dollars.31 One pleaded guilty to fraud.31 Other companies have no pre-covid track record. Now the covid pandemic has minted many new pharma billionaires, and vaccine manufacturers have reported tens of billions in revenue.32

The BMJ supports vaccination policies based on sound evidence. As the global vaccine rollout continues, it cannot be justifiable or in the best interests of patients and the public that we are left to just trust “in the system,” with the distant hope that the underlying data may become available for independent scrutiny at some point in the future. The same applies to treatments for covid-19. Transparency is the key to building trust and an important route to answering people’s legitimate questions about the efficacy and safety of vaccines and treatments and the clinical and public health policies established for their use.

Twelve years ago we called for the immediate release of raw data from clinical trials.1 We reiterate that call now. Data must be available when trial results are announced, published, or used to justify regulatory decisions. There is no place for wholesale exemptions from good practice during a pandemic. The public has paid for covid-19 vaccines through vast public funding of research, and it is the public that takes on the balance of benefits and harms that accompany vaccination. The public, therefore, has a right and entitlement to those data, as well as to the interrogation of those data by experts.

Pharmaceutical companies are reaping vast profits without adequate independent scrutiny of their scientific claims.33 The purpose of regulators is not to dance to the tune of rich global corporations and enrich them further; it is to protect the health of their populations. We need complete data transparency for all studies, we need it in the public interest, and we need it now.

Footnotes

  • Competing interests: We have read and understood BMJ policy on declaration of interests and declare that The BMJ is a co-founder of the AllTrials campaign. PD was one of the Cochrane reviewers studying influenza antivirals beginning in 2009, who campaigned for access to data. He also helped organise the Coalition Advocating for Adequately Licensed Medicines (CAALM), which formally petitioned the FDA to refrain from fully approving any covid-19 vaccine this year (docket FDA-2021-P-0786). PD is also a member of Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, which has sued the FDA to obtain the Pfizer covid-19 vaccine data. The views and opinions do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Maryland.

  • Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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View Abstract

Author affiliations

Correspondence to: P Doshi Pdoshi@bmj.com

January 20, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

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