Forget the headlines, these are the vaccine facts
By Geoff Moore | TCW Defending Freedom | January 20, 2022
WE were told before the Covid vaccine rollout that it wouldn’t block transmission, but that it would reduce symptoms and therefore hospitalisation. Throughout 2021 we saw many warning headlines like ‘Pandemic of the unvaccinated’, becoming ever more alarmist like this one in the Guardian towards the end of November when Professor Sir Andrew Pollard opined that ‘Getting jabs to the unvaccinated has never been more critical’. The article said that the horrors of Covid are now restricted to those who won’t or can’t have a jab, and further claimed that Covid patients in ICUs are ‘now almost all unvaccinated’. The BBC too was not backwards in coming forwards, in December reporting a spokesman for Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, saying that ’80 per cent of patients we’ve seen over the last few months in general wards and critical care have been unvaccinated’.
In his statement to Parliament yesterday the Prime Minister continued with this narrative: ‘When there are still over 16,000 people in hospital in England alone, the pandemic is not over. And, Mr Speaker, make no mistake, Omicron is not a mild disease for everyone – and especially if you’re not vaccinated.’
So, let’s report what Mr Johnson so blatantly ignored – the latest government data on Covid-positive hospitalisations: the facts, not his opinions. It makes for interesting reading.
Public Health Scotland’s Winter Statistical Report states that 541 vaccinated people were hospitalised versus 168 unvaccinated, see page 36 table 12 (I used December 25-31 as it’s not provisional) which by my count is over three times as many vaccinated.
NHS Wales Surveillance of Vaccine Status states that 433 vaccinated people were hospitalised versus 90 unvaccinated, see page 4 table 4. That’s nearly five times as many.
Northern Ireland’s Vaccination Status of Deaths and Hospitalisations states that 395 vaccinated people were hospitalised versus 289 unvaccinated (page 8 table 1). That’s 108 more vaccinated than unvaccinated.
UK Health Security Agency Covid-19 Vaccine Surveillance Report states that 8,566 vaccinated people were hospitalised in England versus 4,738 unvaccinated (Page 40 table 10).That’s nearly twice as many.
All confirmed in the report of the 95th Sage meeting on Covid-19 which states: ‘For patients admitted after 16 June 2021 the majority of patients had received two doses’ (Page 3 item 3).
I don’t know what Sir Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, University of Oxford and the media were basing their headlines on but it certainly wasn’t this data.
Meanwhile Johnson did his best with something that’s come to be understood with the phrase, ‘lies,damn lies and statistics’, telling us that from ‘our NHS data, we know that around 90 per cent of people in intensive care are not boosted’. Never mind that the totally unvaccinated are the minority in intensive care.
Sir Andrew Pollard might buy that one. Others won’t.
Do face masks make you more attractive?
By James Townsend | January 18, 2022
Cardiff University published a news story on their website about a new scientific study suggesting “protective face masks make wearers look more attractive”. It was framed around experts finding a “surprising new reason to mask up”.
At the time of writing this, the study had been covered in media in six different countries, spanning print, online, broadcast, & radio — the whole spectrum of earned media. Sky News framed their coverage most positively and put forward that people previously reluctant to wear one “may change their minds” thanks to this academic discovery.
The headlines all scream in unison: face masks make you look more attractive – ‘The Science’ says so. A resounding success for the Cardiff Uni team!
Knowing that many who wear masks do so under duress, and then accounting for the significant proportion of the population who hate the very concept of them, I immediately smelt a rat. Besides which, even if you agree with their usage from a public health point-of-view, it is surely a stretch of anyone’s imagination to claim that most people find a germ-ridden mouth blanket more attractive than being exposed to a naked face? Nonetheless, that’s what the scientists were claiming.
In this weird, post-Covid world where fiction is often pushed as fact, I decided to do what any journalist worth their salt would do, and explore the veracity of such claims.
Various articles only quoted Dr Lewis directly from the press release, and it was obvious they hadn’t spoken to him. As a journalist, this immediately set alarm bells ringing for me. If they didn’t speak to the lead scientist, did they even read the study? If they didn’t read the study, how can they be sure what they are reporting is correct? What if they missed some crucial context?
Call me old fashioned but I then did what the journalists should have done, and I read the actual study.
Before even clicking onto the study, I already knew from the initial press release that only 43 participants had taken part. Had the group of 43 included women from all walks of life and parts of society, perhaps the small number would have stood up to scrutiny more robustly. So, it was genuinely bemusing to then read that every single participant was a psychology student from the same course being run by the report authors. On top of that, they were 93% white and all aged 18 to 24. No diversity in a small sample to start with, is bad news.
Beautiful Cardiff is the capital city of Mark Drakeford’s Labour-run Wales – a country which has seen and, in many cases, embraced some of the most draconian reactions to this pandemic we have seen; including wearing masks with pride, introducing scientifically illiterate vaccine passports, and even banning people from buying books from supermarkets during the 2020 lockdowns. With this in mind, it’s not beyond the realms of sensible possibility to think that psychology students logging onto their laptops – who, by the way, received “course credits as compensation” for their participation – already knew what the ‘right’ answer was before rating their first masked and unmasked face.
This feeling was confirmed pretty swiftly when I stumbled across what I would describe as the key nugget of information:
It’s little wonder they hid this line at the end of the paper, given it confirms the vast majority of the participants were essentially pro-maskers talking favourably about men in masks.
It is an indictment of the sad state of journalism today that the enthusiastic coverage of this woeful study has not excavated this nugget. One of the reasons I left the newsroom, was the slow transition from journalist to churnalist – churning out other organisations’ press releases rather than discovering your own stories. So, in many respects, I haven’t been surprised to witness what I have since March 2020.
Of course, declining journalistic standards are nothing new and have been apparent for some years. The pandemic has merely shone a light on how dangerously out of control it is, and what a devastating impact it can have on the relationship of trust that should exist between citizens and the people who are employed to disseminate news and information to serve the public interest.
The uncomfortable truth is that agenda-driven scientists sometimes try to prove a pre-determined outcome. Misinformation based on flawed data create headlines around the world. And another ugly truth? Masks don’t make you more attractive.
UK government hires ad agency to convince the public they don’t need privacy
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | January 17, 2022
The UK is stepping up its “war on encryption,” reports are saying, and like in any good old war, propaganda comes first to “prepare the ground.” And a new campaign is expected to launch as early as this month.
In this case, they call it publicity, with the Home Office being behind the effort whose goal is to sway public opinion in favor of undermining the privacy of the very members of that public – using their own money from public funds, to the tune of over half a million pounds.
Meanwhile the “hired gun” is ad agency M&C Saatchi. The Rolling Stone said it had a chance to review documents thanks to a Freedom of Information request, and that what it discovered were “some shockingly manipulative tactics.”
The main target seems to be Facebook’s Messenger app, specifically, the giant company’s move to better encrypt communications of its users. The government’s narrative is old – “think of the children” – the way many politicians try to push through policies of deeper and broader restrictions that eventually end up hurting everybody.
But the UK government appears to want to wrap that “classic” message in some new advertising glitz – as it launches what the Rolling Stone calls “a publicity blitz” to undermine privacy of people’s chats.
“We have engaged M&C Saatchi to bring together the many organizations who share our concerns about the impact end-to-end encryption would have on our ability to keep children safe,” said a statement from the Home Office.
The advertising agency has reportedly gone with visualizing end-to-end encryption – which safeguards people’s security and privacy online and keeps bad actors out – as something sinister and dark. The report says that this is done by putting two actors, an adult and a child, both appearing to be on their phones, in a glass box installed in a public space, which gradually becomes black.
The idea here is that allowing law enforcement near unfettered access to people’s communications would represent the clear glass, while encryption dims it until the goings on inside the box become invisible.
The documents, a presentation to get non-profits on side, also contains a slide saying that since “most of the public” is ignorant about end-to-end encryption they can be easily swayed, while the recommendation is not to allow the campaign to turn into “a privacy vs safety debate.”
But that’s exactly what it is, advocates suggest.
“The Home Office’s scaremongering campaign is as disingenuous as it is dangerous. Without strong encryption, children are more vulnerable online than ever. Encryption protects personal safety and national security… what the government is proposing puts everyone at risk,” said Robin Wilton, a director with the Internet Society.
What did they know and when did they know it?
By Neville Hodgkinson | TCW Defending Freedom | January 17, 2022
WHEN the public awakens to the great betrayal of both health and science surrounding the handling of Covid, it will be important not to let anger run riot. After all, the mistakes have taken place on a global scale, even leading a nation such as Australia, which we previously thought of as civilised and sensible, to behave like a despotic banana republic both towards its own citizens and in ill-treating unvaccinated tennis players wanting to enter the country.
But that doesn’t mean we should hold back in our efforts to understand and deal with this disastrous aberration in human consciousness, whose dire consequences have been spelled out comprehensively by public health specialist Dr Alan Mordue.
One root of the global nature of the crisis, now more and more coming to light, is the extraordinary power wielded by a tiny group of scientists to dictate World Health Organisation (WHO) policy, from which the rest of the world took its lead.
Email disclosures show not only a deliberate plot to hide the laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2, making it out to have jumped naturally from bats into humans, but how a WHO inquiry was rigged to reach the same conclusion.
This issue has immense implications. If the virus really did make a random ‘jump’ across species, we could be at risk of similar future events. Pleas to provide billions in public funds for research and development of more drugs and vaccines could be justified to help prepare for such threats to global health security.
Uncertainty arising from such a freak of nature would also justifiably have been used to argue for at least temporary measures of draconian control, to protect health services until the true threat could be assessed.
If on the other hand the virus was a laboratory escapee resulting from ‘gain-of function’ research by American and Chinese scientists – now as good as proven – would governments and the public have been so ready to trust the scientists with even more money and power? Or ‘trust the science’, as the Prime Minister kept telling us?
Jeremy Farrar, boss of the UK’s Wellcome Trust, wrote to US health chiefs Francis Collins and Tony Fauci on February 5, 2020 – almost two years ago, just after WHO had declared Covid a global health emergency – to explain how the WHO inquiry would be staffed to support the animal origin theory.
A few days earlier, Farrar had emailed Fauci and Patrick Vallance, the UK Government’s chief scientific adviser, copying in six others including Paul Schreier, Wellcome’s chief operating officer, about a teleconference called to discuss the virus’s provenance. His email said: ‘Information and discussion is shared in total confidence and not to be shared until agreement on next steps.’
That followed a late-night warning by immunologist Kristian Anderson of the Scripps research Institute in California that the virus had features which might make it look as if it had been genetically engineered in a laboratory. Anderson sent that email to Fauci on the evening of January 31, the day WHO announced an emergency, copying in only one other person – Jeremy Farrar.
As I reported last week, despite knowing a laboratory origin was likely, the group was anxious not to weaken confidence in science by allowing that possibility to reach the public. Dr Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health at the time, told Farrar: ‘I share your view that a swift convening of experts in a confidence-inspiring framework is needed or the voicers of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.’
So to protect the good name of science, the group chose a strategy that was the opposite of scientific, in that it suppressed rather than encouraged open investigation and rational discussion of evidence.
But did the motives run deeper than that?
Robert Kennedy Jr, an American lawyer and environmental activist, made the case in a recent book that a web of corruption has been polluting medical science internationally for decades, fuelled by massive misuse of public funds. As director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Fauci dispenses more than $6billion a year in taxpayer funds for research, and Kennedy says he uses this to ruin, advance or reward the careers and institutions of thousands of doctors and scientists.
As part of what Kennedy calls a ‘vaccines cartel’, Fauci also partners Bill Gates, who uses tax-deductible dollars to fund research from which the investment arm of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gains massively – including a big stake in Pfizer.
Gates has huge influence over WHO as its second-biggest funder after the US administration. That influence also extends into the heart of the British medical and scientific establishment. It includes working closely with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the British pharmaceutical giant, for which Vallance was previously a top executive.
The Gates foundation has also given more than $250million to media companies around the world, most of whom have given unquestioning support to the Covid vaccine rollout and discriminatory, fear-inducing policies aimed at encouraging its take-up, despite its experimental nature.
Media beneficiaries in the UK include the BBC, Guardian and Financial Times. Incredibly, the UK’s Medicine & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which approved the Covid jabs – even for children – has also received several million pounds.
A similar strategy to Gates’s has enriched and empowered Farrar’s Wellcome Trust, which distributes £1billion annually for global health research. It has an investment portfolio of nearly £30billion, growing at about 12 per cent per annum over the past decade.
Farrar was a senior member of Sage, the UK Government’s advisory body on Covid, until last October, and is a founding member of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which gave $1billion to help Covid vaccine development.
The Wellcome Trust’s website claims to offer ‘a collection of quick and simple resources on how Covid-19 vaccines work, how we know they’re safe, and how they can be distributed to everyone around the world’.
In March last year, the British Medical Journal reported that the trust stood to gain financially from the pandemic through its investments, raising questions about transparency and accountability. A trust spokesman disputed this, saying they ‘would never make decisions or advise others about the pandemic response for a reason other than public health’.
But according to Mordue, a retired consultant in public health medicine, the public’s health has suffered immensely from the policies the UK pursued. He mourns the lack of relevant expertise among government and media spokesmen; the ‘inadequate and inaccurate’ case definition; the false ‘worst-case’ scenarios produced by modellers; the failure to protect the most vulnerable; the lack of cost-benefit analysis that would have kept society, the education system and the economy functioning while protecting the most vulnerable; and the failure to follow the principle ‘first do no harm’ in the mass rollout of an experimental vaccine. He also deplores the way a Sage sub-group deliberately sought to heighten fear and alarm as a means of driving compliance with Covid measures.
‘What has happened amounts to a betrayal of the specialty of public health and all the principles and values it used to stand for, and a betrayal of the health of the population,’ he writes.
‘What mystifies me is why my former colleagues and the UK professional body charged with developing and maintaining standards in the public health specialty, namely the Faculty of Public Health, have been so quiet through the whole of this pandemic.’
Vallance’s involvement in those crucial early decisions on how SARS-CoV-2 was to be handled, with their subsequent impact on public health decisions globally, raises questions about his fitness to continue in such a vital role as chief scientific officer for the UK.
He was revealed by the Telegraph back in in 2020 to have a £600,000 shareholding in GSK, having already cashed in more than £5million worth of shares received during his tenure at GSK as president of research and development. Claims of a conflict of interest, because of GSK’s own Covid drug and vaccine research and development, were denied by Matt Hancock, Health Secretary at the time.
Leaving aside his financial interest and affiliation to Big Pharma, it was his duty to offer rigorously objective scientific advice to the Government at a time of such crisis. Did that happen? That’s a central question that the forthcoming public inquiry into the pandemic, announced last month, will need to answer.
Vaccine judge whose mind ‘was already made up’
By Sally Beck | TCW Defending Freedom | January 17, 2022
PARENTS of children in the 12-17 age group want government officials to release real-time safety data for Covid vaccines. One mother is so concerned about the possibility that her three children could suffer serious adverse events that she asked the High Court on their behalf to force full public disclosure.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) admit they hold the figures but have not revealed them publicly, so last Thursday parent EF, who cannot be named for legal reasons, put her concerns to Mr Justice Jonathan Swift and asked him to direct the ONS to release the data. Her request was denied.
She said: ‘I’m not surprised. I feel as though the judge had already made up his mind.’
To those of us in court, it certainly felt as though he had and that no one dared question Health Secretary Sajid Javid’s decisions.
Television and radio presenter Beverley Turner, who helped raise over £100,000 to fund the action and who has been vilified for asking questions about the vaccine’s safety, was also there. She said: ‘It felt that the judge had already decided the outcome. He was hostile to the plaintiffs and convivial to the defendants.
‘All we’re doing is fighting for transparency and for that, we got a hostile response.’
It is known that Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA Covid vaccines can cause the inflammatory heart conditions myocarditis and pericarditis, mostly in young males, while the Oxford/AstraZeneca can cause blood clots and strokes. We do not know to what extent, and whether children have died or been permanently disabled as the result of a Covid vaccination.
EF’s children AB and CD applied to the courts last September to halt the vaccine rollout for 12-17-year-olds and asked for a judicial review. They say they need the ONS figures to support an appeal as the application was denied.
Their mother, who is their ‘litigation friend’ EF said: ‘The court was told that only two children without diagnosed underlying conditions have died of Covid so far. Clearly Covid is not a problem for young people but the vaccine may be. All we want is honest disclosure of the figures so that parents can make an informed decision. None of us are anti-vaccine but we are concerned by the lack of safety data for Covid jabs.
‘We know the mRNA vaccines are experimental and that they are being offered under emergency use. We also know that the trials do not officially finish until 2023.
‘Many parents do not want their children to be guinea pigs.’
After reviewing the evidence, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) recommended against vaccinating 12-15-year-olds, but were overridden by the UK’s four chief medical officers.
Up to December 22, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), who assess the safety of new drugs, had received 2,546 reports of adverse events, likely to be 10 per cent of the true total, for under 18s via their Yellow Card self-reporting scheme, but give details only about heart inflammation.
A statement said: ‘As of November 17, 2021, there have been 432 reports of myocarditis and 332 reports of pericarditis following the use of the Pfizer vaccine. There have been 101 reports of myocarditis and 57 reports of pericarditis following the use of the Moderna vaccine. This is a recognised potential risk with the Covid-19 Pfizer/BioNTech Vaccine and Covid-19 Vaccine Moderna and the MHRA is closely monitoring these events.’
We know that 2.9million children have received first doses of Pfizer and 20,550 have had first doses of Moderna, while 11,600 children have received first doses of Oxford/AstraZeneca’s vaccine (though it is no longer recommended for the under 40s because that age group is more susceptible to potentially fatal blood clots). Nearly a million under 18s have received second shots.
The action was brought by solicitor Stephen Jackson of the firm Jackson Osborne and argued by barrister Francis Hoar, who endured constant interruption from Mr Justic Swift. He presented evidence to the court from consultant pathologist Dr Clare Craig.
Dr Craig said that available ONS figures relating to the number of deaths in the 15-19-year-old age group showed ‘a trend of excess non-Covid deaths in boys of that age which exceeded deaths for previous years.’
From May 1 2021 to December 30 2021, 402 male deaths were recorded, 34.6 per cent above the five-year average between 2015 and 2019. The number for females for the same period was 163, a decrease compared with the five-year average of 175.
Barrister Heather Emmerson, representing the ONS, who did not incur the wrath of Mr Justice Swift, said: ‘We do not accept a significant increase in deaths of boys compared with previous years. This is because it is statistically difficult to calculate a mean mortality rate.’
She did however accept ‘that there is a marginal increase in mortality for that period, but the figures should be treated with caution. The differences are sufficiently small that they could be caused by a delay in the registration of the death.’
Health statistician for the ONS Dr Vahé Nafilyan said in a statement that they had only 62 per cent of the data requested as 38 per cent of deaths had yet to be registered. Potentially, the mortality margin could increase by as much as 38 per cent or decrease by the same amount or somewhere in between.
An inquest is required when a coroner believes a death was due to something other than natural causes. The death cannot be registered until the coroner has reviewed the post-mortem and other evidence and has decided the cause. There is a 12-month delay for inquests currently.
Ms Emmerson said she was not confident that if the ONS released the available data the recipients would interpret it correctly – a statement the plaintiffs found patronising. ‘We have to be extremely careful about this data and the conclusions that may be drawn,’ she told the court.
She was also concerned that although data would be anonymous with no names, dates of birth or regions released, the children’s identities could be discovered, citing newspaper reports of sudden child deaths which could be linked to the data.
Mr Justice Swift said: ‘Correlation does not equal causation and the ONS information is not necessary to decide that claim.’
None of this helps parents who are also concerned that by asking reasonable questions they are being labelled as antivax. Mother of three Bev Turner said: ‘I’d never heard the term before 2021.
‘All parents want is the latest safety data that is simply not available so we do not know if the vaccines could cause neurological problems, fertility issues or other physiological problems.’
Parent EF, who has two girls aged 13 and 16 eligible for vaccination, and a son aged seven, currently too young to receive the jab, says that because of this uncertainty her children are anxious about receiving it.
‘None of them want to take the vaccine,’ she said, ‘and one of them has a friend who fainted immediately after receiving the vaccine and was then off school for two weeks. We don’t know any details other than that, but she was clearly unwell otherwise she would have been at school.
‘We have no information. They can’t tell us if the jabs cause cancer or blindness and until we know, how can we make a properly informed decision?’
‘Ministry of Truth’ vs Nutritional Medicine
By Damien Downing, MBBS, MRSB | Orthomolecular Medicine News Service | January 6, 2022
Just outside the local primary school here in north London, somebody has sprayed these words on a phone or cable junction box, highly visible to the mums and tots:
COVID 1984
I often cycle past there, and have always thought “Mmm, a bit extreme”, but now I’m starting to wonder.
In George Orwell’s novel “1984,” Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, which administers Newspeak, deciding what the “truth” is, propagating it, and rewriting history when necessary. Newspeak is “characterized by a continually diminishing vocabulary; complete thoughts are reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning” according to our old friends Wikipedia. The purpose is thought control; you know the saying “The French have a word for it”? If you don’t have a word for it you struggle to think it. So words like “anti-vaxxer” polarize opinions and prevent any subtlety of thinking about viruses and vaccinations.
For two years, we at the OMNS have been stating one simple message: Nutritional therapy works on Covid, as it does on all viruses.
On January 26, 2020 the OMNS Editor in Chief, Andrew W. Saul, wrote a news release: “Vitamin C Protects Against Coronavirus.” [1] It also made recommendations for vitamin D3, magnesium, zinc and selenium, which strengthen the immune system. We have continued to repeat and expand the message again and again. And have been suspended by Facebook again and again.
Others, including highly respected front-line physicians such as Paul Marik, have also figured out the importance of these nutrients. [2] In fact we have known about the anti-infective potential of vitamin C for over 50 years, since it was reported by Frederick Klenner. [3,4] He described traditional sources such as acerola cherries, which are very rich sources of C. That puts the knowledge back way before we named it “vitamin C.”
And it makes nonsense of the narrative that there is only one solution to Covid: vaccinate, again and again.
Two years ago I failed to persuade mainstream colleagues of the utility of this. “It’s not evidence-based,” they said. Now two review papers have shown the evidence, and it’s pretty solid.
The first, in the journal Life, is called “Vitamin C Intervention for Critical COVID-19: A Pragmatic Review of the Current Level of Evidence.” [5,6] It shows clearly that “this simple vitamin saves lives when given in the right dose.” In fact, vitamin C saves about 80% of the lives of critically ill Covid patients.
With a roll-call of experts saying vitamin C can save lives, what has been the response of the authorities, the powers-that-be?
The UK’s National Health service responded back in 2020 by promising a trial of intravenous vitamin C. Until that evidence becomes available, they have continued to say that there is no good evidence that vitamin C works. Scientists including the authors of the above paper sent them studies and they still said that. Finally a freedom of information (FOI) request established that the NHS had received the papers and had ignored them, for at least a year.
But the promised international multi-center trial would fix this, right? The only problem is, apparently, that the NHS had already signed an exclusive contract with a single company to supply the vitamin C, and that company was and still is unable to provide any. So the trial still has not started. Even for a piece of fiction, you couldn’t make it up! I could lend them some tomorrow.
The second review is by my colleague, independent researcher Rachel Nicoll: “COVID-19: Presenting the case for vitamin D: A cheap, effective measure overlooked by most governments.” [7]
As always with Rachel’s writings this is very information-rich. Here’s just one sentence;
A meta-analysis of 23 studies containing 11,901 participants found that in patients with vitamin D deficiency, the risk of being infected with COVID was 3.3 times higher and the risk of developing severe COVID was around 5 times higher compared to those with more healthy vitamin D levels.
Our knowledge of vitamin D and its importance for immunity has progressed by leaps and bounds in this pandemic, but a lot of this too we have known for ages. I wrote a book about it back in 1988; there’s a team in San Diego that has been studying sunlight and health for decades. [8]
Just as modern agriculture has been depriving us of many essential nutrients, [9] modern lifestyles have been depriving us of sunlight and therefore vitamin D. Lucky you if you live somewhere sunny like San Diego, because here in London nearly everybody is vitamin D deficient. Not that things are perfect in San Diego; we all shun the sun these days, often due to scare tactics about skin cancer.
That’s a story for another time, but here’s a take-home thought about vitamin D levels. It has been shown that a population needs a vitamin D blood level above about 75 nmol/L (30 ng/ml) to stop deaths from Covid, [10] but precious few of us manage it. So what should our blood level be? Where’s the benchmark when nearly everybody is deficient? If you take our nearest evolutionary relatives, non-human primates, they have around twice that level, 125 to 200 nmol/L (50-80 ng/ml). [11,12] We’re not just falling behind them, we’re missing it by a mile. You need at least 10,000 IU per day long-term to achieve that.
Guess what comes next? When the “experts,” at least in the UK, are asked about the safety and toxicity of vitamin D, they say we should not take more than 2000 IU per day. But this is based on the UK’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) 2016 report. SACN cited a 2006 paper by Vieth as showing toxic effects above this level. However, the Vieth paper actually states that toxicity may occur at 25(OH)D concentrations beyond 500 nmol/L (200 ng/ml), levels which could not be achieved unless an individual was taking extremely high doses for a prolonged period of time (such as 30,000 IU/day for three months). [13] This warning has been misunderstood and misquoted and has given rise to a lot of pointless restriction of vitamin D intake. So even though the error about vitamin D safety was pointed out 15 years ago, and repeatedly since then, it is still being perpetuated by supposed experts.
Two years down the line, then, we at the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service are still saying the same simple message that nutrition works. And the bureaucrats at the ‘Ministry of Truth’ are still deleting it.
References
1. Saul AW (2020) Vitamin C Protects Against Coronavirus. Orthomolecular Medicine News Service. http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v16n04.shtml
2. Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance: Prevention & Treatment Protocols for COVID-19. (2022) https://covid19criticalcare.com
3. Klenner FR. (1949) The treatment of poliomyelitis and other virus diseases with vitamin C. South Med J, 111:209-214. https://www.seanet.com/~alexs/ascorbate/194x/klenner-fr-southern_med_surg-1949-v111-n7-p209.htm
4. Klenner FR. (1951) Massive Doses of Vitamin C and the Virus Diseases. Presented in the Fifty-second Annual Meeting of the Tri-State Medical Association of the Carolinas and Virginia, held at Columbia, February 19th and 20th, 1951. https://www.seanet.com/~alexs/ascorbate/195x/klenner-fr-southern_med_surg-1951-v103-n4-p101.htm
5. Holford P, Carr AC, Zawari M, Vizcaychipi MP (2021) Vitamin C Intervention for Critical COVID-19: A Pragmatic Review of the Current Level of Evidence. Life, 11:1166. https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/11/11/1166
6. Holford P (2021) Twelve intervention trials conclude that vitamin C works for Covid. So why are hospitals being prohibited from using it? Orthomolecular Medicine News Service. http://www.orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v17n27.shtml
7. Health Advisory and Recovery Team (2021) COVID-19: the case for supporting the human immune system with vitamin D: Why is this simple vitamin not promoted more? https://www.hartgroup.org/briefing-covid-19-the-case-for-supporting-the-human-immune-system-with-vitamin-d
8. Mohr SB, Gorham ED, Garland CF, et al. (2021) San Diego group studying positive effects of sunlight. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Mohr+SB+Gorham+ED+Garland+CF
9. Lowther M (2020) Why are there fewer nutrients in our food? Orthomolecular Medicine News Service. http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v16n54.shtml
10. Downing D (2020) How we can fix this pandemic in a month. Orthomolecular Medicine News Service. http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v16n49.shtml
11. Power ML, Oftedal OT, Savage A, et al. (1997) Assessing vitamin D status of callitrichids: Baseline data from wild cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus) in Colombia. Zoo Biol 16:39-46. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1098-2361(1997)16:1<39::AID-ZOO6>3.0.CO;2-C
12. Power ML, Dittus, WPJ (2017) Vitamin D status in wild toque macaques (Macaca sinica) in Sri Lanka. Am J Primatol. 79:e22655. http://www.primates.lk/health-vitamin-d-in-wild-monkeys-and-you
13. Vieth R (2006) Critique of the considerations for establishing the tolerable upper intake level for vitamin D: critical need for revision upwards. J Nutr, 136:1117-1122. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16549491
Nutritional Medicine is Orthomolecular Medicine
Orthomolecular medicine uses safe, effective nutritional therapy to fight illness. For more information: http://www.orthomolecular.org
What Kind of ‘Experts’ Didn’t Foresee This Lockdown Devastation?
The Daily Sceptic | January 14, 2022
On Wednesday, the Telegraph published this article: “How lockdowns left babies more vulnerable to respiratory disease.” It’s all about an extra risk this winter from “respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), an infection that can in rare cases make it difficult for children to breathe.”
That really hit home. One of my oldest and dearest friends, a grandparent like myself, has had the shocking experience of seeing two of her granddaughters, both born in late 2021, being seriously afflicted. One nearly died from RSV, caught in the maternity ward after birth where it was rife and where she had not been born long enough to build up resistance. It was very touch-and-go for several weeks.
Her little cousin, born a few weeks earlier, was hit by cytomegalovirus (CMV). Her mother seems to have caught it during pregnancy and since she is a nurse the most likely place was in hospital. The little girl has no hearing in one ear and is likely to lose it in the other, and has only one kidney.
Neither of these viruses is new. RSV is very common. Most children will catch it by the age of two with few ill effects. The same applies to CMV. But some children do become seriously ill, so there is nothing to prove these two little girls wouldn’t have been among them anyway. We’ll never know, but it’s starting to look as though they may well have been two more victims of the madness that has engulfed us.
What is new is the increase in cases and the disruption of the normal cycle which would aid the natural build-up of resistance. RSV, for example, largely disappeared in the winter of 2020-21 but then reappeared incongruously to cause a surge in the summer of 2021, which has not yet abated.
Not surprisingly, the dawning realisation is that lockdowns are probably to blame. “Because of all the Covid restrictions, we’ve been spreading viruses less, so we think that everybody’s natural immunity to viruses like RSV has gone down,” said Dr. Andrew Whittamore, a GP and clinical lead at the British Lung Foundation.
This raises the whole fascinating question of how we define and understand the meaning of the word ‘expert’. That doesn’t mean substituting for a professional the opinions of someone whose education has been conducted at the University of Google, magically conferring on them brilliant insight and revelations that have escaped everyone else. But it does mean using some commonsense.
To me, as a layman, I find it utterly astonishing that the conventional experts became so suffocated and obsessed by one risk that they managed to ignore all the empirical observations and experience of their lives that might have told them that ripping up the way human society functions, and how we build up resistance to disease, might possibly generate massive problems from mental breakdowns to economic decline and cancer to reduced immunity. Forgive me for saying so, but I’d have thought that was pretty obvious. If expertise prevents an expert from seeing that, or at least standing up and saying so, then of what value is the expertise?
In the bigger picture, the possibility that RSV and CMV are going to cause more serious cases than hitherto is not an overwhelming one – albeit devastating to the parents in every instance – but it is an allegory for countless other contexts and scenarios where we have allowed the opinions of a small number of people to drive an agenda as if it was a tank into an aquarium. Taken together their cumulative impact is going to be, and already is, extremely serious.
The sheer recklessness of what has been done in the name of annihilating Covid (which didn’t happen anyway) is difficult to measure. One thing was clear from the outset: the ‘experts’ really didn’t have a clue and I’d suggest to a large extent they still don’t [or at least still can’t stand up and say so]. The best thing about Boris Johnson’s Partygate is that not only has it terminally undermined the Government’s authority and basis for locking us all down, but also it has flagged up the sheer idiotic stupidity of some of the rules that – even if one believed an initial lockdown had some benefit – were manifestly not going to make a difference.
As the high tide of the Covid Hysteria turns and gradually recedes towards the horizon it is leaving scattered across the exposed beach of our world countless shattered seashells, every one of which represents broken lives and families, wrecked livelihoods, shattered education and prospects, and a whole raft of medical consequences including these two little girls among a cascade of undiagnosed and untreated cancers and other conditions.
Let’s not fool ourselves. Covid was, and is, an extremely serious and potentially fatal illness for some people, just as flu, pneumonia, and bronchitis have always been. But it’s a rum thing to see how the people we choose to define as experts have played such an enormous part in the consequential devastation. By blinding themselves to everything except one disease they have presided over a farce of unprecedented consequences, driven along by their self-belief whether predicated on their self-professed mathematical ability to foretell the future or the conceit that they could ‘keep everyone safe’ with measures that we now know have done as much damage, or more, than the devastation they were supposed to prevent. What then, is an expert? Perhaps someone who feels they have to come up with something, anything, that makes them look like they know what they’re doing.
As for my friend, the grandmother: just after the viral storm that hit her granddaughters, she had the misfortune to choke on a piece of meat at a dinner party in December. This was no trivial incident. It nearly killed her. She was attended by paramedics and had to be dashed to hospital unconscious. She only just made it through.
What was the reason for her admission? Why of course, she was recorded with “suspected Covid”, even though the reason she was on the point of death ought to be have been obvious even to a blind man with hearing difficulties. It was as fatuous as a priest in the Middle Ages blaming her accident on evil spirits or the ‘will of God’, the catch-all diagnoses of that era.
Nothing could illustrate to me better the extent of the collective insanity that has consumed our time and for which we will all be paying for the rest of our lives – though the two little girls I started out with may well be paying for a great deal longer than most of us, as the grass grows long on the graves of the modellers and other luminaries of this present age.
Boris’s garden party – a more pressing issue than Yemeni genocide
By Gavin O’Reilly | OffGuardian | January 15, 2022
Over the past several days, the news story that has dominated British news headlines, and consequently, the news headlines of the rest of the Western world, is controversy over a leaked email confirming Boris Johnson’s attendance at a Downing Street garden party in May 2020 – a time when the Summer weather is usually at its peak in Britain, and incidentally, the same time when the entire country was under stringent lockdown measures.
In spite of offering an almost immediate apology in the House of Commons on Wednesday, Johnson has faced intense calls to resign from his position.
Not only from the opposition of Keir Starmer’s Labour, Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats and Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP, but also from prominent members of his own Conservative Party such as Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross. With the main point of contention being that members of the British public were prohibited from seeing gravely ill loved ones at the same time as Johnson’s attendance of said garden party due to the restrictions put in place.
The ongoing controversy over ‘partygate’ however is in stark contrast to the minuscule Western media coverage of Boris Johnson’s key role in what is currently the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the now seven-year long Saudi Arabia-led war on Yemen.
A conflict that has resulted in the worst Cholera outbreak of all time, the deaths of 10,000 children directly through the ensuing violence, and the further deaths of more than 85,000 children through the mass-starvation the conflict has triggered.
In July 2016, following his appointment as Foreign Secretary under the then-government of Theresa May, Johnson approved the sale of more than £1.2bn worth of British made-weaponry to Downing Street-ally Saudi Arabia – the Gulf Kingdom immediately putting it to use on Yemen’s agricultural, health and sanitation infrastructure.
This lead directly to the aforementioned Cholera outbreak and famine in what is already the most impoverished nation on the Arabian Peninsula, a situation exacerbated even further by a Saudi blockade preventing food and medical supplies from entering the country.
British support for the Saudi-led conflict goes far beyond lucrative arms sales to Riyadh however, with British military advisors on hand alongside their US counterparts in the Saudi command room to assist in the selection of targets for the Royal Saudi Air Force – more than 100 Saudi pilots have also been trained at RAF airbases in Britain over the past decade alone.
With both policies remaining in place since Johnson became Prime Minister in July 2019, alongside the aforementioned arms sales which have resulted in significant profit for British defence contractors such as BAE Systems.
Perhaps the most crucial role in Britain’s decision to support the Yemen war however, is a geopolitical ambition that Downing Street shares with the United States and Israel – the containment of Iran within the region.
The Islamic Republic, a long-time Western foe since the 1979 Islamic Revolution saw the US-UK aligned Shah deposed and replaced with the anti-Western and anti-Zionist Ayatollah Khomeini, is widely accused of backing the Ansar Allah rebel movement, more commonly known as the Houthis. Whose seizure of the Yemeni capital Sana’a and overthrow of the then pro-Saudi President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi in early 2015 would result in Riyadh launching its US-UK backed air campaign in March of that year in a bid to restore the government of its favoured candidate.
It is also the reason why, in addition to multi-billion pound arms deals between London and Riyadh, that what has now amounted to a seven-year long US and UK backed genocide of the Yemeni people, has received scarce media coverage in the West – in stark contrast to a Summer garden party held by a British Prime Minister who has himself played a key role in the slaughter.
Gavin O’Reilly is an Irish Republican activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism; he was a writer for the American Herald Tribune from January 2018 up until their seizure by the FBI in 2021, with his work also appearing on The Duran, Al-Masdar, MintPress News, Global Research and SouthFront. He can be reached through Twitter and Facebook.
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As Hillary Clinton kisses up to Henry Kissinger, RT looks at 4 of his most heinous acts
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