Silencing criticism of Israel
PSA vs. Nazim Ali—What it means for the pro-Palestine Activists
By Massoud Shajareh | MEMO | November 9, 2021
Many of you will have seen the recent news about Nazim Ali’s loss at the High Court. A detailed timeline can be found elsewhere. I want to discuss the three main consequences of this judgment.
First, a quick summary of the case itself. In June 2017, Ali took part in the annual Al-Quds Day parade, during which he made several ill-advised comments about Zionists and Zionism. The Campaign against Antisemitism (CAA) complained to the police and to the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC). The police complaint was passed to the CPS, who decided not to press charges; this was appealed and, again, the CPS declined to prosecute Ali. So, the CAA brought a private prosecution against Ali, which the CPS took over and discontinued. This decision was challenged by way of judicial review, which the CAA lost, as the court agreed with the CPS that Ali’s comments were anti-Israel -Zionist in nature and not anti-Semitic.
The GPhC complaints team subsequently decided that Ali’s words were anti-Israel political speech, that they were not anti-Semitic or racist, and dismissed the CAA’s complaint. Ali was notified that the complaint was closed. However, in the summer of 2019, the GPhC reopened the case, justifying its decision on the basis that it had to evaluate Ali’s comments based on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism.
Late last year, those proceedings culminated in the GPhC finding the comments made by Mr Ali to be offensive but not anti-Semitic. They held that, a reasonable bystander who was apprised of all the facts would not consider his speech in their context (a pro-Palestine rally) to be anti-Semitic. They took account of the context, Ali’s explanation of his words and his upstanding character. It issued him with a warning, on the grounds that his words were offensive and his behaviour amounted to misconduct.
Pro-Israel campaigners prevailed upon the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care (PSA) to appeal the GPhC decision to the High Court, which has now decided the GPhC reconsider afresh the allegations of anti-Semitism against Mr Ali, on the grounds that the body had erred by taking into account Ali’s explanation for, and intention behind, the words. The High Court held that Ali’s intention and explanation could not form part of the analysis of whether his words were anti-Semitic. Instead, an “objective” test should be used—something the learned judge does not define; he only elaborates on what it cannot include, i.e., the intention of the speaker.
So why is this dangerous?
- Once you remove intention, all criticism of Israel and Zionism is potentially anti-Semitic: Intention behind words is important. They tell us what the speaker intended, or meant, to say. In the context of controversial subjects, such as Israel/Palestine, they become crucial to understanding what the speaker means. The CAA/UKLFI and others want the courts and tribunals to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism as the “objective” definition. This is a controversial definition, one which puts substantial emphasis on criticism of Israel. Once an “objective” definition is accepted, where intention is not relevant, pro-Palestine activists will find there is little they can say about Israel without being labelled anti-Semitic.
- The “objective” definition will be wielded as a weapon to harass and silence professionals who criticise Israel. Pro-Israel groups will target any and every one they can identify as a regulated professional who has the temerity to criticise Israel in public. As the definition is “objective”, pro-Israel groups will simply start framing their complaints as the “person’s words are objectively anti-Semitic” in each case, thereby, avoiding the need to discuss the speaker’s intention. The regulators themselves seem uninterested in the politicised nature of the complaints and will bring to bear their full regulatory weight on the individual— involving a complaints process, a tribunal, lawyers’ fees, appeals and counter appeals. The thought of such an overwhelming process will be enough to stop any regulated professional from publicly criticising Israel or Zionism.
- Regulated professionals are just the start— this will set a chilling benchmark that can be replicated in many other regulatory and disciplinary settings. Labour party members accused of anti-Semitism, university disciplinary proceedings, employment tribunals and others will find this case being cited as a precedent. Suddenly, union members are accused of “objective” anti-Semitism as they believe Israel is an apartheid state. Their intent is irrelevant, as the complaint will be framed as the meaning of their words is anti-Semitic— and it is according to the “objective” IHRA definition: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.” Teachers, students, employees of any major company, anyone who criticises Israel in public, will find complaints being made against them by pro-Israel groups. These groups know most people do not want their livelihood taken from them; they calculate most people will just remain silent about Israel’s crimes rather than face being disciplined and being removed from employment.
Ali’s words were inappropriate and, on occasion, factually inaccurate (Israel and Zionism are guilty of a lot, but they did not set fire to Grenfell), but they were not anti-Semitic. Our purpose in fighting this judgment is not to defend Ali’s words. Rather, it is to stop the creation of a precedent that will silence virtually all criticism of Israel. Pro-Israel groups wish to proscribe all criticism of Israel; this judgment gives them the tools with which to achieve their goals. Free speech on Israel will be eroded if we do not fight back now.
The courts are backing the Covid vaccine madness
By Sally Beck | TCW Defending Freedom | November 9, 2021
IN THE last few weeks the High Court has thrown out two big Covid vaccine legal challenges. Last Tuesday they said No to a judicial review to stop mandatory vaccination for health care workers, and in September they threw out a bid to injunct and pause the vaccination of children and teenagers aged 12 to 17.
I was in court for both cases, and heard the judges put intelligent and insightful questions to the claimants’ legal teams. Both justices clearly found their well-constructed arguments on the vaccines’ questionable efficacy, and arguments about bodily autonomy, compelling and unsettling. Despite this, they sided with the government using the pandemic as a get-out clause.
Solicitor Stephen Jackson, whose firm Jackson Osborne brought both cases, said: ‘The court absolved itself from any need to consider the extent of the investigation made by the government into Covid vaccines and the analysis they’ve made. So basically, what they are saying is that the government have consulted experts and are not going to look at it any further.
‘The court’s position is that there’s a particularly wide margin of discretion where the government is considering complex data and science. They say that the Secretary of State for Health, Sajid Javid, is entitled to rely upon the advice of the experts he goes to.
‘It gives the government a blank cheque. As long as they have taken advice from an expert body, the court assumes their advice is correct. If you turn up to court and seek to challenge that advice, they say you are simply presenting an alternative expert view, but you cannot establish that the expert advice seen by the government is unreasonable or irrational.’
It seems that the vaccine juggernaut is unstoppable, despite growing evidence of irreparable harms and even death, with more than 1,700 fatalities reported. The argument is that this is a minuscule number considering that 55.6million doses have been given.
The government is fully aware of vaccine harm and has known about it since the 20th century childhood vaccination schedule was introduced in 1959. It considers that collateral damage, however severe, serves the common good. We should just shut up and take one for the team.
Each vaccine can leave its own deadly calling card and Covid jabs are no different. The ones used in the UK are produced by Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson. Their particular signature is blood clots and low platelets (VITT), inflammation of the heart in the form of myocarditis and pericarditis (particularly affecting young men), Guillain-Barré syndrome (an autoimmune disorder that attacks the nerves and can cause paralysis), and Bell’s palsy (temporary paralysis affecting one side of the face).
None of these horrors concern the judiciary yet, which is endlessly frustrating for Stephen Jackson and barrister Francis Hoar QC, who was involved in both cases.
Jackson said: ‘The courts are very reluctant to interfere with government decisions. If they feel they might be treading on political ground, then they steer a wide course.
‘The way they avoid interference is to cite the pandemic. The pandemic trumps everything.’
Millionaire entrepreneur Simon Dolan failed in his bid to obtain a judicial review earlier this year. He planned to challenge the government over lockdowns and mask wearing, claiming that Boris Johnson and Co had acted illegally and disproportionately. His defeat set the tone.
‘In the Simon Dolan case they basically said that there’s a two-stage process; first stage: it’s a pandemic, next stage is that the government has a very wide discretion as to their response,’ Jackson said.
‘In the care home case, they went further and said they had looked at a European Court of Human Rights case, heard in April, where Czech parents challenged the state’s mandatory vaccine schedule for nursery school children. It was a case where children were excluded from premises of education unless they had their vaccines. The judge who heard the care workers case said that what the government is doing now is nothing very different.
‘What the court doesn’t recognise in that analogy is that in the Czech case you are talking about very well-established vaccines with long safety records. By comparison we’re still looking at experimental technology with Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines, which remain under trial until 2023. We still don’t know the long-term effects.’
The same applies to children. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) said covid vaccines offer very little benefit to the under-18s and recognised that they have the potential to harm. They recommended against routine vaccination for this age group, but the UK’s four chief medical officers (CMOs) overruled them saying that the JCVI hadn’t taken into account the school days they might lose, and the effect that being locked out of education would have on their mental health. In contrast, the CMOs did not take into account potential vaccine damage, days off school because of adverse reactions and time spent away from class to receive the jabs.
A judicial review is where the courts are asked by citizens adversely affected by government rules to review the decisions made by them. In 2018 there were 3,597 claims lodged but only 184, or 5 per cent, proceeded to a full hearing. Of the cases heard, 50 per cent were won, so there are chances at victory. The government knows this, abhors challenge and feels that the judicial review process is being used to excess, having lost two high profile cases, one on Brexit and the other on the prorogation of Parliament.
Bloodied, battered and humiliated, the Conservatives now want to change the law to restrict judicial reviews. In July, Johnson introduced the Judicial Review and Courts Bill which former Secretary of State David Davis called ‘a worrying assault on the legal system and an attempt to avoid accountability’.
Covid cases are challenging, based on complex science which judges do not necessarily have the skills to weigh up. Both Justice Robert Jay, who heard arguments in the child vaccination hearing, and Justice Philippa Whipple, appointed to rule in the care home challenge, indicated this. Jay almost threw up his hands at one point saying in effect, I don’t understand this, this is all science. Whipple modestly asked for the arguments to be kept simple saying: ‘I am a bear of very little brain. These are matters of complex data and science.’
Listening, it felt both were looking for a back door escape route.
The care home case was brought by two care home workers. One, Julie Peters, from Poole, a former programme director of Barchester Healthcare, a large provider with over 200 locations, was sacked for refusing the jab. She said: ‘I’ve lost my job, the government has changed the law so that although technically, I can fight for unfair dismissal, it’s likely I would lose. I also lost the challenge to overturn the legislation making vaccination mandatory for care home workers. So, any hairdresser, electrician, cleaner, occupational health care worker, or care home staff now has to have a vaccine to enter a care home. I’m pretty devastated.’
When in doubt, fiddle with the vaccine figures
By Tom Penn | TCW Defending Freedom | November 9, 2021
DR Mary Ramsay, Head of Immunisation at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) and joint ‘chief editor’ of their vaccine database, penned a recent blog post for gov.uk in which she makes a most ludicrous claim.
She states that the dramatic rise in cases in the vaccinated cohort compared with the unjabbed should be interpreted not as evidence of the vaccine’s inefficacy, but rather as consequence of behavioural traits in the vaccinated, whom she alleges are ‘more health conscious and therefore more likely to get tested’, and who ‘behave differently, particularly with regard to social interactions and therefore may have differing levels of exposure to Covid-19’.
According to Ramsay, then, the epidemic of reinfection is the fault not of the vaccine itself but its recipients, who if only they would just stop testing themselves and socialising with each other might just conveniently knock the issue of inefficacy on the head.
It appears that the UKHSA have found themselves between a rock and a hard place vis-a-vis the rollout. Without mass testing there exists no casedemic, and without a casedemic there in turn exists no pandemic. Without an engineered pandemic there exists not the vehicle by which to crush self-determination. However, maintain hypochondriacal mass testing and current levels of faux-freedom, and the casedemic ends up inconveniently betraying the inefficacy of the product, vehicle for the introduction of a universal, health-based identification system; critical in turn to the instalment of a single, global government.
Two recent announcements lead me to speculate that once the majority of children have been vaccinated, the death season is over, and we can supposedly make our way out of the Covid Stadium, ‘Van-Tam Cup’ in hand after a winter playing out the longest tournament of public health intervention-football ever known, the UKHSA’s muddying of data will only accelerate.
The MHRA’s approval of Merck’s molnupiravir antiviral drug to treat symptomatic Covid-19 (Pfizer’s Paxlovid offering is yet to be approved), and the likelihood that vaccine smart patches could begin human trials by the middle of 2022, introduce two more elements to an already obscenely corrupt so-called crisis which may end up prolonging the use of damaging public health controls for many winters to come, as the data harvested from how these various Covid-19 ‘treatments’ interact with each other could provide limitless scope for misinterpretation or outright censure, and thus the basis for manufacturing further interventions.
It is the running theme of this counterfeit emergency that data has been modelled, muzzled, meddled with and misconstrued with a view to help obfuscate an ulterior geopolitical agenda. Dr Mary Ramsay, for example, has solved the matter of vaccine inefficacy by simply defecting from pharmaceutical to behavioural science unchallenged.
What might happen when government agencies begin playing off booster-shot data against molnupiravir efficacy against vaccine smart-patch glitches against case rates against hospital figures, and then measuring it all up against what appears to be a state-decreed behavioural and mental health index? The answer: the end of the current Anthropocene epoch as we know it, and the beginning proper of its successor: the Propagandacene.
Molnupiravir is already being trumpeted as the world’s ‘first’ at-home treatment designed to reduce drastically the chance of hospitalisation from Covid-19, yet we already know that to be a false claim, and so right from the off Merck’s offering is fishy; the words of Dr June Raine from the mostly mute MHRA ringing equally hollow: ‘With no compromises on quality, safety and effectiveness, the public can trust that the MHRA has conducted a robust and thorough assessment of the data.’
Some of us have been knocking on the door of the MHRA’s appalling Covid-19 vaccine Yellow Card Reporting System figures for quite some time now, and yet they still refuse to open. Will it be the same with molnupiravir, vaccine smart patches and Lord knows what else the druids of the post-Covid International Order have in store for us?
Introduce alongside all of the aforementioned the incoming attack on the nation’s constitution by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, the consumer healthcare association’s vision of a decade of self care, and the Nudge Unit’s new Net Zero/Zero Covid psyops campaign, and we shall, if we haven’t already, enter an era of human evolution wherein the blame for every single problem in society, no matter how far removed from the common man’s sphere of influence, will be laid squarely at his feet nonetheless. He will doubtless obediently hang his head in shame whilst the hooded executioner readies yet more killing apparatus.
Iconic singer Van Morrison sued over Covid-19 comments
NO MORE LOCKDOWN, NO MORE FASCIST POLICE, NO MORE TAKING OF OUR FREEDOM AND OUR GOD GIVEN RIGHTS
AS I WALKED OUT
BORN TO BE FREE OF THE COVID SCAM
https://www.bitchute.com/video/4OPLfKgq9i3h/
RT | November 8, 2021
Northern Ireland’s health minister, Robin Swann, has filed a defamation lawsuit against Van Morrison after the rock and R&B legend labeled him “very dangerous” over Covid-19 restrictions during the pandemic.
Swan’s legal team believes Morrison’s repeated public statements harmed the minister’s reputation by implying he was unfit for his position during the health crisis. The statement of claim against the 76-year-old singer-songwriter was filed in September.
“Proceedings have been issued and are ongoing against Van Morrison. We are aiming for a trial in February,” Swann’s lawyer, Paul Tweed, told local media on Sunday.
Swann’s choice of legal representation signals his strong desire to win the case, as Tweed is known as a high-profile libel lawyer, who has previously represented the likes of Harrison Ford, Justin Timberlake, and Jennifer Lopez.
The fallout between the minister and musician occurred in June after Morrison’s gig in Belfast was canceled at the last moment due to coronavirus restrictions.
The singer still got on stage and told the audience: “Robin Swann has all the power. So I say Robin Swann is very dangerous.” He also tried to persuade the crowd to chant: “Robin Swann is very dangerous.” […]
Last year, Swann criticized Morrison over his songs about the coronavirus restrictions, including ‘Born to Be Free’, ‘As I Walked Out’, and ‘No More Lockdown’. … Full article
NHS accused of ‘lying’ about Covid stats to promote vaccination
RT | November 8, 2021
NHS chief Amanda Pritchard claimed that 14 times as many Covid-19 patients are in Britain’s hospitals as this time last year. However, even the NHS itself has admitted that Pritchard’s claim uses misleading figures.
Multiple news reports on Monday told the same story: Britain’s hospitals are seeing “14 times more coronavirus patients than this time last year,” and the country faces a “difficult winter,” as people gather indoors, where the virus is more likely to spread.
The source of the “14 times” figure is Amanda Pritchard, Chief Executive of NHS England. Pritchard used the apparently alarming surge in hospitalisations to encourage the 4.5 million Britons who still haven’t gotten vaccinated to roll up their sleeves, and those eligible to take their third shot of the vaccine.
However, NHS data shows that Pritchard’s figures are false. According to the health service, a 7-day average of 9,331 Covid-19 patients were in hospital at the beginning of November, compared to 12,654 a year earlier. Just over 1,000 people per day were being admitted to hospital at the end of October, compared to 1,500 last year.
Pritchard was swiftly accused of peddling fake news, with commentators warning that such misleading figures were straying into “resignation territory.”
Amid a growing clamour online, NHS officials told reporters shortly afterwards that Pritchard was citing figures from August 2021 compared to August 2020. Hospital admissions were indeed 14 times higher this August than in 2020, but only for several days toward the end of the month. Since then, they have trended downwards and are now comparable to last year’s rate.
However, hospitalisations persist despite the fact that nine out of 10 people over the age of 12 in the UK have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to NHS statistics. Rising cases too have called into question the long-term efficacy of the jabs, but government officials still insist on vaccination as key to defeating the virus – and studies suggest those vaccinated patients still fare better if they catch the virus.
As Pritchard called on the population to get vaccinated or go in for booster jabs, former Health Secretary Matt Hancock called on Monday for the government to mandate vaccines for healthcare workers. “There is no respectable argument left not to force health and social care workers to get jabbed,” he wrote in The Telegraph, calling the vaccine “the only reason for the safe return of our liberty.”
UKHSA Admits it’s Monitoring Current Vaccine Effectiveness But Not Publishing It. What’s it Got to Hide?
By Will Jones | The Daily Sceptic | November 6, 2021
The UKHSA has admitted for the first time that it is undertaking internal analysis “every week or two” to monitor the current real-world performance of the vaccines but not publishing the results.
In an email seen by the Daily Sceptic, Dr Mary Ramsay, Head of Immunisation at the UKHSA, admits that her agency is continuing to undertake regular analysis of vaccine effectiveness but, despite publishing a weekly Vaccine Surveillance report, is not publishing the estimates.
The Vaccine Surveillance reports have recently been criticised by the U.K Statistics Authority and others for including data which shows infection rates in the vaccinated running at more than double the rate in the unvaccinated. Critics have argued this gives a misleading impression that the vaccines are ineffective or worse. They say it is really a result of problems with the population estimates and systemic differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.
The UKHSA has responded by altering the presentation of its data to draw attention to these limitations and make clear that, in its view, the data should not be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness.
However, it has not published an update of its own estimates of vaccine effectiveness using data more recent than May 2021. This means it has not updated its estimates with data from the summer and autumn, a period when its raw data shows infections in the vaccinated outpacing those in the unvaccinated.
In a recent post I encouraged readers to contact Dr Ramsay to ask her to publish an update of her agency’s study of vaccine effectiveness. In a reply to one reader, seen by the Daily Secptic, Dr Ramsay made the stunning admission:
We continue to undertake TNCC analysis every week or two and will update this when things change or when we want to highlight a new analysis, for example for a new variant or the booster effect.
TNCC stands for test-negative case control, and it is one of the approaches UKHSA uses for estimating vaccine effectiveness, which it deems to eliminate key biases in the data, especially from different testing behaviour.
Dr Ramsay has thus admitted that they are continuously monitoring real-world vaccine effectiveness using their worrying data. Why then are they not routinely publishing the results? What have they got to hide?
Dr Ramsay says they will publish an update when “things change” or when they want to highlight a new variant or the impact of boosters. In the meantime, they are publishing the raw data showing infections in the vaccinated eclipsing those in the unvaccinated, but telling people the data is biased and no conclusions can be drawn about the vaccines. This is an absurd state of affairs and needs to be challenged.
As before, if readers want politely to suggest that UKHSA actually publishes its estimates of vaccine effectiveness based on the latest real-world data, you can email Dr Mary Ramsay here (or find her on Twitter here).
British Funeral Director: Dead Babies Are Piling Up in Morgues
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | November 5, 2021
A British funeral director says he’s seeing untold numbers of dead babies and newborns in cold storage and piling up in mortuaries waiting for their funerals.
The unprecedented numbers of babies that he and other morticians are dealing with are matched only by the excessive number of younger people in their 30s and 40s who have been dying since the COVID-19 vaccine rolled out, he says.
When the pandemic first began the mortuaries saw a flurry of deaths which, in a few months, calmed down, even though media continued to hype COVID deaths. There was an uptick in suicides in the summer of 2020 in mostly younger men, but when fall 2020 came, everything was rather quiet.
And then, he said, “Come January [2021] the numbers were going through the roof … and that’s since people were being vaccinated.” Now he’s having the most funerals he’s ever seen in a period of two weeks, and in younger people, he’s averaging about 12 “in one go,” when before the vaccine he would see only “four or five funerals going, not 12, and not all in that age group.”
And now, he says, what he’s seeing is a lot of newborn babies … “really high, about 30” when he’s used to seeing only three or four. In other words, about 10 times the number of newborn babies are dying than he normally would see — so many they’re having to keep them in the adult section, where there’s more room. “Obviously they’re either miscarried or full-term births, but not a lot is being said about it,” he says.
To put the causes of deaths in perspective, he says he’s only had one COVID death this year. All the rest are myocarditis, infarctions (heart attacks) and some pneumonia. He also notes that “anybody and everybody” who died when the pandemic started was marked as COVID on their death certificates, but that’s not happening since the vaccine was introduced.
Mirror source: Brighteon November 4, 2021
Infection Rates More than Twice as High in the Vaccinated, New UKHSA Data Shows, as Agency Dismisses Own Data as ‘Biased’.
But Why No New VE Estimate Since May?
By Will Jones • The Daily Sceptic • November 5, 2021
The latest UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance report was released Thursday, and its authors are now bending over backwards to keep their critics happy. Following a telling-off this week from the U.K. Statistics Authority, the UKHSA’s Head of Immunisation, Mary Ramsay (pictured above), published a blog post explaining what they’ve done to appease their detractors, while the report now states no fewer than four times, twice in bold typeface, that “these raw data should not be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness”. Ramsay grovels:
To make our data less susceptible to misinterpretation, the U.K. Health Security Agency has worked with the UK Statistics Authority to update some of the data tables and descriptions in the report, specifically around rates of infection in vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. In our commitment to transparent and clear data, we regularly review our publications to ensure they reflect the current situation within the pandemic, and we will continue to work with our partners at the statistics bodies, to ensure our reporting is as scientifically robust as possible.
As I noted last week, the UKHSA does not accept the criticism of its population estimates levelled by, among others, David Spiegelhalter, who declared that using them was “deeply untrustworthy and completely unacceptable”.
The agency instead takes the view that the problem is systemic biases in the data which mean it “should not be used” to estimate vaccine effectiveness. But as I have noted repeatedly, those biases just mean that the estimate will be of unadjusted vaccine effectiveness, which is a perfectly legitimate quantity to estimate and has its uses, particularly when looking at trends or when there is reason to think the biases may be relatively small. (For instance, a recent vaccine effectiveness study in California adjusted its raw data for 22 different factors but in almost all cases the adjustments were tiny.)
The UKHSA report itself correctly gives the definition of vaccine effectiveness: “Vaccine effectiveness is estimated by comparing rates of disease in vaccinated individuals to rates in unvaccinated individuals.” The U.S. CDC, likewise, states the definition as “the proportionate reduction in disease among the vaccinated group”. The CDC distinguishes “vaccine efficacy”, estimated from controlled studies, from “vaccine effectiveness”, which is used “when a study is carried out under typical field (that is, less than perfectly controlled) conditions”. It is therefore not appropriate for the UKHSA, a Government agency, to insist that its data “should not be used” to estimate vaccine effectiveness, which is a false statement and amounts to attempted Government censorship of scientific enquiry.
The report explains that “vaccine effectiveness is measured in other ways as detailed in the ‘Vaccine Effectiveness’ Section.” However, that section is clear that each estimate “typically applies for at least the first three to four months after vaccination”, and “there may be waning of effectiveness beyond this point”. The report discusses this waning, but only for the Alpha variant: “Data (based primarily on the Alpha variant) suggest that in most clinical risk groups, immune response to vaccination is maintained and high levels of VE are seen with both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines.” What use is data based primarily on the Alpha variant, which went almost extinct around six months ago? There is no attempt to present adjusted estimates of vaccine effectiveness based on the most up-to-date data. Instead, we are just given repeated insistences that the data is not showing what it appears to be showing because it is subject to unquantified biases.
What are those biases? Last week the report claimed that vaccinated people “may engage in more social interactions because of their vaccination status”, which didn’t fit with the more usual idea of unvaccinated people as a less cautious sort. Neither did it fit with the other reason they gave, that the vaccinated “may be more health conscious and therefore more likely to get tested for COVID-19”. This week they kept the latter but changed the former to the entirely ambiguous: “People who are fully vaccinated and people who are unvaccinated may behave differently, particularly with regard to social interactions.”
The other two biases they suggest are that “many of those who were at the head of the queue for vaccination are those at higher risk from COVID-19” and “people who have never been vaccinated are more likely to have caught COVID-19” previously. (The latter they say gives a person “some natural immunity to the virus for a few months”, which seems a very pessimistic view of natural immunity, particularly seeing how optimistic they are about the effectiveness of the vaccines.)
The report asserts categorically that the unvaccinated have higher previous infection rates, but cites no evidence to support this. Why not? Why, almost a year into the vaccination campaign, are researchers still so often waving their hands when talking about the differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups? Where is the published data? Precisely how much more likely are the unvaccinated to have had a previous infection? This is a simple data comparison. Why hasn’t it been done? The study in California mentioned earlier found that 2% of the vaccinated had recovered from Covid against 2.3% of the unvaccinated, so not a large difference. Is England similar? Why don’t we know? Likewise, how much more likely are vaccinated people to be tested? This is just a comparison of the testing rates in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. Why hasn’t it been done? This is not good enough. We want more data from UKHSA, not lectures on how not to use the meagre amounts of data they release.
In her blog post, Mary Ramsay points to studies PHE (UKHSA’s predecessor) has published in the past:
These factors are all accounted for in our published analyses of vaccine effectiveness which uses the test-negative case control approach. This is a recommended method of assessing vaccine effectiveness that compares the vaccination status of people who test positive for COVID-19, with those who test negative.
This method helps to control for different propensity to have a test and we are able to exclude those known to have been previously infected with COVID-19. We also control for important factors including geography, time period, ethnicity, clinical risk group, living in a care home and being a health or social care worker.
While PHE did publish such studies earlier in the year (I analyse them here and here), they have not published anything based on data more recent than May, over five months ago. This was just as Delta arrived, and before infections surged over the summer and the raw data started showing infections in the vaccinated eclipsing those in the unvaccinated.
So where is the update? It’s all very well writing pages at the behest of the U.K. Statistics Authority policing how people use your data, but where are the studies setting the picture straight? We’ve had studies from California, Sweden and Israel using data from over the summer, all showing sharp decline in vaccine effectiveness. Where is the U.K.’s contribution to this emerging understanding of the vaccines?
Yes, we had that dubious study in August from Oxford University based on the ONS Infection Survey. But there’s been no update from UKHSA to its studies based on Government testing data.
Here’s a suggestion. Why don’t Daily Sceptic readers write a (polite!) email to the UKHSA’s Mary Ramsay (address here, Twitter here) asking for an update on their very useful test-negative case control study with data from the summer and autumn. You might say you have been concerned about the data in their Vaccine Surveillance reports showing high infection rates in the vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated, but note they say vaccine effectiveness can only be properly estimated in a study, so would be grateful for an update on this.
Here’s this week’s table of unadjusted vaccine effectiveness and the updated graphs showing how it is changing over time. It shows infection rates currently twice as high in the vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated for those aged 40-79, corresponding to an unadjusted vaccine effectiveness of minus-100% or more. Vaccine effectiveness is negative for all over-30s, and almost zero for those aged 18-29 (and still declining). It remains high for under-18s, and effectiveness against hospital admission and death is holding up. This week the decline appears to have stopped, or at least paused, in most age groups.
Yemen on the Brink of Disaster, Poverty, and Extinction
By Viktor Mikhin – New Eastern Outlook – 03.11.2021
UNICEF Spokesperson James Elder has just returned from Yemen with some tragic news about children living in what the United Nations calls the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
Speaking at a press briefing in Geneva, he said: “The Yemen conflict has just hit another shameful milestone: 10,000 children have been killed or maimed since Saudi Arabia’s bombing campaign started in March 2015. That’s the equivalent of four children every day.” Elder told reporters that the estimates provided by the international UN agency were likely an understatement of the actual number of children killed and injured, which is rarely recorded by anyone. “These are of course the cases the UN was able to verify. Many more child deaths and injuries go unrecorded, to all but those children’s families.”
International experts have identified four significant dangers that have brought the country to the brink of humanitarian collapse. First of all, it is a brutal and protracted military conflict, and the blame for unleashing it lies entirely with the US and Saudi Arabia. Secondly, the colossal economic devastation that struck all regions of the country resulted from the military conflict. Also, there is a lack of infrastructure and social services, i.e., health, nutrition, water and sanitation, social protection, and education. Finally, the UN is critically underfunded.
It may be recalled that the war with Yemen began in March 2015, when Saudi Arabia brazenly and cynically launched a bombing campaign to restore the former regime, which obeyed orders from Riyadh, essentially maintaining Yemen’s status as a parallel and subordinate state to the Saudis. This had been the case before the popular revolution in the country, which triggered powerful Saudi airstrikes. The United States sold hundreds of billions of dollars worth of arms to the Kingdom during this war, in addition to intelligence and logistical support for Saudi military aircraft. Evidence shows that the UK is the second-largest supplier of arms to Riyadh, which is being actively used in an undeclared war, mostly against civilians. Other Western countries, including “democratic” France and Canada, have also profited enormously from this war, supplying the Saudis with mountains of offensive weapons.
These are the words and deeds of the so-called democratic West. Calling for democracy and freedom in their words, Western countries in reality supply arms and military equipment at every opportunity, thus fomenting military conflicts in which hundreds of thousands of people die in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya. It makes one wonder where are the so-called international organizations which allegedly aim to prevent conflict and prosecute those who incite and encourage these bloody wars?
The United States, the skilled cheaters of double standards in politics and human rights, has once again manifested itself concerning Yemen. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has loudly reiterated that resolving the conflict in Yemen remains an alleged top priority of US foreign policy. These comments were made during a telephone conversation with the newly appointed United Nations Special Envoy for Yemen Hans Grundberg. And this was said at a time when the Pentagon was sending a new shipment of aerial bombs to Saudi Arabia, which the Saudis are actively using in their war against, as Riyadh says, “the fraternal Yemeni people.”
So far, only human rights groups have accused these countries of complicity in Saudi Arabia’s war crimes in Yemen. One investigation found that the bomb dropped from a Saudi warplane in August 2018, which hit a school bus and killed more than 40 children, came from the United States. But it was just one bomb, while Yemeni officials say most Saudi airstrikes have targeted residential areas, and all Saudi bombs and missiles are purchased abroad from “democratic” countries.
The head of the UN Children’s Agency also presented journalists with these grim figures on the suffering of Yemeni children, from malnutrition to education and sanitation. For example, he said: “Let me share a few more numbers: Four out of every five children need humanitarian assistance; that’s more than 11 million children, and 400,000 children suffer from severe acute malnutrition More than two million children are out of school. Another four million are at risk of dropping out. Two-thirds of teachers, more than 170,000, have not received a regular salary for more than four years. 1.7 million children are currently internally displaced because of violence. As the violence has intensified, especially in the Marib area, more and more families have fled their homes. A staggering 15 million people (more than half of them, about 8.5 million, are children) do not have access to safe water, sanitation or hygiene. With the current level of funding and without an end to the fighting, UNICEF will not be able to help all these children.” And he went on to predict a grim prognosis: “There is no other way to help them without a lot of international support, which will result in a large number of Yemeni children dying.”
But does it matter to the gentlemen in western capitals who make huge profits from the blood of Yemeni children and the supply of arms, which allows them to eat sweet and sleep well? It’s none of their business. As they usually say in the United States, it’s just business, nothing personal.
Despite the efforts of UNICEF and other international organizations, the severity of the humanitarian situation in Yemen cannot be overemphasized. The economy is in a critical state. GDP has fallen 40% since 2015 when neighboring Arab Saudi Arabia decided to punish Yemenis for their “disobedience.” Vast numbers of people lost their jobs, causing family incomes to plummet. About a quarter of people, including many health workers, teachers, engineers, and sanitation workers, rely on civil servants’ salaries that are paid irregularly, if at all. And while the displacement and destruction of schools have resulted in classrooms that can hold up to 200 children, teachers are showing up. Yes, unpaid teachers come in and teach on their enthusiasm to educate the next generation.
In addition to the Saudi-imposed war, with the US behind it, many Yemenis are starving not because there is no food but because there is not enough money to buy it. “But such people have no choice, which means they are forced to sell everything from jewelry to pots just to feed their own children,” writes Egypt’s Al-Ahram. “But their children continue to starve, as families end up selling off all their possessions and cannot buy simple food for themselves or their children.”
Economists believe that UNICEF alone urgently needs more than $235 million to continue its life-saving work in Yemen until mid-2022. Failure to do so will force the agency to reduce or terminate life-saving assistance to vulnerable children. “Funding is critical,” notes Al-Ahram. “We can draw a clear line between donor support and lives saved,” it adds. And perhaps the newspaper’s most emotional comment was the following: “Yemen is the most brutal place in the world to be a child. And, incredibly, it’s getting worse.”
Last month, the United Nations warned that 16 million Yemenis, more than half the population, are facing starvation. Unless the international community steps up support, food aid could soon dry up. Doctors warn that a staggering 99% of Yemenis have not been vaccinated against Covid-19. The country is now battling a third deadly wave of infections in which large numbers of people, especially children and the elderly, will die due to a lack of vaccines. How the West treats the suffering of Yemenis, who are direct co-conspirators in Saudi Arabia’s shameful war, was directly commented on by Yemen’s Al-Sahwa : “We need the promised vaccines, but it is also shameful that by buying up all the vaccines for themselves, rich countries like the UK and Germany are blocking all decisions to get the medicine we need into our country.”
Many countries worldwide are well aware of the plight of the Yemeni people, especially the children and elderly, and deplore the fact that Saudi Arabia still seeks a military solution to the Yemeni crisis, stating that this approach will lead to nothing but death and destruction. They have repeatedly called on Riyadh to abandon a military solution and instead seek political ways to end the devastating war in Yemen. Speaking at a briefing for journalists, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said: “Unfortunately, the Saudi government is still looking for a military solution for Yemen, even though it knows and has understood after a long time that war has no other result than killing innocents and civilians, damaging the peoples of the region and security.” The sooner the Government of Saudi Arabia shows its commitment to political solutions and ends this destructive war, the better for the country and the region, as well as for the peace and security in the entire region.
Your child’s education will be safeguarded by common sense, facts, political will and a new bill.
By Laura Dodsworth | November 5, 2021
This is a rapid response to a video released on Twitter by the Department of Health and Social Care which states that “Your child’s education will be safeguarded by them being vaccinated.”
“Your child’s education will be safeguarded by them being vaccinated.” @VHSchool teacher Stephanie explains how the #COVID19 vaccination is helping to keep 12-15 year olds in school and learning. Watch 👇 More info: nhs.uk/conditions/cor…
This video is an example of logical fallacy. Here are few facts to support alternative reasoning:
- Locking down schools was a political decision. The UK had the second longest school closures in Europe. In contrast, Sweden only closed upper secondary schools (16 years+).
- Schools did not play a significant role in driving transmission of Covid-19, but rather they reflect the level of transmission in the community.
According to Dr Shamez Ladhani, Consultant Paediatrician at PHE, the latest results of the School Infection Survey show that infection and antibody positivity rates of school children did not exceed those of the community. Dr Ladhani commented, “This is reassuring and confirms that schools are not hubs of infection.”
This was also indicated by the PHE study from England’s school re-opening in August 2020, which concluded that “infections in the wider community likely driving cases in schools.” - The vaccines do not stop transmission or infection, although they may reduce the risk of transmission, and they reduce the severity of symptoms and the risk of hospitalisation. There are too many conflicting reports and papers to offer one definitive link, but there is broad consensus for these points.
- Covid is not a serious illness for children and young people and symptoms are normally very mild.
- The key point: Three quarters of children aged between five and 14 have already been infected with Covid, and as a result cases are now falling. Overall, Covid cases are falling.
- Closing schools was incredibly damaging to children and young people, and there’s now a proposed ‘triple lock’ bill, The Schools and Education Settings (Essential Infrastructure and Opening During Emergencies) Bill, to prevent such a terrible disaster befalling the younger generation again.
Vaccination should be chosen by parents and their children for the medical benefits it confers, and based on an informed consideration of the benefits and risks. Parents and children should not be subtly threatened with further school closures.
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Jewish Guilt is the Discourse of The Goyim
By Gilad Atzmon | April 24, 2018
For quite some time the British have accepted that British Jewish organizations have hijacked the political discourse. As has happened in other Western countries, the British political establishment has engaged is a relentless rant against antisemitsm. Sometime the focus drifts for a day or two. An alleged ‘Russian nerve gas attack’ provided a 48 hour pause. Occasionally we bomb Arabs in the name of ‘human intervention’ only to realize a day or two later that we have, once again, followed a premeditated foreign agenda. But, somehow, we always return to the antisemitism debate, as if our media and politicians are a herd of flies gravitating to a pile of poop. … continue
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