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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

November 9, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

Myocarditis ‘tends to be mild’? Tell that to this vaccine victim

By Sally Beck | TCW Defending Freedom | November 8, 2021

YOUNG men who develop the heart conditions myocarditis or pericarditis post Covid vaccination are ‘extremely rare’ according to the UK’s drugs watchdog. This is not true, says leading US cardiologist Dr Peter McCullough, and even if it was true, it is no comfort if you are one of the ‘rare’ cases to find yourself in hospital with heart inflammation like Amanda Hartnetty’s 21-year-old son.

‘The term “rare” is getting old now,’ she said. ‘My son was admitted to hospital in August two days after his second Moderna jab. He had been there for a week when a nurse told him: “Another one of you with myocarditis after the vaccine has just come in and he’s 29.” I wonder how rare it really is?’

According to Dr McCullough, heart inflammation cases in the US have increased by 21,000 per cent in four months, predominantly affecting young men. He said: ‘In June 2021, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said there were 200 cases of myocarditis. By October we had 10,304 cases. This number is shocking.’

Amanda’s youngest son, now 22, who does not want to be named, was admitted to Hillingdon Hospital, Uxbridge, on August 19 with excruciating chest pain.

Amanda, 57, from north London, who works in customer support, said: ‘He and his girlfriend had been to visit the university where he was just about to start, then stayed at a friend’s overnight. In the morning they were driving back and his arms were in incredible pain, he had tingling in his fingers and his chest felt really heavy. Then he felt sick and shivery and started vomiting. He said his chest felt like it was being ripped apart.

‘He had no idea what was wrong, and they thought he might have food poisoning. They got back to her place where she dialled 111. The call handler made an appointment for him at the hospital for an hour’s time and then they sat in A&E for hours.’

Crucially, hospital staff measured his troponin level and when they got the results, they were so startling they thought they were wrong. Troponin is a protein which regulates the heartbeat. The normal level for a 21-year-old is less than 14 ng/l (nanograms per litre), but his was sky high. ‘My son’s level was 7,000 and it rose to 25,000 at its worst,’ said Amanda.

This can indicate that the person is having a heart attack, but he was diagnosed with myocarditis which has similar symptoms of chest pain, shortness of breath and fatigue, because his electrocardiogram (ECG), which checks the heart’s rhythm, was fine. His discharge letter confirms that the vaccine was the cause, saying ‘myocarditis secondary to Covid-19 vaccination’.

Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle, can cause a cardiac arrest and can be fatal. It is more serious than pericarditis (also linked to the vaccine) which is inflammation of the sac surrounding the heart. Myocarditis is caused either by a virus – so SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, could cause it – or it is autoimmune, when your body attacks itself. Vaccines are designed to provoke the immune system so it is entirely possible that an unexpected immune response could occur, but the NHS know little about vaccination as a cause of myocarditis and often pooh-pooh the connection.

Hillingdon is part of Harefield Hospital, which has a specialist heart unit, so thankfully Amanda’s son was in the best place to get the best care, but at first, hospital staff would not consider the possibility that Moderna’s Covid jab had caused his problems.

He spent a week in hospital but even after he was discharged last month, his GP was unaware of the connection. ‘He was trying to explain to the GP that his problems had been caused by the vaccination and she had never heard of it. That’s why I’m speaking out now because this is a side-effect that is just not known about. It was such a shock to take in. We didn’t know about it, and it was not discussed with him before he had his jab.

‘We are so lucky his girlfriend called 111. Who knows what might have happened if she hadn’t? A nurse told me they were really worried, and they didn’t want to tell him how worried they were.’

The youngest of four siblings, he was a fit, healthy young man who played drums in a rock band, held down jobs in a restaurant and a warehouse and before lockdown last March, was keen to join the RAF. He is now so debilitated he is unable to do any exercise and has been advised not to do anything more strenuous than a walk until at least January. Most days, he needs an afternoon nap. Three months on and an MRI scan shows that his heart is still inflamed, which contradicts the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) advice that ‘cases tend to be mild when they do occur’.

Jonathan Engler, a bio-medical entrepreneur who has studied law and medicine and developed a phase III clinical trial for a heart failure medicine, said: ‘If you’ve had myocarditis you have to be monitored permanently and are at risk of developing heart disease later in life.’

The British Heart Foundation, our premier heart health charity, say that if the damage is severe you may need a heart transplant.

Amanda said: ‘One question neither the hospital nor the GP could answer is what happens if he catches Covid? They said they don’t know because they don’t have the data. I also asked if there would be any lasting damage and the best answer they can give me is “hopefully not”.’

Meanwhile, her son is taking things easy and trying not to think about the future: ‘He has to take betablockers to stabilise his mood so that his heart rate isn’t raised,’ she said.

Amanda’s four children have all had their childhood vaccines, as have her three grandchildren. ‘I am not antivax,’ she said. But she was worried about the speed with which the Covid jabs were introduced and the lack of long-term data.

She received her first Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine on March 1 from the now-notorious batch number PV46671 and suffered a serious adverse reaction. There are now 11 people known to have had bad reactions to that batch, and seven spoke to TCW earlier this year.

Amanda, who does not use social media, was unaware that there was a problem with that particular batch until we spoke. She said: ‘I was so ill afterwards; I threw up before I got home from the surgery. It was like instant, proper flu, no build-up like you normally get of feeling under the weather for a couple of days. I had shivers and shakes and a terrible headache. I felt like my head was in a fog and I just wanted to sleep. I was like that for a week, and it took weeks for me to get better.’

She filled in a Yellow Card report for the MHRA about her son but not herself. She said: ‘They sent lots of questions back like “does he take drugs,” they listed everything apart from what was in the jab.

‘My message is that people do need to look out for these side-effects. They were not mentioned to us before we got our jabs, so I just wonder how many others know about them.’

November 8, 2021 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

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.

https://twitter.com/PoliticsForAlI/status/1457678439557832705?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1457678439557832705%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fuk%2F539687-nhs-covid-patients-fake-news%2F

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.”

November 8, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

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).

November 7, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

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

November 7, 2021 Posted by | Video, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

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.


November 6, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

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.

November 5, 2021 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

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.”

Twitter avatar for @DHSCgovukDepartment of Health and Social Care @DHSCgovuk

“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…

November 5th 2021

14 Retweets

 

This video is an example of logical fallacy. Here are few facts to support alternative reasoning:

  1. 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+).
  2. 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.”
  3. 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.
  4. Covid is not a serious illness for children and young people and symptoms are normally very mild.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.

November 5, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Why I Will Not Take the Second Dose

BY MEDHET KHATTAR | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | NOVEMBER 4, 2021

I am a microbiologist and a scientist. I am a microbiologist because that is what I specialised in at university, and what I have worked in since, in academia. I am a scientist because I place a higher value on asking questions than on consumption of knowledge.

Never previously have I felt hesitant about vaccines. Yet I took my first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine last March with some hesitation, and have since decided not to take the second dose.

Something struck me as problematic very early on in the Covid-19 narrative when the Director-General of the World Health Organisation announced that the Coronavirus in question was ‘public enemy number one’, an ‘unprecedented threat’ and an ‘enemy against humanity.’

I knew that something was not right, for this was the kind of terminology that had been used at the end of the Second World War, not to describe an infectious agent, but to refer to nuclear weapons and the banality of evil.

I complied with the first UK-wide lockdown in March 2020 with an unresolved mixture of disbelief and concern, laced with an unavoidable shot of fear; even though, rationally, I did not believe that the air all around us was full of a new plague. I even volunteered for vaccine trials. This was the United Kingdom shutting everything down, and everyone in.

But I gradually came to the view that the lockdown was disturbingly misguided; at best disproportionate to the problem it was meant to solve. But like many, I did not want the NHS to fall apart, nor did I want to catch SARS-CoV-2 myself, or to pass it to anyone else. I even refrained robotically from hugging my mother and siblings when I visited my family late in 2020.

As it turned out, science was the casualty of a toxic narrative of extreme urgency and fear, a narrative swiftly adopted by most governments and their advisors the world over. Koch’s postulates (the demonstration of a causal link between a microbe and a disease that have served us well for over a hundred years since their articulation by the German physician Robert Koch) were summarily discarded in favour of correlation.

The presence of fragments of SARS-CoV-2, specifically targeted and detected using RT-PCR, became incontrovertible evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was the causative agent of symptoms so generic that they could easily be caused by a wide range of respiratory pathogens, and not only viral ones.

But once you extinguish the need to demonstrate causation the mind recedes into a truism of a kind, because when scientific thinking gives way anything goes if asserted enough times. And so we became, each and every one of us, a biological problem.

We were confined to one or the other group: vulnerable or infectious, a segregation that continues despite evidence of preexisting immunity and near-universal vaccination in the UK. And “test, test, test” was how this division was planted in our daily lives. If you test positive, then you are infectious. And if you test negative, you are vulnerable to infection.

As a result, a positive test result became synonymous with a clinical case. And even though (after some pressure from dissenting scientists) daily UK Covid-19 mortality figures are reported as deaths of any cause within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test, the caveat became mere semantics. In the public consciousness, Covid-19 was the cause of these daily deaths; in mine the statistics were a daily announcement of the slow death of clear thinking.

The collapse of clear thinking seems to have led some to equate the idea of elimination of SARS-CoV-2 with, say, that of measles. The fantastical notion of a Zero Covid world could only appeal to someone who (knowingly or unknowingly) suffers from a dystopian obsession with immortality. But far worse, we are no longer merely responsible for our own well-being.

We are now burdened with saving every other life on the planet from a disease whose infection fatality rate is not unusual compared to other respiratory diseases with which human civilizations have coexisted, suffered, and recovered.

The collective blame for transmission of the smallest and most slippery of all microbes, viruses, had hitherto been implicitly and wisely shared by the community as a price worth paying for the continued process of civilization. As Professor Sunetra Gupta put it, “This chain of guilt is somehow located to the individual rather than being distributed and shared. We have to share the guilt. We have to share the responsibility. And we have to take on board certain risks ourselves in order to fulfil our obligations and to uphold the social contract.”

The advent of a vaccine to relieve the human population of the menace of a fatal disease should be a moment of global celebration. But to the Zero Covid mind, Covid-19 vaccines are a weapon in a fight against nature, not a voluntary health intervention to protect the vulnerable. And when humans with their propensity for muddled thinking position themselves against nature, they invariably end up positioning themselves against fellow humans.

I am not against vaccination, but I am against the coercive campaigns and guilt-summoning policies to promote vaccination, or any other medical intervention for that matter. The Covid-19 vaccine is no longer for me a question of health, but a deeper matter of principle, of good science, and of moral philosophy.

In particular, enlisting children to protect adults in what is effectively an ongoing clinical trial is simply unfathomable. It is enough to watch this advert to recognise the huge, unfair and misinformed burden which children have been put under. Those who argue that vaccination is required to keep schools open should only reflect a fraction deeper on their argument to recognise its disturbing motive, which is to make a political decision easier to take.

I have taken the first dose, but I do not wish to continue to be part of the narrative of irrationalism, fear and coercion that promotes the vaccination programme. I may end up having to take the second dose if that is what it takes for me to continue to be able to work or to travel to see my family; I am not an ideologue. But for now, I am quitting the global clinical trial of Covid-19 vaccines because it is morally unsettling whichever angle you examine it from.

It was the veteran columnist Simon Jenkins who saw with unmatched prescience the future towards which we were heading. Writing in The Guardian on 6 March 2020 – just over two weeks before the UK’s first lockdown – Jenkins ended his piece with the following line.  “You are being fed war talk. Let them wash your hands, but not your brain.” It seems they had us do both.

Dr Medhet Khattar is Teaching Fellow in Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Edinburgh. He has held research and faculty positions in microbiology at a number of institutions including University of Nottingham (1989-1990), University of Edinburgh (1990-1998), Medical Research Council Virology Unit in Glasgow (1998-2000), American University of Beirut (2000-2007), University of Leeds (2009-2010) and Nottingham Trent University (2010-2015).

November 5, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

How freedom of choice on gender divides children and their parents

By Anastasia Safronova | RT | November 4, 2021

As schools increasingly push freedom of self-identification, parents are often unaware of how deeply rooted this ideology has become among their children. A number of international experts tell RT there’s reason to be concerned.

You can never know for sure what’s going on in another person’s head – especially when that person’s a child. And, while you might imagine otherwise, particularly when it’s your own child. Are you so certain you really know everything about them? The reality may shock you.

The scenario in which children trust their ‘virtual’ friends more than their parents is nothing new. The rift between generations is deepening. And, in many places, one of the key factors contributing to this division is the education system. Schools are so focused on honouring students’ freedom of expression and self-identification – including when it comes to their gender – that they often make children’s lives more complicated and stressful rather than less.

“Projects to be worked on”

Angus Fox, a British academic who represents a global alliance of parents and professional groups in his role as the MD of Genspect, is of the view that, in countries where the debate over gender issues being on the school curriculum is raging, the education system has become too political. He says, “Teaching children the basic skills they need to value themselves, to look after their own mental health first and foremost – that seems to have gone. Practical things seem to have disappeared from the curriculum, to be replaced by very ideological stuff.”

Some teachers even appear to view their pupils as a sort of scientific experiment, Fox suggests. “They see children as projects to be worked on, so they start to have this very emotionally intrusive relationship,” he explains. Younger teachers, in particular, may reject the normative beliefs of the older generation – and that applies not only to more senior colleagues, but to some children’s parents too. “They see these very vulnerable children asking, ‘What am I?’ and they take advantage of that – almost, in a way, attacking their parents. What’s happening in schools is terrifying.”

“It’s not about child welfare – it’s about teachers creating the kind of the world they want to live in.”

The situation is very concerning, according to British science teacher and writer Debbie Hayton, who is herself transgender. What happens in schools is going far beyond the concept of ‘safeguarding,’ she says. “Safeguarding is where we protect children from possible harm. As teachers, we tell children that we can’t keep secrets. If children tell us something important, we need to share it with other responsible adults. But there’s a different standard being applied to these transgender-identified children, which is that secrets can be kept from their parents.”

Whatever the situation, the same rules should be applied, Hayton insists. Last year, she spoke to a mother from Massachusetts whose 14-year-old daughter had identified as transgender for three years. Jennifer, a physician in her 50s, told Hayton her child’s school hadn’t revealed that she had started to question her gender identity. When the teenager asked to be prescribed puberty blockers, Jennifer realized no one had warned her daughter about the possibly irreversible side effects.

Fox is aware of stories like Jennifer’s. He says, “I heard of a young girl who started to take testosterone, and her mother said, ‘It can damage your bone health, as you’re a girl.’ But she replied, ‘I identify as a man, so why would testosterone affect me differently from anyone else who’s a man?’ These kids truly believe they can say they’re something and they become something. When the enormity of that hits the parent, it’s often too late.”

“There’s a whole generation of kids who find it very difficult to believe you if you say, ‘Hold on! It’s not that simple. You’ve got this body and you can’t mess it up!’”

“I have a friend who’s a male de-transitioner, and he says that the people he was hanging around with treated their body like it was a customizable object, like a doll,” continues Fox. Young people are often very naïve, no matter how smart they are, and the danger is that their decisions can be influenced by campaign groups, some of which receive funding from pharmaceutical companies, he cautions.

“Influencing children towards a specific way of thinking”

Mary Laval, a member of Genspect’s press team, is the mother of a gender-questioning teenager. She thinks schools should be inclusive and encourage children to be open-minded. “However, it’s not their place to start teaching kids ideology and to spread misinformation,” she says. In her view, gender ideology has become akin to religion, and, and, as in non-religious schools, parents have the right to expect that their children are not taught religion. It’s a plea made by many parents: to have the right to choose whether their son or daughter is taught that they have the freedom to choose their gender.

Reports of schools trying to hide their students’ gender preferences from their parents – usually justified by the institution’s need to protect vulnerable minors – are frequently reported in the media. Occasionally, parents file lawsuits, being of the view that they have the right to know what’s going on with their children.

Sometimes, the pursuit of ideological goals leads to major problems, as evidenced by the recent scandal involving the Loudoun County School Board, in Virginia, US, which became far greater than just a local conflict between parents and the education system. Two sexual assault cases were filed in two different schools in the space of six months, with the same student convicted of one charge and facing a sexual battery charge for the other. Parents in the county were furious, blaming the authorities for seemingly having tried to silence the matter after the first case, which saw the male student in question enter the female toilets wearing a skirt and carry out the aforementioned assault. Students themselves staged a protest demanding their school guarantee their safety.

According to Genspect founder Stella O’Malley, a psychotherapist and best-selling author, it’s inappropriate for schools to misuse their position of responsibility to influence children into thinking a certain way. She says, “​​Schools are for educating young people, for broadening their minds. Young people need to be allowed the opportunity to first learn about concepts in a neutral manner so they can ultimately decide for themselves their own views on any given topic.”

There’s one more angle to this issue that’s worth considering here. Relationships between teenagers are not always straightforward – they’re often not very kind to each other. Last month, it was reported that a group of students from an Illinois high school staged a survey asking whether “queers” should be allowed to use the restroom alongside “normal people.” That’s just one example of the anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment coming to the fore in some American high schools, fanned, it would appear, by an insistent focus on gender and sexuality. Many professionals believe the question of gender wouldn’t have become so difficult for youngsters of all persuasions if the debate – which was originally initiated by adults, after all – hadn’t been allowed to get so heated.

Fox says most parents don’t believe it’s a problem to teach about gender in school until it affects their family personally. He explains: “You get this phenomenon of ‘Well, yes, but not my child.’ A lot of parents I work with have been very honest and said, ‘Mea culpa. I made a terrible mistake. Because, before it was my child, I saw other children going through this and I thought, it was a good thing that we now have more trans people.’” However, when it comes to being told by their child’s school about their own offspring’s wish to transition, Fox says, their opinion often changes drastically. “They say, ‘It can’t be true. I don’t believe what you say.’”

The situation is exacerbated by mainstream and social media pouring fuel on the fire, while, at the same time, avoiding covering all sides of the argument. Fox says, “It’s as if you say you’re trans and everyone should jump up and celebrate, and anyone who does anything different is a figure of hate. It’s very difficult to operate in that climate.”

However, the tide may be turning. According to Hayton, the public is starting to challenge the one-sided narrative, at least in the UK. “The line being pushed is that children have their gender identity and only they know about it, and that needs to be affirmed at all cost. But people are speaking out against that, and there’s a debate now,” she says. “In other English-speaking countries, I’m seeing less of it, however – they seem to be further behind.”

Those who feel there should be a broader dialogue are coming under a lot of pressure, but they’re persevering, determined to ensure alternative views get airtime too. “There are a lot of people willing to start the debate,” she concludes.

November 4, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

The News is being Nudged

A joint report from Sky and the UK government’s Nudge Unit reveals a startling collaboration

By Laura Dodsworth | November 2, 2021

propaganda, n

The systematic dissemination of information, esp. in a biased or misleading way, in order to promote a political cause or point of view.

– Oxford English Dictionary

Is the news still news when it is being nudged by the UK government’s behavioural scientists?

Sky announced this week that behaviour change on climate can be driven by TV. It released a video which opened with the lines, “We cannot understate the urgency. But faced with issues of such enormity, what role can we play?”

It’s not actually a question, they have already decided their role. Sky announced that it was collaborating with the “independent Behavioural Insights Team”. That sounds more palatable than collaborating with the government doesn’t it? But the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) is one third owned by the Cabinet Office and appears to be on permanent tenure at Downing Street. Can a company which is one third owned by the government be fairly described as “independent”?

BIT’s report The Power of TV: Nudging Viewers to Decarbonise their Lifestyles makes a number of startling admissions.

“Behaviour change via broadcasting and traditional media has historically been aimed at improving public health, boosting gender equality, and reducing violence. Imagine the potential for emissions reductions if the same methods were used to encourage sustainable behaviours!”

The key word is “historical”. If you have ever suspected that social and political issues were being confected somewhat artificially in TV programming, you were right. This is an admission of social engineering.

According to a joint survey by Sky and BIT, 70% of people across Europe are willing to change their behaviour to address the climate crisis and 80% support TV broadcasters ‘nudging’ viewers to think about the environment, whether that’s through documentaries, advertising or increasing the coverage of environmental issues in the news.

Climate policy is a tricky nut to crack – persuading us to have under-performing and expensive boilers, asking us to switch insects for meat, stop taking foreign holidays and drive our cars less is going to be a hard sell. So the nudgers are going to use the telly box to persuade the recalcitrant masses.

The survey itself uses ‘social conformity’. Ah, you are supposed to think, if 80% of people think TV programming should be used to ‘nudge’ us, then that’s what I think too. Notoriously, however, there is a gap between what people say they want in surveys and what they actually want. The ultimate proof will be in behaviour and ratings.

The report states that broadcasters and content creators have a “unique opportunity to make a difference for the planet”. (I wonder what difference it would make if Sky’s CEO stopped commuting transatlantically by private jet?)

According to the report, the British public are unwilling to take supposedly “high impact” actions, such as eating less meat and dairy, switching to electric vehicles, using public transport, and switching to green pensions.

The Power of TV: Nudging Viewers to Decarbonise their Lifestyles

The report is audaciously bossy about how broadcasters and content creators should change the British public’s behaviour.

Advice such as “Frequency of exposure to green themes could be enhanced by building ecological beliefs and traits into core characters within a show so that green issues can fluently be raised time and time again,” sounds potentially tedious.

You will see fewer characters “carelessly drinking from a plastic bottle”. But you will see more kids programming centre on green issues to influence you as well as the kids to promote “intergenerational spillover”.

Suggestions continue with “a family could discuss reducing their waste” in a comedy show. Making that funny is quite the gauntlet throw. News segments could “explore barriers to acting green and share stories for overcoming them,” which doesn’t sound particularly newsworthy. An episode of a drama could include references to buying an electric vehicle and, of course, characters should order vegetarian options in restaurants.

Plump the cushions, grab a cuppa and get ready for the green themes in your favourite psyopera, I mean soap opera. During COP26, storylines are converging on the environment. Soap ratings have diminished over the years and is it any wonder? People don’t want to be preached to. Creativity cannot be programmed and storytelling is an art. It is naïve arrogance to believe this sort of technocratic tinkering will engage viewers. We gravitate to good stories.

Mercifully, BIT suggests that broadcasters “avoid a negative tone” and warns that “fear-mongering, guilt-tripping, blaming, or preaching can be counter-productive.” (I wonder if a certain book had an impact?)

In addition to Sky, another eleven major UK media brands, including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, RTE, Britbox and Discovery, have pledged to increase the amount and “quality” of their climate coverage. So expect the airwaves to be flooded with the techniques suggested in the BIT report. At the same time, expect very little media scrutiny of this astonishing collaboration between nudgers and newscasters. And in print and online, the BBC, The Guardian, The Times and the Financial Times have added specific climate sections to their news.

A few months after the publication of A State of Fear, a government advisor told me that the behavioural scientists are “very pleased with themselves” and “Britain is seen as leading the way in how to manipulate people. There is skipping in Whitehall corridors. The public have been proved to be incredibly sheepish, so there’s more nudge coming.” And so there is.

My book concluded that the UK government’s use of behavioural science during the Covid epidemic lacked transparency and was anti-democratic. BIT’s report might appear to rebut both accusations. Don’t be fooled. It rests upon a survey which says people want to be nudged through the media. But research conducted by biased and vested parties is not a substitute for a democratic mandate. The British public never voted for or consented to the creation of a Nudge Unit to subliminally influence them and then set the news agenda. Furthermore, when behavioural scientists – and by extension the government – influence the news, it risks the inquiry, debate and balance that the media owes the public.

Whatever you believe about climate, or Covid-19, or any other agenda, can any mental contortions justify the news being nudged? We would criticise such blatant propaganda if it happened in any other country and we should not tolerate here. We should switch it off.

November 3, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Suffer the children: How the young are groomed into the transgender trap

By Belinda Brown | TCW Defending Freedom | November 3, 2021

THE eminent biologist Lord Robert Winston recently reminded viewers of BBC’s Question Time that ‘you cannot change your sex. Your sex actually is there in every single cell in the body. You have chromosomal sex, you have genetic sex, you have hormonal sex, you have all sorts of psychological brain sex, they’re all different’.

He said this in defence of Professor Kathleen Stock, the latest victim of death threats and significant harassment having fallen foul of the transgender lobby, who has also won the support of Equalities MInister Kemi Badenoch.

The most vulnerable victims of the trans lobby’s bullying ideological agenda however are not the feminist academics, nor even the female athletes who are now forced to compete against the opposite and far more powerful sex.

They are not even the women in prisons who have to fend off male rapists in their midst, terrible though their situation is and their fear must be.

The most vulnerable are the unacknowledged victims of this ever more determined lobby. They are the children who are systematically groomed to believe they can be the opposite sex.

The trans lobby will tell you that this decision-making is driven by the child. But given the endless funding for propaganda, the persistent drip of modern sex education and zeal of certain child psychiatrists, it is hardly children who are leading the way.

Today, from the earliest ages the normal development of an understanding of sex differences is prevented. Children are given books such as Are you a boy or are you a girl? which teach them not to assume that anyone has a particular sex.

They are further confused with lessons on the gender unicorn which deny biological sex facts.

Along with concepts such as ‘gender expression’, ‘gender identity’ and ‘assigned sex’, serious attempts are being made by some educationalists and trans lobbyists to stop the idea (indeed the fact) that we are born as boys or girls from ever taking root.

It is the most vulnerable of children – those who for whatever reason do not adhere to rigid gender stereotypes – who are too often singled out for special gender treatment; they are ‘affirmed’ as not being their sex.

Being ‘affirmed’ means that this child will instead be told that they are indeed the opposite sex and will be treated as such. The child’s peer group and all his or her trusted adults will be encouraged, or even compelled, to engage in this myth.

Affirmation is but the first step in the process of social transition which sets the child on a path which is likely to involve them in medicalisation for the rest of their lives.

The biggest threat (from the trans ideologists’ point of view) to this process is the onset of puberty. If a child has been told by trusted adults that he (or she) is actually the opposite sex, it could be confusing if significant changes happening to his body led to the conclusion that he had been lied to, or that his trusted adults were wrong.

To avoid this, lobbyists have campaigned for puberty-blocking drugs to be given earlier, at the first onset of puberty. In fact, children are often encouraged to ‘transition’ in the interlude between primary and secondary school, so that no one will ever know they are ‘trans’.

The reality check provided by puberty is averted. And those on puberty-blockers are almost invariably moved on to taking cross-sex hormones.

A female cannot move into womanhood if she hasn’t been able to go through puberty as a girl. This is what Keira Bell was condemned to. Keira is the brave young woman who had treatment at the NHS-run Tavistock child gender clinic in Devon and brought a successful judicial review against the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation, sadly since overturned by the Appeal Court.

She has explained how this process worked: ‘The idea was that this would give me a “pause” to think about whether I wanted to continue to a further gender transition.

‘This so-called pause put me into what felt like menopause with hot flushes, night sweats and brain fog. All this made it more difficult to think clearly about what I should do.

‘By the end of a year of this treatment, when I was presented with the option of moving on to testosterone, I jumped at it – I wanted to feel like a young man, not an old woman.’

This shocking process has been allowed to carry on because we’ve been told that if we didn’t allow it, these young people would kill themselves.

But study after study shows that gender dysphoria is much more likely to be a consequence than a cause of psychological problems – problems that the process of transition may entrench or worsen. In fact, the relationship is the other way around.

A recent study of gender dysphoric children showed that almost 90 per cent had comorbid (simultaneous) health diagnoses and other indicators of psychological distress. (The precise figure is 88.6 per cent – see top of page 80).

Sixty-five per cent of gender dysphoric children suffered from anxiety. Sixty-two per cent suffered from depression. More than 33 per cent had behavioural disorders. The presence of autism was another cause for concern.

The link between gender dysphoria and pre-existing mental ill-health was also confirmed by a study of de-transitioners, of whom 58 per cent felt that their gender dysphoria was caused by trauma or a mental health condition.

This is not a new discovery, but has been found repeatedly in studies. It has just been conveniently ignored. The family stories told by these children and their parents often reveal the source of their mental health disorders. Adverse childhood experiences had been very much part of their lives.

Sixty-six per cent had experienced family conflict, 66 per cent parental mental illness; 60 per cent had lost an important figure via separation, and bullying had been common for 54 per cent. Thirty-nine per cent experienced maltreatment (p.71).

We may be tempted to lay the blame at the feet of these families who, despite measurably high levels of dysfunction and conflict, appear to have no awareness that their problems could be impacting on the child as well as themselves.

Instead, what appears to happen is that the child’s gender dysphoria provides a handy explanation for all the stresses and strains which the family or individual may be feeling, and even better from their point of view, a medical solution through which these problems can be resolved.

Keira Bell explains it thus: ‘When I was seen at the Tavistock Clinic, I had so many issues that it was comforting to think I really had only one that needed solving: I was a male in a female body.’

But the blame does not really lie with these families. Often they were from disadvantaged groups in society, living under considerable financial and social stress. Their biggest crime is perhaps a lack of common sense. Far more culpable are the media, the well-funded lobby groups and the clinicians who’ve recklessly applied this fashionable theory.

This essay will continue tomorrow.

November 3, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

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