Ten years on, Syria is almost destroyed. Who’s to blame?
Syria in ruins after ten years of conflict (File photo)
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | MARCH 20, 2021
In George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, the ruling pigs led by Napoleon constantly rewrote history in order to justify and reinforce their own continuing power. The rewriting by the western powers of the history of the ongoing conflict in Syria leaps out of Orwell.
The joint statement issued by the foreign ministers of the US, UK, France, Germany and Italy last week to mark the tenth anniversary of the Syrian conflict begins with an outright falsehood by holding President Bashar al-Assad and “his backers” responsible for the horrific events in that country. It asserts that the five western powers “will not abandon” the Syrian people — till death do us part.
The historical reality is that Syria has been a theatre of the CIA’s activities ever since the inception of that agency in 1947. There is a whole history of CIA-sponsored “regime change” projects in Syria ranging from coup attempts and assassination plots to paramilitary strikes and funding and military training of anti-government forces.
It all began with the bloodless military coup in 1949 against then Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli which was engineered by the CIA. As per the memoirs of Miles Copeland Jr, the CIA station chief in Damascus at that time — who later actually went on to write a fine book of high literary quality on the subject — the coup aimed at safeguarding Syria from the communist party and other radicals!
However, the CIA-installed colonel in power, Adib Shaishakli, was a bad choice. As Copeland put it, he was a “likeable rogue” alright who had not “to my certain knowledge, ever bowed down to a graven image. He had, however, committed sacrilege, blasphemy, murder, adultery and theft” to earn American support. He lasted for four years before overthrown by the Ba’ath Party and military officers. By 1955, CIA estimated that Syria was ripe for another military coup. By April 1956, a joint CIA-SIS (British Secret Intelligence Service) plot was implemented to mobilise right-wing Syrian military officers. But then, the Suez fiasco interrupted the project.
The CIA revived the project and plotted a second coup in 1957 under the codename Operation Wappen — again, to save Syria from communism — and even spent $3 million to bribe Syrian military officers. Tim Weiner, in his masterly 2008 book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, writes:
“The president (Dwight Eisenhower) said he wanted to promote the idea of an Islamic jihad against godless communism. “We should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect,” he said at a 1957 White House meeting… (Secretary of state) Foster Dulles proposed a “secret task force,” under whose auspices the CIA would deliver American guns, money, and intelligence to King Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Hussein of Jordan, President Camille Chamoun of Lebanon, and President Nuri Said of Iraq.”
“These four mongrels were supposed to be our defence against communism and the extremes of Arab nationalism in the Middle East… If arms could not buy loyalty in the Middle East, the almighty dollar was still the CIA’s secret weapon. Cash for political warfare and power plays was always welcome. It could help an American imperium in Arab and Asian lands.”
But, as it happened, some of those “right-wing” officers instead turned in the bribe money and revealed the CIA plot to the Syrian intelligence. Whereupon, 3 CIA officers were kicked out of the American embassy in Damascus, forcing Washington to withdraw its ambassador in Damascus. With egg on its face, Washington promptly branded Syria as a “Soviet satellite”, deployed a fleet to the Mediterranean and incited Turkey to amass troops on the Syrian border. Dulles even contemplated a military strike under the so-called “Eisenhower Doctrine” as retaliation against Syria’s “provocations”. By the way, Britain’s MI6 was also working with the CIA in the failed coup attempt; the details came to light accidentally in 2003 among the papers of British Defence Minister Duncan Sandys many years after his death.
Now, coming down to current history, suffice to say that according to the WikiLeaks, since 2006, the US had been funding London-based Syrian dissidents, and the CIA unit responsible for covert operations was deployed to Syria to mobilise rebel groups and ascertain potential supply routes. The US is known to have trained at least 10,000 rebel fighters at a cost of $1 billion annually since 2012. President Barack Obama reportedly admitted to a group of senators the operation to insert these CIA-trained rebel fighters into Syria.
The well-known American investigative journalist and political writer Seymour Hersh has written, based on inputs from intelligence officers, that the CIA was already transferring arms from its Benghazi station (Libya) to Syria around that time. Make no mistake, Obama was the first world leader to openly call for the removal of Assad. That was in August 2011. Then CIA chief David Petraeus paid two unannounced visits to Turkey (in March and September 2012) to persuade Erdogan to step in as the flag carrier of the US’ regime change project in Syria (under the rubric of “anti-terror fight”.)
In fact, the US’ key allies in the Persian Gulf — Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE — took the cue from Obama to loosen their purse strings to recruit, finance and equip thousands of jihadi fighters to be deployed to Syria. Equally, from the early stages of the conflict in Syria, major western intelligence agencies provided political, military and logistic support to the Syrian opposition and its associated rebel groups in Syria.
Curiously, the Russian intervention in Syria in September 2015 was in response to an emergent imminent defeat of the Syrian government forces at the hands of the jihadi fighters backed by the US’ regional allies. Saudi Arabia withdrew from the arena only in 2017 after the tide of the war turned, thanks to the Russian intervention.
The joint statement issued last week by the US and its NATO allies belongs to the world of fiction. In reality, there is Syrian blood in the hands of these NATO countries (including Turkey) and the US’ Gulf allies. Look at the colossal destruction that the US has caused: in the World Bank’s estimation, a cumulative total of $226 billion in gross domestic product was lost to Syria due to the war from 2011 to 2016 alone.
The Syrian conflict has been among the most tragic and destructive conflicts of our time. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have died, half a nation has been displaced, and millions have been forced into desperate poverty and hunger. In the UNHRC estimation, after ten years of conflict, half of the Syrian population has been forced to flee home, 70% are living in poverty, 6.7 million Syrians have been internally displaced, over 13 million people need humanitarian assistance and protection, 12.4 million people suffer from lack of food (or 60% of the entire population), 5.9 million people are experiencing a housing emergency and nearly nine in 10 Syrians are living below the poverty threshold.
And, come to think of it, Syria used to have one of the highest levels of social formation in the entire Muslim Middle East. It used to be a middle income country until the US decided to destabilise Syria. Ever since the late 1940s, the US’ successive regime change projects were driven by geopolitical considerations. The agenda is unmistakeable: the US has systematically destroyed the heart, soul and mind of “Arabism” — Iraq, Syria and Egypt — with a view to perpetuate the western [Zionist] domination of the Middle East.
Former President Donald Trump intended to withdraw the US troops from Syria and end the war. He tried twice, but Pentagon commanders sabotaged his plans. What Joe Biden proposes to do is anybody’s guess. Biden doesn’t seem to be in any rush to withdraw the US troops.
The most disturbing aspect is that the US is methodically facilitating a Balkanisation of Syria by helping the Kurdish groups aligned with it to carve out a semiautonomous enclave in the country’s northeast. In fact, the the Arab population in northeastern Syria resents being under the Kurds’ governance, and this may eventually turn into a new source of recruits for Islamic State. Meanwhile, Turkey seized the US-Kurdish axis as alibi to occupy vast territories in northern Syria.
The sad part of the joint statement by the US and its European allies is not only that it is rewriting history and spreading falsehood but conveys a sense of despair that there is no hope for light at the end of the tunnel in the Syrian conflict in a conceivable future.
The US policy in Syria is opaque. It has oscillated between aiming to prevent a resurgence of IS, confronting Iran, pushing back against Russia, providing humanitarian aid, and even protecting Israel, while the crux of the matter is that successive US administrations have failed to articulate a clear strategy and rationale for the US military presence in Syria.
Daisies Under Threat From Climate Change! says the Telegraph
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | April 30, 2021
Where do they dredge up these dolts?
From the Telegraph :
Perhaps somebody should tell Dr Dines the difference between “weather” and “climate”!
Spring last year was a dry one, but there is nothing at all unusual in that, and there have been eight drier springs on record. Nor is there any sort of trend in spring rainfall:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-temperature-rainfall-and-sunshine-time-series
Shame on the increasingly absurd Telegraph, not to mention dopey Olivia Rudgard for printing this nonsense.
There is no scientific foundation to the concept of Vaccine Passports: Doctors for Covid Ethics
By Oliver May • THE DAILY EXPOSE • April 29, 2021
Doctors for Covid Ethics, a group of doctors across Europe and North America, say studies on Covid-19’s closest-related virus to infect humans, SARS, revealed that those who had acquired natural immunity in 2003 remain protected even now. They also maintain that, even before the onset of vaccination campaigns, most people had become immune to Covid-19, either through infection with the virus itself, often without symptoms or with only mild, uncharacteristic ones, or due to cross-immunity conferred by other, naturally occurring coronaviruses.
But under an Article of Law Decree just published by the European Union, its proposed Digital Green Pass will have validity for just six months. Once this expires the holder would need to be re-vaccinated or have had Covid in the last six months or take a test every 48 hours in order to regain their freedoms.
Doctors for Covid Ethics argue there is no rational case for such a pass, which is currently being used in Israel and proposed in the UK, adding that immunity from infection is likely to be durable and unaffected by variants.
Doctors for Covid Ethics said: “There is no scientific foundation to the concept of vaccine passports and no rational case at all for vaccine passports. To set a six-month cut-off is bizarre and arbitrary. Examining the time course of antibodies in blood samples is not a valid approach to the question of, ‘how long does immunity last?’.
“This is because antibodies aren’t the most important host defence mechanism in immunity to viruses. That’s considered to be T-cell memory (cytotoxic as well as ‘helper’ lymphocytes) and B-memory (antibody producing) cells. Antibodies naturally fall over time if you’re no longer constantly rechallenged with the infective pathogen. As community prevalence falls away, this re-exposure to the virus also diminishes.
“When durability of immunity to the closest known virus, SARS, was studied, those who had acquired immunity naturally, through infection in 2003, all retained immunity 17 years later. There is speculation that ‘variants’ of SARS-CoV-2 might ‘break through’ the immunity gained through natural infection or vaccination. There is absolutely no evidence for this at all.
“In fact, there is very strong evidence to the contrary – that no variant is sufficiently different from the original virus that it’s even possible for ‘immune escape’ to occur. Several groups of immunologists have shown convincingly that people immune to one variant have T-cells which recognise all the other variants tested. This isn’t a surprise, for no variant differs from the original sequence by more than 0.3 per cent.
“In fact, those who had retained immunity to SARS also possessed cross-immunity to SARS-CoV-2. These two viruses differ by approximately 20 per cent. Obviously, if our immune systems easily recognise two viruses which share 80 per cent similarity, it follows that differences of 0.3 per cent are completely irrelevant, from an immunological perspective.”
The group went on to add that focusing on antibodies in the context of vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 is “flawed” and so coercing people into so-called booster vaccines in order to regain their freedoms withdrawn by Governments is wholly inappropriate.
“The whole concept of antibody-based immunity against an air-borne pathogen is flawed because the antibodies are on the wrong side of the wall and cannot intercept viral entry into the respiratory tract epithelium,” added the group.
“Secreted IgA antibodies play no significant role either: selective IgA deficiency does not enhance susceptibility towards coronavirus infections.”
The group also highlights that vaccine companies have been exempt from legal liability for vaccine-induced harm, adding that, for the vast majority of people, SARS-CoV-2 is a non-lethal, typically mild to moderately severe illness. They said: “The overwhelming majority of people are not at risk from COVID-19 and do not require vaccination for their own protection.
“The vaccines have been touted as a means to prevent asymptomatic infection and, by extension, asymptomatic transmission. However, “asymptomatic transmission” is an artefact of invalid and unreliable PCR test procedures and interpretations, leading to high false-positive rates. Evidence indicates that PCR-positive, asymptomatic people are healthy false-positives, not carriers. A comprehensive study of 9,899,828 people in China found that asymptomatic individuals testing positive for COVID-19 never infected others.
“In contrast, the papers cited by the Centre for Disease Control to justify claims of asymptomatic transmission are based on hypothetical models, not empirical studies; they present assumptions and estimates rather than evidence. Preventing asymptomatic infection is not a viable rationale for promoting vaccination of the general population.”
They have written to MEP’s, putting them on notice that liability for adverse reactions to the vaccines will fall on them, should they vote for the Digital Green Pass, which was debated on Wednesday.
And last week, Doctors for Covid Ethics wrote their third letter to the European Medicines Agency, warning executive director Emer Cooke that cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) dominates the list of adverse reactions from the vaccines and is not as rare as the EMA suggests.
More False Positives Than True Positives in the First Two Weeks of School Testing
By Michael Curzon • Lockdown Sceptics • April 29, 2021
A member of SAGE warned back in February that the return of unvaccinated children to the classroom would create a “significant risk of a resurgence” of Covid infections. This was not the case – only 0.06% of rapid Covid tests of students produced positive results in the week that schools reopened. But how many of these results were actually positive? Professor Jon Deeks, a biostatistician from the University of Birmingham, said in March: “We would expect far more false positives than true positives amongst those testing positive in schools.” New data from the Department of Health and Social Care has now confirmed that more false positive results were produced than true positives in the first two weeks of school testing.
Department of Health and Social Care
This data, as Professor Deeks points out, is a damning indictment of the use of rapid Covid testing in schools and has resulted in many children having to isolate at home unnecessarily – with their classmates often being sent home too. (At one stage, more than 200,000 schoolchildren were having to self-isolate, forcing them to miss out on much-needed catch-up work in classes.)
[The] proportion[s] false were 62% and 55% in these two weeks.
Of 2,304 positive tests, 1,353 were likely false, with one positive per 6,900 tests done.
The use of PCR tests to confirm or (in more cases) deny lateral flow test results is itself a strange choice, as Lockdown Sceptics’ Will Jones points out, and could mean that the true impact of rapid testing in schools is even worse than this data suggests.
It is interesting that they assume confirmation from a PCR test defines true and false positives, even though PCR tests are more sensitive than LFTs so are no less likely to give a positive from fragments or contamination. What if in some cases the PCR tests are just confirming the false positive of the lateral flow tests?
The British Medical Journal has been warning against the use of PCR tests for “case finding, mass screening, and disease surveillance” since last September (if not before):
PCR is not a test of infectiousness. Rather, the test detects trace amounts of viral genome sequence, which may be either live transmissible virus or irrelevant RNA fragments from previous infection. When people with symptoms or who have been recently exposed receive a positive PCR result they will probably be infectious. But a positive result in someone without symptoms or known recent exposure may be from live or dead virus, and so does not determine whether the person is infectious and able to transmit the virus to others.
Clearly, testing requirements for schools must now change. But the problem is not limited to the classroom. Professor Deeks says that false positive data should now be released for all forms of lateral flow testing.
An exclusive interview with Dr Mike Yeadon
By Oliver May | The Daily Expose | April 25, 2021
Dr Yeadon, a former vice-president and chief scientific officer of the Allergy and Respiratory department at Pfizer, who has also provided a simple explanation of why lockdowns could never have worked, went on to explain that there is “zero” chance of incessantly reported new variants escaping immunity.
The 60-year-old, convinced the UK reached herd immunity last May, is now looking to move to Florida, where he hopes to work alongside Governor Ron DeSantis. He has expressed his severe concern over vaccine passports, saying that not only do healthy people under 60 not need a Covid 19 vaccine, but that the introduction of certification could lead to a society whereby, without such a pass, you may not even be permitted to leave your house.
In a passionate exclusive interview with The Daily Expose, he also criticised former Conservative MP Edwina Currie for her “uninformed” scattergun comments on Good Morning Britain in which she said she would not want anyone unvaccinated anywhere near her.
Dr Yeadon said:
“I know enough about biotechnology to know that you can easily create, shall we say, pathogens, which don’t look like they’re related to what you’ve done. And what’s even more horrifying is you can separate them in time, so an injection which will later make you ill or kill you can be separated by design in time from that event. So you might die a year later of liver cancer or something and you wouldn’t connect that. And if you can imagine making a smorgasbord of different pathogens so not everybody is going to die of the same thing, you literally could do away with big slices of the population if you want. And we could all be running around like headless chickens. This is an attempt on global depopulation.
“I think vaccine passports are a gateway to numerous things and it is my belief that it will be a gateway to mass killing, in the billions. And the reason I say that is many of the key players, including Bill Gates and his father and Boris Johnson and his father, have all been maniacal – and possibly correct – about earth being overpopulated. Even if we said to people can you stop having children, the population would only start to fall in about 100 years. If you got birth rates down below replacement, it would still take a century given each new birth will probably live out 100 years.
“I accept the argument that, if we are on the verge of destroying the planet, the ecosystem and its non-renewables and biodiversity, if these things are true then, I’m not saying I endorse it, I can see the argument of ‘do you know what, the only possible way to save the earth is to get rid of 90 per cent of the people and then it will be a nice place to live’.
“I think a group of people over decades have said to each other, ‘this is an awful task that has fallen to us, which is to rescue the human species and its planet and there is no other way of doing it except for mass extermination. And it’s not something that anybody would want to do but we have to do it and it’s got to happen in this generation and these are the technological advances required’.
“There are some clever people who have taken it upon themselves to basically do God’s work and to do a violent readjustment of the population of the world to put it into a position where, once it sorts itself out from this utter bloody disaster, will be a place where 500million people maybe will be living on the planet and they can have comfortable sustainable lives with plenty of space, plenty of room for the animals. I will not support what they’re doing but that would provide a justification for those who are doing it.”
Dr Yeadon believes the proof lies in the correlation between deaths and the rollout of vaccines which have been rushed through via an Emergency Use Authorisation. He said:
“If you look at every regional health authority, they tick up on the same day, they peak at the same day and drop back in the same way and that’s because they’re sycned to vaccination. If it was the spreading of an epidemic, it could not possibly occur in Auchtermuchty on the same day as Aldershot. It can’t, it has to move.
“But the thing that moved was the vaccination squads. They started on December 8 everywhere in the NHS and then in the care homes, so that was the strong clue for me that what was correlating with the time and cause of deaths was not a geographical history and neither were the differences in timing, it was just the date of vaccination.
“Can it be stopped? I am not optimistic about the UK because as time has gone on there are fewer of me and most people have just put their heads down. I am fortunate in a number of ways, I have the breadth of a full career behind me and I love science and biology. There is nothing I can be fired from and I’m not doing it for money, so I can only be stopped if they arrest me or kill me.
“But I don’t fear for my life. It’s over anyway. This is not going to return to normal. It would be pointless. There is no way, with the amount of damage that has been done deliberately, would it then just be left. It would just be dumb. It would make no sense at all to have marched people up to the top of the hill and then say, ‘you can go back now’. And remember the drum beats for vaccine passports are very strong. And once that’s in then if they can transition an absolute majority that they already have who will be so delighted with their privileges, beeping their phones when they go in and out of shops, they are not going to pay any attention to someone like me who says, ‘excuse me what about the unvaccinated’?
“They will say, ‘well don’t you know, you’re the unclean people, you’re the ones brewing the variants, you’re going to kill us. Can you just go away or I might feel that I have to kill you’. I expect vaccine passport will come in and those who have already been vaccinated will whoop for joy, a large number of people yet to be vaccinated will rush to get vaccinated because they will see their horizons will be shrunk and they simply won’t realise they are being herded like cattle into a pen.
“I would fear next winter being an unvaccinated person in this country, there will be additional orchestrated events. They will need that in order to drive people to top-up vaccines. I’ve decided I’m not going to stop the fight, I’m going to leave the country. I’ll go wherever I have to because it’s not going to be safe for unvaccinated people indefinitely.”
Top-up vaccines is another thing that frightens Dr Yeadon, who highlighted the fact that these too will forego any further safety checks. He added that the driver for these will come in the form of new variants, which he says are barely any different from the original sequence.
“As soon as they started talking about it [new variants] I went to look at the source material and found that the variants most different from the Wuhan sequence are still 99.7 per cent identical. “And I can assure you that there is zero – not just implausible, but zero – chance something that would escape the immunity of someone who was immune from natural infection or vaccinated. It’s absolutely impossible, no matter what they tell you.
“We know for example that Sars 2003 is 20 per cent different – not 0.3, 180 times different – and the immune system has absolutely no trouble in recognising the two as brothers. I have empirical evidence, theoretical evidence and yet, countering that, we are being told by Sage, politicians, people around the world that you need these variant vaccines. We’ve closed our borders, we’re smashing our economy and depriving people of their liberty over the theoretical concern about variants, which is a lie. And now we are making variant vaccines. I became terrified when I knew they were actually making them and not just talking about it – and when all the large medicine regulators of the world put out a joint statement saying that, because vaccine variants are so similar to the parents from which they’re derived, we will not require the manufacturers to conduct any clinical safety studies.
“I have spoken to eight professors in the UK whose discipline includes immunology and they all agree with my analysis in terms of the technical side of it. Three months ago my fear levels went into the red and I begged them, ‘people like you have go to start writing letters to editors and getting pieces into the papers that this b******t about variants is fake because people are going to believe it’. Carl Heneghan [director of evidence based medicine at Oxford University] said that the world is in such a sort of panic at the moment, anything he could say would not have any breakthrough power at all.
“We’ve been trained to think that if anyone raises any question at all about vaccines, you automatically think ‘anti-vaxxer’. I’ve spent my entire professional career in the industry that produces these things. I would say I’m extremely pro innovative medicines. I don’t have an anti bloody anything in my body except I’m anti unsafe medicines. Why have we got vaccines that clearly are much more dangerous than other public health prophylactic vaccines, because they are if you just compare the number of people that have died within a month with the number of reported deaths after all other vaccines – it’s like 10 times worse.
“There have been 10 times more deaths from within a couple of months of any covid vaccination than in the entire year for all other vaccines combined. Most vaccines are very safe but there are rare idiosyncratic responses including fatal ones and I’m afraid that does happen. You might just drop dead tomorrow going out to your car. But as long as the numbers are very, very small it’s tolerable, because there is a benefit to it. But what we have here is that, even if the people being given the vaccines were at risk – and a lot of them are not – anyone 60 or younger who is in good physcial shape and does not have serious prior chronic conditions is not going to be killed by this virus, they’re just not. It’s unethical even to bloody offer it to them. There is no logic to the statement that we need to vaccinate everybody in order to stop this, it’s just nonsense.
“Now if Edwina Currie is vaccinated then she is fine. She might sincerely believe what she’s saying in which case she’s just uninformed and nuts. I’m sure lots of MPs have just been given the brief and they’re not very clever. I’ve personally spoken to about 60. Several get it reasonably well but some of them are just embarrassing.”
Reports have surfaced in the past week that trials mean venues might be able to open to capacity audiences on June 21, in keeping with the Government’s roadmap – but only if people agree to Covid passports. Dr Yeadon believes that introducing such a system will create a two-tier society and one which can be tweaked at a moment’s notice depending on the Government’s wishes.
Dr Yeadon said:
“There is absolutely no chance whatsoever that Westminster will save the people. They are the tools of our destruction. They will vote vaccine passports through, even those who know these are horrible things. They’ll be told it’s temporary and get their pat on the shoulder. But of course they won’t be temporary.
“For example, you might even be told as from next month it will be illegal to leave your house without a valid vaccine passport. That’s how easy it would be. We are following “the science”, capital T, capital S. I’m not saying they will do that but they can exclude non-vaccinated people from civil society wholly and that is what is happening in Israel. Once this system comes in I cannot see a way in which it can be undone. They might say initially you can’t enter a sports ground or a large shopping complex, but then in a couple of weeks they might say, ‘as of Tuesday all large supermarkets will use vaccine passports on the door’, so that’s them out. And eventually they can say, ‘as from Wednesday week, all cashless transactions must be preceded by demonstration of a vaccine pass’ – so you can’t even fill your car with petrol. It could happen.
“The idea would be for me to be in America, educating and essentially immunising populations and politicians against what is happening, so that when they’re told next time that you need to lock down your businesses and your state, they won’t. That’s the goal. My preferred one would be to go and work for either Governor DeSantis or his scientific advisory team.”
Dr Yeadon has criticised his peers for failing to speak out against the problems he sees with following only one line of enquiry. He explains that the UK’s official figures of 4,395,703 positive cases and 127,000 simply cannot be believed due to the countless levels of contamination in testing and the unprecedented change in how deaths are certified.
He said:
“I am disappointed that almost no one in the scientific community has said anything. What about recently retired professors, people who are not being paid by universities, why aren’t you saying something? Is it cowardice? Death certification has been radically changed in a way that has never been done anywhere for any disease. And we have never used PCR on an industrial scale and it is my opinion – confirmed by people who do this professionally – that it could never be done reliably. So whatever they tell you it’s a lie. You cannot run three quarters of a million PCR tests and not have cross contamination all over the place.
“Why were the doctors not complaining about the death certification? If you have a positive in this ropey test at any time 28 days up to your death then that is on your death certificate. It’s just not even logical. It’s like saying if you had biro on your finger at any point 28 days prior to your death, we’ll say you died of biro ink poisoning. It’s absurd. But they went along with it.”
And he has a message for those who no doubt once would have agreed that you cannot trust a politician but who know hang on their every word.
“If you spot an inconsistency, something you think, ‘that doesn’t sound right’, pursue it, because if you pursue it to a point where you think, ‘I’m not being told the truth’ – which you’re not – once you spot that, then the question would be, ‘if your Government has lied to you about one thing, don’t you think it’s quite likely it has lied to you about other things?’ I believe they are lying to you about everything.
“Let’s look at pubs; you can only take a drink outside and you can only pay for it outside. Hold on, have the supermarkets not been open continuously through this process? Sometimes it’s really busy and you might be in the shop an hour. Isn’t that an inconsistency? And why are we OK with that? I don’t believe that any outbreaks have ever been linked to a supermarket. And that is another odd one. That’s about the only place you meet. Surely all the outbreaks that aren’t linked to hospitals and care homes must be linked to common places of commerce and they are supermarkets and essential shops – there aren’t any others, none.”
And he uses supermarkets in his insight as to why lockdowns are pointless; in a nutshell, if you are full of virus, you feel very ill, so you would be at home, curled up on the sofa, in bed or in hospital. If not, you do not have enough virus in your body to be a threat of transmission. Indeed, a global study, cited by Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, to a court in Manitoba, found that asymptomatic transmission is close to zero in an outside setting, given it is about 0.7 per cent inside.
Dr Yeadon says:
“We will lock down again. They will want to do it as early as possible, so October.
“But the reason why lockdowns could never have worked is combined with one of the other lies, asymptomatic transmission. The reason it’s a lie is that, in order to be a good source of infection, you need to have lots of virus in your body. If you’ve only got a little bit, the chances that you would infect another person is very low, even if you were close to them – maybe even if you kissed them – you just don’t have that much virus in and around your body.
“But if you had a thousand times more virus, maybe you could put a droplet on a person and they might inhale it or whatever. But if you have lots of virus you must have symptoms. You cannot have a situation where your body is growing huge amounts of virus in the airwaves and producing no symptoms and this is because the virus will attack you, it’s damaging your tissues, every cell it multiplies in and then escapes from is destroyed. It’s not just a theory, it’s inevitable you will have symptoms. And furthermore you need symptoms like coughing in order to propel infected droplets out of your body. They don’t come out when you’re just passively breathing. If you have lots of virus and it’s attacking you and making you ill and your immune system is fighting it back, which is also making you feel ill, those symptoms are called ‘I don’t feel well’.
“So if you’re a good source of infection, you’re symptomatic, you don’t feel well, you probably feel very ill, possibly bad enough to be in your bed and we’re giving you chicken soup and cups of tea every few hours. And if you’re a bit older you might be in hospital. But what you’re not going to be doing is dashing up and down the aisles in Sainsbury’s. Or sitting in the pub. You’re ill. So that’s the whole point. In the general community, almost no one who met the conditions to be pretty sure of infection was out there. It’s just simply not possible. You need to be full of virus, you need to get the symptoms to get the stuff out of your body but you need to be completely unwell despite those two things.
“And those things do not overlap, you can’t have ‘feeling fine out and about, looking normal but full of virus’. And we are trained to notice if someone has a cold or they look ill. We have known this stuff for tens of thousands of years. You can spot someone who is a respiratory threat to you. It’s very uncommon for people with good sources of infection to be walking about in the community and, even if they were there, you would usually avoid them. And as a result hardly any transmission occurred in the general population. And as a result shutting down the general population made f**k all difference to transmission. And that is why lockdowns don’t work and they never did. They never worked anywhere because lockdown isn’t really lockdown, it just smashes the economy.”
Parents, Please Read This. It Could Save Your Child’s Life.
By Richie Allen | April 29, 2021
Public Health England has admitted that it did not consider’ the negative health impacts of requiring children to wear face masks during lessons. Parents, read that again. And again.
In documents seen by The Telegraph newspaper, the watchdog acknowledged that it; “expressly did not consider any potential disbenefits of the policy.”
I’ll put it more plainly. The organisation charged with looking after the health and wellbeing of children, didn’t give a fuck about whether masks might harm them. Mind-boggling isn’t it?
Christine Brett, the co-founder of the parent group UsForThem told The Telegraph :
“It beggars belief that the Government has recommended secondary school children wear face coverings for up to eight hours a day without the usual rigour of an public health intervention imposed on a healthy population.
There is increasing evidence of masks being harmful to children’s health, welfare and impacting on their ability to learn, develop and communicate.”
The evidence is overwhelming, not increasing. There isn’t a shred of data, to support the claim that wearing a mask reduces transmission. The government and its scientific advisers have known this from day one.
When you accept that they know facemasks are both useless and highly dangerous, you must then ask, why have they mandated them? That’s a place most people don’t want to go.
I’m telling you now, that if you are a parent and you consent to your children wearing a mask at school or anywhere else for that matter, you are putting them in grave danger.
The government doesn’t give a shit about the welfare of your children. Public Health England couldn’t be bothered to investigate the possible harms before claiming that kids should wear masks.
Only you can stand up for your child. Do it. Today. What are you waiting for?
Lavrov Calls Out Perfidious Albion in EU Diplomat Spat
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | April 28, 2021
Britain is fomenting a diplomatic crisis between the European Union and Russia, according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Evidence and precedent indicate Lavrov has his sight well-trained.
The British establishment’s notorious ability for machination and intrigue – hence the ancient moniker Perfidious Albion – can be seen as stirring the escalating row between the European Union and Russia in which diplomats are being expelled pell-mell.
This week, Russia ordered the withdrawal of representatives from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia. That came in response to the expulsion of Russian diplomats from those countries. Russia has also ordered home more diplomats from the Czech Republic. Poland and Italy have also been caught up in diplomatic antagonism with Moscow.
The row blew up last week when the Czech Republic accused Russian state agents of being responsible for twin explosions on its territory back in 2104. The blasts caused the deaths of two workers at an ammunition depot near the village of Vrbetice close to the border with Slovakia. Until recently, the Czech authorities had concluded that the explosions were an industrial accident.
What prompted the Czechs to revise their ideas and to now blame Russia for sabotage is the interpolation of Britain in providing “new information”. Specifically, it was the MI6-sponsored media group Bellingcat (a so-called private investigatory agency) which appears to have furnished the disinformation which purports to show the involvement of Russian military intelligence (GRU). Incredibly, the British claim their “evidence” shows that two of the GRU agents were also the same individuals who were alleged to have been involved in poisoning the Russian traitor-spy Sergei Skripal in England in 2018. The British claim to have passport information to support their claims, but such methodology is rife with forgery – a black art that the British are all-too skilled at.
On leveling the accusation against Russia, the Czech Republic then ordered the expulsion of 18 Russian diplomats. Moscow responded angrily, saying that the claims of sabotage were a “dirty fabrication” and pointing out that Prague did not provide any information for verification. Russia took swift reciprocal action by banishing 20 Czech diplomats from its territory.
However, the row continues to flare with the Baltic states entering the fray by banning Russian officials in “solidarity” with the Czech Republic. The move by the Baltic states is predictable as they are supercharged by anti-Russian political sentiment. It’s a case of any excuse for them to inflame relations.
The dispute comes at a fraught time when the European Union is discussing imposing more sanctions on Russia over wider concerns about the conflict in Ukraine, the imprisonment of blogger Alexei Navalny and a Russian security crackdown on Navalny’s shadowy Western-backed “opposition” network.
The skirmishing over diplomats is a convenient way to further damage relations between the EU and Russia, especially as the strategically important Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline project nears completion – a project that Washington wants to eviscerate for its own selfish commercial reasons. Uncle Sam’s junior partner Britain may be obliging in that regard and thus trying to curry favor for garnering an American trade deal in the post-Brexit world.
Certainly, Russia’s top diplomat Sergei Lavrov is clear about the stealthy British hand in recent events. In a media interview this week, Lavrov mentioned the United Kingdom in wary terms, saying: “As far as the relations between Russia and Europe are concerned, I still believe that the UK is playing an active and a very serious subversive role. It withdrew from the European Union, but we see no decrease in its activities on this track. On the contrary, they are trying to influence EU member states’ approaches to Russia to the maximum possible extent.”
It should be recalled that Britain has played a starring duplicitous role in demonizing Russia and poisoning international relations.
It was Bellingcat (MI6) that pushed the narrative that Russia was complicit in the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner in 2014 over Eastern Ukraine with the loss of nearly 300 lives. Based on British “evidence” (which has been debunked as fabrication), a Dutch investigation into the disaster has accused Russia. That affair has hardened European prejudices against Russia which has fomented the imposition of sanctions.
It was a former British MI6 operative Christopher Steele who was instrumental in promoting the Russiagate dossier around 2016 which destroyed bilateral relations between the United States and Russia, and which continues to fuel fabrications about Moscow’s interference in American and European politics (even those Steele’s “dirty dossier” is a risible load of rubbish and has been debunked).
And it was the Skripal saga in Salisbury in March 2018 which Britain hatched to further poison international relations with Russia. That saga – with no proof against Russia – has become a concocted “standard proof” for the subsequent saga of “poisoning” the blogger conman Alexei Navalny. Western governments and media refer to the “Kremlin plot” to kill Skripal as “evidence” for another “Kremlin plot” to assassinate Navalny. This is tantamount to one fiction being used to prove another fiction. The same saga is now feeding into the Czech explosion row. And it all comes back to the devious ingenuity of Perfidious Albion.
Foreign Minister Lavrov added a further incisive comment on the role of Britain. He said: “At the same time, you know, they send us signals, they propose establishing contacts. This means, they do not shy away from communication [with Russia], but try to discourage others. Again, probably [this can be explained by] their desire to have a monopoly of these contacts and again prove that they are superior to others.”
The British establishment likes to boast that they “punch above their weight” in terms of influence beyond their territorial size. It’s not hard to see how they manage such a feat. It’s called duplicity, intrigue, lies, and dividing and ruling. Perfidious Albion par excellence.
Why Can’t the Government be More Transparent About the Data Guiding its Decisions?
By Professor Anthony A. Fryer | Lockdown Sceptics | April 27, 2021
When I look back over the last year or so of the pandemic, I can forgive the first couple of months. We were all finding our feet with a largely unknown entity. However, as a clinical scientist with over 30 years in NHS laboratories and as an academic researcher with over 200 peer-reviewed clinical research articles in scientific and medical journals (including over 130 involving use of the polymerase chain reaction [PCR]), I found my views increasingly divergent from those of the Government and its advisors. Those who know me will know that it takes a lot to get me annoyed, but I could not sit by and do nothing when I could see the immense damage being done to countless lives and businesses in the name of supposedly protecting us from SARS-CoV-2.
But let me say at the start; I am not one to deny the damage that COVID-19 can do. (And I deliberately use that term, rather than SARS-CoV-2. It’s the disease that causes the problems – most people manage the virus without much difficulty.) COVID-19 can be very nasty and my heart goes out to all those affected. But the way in which the Government handled the pandemic has, in my view, been shocking. It’s felt like it has focused blindly on the virus (and not very well at that either – just think about PPE in care homes for a start) and ignored the massive implications on every other level.
So I wrote. I wrote letters to the local paper, emailed the Chief Medical Officer, submitted evidence to a Parliamentary Inquiry, signed the Great Barrington Declaration, published scientific papers on the ineffectiveness of face coverings and on the non-Covid harms to people with diabetes, and wrote to my MP. Several times. I also joined UsforThem and the Health Advisory and Recovery Team (HART).
Back in October 2020, I wrote one of my letters to my MP, Fiona Bruce, raising a number of concerns about the Government’s handling of the pandemic, and requesting that she raise these concerns with the powers that be on my behalf. While the letter was written as a member of the public, I felt that my expertise and experience put me in a position to comment in a way that perhaps others couldn’t.
In the letter, I highlighted three main concerns:
1. Evidence. That measures to reduce the spread of coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 were introduced without evidence to support them.
2. Context. That such measures were generating more harms than those caused by the virus itself, and this was not being reflected in a balanced way in the press briefings, including in the figures presented, thereby creating an atmosphere of fear.
3. Testing. That the way in which testing data has been presented had been misleading to the public and media. This area was of particular concern to me, given my clinical and research experience in the field.
In respect of the above three areas, I requested the following of my MP:
1. Please could you lobby that scientific evidence underpinning decisions is provided with all future communications.
2. I would ask that you raise this with the Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Health as a matter of urgency to ensure that contextual information is co-presented at press briefings for comparison.
3. I would be grateful if you could impress upon the Secretary of State for Health, the Chief Medical Officers and the Chief Scientific Officer to present adjusted data in a more balanced way to reflect the major difference in rates of cases now with those in April.
… and…
I would request that you (i) ask the Secretary of State for Health to ensure that all positive tests are repeated before labelling an individual as positive, and (ii) that the estimated one third of deaths attributed to COVID-19 because of a SARS-CoV-2 positive test, but where the cause of death was not COVID-19, be removed from the figures.
On April 13th 2021, some six months later, the reply arrived, along with a letter from Lord Bethell (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Health and Social Care), dated April 7th.
The response, which you can read here, was both enlightening and disheartening, if not unexpected.
Here is my commentary on the response from Lord Bethell, passed on by my MP:
Evidence
Lord Bethell referred to the release of papers and minutes from SAGE, presumably to exemplify the evidence underpinning the decisions to implement mitigation measures. The complete lack of credibility of anything coming from SAGE notwithstanding, this is hardly an independent assessment of the evidence underpinning the Government’s decisions.
To me, anyone with any scientific nous could present a fairly long list of actions that the Government has taken without first presenting clear evidence to indicate their effectiveness and an evidence-based risk-assessment of potential non-Covid harms. The “Rule of Six”, the 10pm curfew, face coverings (anywhere, let alone in schools), lockdowns (in any of its many guises, including Tiers), etc, etc, etc. Where is the assessment of non-Covid physical and mental health harms, economic impact, or the effect on our children’s education and wellbeing? Or even evidence on reducing transmission of the virus itself, for that matter?
All we have seem to have seen is exaggerated figures predicting doomsday scenarios, mostly based on modelling rather than actual data, none of which have come to pass. These seem only aimed at scaring the public into following their non-evidence-based guidelines (an approach which, to me, could itself have a potentially significant negative mental health impact).
Context
In terms of presenting COVID-19 data in a wider context, Lord Bethell’s response seemed silent on this one. I am still waiting to hear a press conference which presents the non-Covid harms that we are hearing about all the time in the scientific literature, from the mental health sector, from education, from the business world and from thousands of individual stories.
We are instead presented with advertising campaigns which tell us to “act like you have it”. Not only is that completely illogical – if we all took that literally, society would stop. All of it. No hospitals, no supermarkets, no police, nothing. We’d all be at home self-isolating. But it verging on emotional blackmail. Please give the public some respect and allow them to make responsible decisions.
Testing
The third area covered three distinct points:
- Comparing like with like. A request to not compare figures in October with those in April when testing levels were at a much lower level.
- False positives. A request to define positive ‘cases’ accurately by correctly addressing the issue of false positives.
- ‘With’, not ‘from’. A request to exclude deaths where COVID-19 was not the cause of death from the figures for COVID-associated deaths.
a. Comparing like with like. On the first of these, it’s hard to identify whether Lord Bethell had anything to say on this. He didn’t address it directly. My point focused on the unbalanced way figures were presented back in October which, in my view, presented to the public another doomsday, worst-case scenario to frighten them into compliance with Government wishes. Models presenting huge potential death tolls, all of which were subsequently shown to be out by orders of magnitude.
b. False positives. On the second point, Lord Bethell’s response went into some detail, the content of which itself seemed to either miss the point, or indeed add fuel to my initial concern.
On the positive side, there were some admissions about the PCR test. For example, his response stated: “We are also aware that when PCR test detects viral material it does not indicate that the virus is intact and infectious.” So a positive test doesn’t equate to infectiousness, or even having the virus at all. That’s obvious. It’s just a pity this isn’t mentioned in any of the press briefings along with an evidence-based assessment of its impact on the figures. “Positive tests”, “infections” and “cases” are used interchangeably.
Regarding the PCR test cycle threshold (Ct), he also acknowledged that “…values obtained in this way are semi-quantitative, meaning they do not measure the precise quantity of the virus…” He focuses on the small number of samples with a cycle threshold of over 37. I would be interested in what proportion are above 27, as there is increasing evidence that test samples above this level are significantly less likely to be infectious (and have a much higher false positive risk). Indeed, some data published by the Oxford Group based on the UK’s COVID-19 Infection Survey illustrated that the vast majority of ‘positive’ PCR tests have a Ct value of >27 (Pritchard et al. Impact of vaccination on SARS-CoV-2 cases in the community: a population-based study using the UK’s COVID-19 Infection Survey). So most of the positive tests contain low levels of virus (if any) and the risk of transmission is small.
But even taking Lord Bethell’s Ct cut-off, his comments on test specificity are particularly revealing. He acknowledges that, “Like any diagnostic test, there is a possibility of a false negative or false positive result”, but goes on to say, “but this is very small”. He states that: “Independent, confirmatory testing of positive samples indicates a test specificity that exceeds 99.3%, meaning the false positive rate is less than 1%.”
My HART colleague Dr Claire Craig did some sums on this. At a false positive rate of 0.7%, there would have been 8,700 false positives and 6,200 true positives for the week beginning April 12th on PCR. In other words, 58% of the positives would have been false. If we include the Lateral Flow Tests, then 70% of the cases would have been false positive that week.
My real question is, why are the ‘case’ figures not revised downwards accordingly, or at least the impact of false positives explained at the briefings?
c. “With”, not “from”. On the third point, Lord Bethell made some valid points, though their interpretation was a little off kilter. My concern related to the definition of the figures used to define Covid-associated deaths in official figures. In my mind there were three ways these could be derived; (i) those where the cause of death was primarily COVID-19 (“from” Covid), (ii) those where the person had a SARS-CoV-2, or even COVID-19, but where this was not the cause of death (“with” Covid), and (iii) those who had a false positive test for SARS-CoV-2 (i.e., did not actually have the virus or COVID-19 when they died).
My view was that these latter two would over-estimate the figures for Covid-associated deaths and should be excluded (though I acknowledge that separating the first two from each other can sometimes be difficult in clinical practice). Lord Bethell rightly pointed out three other possible scenarios that could theoretically cause an under-estimate of the figures. Firstly, those who “had COVID-19 but had not been tested”, secondly, those who had “tested positive only via a non-NHS or PHE laboratory” so their positive result was not recorded on their death certificate, and thirdly, those who “had tested negative and subsequently caught the virus and died”. He also acknowledged that it is possible that my options (ii) and (iii) above are plausible scenarios: “It is true that people who have tested positive for COVID 19 could, in a few cases, have died from something else.” (His phrasing is interesting here – I wonder if he realises that PCR is not a test for the disease, COVID-19, but for the virus, SARS-CoV-2?) It is saddening that he feels the need to qualify the option that overestimates death with the phrase “in a few cases”, but not his three scenarios that might lead to under-counting, despite the likelihood that these have much less impact on the figures.
Have we moved on since October?
My feeling is that we have moved on in some areas. Now we have the vast majority of susceptible individuals vaccinated (one of the few success stories), a huge number of people who are resistant or immune, herd immunity, and a whole range of effective treatments (and that’s excluding the two magic pills we are promised by autumn). This should mean that we are completely back to normal – no masks, no distancing, no sanitisers – and focusing on how we can help those in other countries to get to the same place, and recovering from the damage caused by the mitigation measures.
But sadly we still don’t get anything high profile (e.g. in Government briefings) on my areas of concern. Nothing on the evidence underpinning the Government’s decisions, nothing on non-Covid harms, nothing on the impact of false positives on “cases” and Covid-associated deaths. And still, millions of people in the UK suffer needlessly. An apology would be nice.
In the first paragraph of his response, Lord Bethell states that “we are committed to open sharing of the scientific advice that guides our response to COVID-19 where possible”. I am yet to be convinced.
Dr Anthony Fryer is Professor of Clinical Biochemistry at the Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine at Keele University and member of HART and is writing in a personal capacity.
“The UK Currently Operates a System of Informed Consent for Vaccinations.” Currently, Minister?
By Will Jones • Lockdown Sceptics • April 27,2021
Dr Helen Westwood, a GP whose previous letters and comments have appeared on Lockdown Sceptics, wrote to her MP Sir Graham Brady in March with some concerns about the vaccines and the potential for coercion. She has now received a reply from Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi that is far from reassuring.
Here’s what she wrote.
Dear Sir Graham,
Firstly I wish to thank you again for your ongoing hard work in arguing for a more proportionate response to dealing with COVID-19. The concerns I wish to raise with you today relate to the vaccination program and the proposition of vaccination certificates.
As you know I am a GP. I am horrified by the talk of ‘No Jab, No Job’ policies and vaccination certificates.
The GMC are very clear that “all patients have the right to be involved in decisions about their treatment and care” and that “doctors must be satisfied that they have a patient’s consent… before providing treatment or care”. They also state “doctors must… share relevant information about the benefits and harms of proposed options and reasonable alternatives, including the option to take no action”.
Following interim analysis of the ongoing clinical trials, emergency use authorisation has been granted by the MHRA for both the Pfizer BioNTech and the AstraZeneca vaccines. They are as yet unlicensed. The clinical trials are due to continue until 2023. I find it alarming that much attention is paid to the headline figures of relative risk reduction (RRR) with no mention of the absolute risk reduction (ARR). The RRR of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine is 95.1% (CI 90.0%-97.6%, p=0.016). Dig a little deeper into the data and you learn that the ARR is only 0.7% (CI 0.59%-0.83%, p<0.001) and the number needed to vaccinate in order to prevent one infection is 142 (CI 122-170).
The WHO published a bulletin written by John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, in October 2020. He quotes an infection fatality rate (IFR) for Covid of 0.00-0.57% and in those under the age of 70 it stands at 0.05%.
Given the minimal risk healthy people under the age of 70 face, and the very small absolute risk reductions noted in the clinical trials, I have to ask why are we so desperate to vaccinate the whole population? For healthy, working age people Covid poses less of a risk than seasonal flu. It has never been proposed that we vaccinate the entire adult population against flu; we target the populations most at risk.
The speed at which these vaccines have been developed is truly remarkable. However, I have grave concerns that they are being rolled out on such a scale and at such pace. I am not sure whether you are familiar with the work of Joel Smalley MBA (a member of HART) but he has done some very interesting analysis of mortality data. Whilst correlation (between vaccination administration and rises in mortality) absolutely does not mean causation, the striking patterns he has highlighted suggest to me that now is the time to pause and reflect on the data we have so far. We know from the clinical trials that the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine causes a drop in lymphocytes around seven days post administration; theoretically at least this could pose a risk of intercurrent infection, especially in frail patients.
Both vaccines in current use in England employ novel technology, namely mRNA (Pfizer BioNTech) and Adenovirus vector (AZ). Human challenge studies have only recently begun. We do not currently know anything about the medium and long term safety of these vaccines. There are concerns about Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) reactions whereby vaccinated individuals may develop more severe disease upon exposure to the wild virus. Theoretical concerns have also been raised about potential cross reactivity with Syncytin-1 which could have effects on placental development and therefore fertility. Until these areas have been studied we cannot advise patients fully. This has significant implications for the informed consent process.
There seems to be some enthusiasm for “vaccination passports” among the population, whether for domestic use or international travel. These have been compared to Yellow Fever certificates that are required for individuals travelling to certain destinations. In reality there is no comparison. The mortality rate for Yellow Fever is in the region of 30%, transmission of Yellow Fever is confined to a relatively small number of countries and there are long term safety data available regarding the licensed vaccine.
Uptake of the Covid vaccine has been notably lower amongst certain ethnic minorities. The reasons for this are as yet unclear, but any policy requiring proof of vaccination has the potential to lead to indirect discrimination.
Professor Chris Whitty has said that doctors and care workers have a “professional responsibility” to get vaccinated. Given that reduction of transmission is not an outcome that is being measured in the clinical trials that are still ongoing, I do not agree with him. Article 6 of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights states: “Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice.”
On November 4th 2020 Theresa May MP made a speech in the House of Commons. She was referring to the closure of places of worship when she said, “My concern is that the Government today making it illegal to conduct an act of public worship, for the best of intentions, sets a precedent that could be misused by a Government in future with the worst of intentions, and that has unintended consequences.” I fear the same could be said for the introduction of vaccination passports.
Personally I have declined this vaccine because of the concerns outlined above. I hope this decision does not mean I am unable to work, visit a restaurant or travel.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Helen Westwood
Here is Nadhim Zahawi’s response, passed on to Dr Westood by Sir Graham Brady.
This is how Dr Westwood replied this week.
Dear Sir Graham,
Thank you for sending me the letter you received from Nadhim Zahawi MP, Minister for Business and Industry & Minister for COVID Vaccine Deployment in response to the representations you made to him on my behalf. I have attached his letter and my original email.
I must say I find his responses entirely unsatisfactory. He has failed to address any of my concerns. I know he is an intelligent man, so I can only assume that he has been deliberately disingenuous rather than not understanding the questions posed.
I am already aware of the processes involved in the development and testing of new drugs. I understand that Phases 2 and 3 are usually run sequentially but, given the urgency of this situation, a pragmatic decision was taken to run them in parallel. For elderly patients at increased risk from COVID-19 infection I can understand this approach. However, when the program is being rolled out to younger, healthy individuals whose risk-benefit ratio is entirely different, an alternative approach is required. It is imperative that individuals are not exposed to a greater risk of harm undergoing a medical intervention than the risk of not doing anything. Primum non nocere. Since my original email, significant concerns have been raised in a number of European countries about the risk of rare cerebral venous sinus thromboses associated with thrombocytopenia. Young, fit, healthy people who were at negligible risk of COVID-19 have tragically died.
Mr Zahawi has elected not to make any comment on the concerns I raised regarding rises in mortality in the immediate post-vaccination period. This is a pattern that has been repeated in multiple locations, currently most notably in India. I would like to know what research is being done by the UK Government to investigate this.
I note that Mr Zahawi referred to the fact that the UK “currently operates a system of informed consent for vaccinations”. I have two concerns regarding this statement. Firstly, how is the consent fully informed if we do not know the answers to the questions I have raised? I know from first hand experience that individuals attending for Covid vaccinations are not routinely being informed that the clinical trials are ongoing until 2023. Nor is the potential issue of antibody dependent enhancement being discussed. The advice for vaccinating pregnant women changes virtually day by day. Secondly, why does he need to use the word “currently”? Are there plans for mandatory vaccination in future? Already there are discussions about making vaccination compulsory for care home workers. In September 2019 the Guardian reported that Secretary of State for Health Matt Hancock was seriously considering making vaccinations compulsory for state school pupils. I defy anyone not to find this proposal chilling.
With regard to black, Asian and minority ethnic populations, again Mr Zahawi seems to have entirely missed my point. I was not arguing for the prioritisation of these groups; I was pointing out that uptake in these groups has been lower and therefore any certification system has the potential to lead to indirect discrimination.
I agree with Mr Zahawi that an effective vaccine is an excellent way to protect those that need protection, but it also needs to be safe. Given his failure to address the concerns I raised I can only assume he does not have answers to my questions.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Helen Westwood
UK Hiring COVID Marshals to Patrol Streets Until 2023 Despite Lockdown Restrictions Supposedly Ending in June
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | April 27, 2021
Government councils in the UK are hiring COVID Marshals to patrol streets from July until the end of 2023, despite the fact that all lockdown restrictions are supposed to end in June.
“A new army of Covid Marshals is being recruited for roles that could last until 2023 despite Government plans to lift all remaining restrictions on June 21,” reports the Telegraph.
“Councils around the country are advertising jobs that do not begin until July – several days after the supposed freedom day.”
One example is Hertfordshire County Council, which is “offering a contract of up to £3 million to firms that can supply 60 marshals from July 1 until January 31 next year.”
“The contract comes with a possible one-year extension, meaning marshals would still be patrolling until 2023,” states the report.
The Marshals will be tasked with ensuring “compliance” and helping the public understand “regulations and guidance,” despite the fact that all regulations are supposed to be terminated in 8 weeks time.
“We know that the virus is still circulating and will be for some time. We know from last year that numbers of infections can change rapidly, and Government are very clear that we should plan in case a third wave arises. It would be a dereliction of duty not to prepare for a third wave,” said Jim McManus, director of public health for Hertfordshire County Council.
Critics have accused the government of wasting taxpayer money by allowing councils to use government grants to fund the program.
“To start hiring people based on the situation we faced last year, before we had rolled out the vaccines, does seem to be a waste of public money,” said Mark Harper MP, Tory chairman of the Covid Recovery Group.
The fact that COVID Marshals will be patrolling the streets beyond June once again illustrates how the timetable to lift restrictions is completely phony.
Just like the UK government promised for months that it wouldn’t introduce vaccine passports while secretly funding their creation, the state has been caught lying yet again.
In all likelihood, fearmongering over a “third wave” of the virus, despite the UK vaccinating virtually all of its vulnerable population, will be used to reintroduce lockdown at the beginning of Autumn.
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Insanely disproportionate use of violence against unarmed civilians… continue
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