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The Meaning of the FDA Resignations

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | September 14, 2021

How significant is it that the two top FDA officials responsible for vaccine research resigned last week and this week signed a letter in The Lancet that strongly warns against vaccine boosters? This is a remarkable sign that the project of government-managed virus mitigation is in the final stages before falling apart.

The booster has already been promoted by top lockdown advocates Neil Ferguson of Imperial College and Anthony Fauci of NIH, even in the face of rising public incredulity toward their “expert” advice. For these two FDA officials to go on record with grave doubts – and their perspective is certainly backed by the unimpressive booster experience in Israel – introduces a major break in the narrative that the experts in charge deserve our trust and deference.

What’s at stake here? It’s about more than the boosters. It’s about the whole experience of taking away the control of health management from individuals and medical professionals and handing it over to modelers and government officials with coercive power.

From the first week of March 2020, the US embarked on a wild experiment in virus mitigation, deploying a series of measures with a sweep and scope that had never previously been attempted, not in modern times and not even in ancient times. The litany of controls and tactics is long. Many of these measures survive in most parts of the US. The retail landscape is still filled with plexiglass. We are still invited to sanitize ourselves when going indoors. People still mask up in proximity to others. The “Karens” of the world are still actively shaming and denouncing anyone suspected of non-compliance.

The vaccine push has been particularly divisive, with President Biden actively encouraging “anger” at those who don’t get the jab, even as he refuses to acknowledge the existence of infection-induced immunities. In several cities, people who refuse vaccines are being denied active participation in civic life, and a populist movement is rising up that scapegoats the refuseniks as the only reason that the virus continues to be a problem.

All these measures were deployed in waves of controls. It all began with event cancellations and school closures. It continued with travel bans, most of which are still in place. Sanitization and plexiglass were next. Masks were rolled out and then mandated. The principle of forced human separation governed social interactions. Capacity limits indoors were a common feature. The US example inspired many governments around the world to adopt these NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) and take away the liberties of the people.

At each stage of control, there were new claims that we’ve finally found the answer, the key technique that would finally slow and stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Nothing worked, as the virus seemed to follow its own course regardless of all these measures. Indeed there was no observable difference anywhere in the world based on whether and to what extent any of these measures were deployed.

Finally came the pharmaceutical interventions, voluntary at first but gradually mandatory, just as with each previous protocol began as a recommendation until it was mandated.

At no point in these 19 months have we seen a clear admission of failure on the part of government officials. Indeed, it’s mostly been the opposite, as the agencies double down, claiming effectiveness while citing no data or studies, while social media companies backed it all by taking down contrarian posts and brazenly deleting accounts of people who dare cite dissenting science.

The vaccine was the biggest gamble of all simply because the program was so expensive, so personal, and so wildly oversold. Even those of us who opposed every other mandate had hopes that the vaccines would finally end the public panic and provide governments a way to back out of all the other strategies that had failed.

That did not happen.

Most people believed that the vaccine would work like many others before them to block infection and spread. In this, people were merely believing what the head of the CDC said. “Our data from the C.D.C. today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick,” Rochelle Walinsky told Rachel Maddow. “And that it’s not just in the clinical trials, it’s also in real-world data.”

“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,”President Biden said, reflecting what was the common view in the summer of 2021.

That of course turned out not to be the case. The vaccines appear to have been helpful in mitigating against some severe outcomes but it did not achieve victory over the virus. Israel’s surge in infections in August was among the fully vaccinated. The same happened in the UK and Scotland, and that precise result began to hit the US in September. Indeed, we all have vaccinated friends who caught the virus and were sick for days. Meanwhile, team natural immunity has received a huge boost from a large study in Israel that demonstrated that recovered Covid cases gain far more protection than is conferred by the vaccine.

The fallback position then became the booster. Surely this is the answer! Israel was first to mandate them. Here again, the problems began to show, as yet another magic bullet of disease mitigation failed. Then the inevitable headline came: Israel preparing for possible fourth COVID vaccine dose. So think about this because there is a sense in which the vaccines rank among the biggest failures: in a matter of a few short months, we’ve gone from the claim that they fully protect to they are pretty okay provided you get regularly scheduled boosters forever.

Now to the striking resignation of two top officials at the FDA who were in charge of vaccine safety and administration. It was the Director and Deputy Director of the Office of Vaccines Research, Marion Gruber and Phillip Kause. They gave no reason for their departure, which is scheduled for October and November.

The case is fascinating because 1) people rarely resign cushy government jobs unless a higher-paying, higher-prestige job in the private sector awaits, or 2) they are being pushed out. It’s rare for anyone in a position like that to resign over a principled matter of science. When I first read that they were going, I figured something else was up.

These days, extremely weird things are going on within the Biden administration. Even though his approval ratings are sinking, the president has to pretend that he has all the answers, that the science behind his mandates and virus war is universally settled, that anyone who disagrees with him is really just a political enemy. He has gone so far as to denounce, demonize, and legally threaten red-state governors who disagree with him.

This is a deep problem for actual scientists working within the bureaucracy because they know for sure that all of this is a pretense and that the government cannot win this war on the virus. They simply cannot preside over more false promises, especially when the whole of their professional training is about assessing the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.

So what can they do? In this case, it appears they had to get away before they dropped a bombshell.

The bombshell is called “Considerations in boosting COVID-19 vaccine immune responses.” It appears in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet. The two top officials are among the authors. The article recommends against the Covid booster shot that the Biden administration, following Fauci’s advice, is suggesting as the key to making the vaccines work better and finally fulfill their promise.

Fauci and company are pushing boosters because they know what is coming. Essentially we are going the way of Israel: most everyone is vaccinated but the virus itself is not being controlled. More and more among those hospitalized and dying are vaccinated. This same trend is coming to the US. The boosters are a means by which government can save face, or so many believe.

The trouble now is that the top scientists at the FDA disagree. Further, they think that the push for boosters is courting problems. They think the current regime of one or two shots is working as well as one can expect. Nothing is gained on net from a booster, they say. There just isn’t enough evidence to take the risk of another booster, and another and another.

The authors knew this article was appearing. They knew that signing it under the FDA affiliation would lead to a push for their resignations. Life would get very difficult for both of them. They got ahead of the messaging and resigned before it came out. Very smart.

The signed article goes even further to warn of possible downsides. They point out that boosters might seem necessary because “variants expressing new antigens have evolved to the point at which immune responses to the original vaccine antigens no longer protect adequately against currently circulating viruses.” At the same time, there are possible side effects that could discredit all vaccines for a generation or more. “There could be risks,” they write, “if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects (such as myocarditis, which is more common after the second dose of some mRNA vaccines, or Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been associated with adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccines.”)

Bringing up such side effects is essentially a taboo topic. That this was written by two top FDA officials is nothing short of remarkable, especially because it comes at a time when the Biden administration is going all in on vaccine mandates. Meanwhile, studies are showing that for teenage boys, the vaccine poses a greater risk to them than Covid itself. “For boys 16-17 without medical comorbidities, the rate of CAE is currently 2.1 to 3.5 times higher than their 120-day COVID-19 hospitalization risk, and 1.5 to 2.5 times higher at times of high weekly COVID-19 hospitalization.”

From the beginning of these lockdowns – along with all the masks, restrictions, bogus health advice from plexiglass to sanitizer to universal vaccine mandates and so on – it was clear that there would someday be hell to pay. They wrecked rights and liberties, crashed economies, traumatized a whole generation of children and other students, ran roughshod over religious freedom, and for what? There is zero evidence that any of this has made any difference. We are surrounded by the carnage they created.

The appearance of The Lancet article by two top FDA vaccine scientists is truly devastating and revealing because it undermines the last plausible tool to save the whole machinery of government disease management that has been deployed at such enormous social, cultural, and economic cost for 19 months. Not in our lifetimes has a policy failed so badly. The intellectual and political implications here are monumental. It means that the real Covid crisis – the task of assigning responsibility for all the collateral damage – has just begun.

In 2006, during the early years of the birth of lockdown ideology, the great epidemiologist Donald Henderson warned that if any of these restrictive measures were deployed for a pandemic, the result would be a “loss of trust in government” and “a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.” Catastrophe is exactly what has happened. The current regime wants to point the finger toward the noncompliant. That is no longer believable. They cannot delay the inevitable for much longer: responsibility for this catastrophe belongs to those who embarked on this political experiment in the first place.

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

September 16, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

An Evil Rationalization on Afghanistan

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | September 15, 2021

One of the arguments that interventionists, including many U.S. military veterans, use to rationalize the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan is that U.S. forces were fighting to bring “freedom, democracy, and women’s rights” to the country. In fact, the Pentagon even coined the term “Operation Enduring Freedom” as one of the ways to justify the invasion and occupation of the country. Even though the effort failed, the argument goes, interventionists, including veterans, should nonetheless feel good about their “service” to both America and Afghanistan.

There is a problem with this rationale and justification, however. The problem is that it is evil to the core.

In any invasion and occupation, there are inevitably going to be people killed, injured, and maimed. There is also going to be destruction of homes, business, and infrastructure. That certainly proved to be the case in Afghanistan.

Therefore, what interventionists were — and are — saying is that all those deaths, injuries, and property destruction were worth bringing freedom, democracy, and women’s rights to Afghanistan.

But who died and made these people the arbiters of that type of mathematical life-and-death calculation? After all, those who were killed in the process would never have experienced freedom, democracy, and women’s rights. That’s because they would be dead.

Now, it’s one thing for the citizens of a country to decide for themselves whether to revolt against the tyranny of their own government. Violent revolutions can be very costly in terms of life and property. That’s why people might decide to put up with a lot of tyranny before they revolt. They don’t want to lose their family members, friends, and countrymen by revolting, until the situation gets so bad that they feel that they have no choice but to do so. In the final analysis, the decision to revolt and when to revolt can be highly subjective.

But that’s a far cry from U.S. officials making that decision from afar. Their decision is a cavalier one because they don’t put the same value on Afghan life that the Afghan people do. In fact, interventionists put little or no value on Afghan life. That mindset is reflected by the fact that early in the invasion and occupation, the Pentagon, with the full support of Washington, D.C., officials, made the conscious decision to not even keep track of how many Afghans they were killing. Moreover, there was never an upward limit on the number of Afghan people who could be killed, injured or maimed in the effort to bring freedom, democracy, and women’s rights to the country. It just didn’t matter. Any number of Afghan people killed in the effort would be considered worth it by U.S. interventionists. 

That’s why the purported concern that U.S. interventionists, including many U.S. military veterans, express for the Afghan people rings hollow, given that they were willing to kill or maim any number of Afghans to reach their political goal.

How many Afghan lives were worth the U.S. effort to bring “freedom, democracy, and women’s rights” to Afghanistan? None! It was never morally or religiously justified for the U.S. government to kill even one single Afghan citizen for the sake of a political goal. Killing, injuring, or maiming even just one single Afghan, much less tens of thousands of Afghans, for the sake of “freedom, democracy, and women’s rights” has always been the epitome of evil. 

September 15, 2021 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

As BoJo prepares Britain for another winter of Covid restrictions, it’s still not enough for the hardliners

By Neil Clark | RT | September 15, 2021

The UK government’s ‘Winter Plan’ for Covid is likely to mean the attempted introduction of vaccine passports and more lockdowns. It’s all a far cry from the freedom we were promised would come with mass vaccination.

Suppose someone had told you back in March 2020, that, 18 months later, despite two-thirds of the population being double-vaccinated, Britain would be facing the prospect of another depressing autumn and winter of Covid restrictions and lockdowns?

Well, there were people back then who warned such things would happen, that life would never be allowed to get back to the ‘old’ normal and that the governing, globalist elite was working to a different plan that had little to do with countering a virus. These people were denounced as ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘crackpots’. Yet, after Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s unveiling of yesterday’s ‘Winter Plan’ for England, it seems the ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘crackpots’ have got it right once again.

Plan A is learning to live with Covid. But this doesn’t mean living totally normally. There will still be border restrictions. We’ll still be urged – some would say coerced – to get the booster jab and to have our kids vaccinated too (even though, less than a fortnight ago, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation didn’t recommend it). We’ll still be encouraged to wear masks in certain settings.

Yet for all its downsides, life under Plan A is still better than the alternative, Plan B. This “toolkit” includes the return of mandatory masks, and the introduction of jab-only vaccine passports for large events, which could be extended to other gatherings too. And, most revealingly of all, further lockdowns are not ruled out, despite the disastrous impact they have had on both the economy and on society.

Let’s be clear what we are dealing with here: it’s psychological warfare on an industrial scale. The semblance of normality that Plan A gives us can be withdrawn at very short notice and Plan B – or parts of it – will be put into operation if ‘cases’ surge and the NHS comes under “unsustainable pressure.” But the NHS comes under pressure every winter, meaning Plan B is actually Plan A. Plan B is clearly what the government really wants to implement, but Johnson knows that, to keep disgruntled Tory backbenchers on side, he can’t do so straightaway.

Hospitals are nearly always close to capacity in December and January. Inevitably, once the flu/cold season starts up again in October, and with mass testing still in place, we’ll see a rise in ‘cases’, which will then see Johnson reach for his “toolkit.” That will be preceded by the usual doomladen and ludicrously over-the-top predictions from ‘modellers’ and ‘advisers’ of what will happen if the Prime Minister fails to ‘act’.

‘Something must be done!’ will be the cry from those who will lose nothing financially from another lockdown.

In fact, the calls for an immediate return of restrictions have already begun. A headline on the BBC News website reads, “Hospital Covid cases may see big jump, say experts.” The piece refers to how the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) committee modelling “suggested” hospitalisation could reach 2,000 to 7,000 per day next month.

We’ve been here before. Lots of times. Only a few months ago, there were dire predictions from ‘modellers’ and ‘experts’ of what would happen if restrictions were lifted in England in July. A member of Independent SAGE – which is even more hardline than SAGE – said the UK could face cases of more than 100,000 a day if lockdown easing went ahead. Well, lockdown easing did go ahead, and guess what? Cases fell. From 43,910 cases (on a seven-day average) on July 16 to 23,002 by the end of the month.

We’re meant, though, to have the memory of a gnat and to have forgotten how wrong the ‘modellers’ have consistently been, and to be terrified once again by their latest ‘predictions’, which make Private Frazer of 1970s sitcom ‘Dad’s Army’ fame – whose catchphrase was “We’re doomed!” – sound like the world’s greatest optimist.

With all the sensationalist ‘cases set to surge this autumn unless restrictions are re-imposed’ headlines, I expect that, straight after next month’s Tory Party conference – and after the Coronavirus Act has been renewed for another six months – Johnson will reach for his “toolkit” and bring back mandatory masks. Then, a few weeks after that, it’ll be ‘accept jab-only vaccine passports or we’ll have to do another lockdown’.

But hang on a minute… weren’t the vaccines meant to put an end to all of this? “15 million jabs to freedom” was the famous headline in the Daily Mail last 27 December. Yet with 66% of the population double-vaxxed – and around 90% of those deemed the most ‘vulnerable’ having had their jabs – we have more ‘cases’ and deaths with Covid than we did this time last year, when no one was vaccinated. How come?

On ‘Good Morning Britain’, Richard Madeley, a proper ‘old-school’ journalist asked this emperor’s new clothes question to Dr Hilary Jones. Jones struggled to answer and kept muttering about cases being higher this year. But if the vaccines work so well, and so many people have been vaccinated, why are we even talking of having more restrictions this autumn and winter? Either the vaccines work or they don’t. If they work, then there’s no need to discuss restrictions. If they don’t, then why push them?

The government line is we need more jabs and a “toolkit” of restrictions too. More lockdowns as a “last resort,” if cases surge, “to protect the NHS.” And vaccine passports too – without a negative-test or prior-infection option – even though we know the vaccines don’t prevent transmission.

Like the autumn and winter of 2020-21, this coming ‘winter of discontent’, of fear and dread, and restrictions being imposed or re-imposed at a moment’s notice, is meant to be our ‘new normal’. Which means this will only end when people realise it’s never meant to end.

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com.

September 15, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , | Leave a comment

Viral Reality Check – What’s going on, but with real logic and science

Ivor Cummins | September 13, 2021

Quick update on the evolving irrationality of our viral issue – couple of links below that were mentioned:
Revealing talk on one major reason WHY science died in early 2020:  https://odysee.com/@IvorCummins:f/Ernst-Wolff—Uncovering-the-Corona-Narrative—Aug-2021:8

Also our Covid Chronicles movie latest update here:  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/capecrusaders/the-covid-chronicles/posts/3279184

NOTE: My extensive research and interviewing / video/sound editing and much more does require support – please consider helping if you can with monthly donation to support me directly, or one-off payment: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=69ZSTYXBMCN3W

September 15, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Javid: “Healthcare Staff Facing Mandatory Covid & Flu Jabs”

By Richie Allen | September 14, 2021

Speaking in the House of Commons this morning, Health Secretary Sajid Javid said that a consultation has been launched over making Covid and flu vaccinations mandatory for front-line healthcare and social care workers in England.

Javid said that while he’s keeping an open mind until he sees the results of the consultation, he believes that:

“It is highly likely that front-line NHS staff and those working in wider social care settings will also have to be vaccinated to protect those around them and this will be an important step in protecting those at greatest risk”.

Tyranny just rolls off the tongues of these fascists doesn’t it? Nobody cares though. There wasn’t so much as a murmur from the Labour Party benches, the so-called party of the working man and woman.

The Health Secretary had just threatened hundreds of thousands of people who work in the nation’s hospitals and care homes, that if they don’t take his medicine, they’ll be out of a job. Not a peep from Labour.

Javid was laying out his plans for tackling covid and flu this Winter. On flu, he said that in the next few weeks we will see the launch of the largest flu vaccination campaign the country has ever seen.

He said that people will also be encouraged to meet outdoors where possible, and try to let in fresh air when meeting indoors.

He also said that people will be encouraged to wear face masks in crowded areas where they can come into contact with others they don’t normally meet. This was greeted by jeers from his Tory colleagues on the backbenches.

I never believed for a moment, that we would ever see the back of the arbitrary measures introduced to tackle covid. I said many times on The Richie Allen Show that we’d be living with these measures and more forever. I hate being right.

September 14, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

You’re liable for vaccine harm, Euro MPs are warned

TCW Defending Freedom – September 14, 2021

DOCTORS yesterday warned Euro MPs that they will be held personally responsible for harm and death caused by Covid vaccines.

Doctors for Covid Ethics, a group of doctors and scientists from 30 countries, sent letters to all European Parliament members giving notice of liability.

They sent the same letter to Emer Cooke, executive director of the European Medicines Agency.

Their action came as the parliament resumed business with a debate on health and prevention of disease, which will be voted on today.

The notice, served with supporting documentation, read: ‘The rush to vaccinate first and research later has left you in a position whereby Covid-19 vaccination policy is now entirely divorced from the relevant evidence-base.

‘As you consider your next steps in mandating a vaccine that is contra-indicated by science, we draw your attention to recently published Freedom of Information requests, which reveal gross negligence in the Covid vaccine authorisation process, including misleading the Commission on Human Medicines as to whether any independent verification of vaccine trial data had occurred.’

Doctors for Covid Ethics describes itself as an organisation of hundreds of doctors and scientists from all corners of the globe.

Its website says: ‘We have written three letters to the European Medicines Agency, urgently warning of short term and long term dangers from Covid-19 vaccines, including clotting, bleeding and platelet abnormalities. We first began warning of blood-related risks before media reports of clotting led to vaccine suspensions around the world.

‘In the absence of crucial safety data, we are demanding the immediate withdrawal of all experimental gene-based Covid-19 vaccines.

‘We oppose vaccine passports, which threaten public health and violate Nuremberg and other protections. We are warning that “health passes” place coercive pressure on citizens to submit to dangerous medical experimentation, in return for freedoms that once were human rights.’

September 14, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Most Americans say Biden’s vaccine mandates for companies set bad precedent – poll

RT | September 13, 2021

The majority of Americans oppose President Biden’s vaccine mandate for employees of mid-size or larger companies, according to a recent poll which found many doubt his authority to impose such a rule and fear it will be abused.

Nearly six in ten (58.6%) Americans polled over the weekend believe the president lacks “constitutional authority” to force private businesses to mandate that employees receive vaccination against Covid-19, according to the Trafalgar Group, which published the results of its survey on Monday. Just 29.7% argued he did have the authority, while 11.7% were unsure.

The White House plans to roll out the vaccination mandate announced last week through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a subsidiary agency of the Department of Labor. Under the proposed rule, any business with 100 or more employees must require its workers to be vaccinated or receive weekly Covid-19 testing. The mandate is expected to affect as many as 100 million Americans.

Opinions regarding the president’s authority or lack thereof were strongly split along party lines, with 54.9% of Democrats agreeing Biden did in fact have the power to order private businesses to demand their employees be vaccinated. Among Republicans, however, 83.5% believed the president was overstepping his authority, and more than two thirds of independents and those with no party affiliation (68.2%) agreed Biden lacked the ability to make such demands.

Similarly, the vast majority of Republicans – 79.5% – believed the vaccine mandate set a dangerous precedent that “could be abused by future presidents on other issues,” an opinion shared by 58% of non-affiliated voters and even 30.4% of Democrats. The majority of those hailing from Biden’s party, however (54.4%), did not believe the mandate would be abused by future leaders.

Biden’s announcement on Thursday regarding the pending vaccine mandate has polarized the nation, with even many fully vaccinated Americans balking at using government muscle to force a controversial medical treatment on unwilling individuals. Several Republican governors have vowed not to enforce the mandate, a show of defiance which won support from 55.1% of the poll’s respondents. Some 40.1% opposed the governors’ efforts to block Biden’s mandates, however. Party affiliation heavily predicted whether one supported or opposed the dissident governors, with the majority of unaffiliated voters (62.3%) also supporting the governors who had vowed to block the mandate.

No timeframe has yet been unveiled for the mandate to take effect, though the White House has hinted OSHA will deliver the order “in the coming weeks.” There has been little discussion of exemptions, medical or otherwise, and the matter of who will be expected to pay for weekly testing for those who refuse vaccination remains up in the air. Companies that fail to heed the mandate have been threatened with enforcement fees of $14,000 per violation.

Conducted in partnership with the Convention of States Action, the poll surveyed 1,098 likely general election voters.

September 13, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

COVID-19 and ‘Politician’s Logic’

By Noah Carl | The Daily Sceptic | September 13, 2021

Freddie Sayers, the host of UnHerd’s ‘Lockdown TV’, has written an interesting piece for The Telegraph. Commenting on the Government’s insistence that we must vaccinate 12–15 year olds – in defiance of its own expert panel – he notes that a “dangerous new wisdom is forming, which views action as always better than inaction”.

“In this view,” Sayers continues, “long-standing rules and institutions of liberal democracies have been demoted to fussy obstacles that prevent us from replicating the successes of the command-and-control governments of Asia.”

He then makes the important but often overlooked point that “action can be every bit as damaging as inaction”. If only politicians had taken this into account last year, the response to the pandemic might have looked very different.

When I asked Philippe Lemoine why lockdowns were implemented with so little regard for costs, he suggested that politicians didn’t want to “leave themselves open to the accusation of not having done anything to curb the epidemic”. They had to do something, even if that something ended up causing more harm than good.

This fallacy was popularised by the much-loved British sitcom Yes, Prime Minister. In the episode ‘Power to the People’, Sir Humphrey Appleby is talking to his predecessor Sir Arnold Robinson about the Prime Minister’s plans to reform local government.

Sir Arnold says, “He’s suffering from politician’s logic,” to which Sir Humphrey replies, “Something must be done; this is something; therefore we must do it.” In other words: ‘Something must be done; lockdown is something; therefore we must do it.’

The incentives that gave rise to ‘politician’s logic’ in this case are obvious. While the ‘benefits’ of lockdown are immediate and visible, the costs may take months or even years to materialise. (By ‘benefits’, I mean the reduction in social and economic activity that is believed to reduce viral transmission.)

Furthermore, even if lockdown’s impact on mortality turns out to be marginal, politicians can claim that things would have been far worse if not for their tough and far-sighted decisions.

After all, we can’t observe the counterfactual of what would have happened in the absence of lockdown. And the politicians themselves? They may well be out of office by the time the full costs of lockdown become apparent.

Incidentally, the fact that ‘politician’s logic’ is a fallacy obviously doesn’t imply we should never do anything. In the case of the pandemic, there was something else we could have done, namely focused protection.

Let’s hope that when the next pandemic arrives, there are a few people around who remember the lessons of Yes, Prime Minister. Just because this is something, doesn’t mean we have to do it.

September 13, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Latvian military apologizes for NATO war games gunfire in busy streets of Riga which left civilians terrified

RT | September 13, 2021

Latvia’s capital RIga briefly turned into a warzone at the weekend, with heavily armed soldiers firing weapons among startled civilians. The firefight turned out to be an exercise that had somehow not been marked or cordoned off.

Multiple videos of the incident surfaced online on Saturday, promptly going viral. Footage from the scene shows multiple soldiers in the middle of a street, crouching behind cars and firing their weapons at a building.

One of the solders discharged his assault rifle as a woman with her baby was passing by, another video shows. The woman was left visibly shaken, while the baby began crying.

There were no visible cordons or markings that the area was being used for drills, with pedestrians walking right next to the heavily armed troops. The exercise looked very lifelike, with only an unarmed supervising officer casually moving among the troops serving to indicate that the street had not turned into an actual warzone.

The incident has drawn an overwhelmingly negative reaction, with the comment sections of the videos full of angry remarks. Some said that residents of the city should have at least been given clear notice via SMS, while others argued that the area should have been completely cordoned off.

Following the outcry, the military gave a lackluster apology, stating that it uses only blank cartridges for such events, and insisting that no harm was caused.

“During such drills, we only use blank cartridges, which make noise but do not pose any danger to the health and life of others. In this case, blank cartridges were also used, and this situation was a bitter misunderstanding, for which we apologize. The Defense Ministry calls on the public to show understanding for the exercises,” the ministry said in a statement cited by the TVnet website.

The Riga ‘firefight’ came as a part of the NATO Namejs 2021 war games, which are running from August 30 to October 3 across multiple locations in Latvia. The exercises involve some 9,300 soldiers from different countries of the bloc. Three soldiers were injured during the drills in a separate unspecified accident on Saturday, with the Defense Ministry stating that two servicemen from the “allied armed forces” had ended up hospitalized in “stable” condition.

September 13, 2021 Posted by | Militarism, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Hot Mic Catches Israeli Health Minister Admitting Vaccine Passports Are About Coercion

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | September 13, 2021

Unaware that he was on a hot mic and being broadcast live on a TV station, Israeli health minister Nitzan Horowitz admitted that vaccine passports were primarily about coercing skeptical people to get the vaccine.

“Imposing “green pass” rules on certain venues is needed only to pressure members of the public to get vaccinated, and not for medical reasons, Israeli Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said on Sunday, ahead of the weekly Cabinet meeting,” reports Jewish News Syndicate.

Unaware that his words were being broadcast live to the nation on Channel 12, Horowitz told Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked that not only should the green pass be removed as a requirement to dine at outdoor restaurants, but also, “For swimming pools, too, not just in restaurants.”

“Epidemiologically, it’s true,” said Horowitz, adding, “The thing is, I’m telling you, our problem is people who don’t get vaccinated. We need [to influence] them a bit; otherwise, we won’t get out of this [pandemic situation].”

The health minister went on to acknowledge that the system wasn’t even being enforced in most venues.

“There is a kind of universality to the ‘green pass’ system, other than at malls, where I think it should be imposed, [because] now it’s clear that it applies nowhere,” he said.

Israel was once lauded for its successful vaccine rollout and the speed with which it introduced vaccine passports.

The green pass was heralded as an “early vision of how we leave lockdown.” However, the country recently reported its highest ever number of daily COVID cases, with nearly 11,000 infections being recorded.

Although the early threat that the unvaccinated would be banned from entering numerous public venues convinced many younger people to get the vaccine, once it rolled out, the ‘green pass’ system was rarely even enforced and was subsequently scrapped at the end of May.

But once cases started rising again later that summer, Israel’s vaccine passport system was reintroduced and expanded.

Meanwhile, Sweden, which never imposed a hard lockdown, recently banned travelers arriving from Israel from entering the country.

September 13, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Australia: Petition EN3196 – Alternate treatment options for Covid 19

Petition Request

Millions of Australians are extremely concerned about the federal government’s push to force hastily approved and poorly tested novel vaccines on the population, when adequate long term safety data is unavailable.

It is also is of great concern that many notable doctors and medical researchers reporting successful treatment using cheap, safe generic anti viral drugs appear to be ignored by the government and TGA, due to these generic drugs being of little commercial value and not sponsored by pharmaceutical companies for approval by the TGA.

We therefore ask the House to formally request that the TGA assess the use of Ivermectine and Hydroxycloriquine, in the recommended dosages and combination with complimentary drugs, based on the peer reviewed studies and data, and the recommendation of notable Australian medical researchers such as Professor Thomas Borody and Professor Robert Clancy.

We ask that the house requests this of the TGA in the absence of sponsorship by a pharmaceutical corporation, seeing as both of these drugs are generic and of little commercial value to an individual company, and due to the conflict of interest many of these companies have with competing patented vaccines of far higher commercial interest.

We believe that if this is performed thoroughly and transparently it will restore public faith in the federal government, and also provide confidence to the public that all options for treatment are being honestly explored.

The petition is currently open for signatures. [until September 29th]

To see more and sigh the petition, see here: aph.gov.au

September 13, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Solidarity and Activism | , , | Leave a comment

The Vaccine Passport Scheme Has NOT Been Scrapped

By Richie Allen | September 13, 2021

UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid told the BBC’s Nick Robinson yesterday, that his government has decided to scrap the vaccine passport scheme which was due to be implemented at the end of the month. Javid was telling porkies.

He told Robinson:

“We shouldn’t be doing things for the sake of it. We’ve looked at it properly and, whilst we should keep it in reserve as a potential option, I’m pleased to say that we will not be going ahead with plans for vaccine passports.”

However, The Times reports this morning that:

Downing Street has insisted that vaccine passports are still a “first-line defence” against a winter wave of Covid-19 after the health secretary said plans to introduce them had been scrapped.

No 10 said checks on the vaccine status of people going to nightclubs and other crowded events remained a crucial part of the government’s winter Covid plan due to be unveiled by the prime minister tomorrow.

They haven’t scrapped the scheme, they’ve simply postponed it. Facing a backlash from backbench MP’s and the wrath of night-time industry leaders, the government has decided that the smart move is to row back on vaccine passport plans, for now.

But when the NHS is overwhelmed again this Winter (as it is every Winter), vaccine passports will be back on the table. Hospitality bosses will be told to implement the scheme or face mandatory closure.

Dr. Chand Nagpaul is the chair of the British Medical Association. Today, he will address the BMA’s Annual Representative Meeting. He is expected to deliver a damning assessment of the Government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. According to The Telegraph :

Dr Nagpaul will argue that the health service was already in crisis before March 2020, after parts of it had been “starved” by a lack of facilities and almost 90,000 staff vacancies.

The latest NHS England figures show 5.6 million people are now waiting to start treatment, up from 4.2 million in March 2020.

The number of NHS hospital beds in the UK has more than halved in the last 30 years, from around 299,000 in 1988 to 141,000 in 2019.

In 1988, the UK population was 56,812,757. Today it’s 68,207,116. NHS Winter crises are as certain as death and taxes. Now factor in the tens of thousands of staff who will leave the health service (and social care) because they will refuse to be jabbed and you have a perfect storm.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson will address the nation tomorrow. He will say that he wants to move towards “living with covid as an endemic disease.” He’ll say that he doesn’t want to lockdown again this Winter and that he is diametrically opposed to vaccine passports.

However, the power to reimpose any measure he sees fit will remain on the statute books. Lockdowns, masks and vaccine passports will be back this Winter. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.

September 13, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , | Leave a comment

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