This document is part of an archive of postings by John Ray on Dissecting Leftism, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written.
This is a backup copy of the original blog
Below is the backup of this blog for January, 2023. To access the backups in earlier years, click here
31 January, 2023
Pfizer admits 'engineering' Covid mutants in lab studies to ensure its antiviral drug works on new variants — but pharma giant insists tests were not 'gain of function’ and did not pose risk to public
I am not too critical of this. The more we know about what the virus can do, the better. But they should probably have sought some form of approval for the work
Pfizer has admitted it ‘engineered’ mutated Covid viruses in lab tests to ensure its vaccine and drugs remained effective against new variants – but the company denies the experiments posed a risk to the public.
In a press release sneaked out on Friday night, the pharma giant finally responded to an undercover video that went viral last week in which a supposed director at the firm claimed the company was exploring 'directed evolution' research on monkeys to make the virus 'more potent'.
Jordon Trishton Walker, who appears to have been a senior staffer in Pfizer's research and development division, was caught making the explosive claim in a sting by the right-wing activist group Project Veritas.
Pfizer flatly denied conducting gain of function or directed evolution research on monkeys but admitted that ‘in a limited number of cases’ it altered the virus and tested new mutations against its Covid antiviral drug Paxlovid in Petri dishes.
The New York-based firm claims the experiments are essential to get ahead of drug-resistant strains and says similar tests are carried out by 'many companies and academic institutions in the US and around the world'.
But DailyMail.com spoke to several independent virologists and epidemiologists who were split about whether Pfizer's experiments posed a risk to the public.
Professor Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has been an outspoken advocate of the lab leak theory, the idea Covid escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
He told DailyMail.com that Pfizer's press release 'unequivocally' indicates that 'Pfizer and its collaborators performed... high-risk gain-of-function research and enhanced potential pandemic pathogens research'.
But Professor Ian Jones, a virologist at the University of Reading in the UK, told this website: 'I don't find it [Pfizer's statement] alarming for a number of reasons.'
Paxlovid works by blocking the virus from releasing an enzyme crucial for Covid to replicate when it enters the body, known as the 3CL protease, explained Professor Jones.
He said Pfizer's experiments involve looking at 'what changes to the sequence of the protease gene would be necessary to make the virus no longer sensitive to the drug'.
'So they make a range of mutations in the virus, led by computational predictions, and then culture that mutated virus in the drug to see if indeed it is no longer sensitive and if so by what degree,' he added.
150 experts call for gain-of-function research to CONTINUE
The group - mainly virologists and biologists from the US and the UK - argue the experiments are necessary to stop future outbreaks.
'Many of the mutants they make will not do anything, but some could make a Paxlovid-resistant virus. The risk would be that this could escape and spread, making the drug useless.
'My point is that such a virus remains unaltered in every other way, so the overall risk [of the virus being able to infect people and leaking from the lab] is very small.'
Professor Jones said this tiny risk is outweighed by the benefit of 'being ahead' of the virus' evolution in nature.
Professor Paul Hunter, an infectious disease expert at the University of East Anglia in the UK, also told DailyMail.com: 'The press release doesn’t cause me too much concern. 'To me, it doesn’t look like Pfizer is doing anything that isn’t being done by many other groups.'
His comments were echoed by Dr Simon Clarke, a microbiologist at the University of Reading. Dr Clarke told DailyMail.com: 'These are not experiments which might risk the generation of a new variant that transmits more readily between people.
'What Pfizer are doing is to look at how Covid becomes resistant to nirmatrelvir, a component of their PAXLOVID antiviral medicine. 'They are looking to see what mutations to the molecule that nirmatrelvir’s targets can make it resistant to the drug.
'This is important because scientists don’t fully understand how viruses might become resistant to nirmatrelvir.
'These sorts of experiments are routine in the development of new anti-infective drugs and are required by regulators around the world. 'Without this level of understanding, we could end up relying too heavily on drugs that rapidly become useless.'
Pfizer's response was released at 8pm on Friday, three days after the Project Veritas video was released, unleashing a frenzy on social media.
The post was also based out of the Pfizer Pearl River R&D facility, a research lab around 20 miles from New York.
It is the company's only biosafety level three (BSL-3) lab out of its nine major research and development sites in the US and UK.
BSL-3 labs are authorized to handle dangerous pathogens. Experiments at these labs often involve tinkering with animal viruses to advance treatments and vaccines that could be used in a future outbreak.
In BSL-3 labs, researchers do all experiments in a ‘biosafety cabinet’ — an enclosed, ventilated workspace for handling materials contaminated with pathogens.
Work on the live virus that causes Covid must be carried out at a BSL-3 or BSL-4 lab.
Pfizer denied that its work qualifies as gain of function, a loaded term that has become synonymous with questions about Covid's origin.
This type of research involves tinkering with viruses to make them more lethal or infectious - hoping to get ahead of a future outbreak and develop treatments.
The authors of two United Nations reports into the pandemic's origins say a laboratory leak was the most likely cause of Covid.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology - located just 8miles from where the first cluster of cases were detected - was carrying out similar research on bat coronaviruses in the years predating the pandemic using US taxpayer money.
The WIV received government grants through a subcontractor known as the EcoHealth Alliance.
Gain of function was largely restricted in the US until 2017 when the National Institutes of Health began to allow it to take place using government funds.
Research teams wanting to do gain of function research in the US using government grants must have their work approved by an independent review panel that decides whether the benefits outweigh the risks.
But Congress admits privately funded research by pharmaceutical companies are not subject to the same oversight.
Pfizer also claimed that its lab work was not 'directed evolution'. This research is intended to imitate the process of natural selection and push a virus' mutations down a certain path. It can be performed in living organisms - such as monkeys - or in vitro (in cells).
Pfizer did admit that it modified the original Covid virus to produce the spike protein of new variants to test them against its vaccine.
Most scientists agree this does not count as gain of function because the variants already exist in nature and infect people.
The grey area appears to be Pfizer's admission that it conducted 'in vitro resistance selection experiments' on its antiviral drug Paxlovid. In vitro resistance selection experiments involve predicting how a virus will mutate as it develops resistance to treatments.
Their purpose was to test which mutations would need to occur to the piece of the virus that Paxlovid targets to render it ineffective. But exactly what these experiments involve is unclear and Pfizer refused to comment again when approached by DailyMail.com today.
Pfizer's official release does not refer to Project Veritas or the alleged employee Mr Walker.
Instead, the statement opens with: 'Allegations have recently been made related to gain of function and directed evolution research at Pfizer and the company would like to set the record straight.'
It adds: 'In the ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research.'
But the company does admit to using the original Covid strain to express the spike protein of new variants of concern to test its vaccine.
'This work is undertaken once a new variant of concern has been identified by public health authorities.'
Most scientists endorsed this research because it helped governments assess how effective their vaccine rollouts would hold up against new variants like Omicron and Delta when those variants took off.
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30 January, 2023
Prestigious medical journal probes study that claimed Covid vaccines have killed up to 280,000 people in the US
I have read the journal article and can compare its methods with my own very extensive experience of survey research.
I was long of the view that online sampling is crap but it is so extensively used these days that I have to give it some credence. And this survey did employ extensive precautions to ensure that something like a true sample was obtained.
So the reported doubts about the conclusions would seem to be driven by their unpalatibility rather than any methodological problems. Prof Skidmore did carry out a careful survey by current standards.
His conclusions are probably on the whole at the better end of the available research. If his work is discredited an awful lot of other survey research would also go down in flames
And an alternative way of assessing the numbers was badly needed now we know -- largely courtesy of Elon Musk -- how much the official figures were "edited". American official figures for anything these days are about as trustworthy as the old Soviet production figures
The publisher of some of the world's most prestigious scientific journals is investigating a study which claimed Covid vaccines have killed up to 280,000 people across the US.
The bombshell estimate has since been peddled by anti-vaxx groups across the planet, who used 'the truth' as ammunition to push for roll-outs across the world to be urgently suspended.
It was also shared by the likes of Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist who has shared discredited views online.
Springer Nature told MailOnline it had now launched an investigation into the study, which was published in one of its underling journals.
'Once the journal's investigation has concluded and we have the necessary information to make an informed decision, we will follow up with the response that is most appropriate and that provides clarity for our readers,' it said. 'This may include potentially taking editorial action.'
The study, published this week in the journal BMC Infectious Diseases, was authored by an economist at Michigan State University.
Professor Mark Skidmore, who has posted a number of articles critical of Covid jabs on his personal blog, used an online survey of 2,840 people taken in December 2021 to make his estimate of Covid vaccine-related deaths in the US.
Funding for the survey was provided by Catherine Austin Fitts.
A woman of the same name - the former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President George H.W. Bush - recorded a lengthy interview as part of the 2021 documentary film 'Planet Lockdown'. The 90-minute video makes a number of unsubstantiated claims about the Covid vaccine programme and cause of the pandemic.
Respondents of the survey were asked if they knew of someone who had suffered a severe health reaction from getting a Covid vaccine.
Of the total 612 people (22 per cent) who claimed they had, 57 people (2 per cent) said that they knew someone who had died as a result. These included deaths from heart attacks, strokes or blood clots.
Professor Skidmore then used the data to create a vaccine fatality ratio and extrapolated that data to the entirety of the US population that received Covid vaccines in the first year they were deployed.
Writing in the journal, Professor Skidmore said: 'The total number of fatalities due to Covid inoculation may be as high as 278,000.' He claimed, however, that the actual death toll could be closer to the 330,000 mark, according to his calculations.
And Professor Skidmore, who is listed by his university as an expert on finances and the economics of natural disasters, stated the figure was 'after fatalities that may have occurred regardless of inoculation are removed'.
Experts raised concerns over the study's methodology.
Dr Simon Clarke, an associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, told MailOnline: 'Any study on a self-selecting cohort of participants, like this one, automatically has a flaw in its methodology.
'They can never be said to be sampling a random selection of people, nor one that uses dispassionate participants. Put simply, people can lie to skew the findings.
'There's nothing wrong with a scientific journal publishing the work of an economist, but we should always be mindful of the limitations any study and just because it's been accepted by a scientific journal does not automatically mean it's right. Editors can make mistakes too.'
'For me, the biggest problem with this paper is that fails to sufficiently highlight its own potential shortcomings and it was the job of the Editors to insist that they be included before they authorised publication.'
US health agencies have said they have received 18,769 reports of death related to a Covid vaccination, about 0.0028 per cent of the 667 million doses administered.
These reports were made via the US's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), and doesn't conclusively mean a death is actually linked to a vaccine, as it could be a coincidence.
All Americans are urged to report any health problem they notice post-vaccination, even if they aren't certain the jab was to blame.
US health authorities have verified nine deaths reported via VAERs that are 'causally associated' to Covid vaccines after reviewing the information like death certificates, and autopsy and medical records.
The UK has a similar reporting mechanism in place, called the Yellow Card Scheme, where around 475,000 adverse events to Covid vaccines have been recorded.
Reports of flatulence, yawning and crying have been logged by vaccine recipients. But it does not mean that the jabs are to blame.
Under the surveillance system in the UK, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has received 19 UK reports of 'suspected adverse drug reactions with a fatal outcome' linked to the bivalent Covid Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and 32 reports for the bivalent Covid vaccine Moderna.
No fatal outcomes following the Novavax Covid vaccine have been reported.
The MHRA does not publicize the exact number of fatal outcomes linked with the AstraZeneca jab, which does not contain mRNA unlike the Pfizer and Moderna jabs.
Multiple real-world studies have repeatedly shown that Covid vaccines are safe and have saved lives in the pandemic.
Yet, like with every medicine, drug and procedure there are risks. People can have allergic reactions to components of vaccines and can suffer from a rare but dangerous heart inflammation called myocarditis.
Some have even died from blood clots, a rare complication of AstraZeneca's jab that eventually saw it restricted for the over-40s. The side effect was so rare that it wasn't spotted in the initial trials involving tens of thousands of people.
But antivaxxers claim deaths from vaccine have also been underreported by global health authorities and masked as a mysterious rise in excess deaths. Such tolls have seen them call for jab roll-outs to be suspended.
Professor Skidmore himself said that the problems reported by survey respondents, including heart attacks and strokes, 'are consistent with Pfizer documentation about the potential risks of the Covid vaccine'.
Health chiefs have repeatedly dismissed fears that mRNA jabs are behind any rise in heart problems.
Latest official data, published earlier this week, shows the US has suffered nearly 300,000 more deaths than usual since the pandemic began that cannot be attributed to Covid.
Leading experts believe these are mostly made up of surges in deaths from cancer, heart disease, drug overdoses and firearms during the pandemic. However, a full analysis by the CDC is still likely weeks away.
Excess deaths across England have been on the rise since summer but have spiked in recent weeks, running a fifth above expected levels. Almost 3,000 more people died than usual during the first full week of January alone.
Experts have blamed the NHS crisis — which has seen record waits for ambulances and in A&E — as well as a brutal wave of flu and the freezing temperatures logged in December.
Charities, including the British Heart Foundation, have warned that 'significant and widespread disruption to heart care services' is to blame for excess coronary heart disease-related deaths.
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29 January, 2023
Resisting fallacious arguments
The last three years since the start of the pandemic have done more to undermine trust in the institutions that were supposed to uphold this set of commitments to an objective truth than anyone could ever have imagined.
First off, most everything the doctorly caste in the form of the official organisations told us has turned out to be either wrong or highly questionable. Heck, last week a new study came out suggesting elderly people did better versus Covid if they were near young ones. Our politicians, backed up by the doctorly organisations, kept grandparents away from grandchildren and left many old and elderly to die on their own. We got myriad idiotic rules – sorry, no golf or tennis for you – that made no sense to any questioning being.
Then there were all the lockdown supporters. At the end of 2019 every major democracy had pandemic plans that said ‘do not lockdown’. These were based on a century of data. In six weeks, based on what a thuggish, authoritarian China was doing, most everywhere outside of Sweden and soon Florida swapped over to despotism. What new data was there? None. Now Sweden has the OECD’s lowest cumulative excess deaths – the hardest criterion to game – and excess deaths about one-third of the other Scandinavian countries. Moreover, even that mouthpiece of lockdown mania, the Washington Post, is reporting that during the pandemic Covid deaths were wildly over-reported. You don’t say? Upwards of half, maybe more, were people who died ‘with Covid’ not ‘because of Covid’. Know what? When it comes to the flu, dying ‘with it’ is not counted as a flu death. My kingdom for a sceptical reporter!
Then there were the three years of the establishment suppressing dissenting views and nudging fear. Read what happened to three of the world’s best epidemiologists – Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford), Martin Kulldorff (Harvard) and Sunetra Gupta (Oxford) – who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration. They were censored online. With the Twitter Files dump we now know that the Biden administration was pushing for them and many others to be silenced and pilloried. If anyone thinks that sort of ‘we are the government and the medical establishment and we know best’ type thinking is consistent with Enlightenment values – or with long-term good consequences for society – then he or she is frankly deluded.
We saw similar cravenness from the churches (who disgracefully closed their doors); we saw it from Dr Fauci, with his laughable claim that ‘I represent the science’ (when we now see he was wrong on more than he was right, perhaps starting with the lab-leak origin theory); we saw it with the endless appeals to authority (that’s not a scientific argument), claims about disinformation and misinformation and myriad personal attacks on dissenters; we saw it with the media’s fearmongering and distinct lack of curiosity as regards anything fed to it by Big Government and Big Tech. Meanwhile almost no media is reporting Germany’s all-cause deaths are now higher than at any time during the last three years and it’s not Covid.
Here’s something else that needs pointing out. One can believe all the long-established vaccines are virtually medical miracles and those who refuse them basically stupid. That’s my belief. And that same person can have real questions about this mRNA vaccine governments indirectly forced many to take. Having questions about one particular pharmaceutical injection (which was given the label ‘vaccine’) does not mean you have questions about them all. Nor does it make one an ‘anti-vaxxer’. If Jeremy Clarkson dislikes one particular brand of car that does not make him ‘anti-cars’, right? This ‘anti-vaxxer’ label is being thrown around now solely as a rhetorical tool. Look, I got the first two shots but no more. The data coming out is making it pretty clear that no young person needed to get any of these mRNA shots. Firstly, the young were 1,000 times less at risk from Covid deaths than the elderly. Their risk was basically zero. So if this new mRNA shot has any risk to them, and it is plain it does, it makes no sense for them to get it. Well, unless perhaps they’re being forced to take it for others, the old. But now we know these shots do not do anything to slow Covid’s spread or the chances you, the taker, will get it. There is data now that suggests the boosters make it more likely you’ll get it. Explain to me the ethics of forcing the young, or any dissenter, to take it, please.
In fact, there are all sorts of questions out there. In the past we would have had a back-and-forth debate that appealed to studies and empirical evidence. The last three years we’ve had only the cancelling of dissenting views. Such behaviour only makes doubters like me more likely to doubt. You see, the science is never settled. I spent a few years teaching the philosophy of science way back when living in Hong Kong. Anyone who tells you the science is settled simply doesn’t understand how science works. You never know when an Einstein will show that two centuries of Newtonian physics turns out to be wrong at some level. For these experimental vaccines just remember they were not tested nearly as rigorously as standard practice requires and that Pfizer and Moderna got government indemnities. If that’s such a great process then why not make it standard practice for all medicines? And if it really was just a case of ‘we’ll take a lot of collateral damage in the hope this is better than nothing’ then you can see why no government will now say so. Ever.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/01/resisting-fallacious-arguments/
******************************************************FDA Quietly Changes End Date for Study of Heart Inflammation After Pfizer COVID Vaccination
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has changed the end date for a key study on post-vaccination heart inflammation without notifying the public.
Pfizer was supposed to complete a study on the occurrence of subclinical myocarditis, or heart inflammation, after receipt of its COVID-19 vaccine. The completion date was listed by the FDA in 2021 as June 20, 2022. Pfizer was also supposed to submit the results of the study to the FDA by the end of 2022 as part of a list of requirements the FDA imposed as a condition of approving Pfizer’s jab.
But after the deadline passed, the FDA quietly changed the date.
Under a list of postmarketing requirements for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the FDA now says the same study has an “original projected completion date” of June 30, 2023. The current status of the study is listed as “pending.”
Jessica Adams, a former regulatory review officer at the FDA, said the wording amounts to misinformation. “By definition, ‘original’ dates can’t change,” she wrote on Twitter, tagging the agency. “Please correct this ‘misinformation.'”
Dr. Vinay Prasad, who has increasingly criticized the FDA over its decisions during the pandemic, said the new timeline “is so slow it will be entirely moot.” “Another FDA failure,” he said on Twitter.
Study
The study is one of nine Pfizer was to complete to examine post-vaccination adverse events. The study is designed to “prospectively assess the incidence of subclinical myocarditis” after receipt of a third dose, or a booster, in people aged 16 to 30.
Pfizer submitted a timetable to the FDA stating the company would submit a final protocol by Nov. 30, 2021, and complete the study by June 30, 2022, according to the FDA’s approval letter for the company’s vaccine. The final report was due to the FDA by the end of 2022.
The study was one of several examining myocarditis and pericarditis, a related condition. Both are caused by the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, according to U.S. officials and other experts.
Some of the vaccine-caused myocarditis cases have led to death.
FDA officials expressed concern about the post-vaccination heart inflammation when considering whether to approve Pfizer’s vaccine.
Signal for Myocarditis After New Booster
The bivalent Pfizer vaccine triggered a safety signal for adults aged 18 to 35, Richard Forshee, an FDA official, told the agency’s vaccine advisory committee on Jan. 26.
Regulators cleared that bivalent and one from Moderna in the fall of 2022 despite there being no clinical data for either shot.
The adverse event happened at a concerning rate after a Pfizer bivalent in recent months, according to analyses of data from the FDA’s Biologics Effectiveness and Safety initiative, which pulls from systems such as one managed by CVS Health.
“The only signal we have detected so far is for myocarditis/pericarditis following the Pfizer bivalent vaccine among adults 18 to 35 years old,” Forshee told the panel.
Safety signals indicate a vaccine may cause events but don’t establish causality. But officials have stressed that the bivalents are similar to the original vaccines in defending the authorization without clinical data, and have acknowledged a causal link between the original messenger RNA vaccines and the heart inflammation.
Most of the meeting presentations that went over adverse events focused on ischemic stroke, which triggered the threshold for a safety signal following Pfizer’s bivalent booster in the elderly and following receipt the original Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in all adults.
Officials said that the stroke has happened in many people who received a flu vaccine on the same day as a COVID-19 vaccine. They’re studying whether there’s a connection, though they noted there was no signal for the stroke after a flu shot alone.
Dr. Nicola Klein, a Kaiser Permanente researcher who helps the CDC monitor vaccine safety, said that the signal for stroke wasn’t as strong as that for myocarditis.
“This is a cluster but … it doesn’t stand out as extremely striking, unlike some other signals which we have seen,” Klein said. “For example, myocarditis, it’s an extremely strong signal that you can see without doing statistics.”
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27 January, 2023
Stroke After Pfizer Booster May Be Connected to Flu Vaccine: Officials
Instances of stroke following receipt of Pfizer’s new booster in the elderly may be connected to the influenza vaccine, officials said on Jan. 26.
One-hundred thirty cases of ischemic stroke, which can be deadly, were recorded among people aged 65 or older within 21 days of a bivalent Pfizer booster, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee heard on Thursday.
That was higher than the 92 cases recorded in the 22- to 42-day window following vaccination, triggering a safety signal.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the administration (FDA) revealed the signal on Jan. 13 but had not said how many cases were recorded from the U.S. government’s Vaccine Safety Datalink surveillance system, which contains records from 12.5 million people across 11 sites.
A preliminary review of medical records at one site, which saw 24 ischemic stroke cases in the three weeks following Pfizer vaccination, revealed that a majority of the people who suffered a stroke had an influenza vaccine administered on the same day as the COVID-19 vaccine.
None of the patients had a history of stroke or transient ischemic attack, which is similar to a stroke and could be a non-vaccine cause of ischemic stroke.
Three of the patients died, including a man who perished one month after the stroke. His death was determined to likely be related to the health event.
Overall, 40 cases of ischemic stroke following both COVID-19 and flu vaccination were identified among people who suffered stroke through Dec. 17, 2022. That post-signal analyses heightened the safety signal, which is a sign a vaccine may cause a condition. Only 34.5 cases were expected based on background rates.
There were 60 cases among elderly people who received a bivalent COVID-19 vaccine without receiving a flu vaccine on the same day. That number did not meet the definition of a signal.
Officials decided to compare the cases recorded among boosted people one to 21 days after vaccination with boosted people 22 to 42 days after vaccination for the primary analysis. The rationale given was that people who recently received a vaccine were “expected to be more similar to current vaccinees than unvaccinated individuals.”
Officials also revealed that they excluded post-vaccination ischemic stroke cases if a person had a personal history of certain conditions, including transient ischemic attack or atrial fibrillation, also known as irregular heartbeat.
The new information came from a set of slides that Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, a CDC official, and Dr. Nicola Klein, a Kaiser Permanente official who works closely with the CDC, presented to the FDA’s vaccine advisory panel.
“CDC and FDA are engaged in epidemiologic analyses regarding coadministration of COVID-19 mRNA bivalent booster and flu vaccine,” one slide stated, following the detection of a “significant cluster” of post-vaccination cases of the ischemic stroke.
The CDC and FDA said previously that an examination of other surveillance systems showed no signal of ischemic stroke for the bivalent boosters but failed to mention that an analysis of reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which the agencies co-manage, for the original Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines triggered the signal for ischemic stroke and hundreds of other adverse events. Both the original vaccines are still administered in the United States; the bivalents can only be obtained as boosters.
Pfizer and its partner BioNTech said in a recent joint statement that the companies were made aware of “limited reports of ischemic stroke” observed in the Vaccine Safety DataLink system.
“Neither Pfizer and BioNTech nor the CDC or the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have observed similar findings across numerous other monitoring systems in the U.S. and globally and there is no evidence to conclude that ischemic stroke is associated with the use of the companies’ COVID-19 vaccines,” the companies stated.
Israel and the European Union have said that they have not detected a signal for ischemic stroke following bivalent vaccination. European officials said they also looked at Pfizer’s original vaccine.
Signal First Identified in 2022
The slides also showed that the safety signal from the Vaccine Safety Datalink was first identified in 2022.
The first time the condition met the signal was Nov. 27, 2022, one slide showed. It did not stop meeting the signal as of Jan. 8, 2023.
The signal has been “persistent for 7 weeks,” one slide stated.
While the rate ratio, or the result of the analyses, “has slowly attenuated from 1.92 to 1.47,” it “has continued to meet signaling criteria,” the slides acknowledged.
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Judge Blocks California’s COVID-19 Misinformation Law
A California judge on Wednesday halted the state’s so-called COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation law, which was challenged by doctors in two lawsuits, claiming it violates their constitutional rights.
In Hoeg v. Newsom, five doctors alleged that the state law, AB 2098, is unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. A separate related lawsuit, Hoang v. Bonta, makes similar allegations.
Both lawsuits sought a preliminary injunction to prevent California from enforcing the law.
The five doctors, Tracy Hoeg, Ram Duriseti, Aaron Kheriaty, Pete Mazolewski, and Azadeh Khatibi, filed their lawsuit against Gov. Gavin Newsom and other officials, including the president and members of the Medical Board of California.
They argued the law prevents them from providing information to their patients that may contradict what the law permits or prohibits. They also alleged the law was used to intimidate and punish physicians who disagreed with prevailing views on COVID-19.
Judge William Shubb, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in his ruling (pdf) it was plausible that the medical board would determine their conduct violates AB 2098, and therefore the doctors’ fears are reasonable “given the ambiguity of the term ‘scientific consensus’ and of the definition of ‘misinformation’ as a whole.”
Shubb noted that this weighed in favor of the plaintiffs having standing.
“Because the definition of misinformation ‘fails to provide a person of ordinary intelligence fair notice of what is prohibited, [and] is so standardless that it authorizes or encourages seriously discriminatory enforcement,’ the provision is unconstitutionally vague,” Shubb wrote. “Accordingly, the court concludes that plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of their vagueness challenges.”
The Law
Newsom signed the bill into law in September 2022, and it took effect on Jan. 1, 2023.
The law defines misinformation as “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus,” and prohibits physicians from disseminating “misinformation or disinformation related to COVID-19, including false or misleading information regarding the nature and risks of the virus, its prevention and treatment; and the development, safety, and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.”
Doctors who deviate from the established U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance by attempting to assess and advise their patients as individuals may run afoul of the new law.
The state medical board is required by law to act against any licensed doctor charged with unprofessional conduct.
The court’s ruling effectively halts the law while the legal challenge plays out.
The legal organization representing the doctors said their clients were put in a difficult position, fearing repercussions for acting in the best interests of their patients by giving them honest information, depriving them of their right to receive advice and hear treatment options without fear of professional discipline.
According to American Civil Liberties Alliance (ACLA), the First Amendment, which protects Americans’ rights to free speech and expression, applies to minority views and majority opinions.
The doctors alleged they have been threatened by other doctors and individuals on social media to use AB 2098 to have their licenses taken away, according to ACLA.
“They are being put between a rock and a hard place, fearing repercussions for acting in their patients’ best interests by honestly giving them the information they believe their patients need in order to make informed care decisions,” ACLA said in a summary of the case of its website.
One of the doctors in Hoeg v. Newsom welcomed the judge’s ruling.
“The ruling bodes well for our case: it indicates that our arguments that this law is unconstitutional have strong pre-trial facial plausibility,” Kheriaty wrote on Twitter. “Not to get ahead of ourselves, of course, or try to predict the final outcome of the case, but this is a very positive development.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/judge-blocks-californias-covid-19-misinformation-law_5011771.html
**************************************************26 January, 2023
Did China Make a Mistake by Ending COVID Restrictions?
Never forget that the New York Times kicked off disease panic in the United States in late February 2020, about a month after China had locked down Wuhan and violated its citizens’ rights to associate on a massive scale. Two weeks earlier, the World Health Organization sponsored a Western junket that was attended by Fauci’s deputy assistant and others. They came back and declared that lockdowns are great and should be adopted by all governments.
The first media outlet in the United States to amplify this China communist propaganda was the New York Times. On Feb. 27, 2020, Donald G. McNeil, the lead virus reporter who was later fired for unrelated reasons, predicted mass death from this virus unless the United States locks down just like China.
The next day, the newspaper published his op-ed arguing for the “medieval” method of virus control. On the same day, the paper ran an article by Peter Dazsak, head of EcoHealth Analysis, which was Fauci’s third-party funding choice to get cash to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for gain-of-function research.
This is a grim history, and one might suppose the newspaper would have moved on. But no! Just yesterday, the same paper ran a piece by Michael V. Callahan, an infectious disease specialist who has been working in China and Southeast Asia for ten years. Listen to what he actually typed:
“China rolled back its longstanding pandemic strategy ‘zero Covid,’ which had protected the country for nearly three years, in early December. This reversal came after historic public protests calling for an ease in restrictions …. The timing could not have been worse.”
Can you even imagine such a thing appearing in any paper, much less the New York Times? We are really being told that this grotesque experiment in mega-totalitarianism that treated the entire population like lab rats was really a successful effort that “protected the country.”
Protected the country! In other words, what we have here is an ongoing effort by the top organ of the mainstream press continuing to shill for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It’s astonishing really, and not only because it is utterly inhumane. It is also a fact that China’s lockdown did not protect the country. What it did was weaken immune systems and make China more vulnerable than ever.
Pretending for a moment that Xi Jinping’s policies were not just a grotesque push for massive power, it was never clear what the exit strategy for zero COVID was supposed to be. Stay locked down forever, as in some dystopian movie? And then what happens on the first exposure to anything? We know from history. Half the native population in the United States died from disease when exposed to colonial travelers. It’s happened to countless native tribes around the world. This is an extremely bad idea, and it is a wonder that a supposed civilized country could ever consider such a thing, and yet most countries in the world did.
Xi actually seemed to believe that he could make a virus go away by muscling his people with enough force and intimidation. It’s arrogance for the ages. But the New York Times was all for it—was and still is!
What is it that Dr. Callahan desires now? He wants the United States to help out this poor country that mistakenly allowed its countrymen to have a modicum of freedom back. His great idea is to export “successful strategies from the United States’ Operation Warp Speed playbook, which accelerated the delivery of mRNA vaccines from the manufacturer into people’s arms. This huge logistical challenge can be revised for the rapid deployment of a new Chinese-made mRNA vaccine.”
What to say to this idea? The CCP is evil but not crazy.
In any case, it appears that China, even after three years of lockdown crazy, is going to deal with this virus the old-fashioned way: get it and shake it off. China’s epidemiologists are now saying that upwards of 80 percent of the population has already been exposed and thus acquired some level of protection. This is how it works: exposure and then protection. It’s what should have happened three years ago. This is how the entire planet will deal with COVID. It adds one more coronavirus to the four that are already endemic.
Let’s turn to Dr. Callahan himself. Why exactly is he the one to author an article urging the United States to work with China to get mRNA shots into billions of arms? Well, the scientist Robert Malone explains his own contact with this man, who might have been responsible for among the first communications from China to the U.S. that warned of a coming virus.
Dr. Malone writes:
“on approximately 04 January 2020 I received an unexpected phone call from Dr. Michael Callahan (known to me to have been a CIA agent, and separately confirmed to me by NY Times reporter Davey Alba in February 2022 as a ‘former’ CIA agent). During this call, Dr. Callahan revealed to me that he was calling from China, and that he was in the country under cover of his Harvard Professor appointment. Further information regarding Dr. Callahan can be found in this article by Raul Diego, with research support by Whitney Webb, entitled ‘DARPA’s Man in Wuhan.’ It is important to know that Callahan has provided advice in the White House to at least three US Presidents, including Obama and Trump. On 04 January 2020, Dr. Callahan told me that there was a novel coronavirus circulating in the Wuhan region, it was looking like a significant biothreat, and I should get ‘my team’ engaged in seeking ways to mitigate the risk of this new agent.”
Malone explains further and more deeply how he comes to the following conclusion concerning Callahan:
“Based on this timeline and history, as well as my own direct personal communication with Dr. Callahan, I strongly suspect that both the gross clinical mismanagement of ventilatory support during the first phase of the outbreak (responsible for up to 30,000 deaths) as well as the stunningly poor management practices of Nursing Home and Extended Care facilities throughout the USA can be directly traced to the influence of Dr. Michael Callahan, DARPA’s Man in Wuhan and arguably the top U.S. Government/CIA expert in both biowarfare and gain of function research.”
If this is the case, let’s just say there are many unquestioned questions, including how it comes to be that Callahan raided the pages of the New York Times only yesterday to praise the CCP’s handling of the virus, adding only that China needs to work with the United States to mass vaccinate its population, even though that strategy has worked nowhere in the world and in fact only prolonged the pandemic and increased infections.
But these days, it seems like facts do not matter anymore, at least not at the New York Times, which has been shilling for the virus police here and abroad for fully three years.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/did-china-make-a-mistake-by-ending-covid-restrictions_5009835.html
***********************************************FDA wants once-a-year COVID shots for most Americans
The Food and Drug Administration on Monday proposed once-a-year COVID-19 shots for most Americans. U.S. health officials see this as a simplified approach for future vaccination efforts and protection against the mutating virus.
If approved, Americans would no longer have to monitor how many shots they had or how many months it’s been since their last vaccine.
More than 80% of Americans have had at least one vaccine dose, and only 16% have received the latest boosters authorized in August.
The FDA will consult its panel of outside vaccine experts at a meeting on Thursday. The agency is expected to take the panel’s advice into consideration while deciding future vaccine requirements for manufacturers.
In documents posted online, FDA scientists say many Americans now have “sufficient preexisting immunity” against the coronavirus because of vaccination, infection or a combination of the two. That baseline of protection should be enough to move to an annual booster against the latest strains in circulation and make COVID-19 vaccinations more like the yearly flu shot, according to the agency.
A two-dose combination may be needed for the protection of immunocompromised adults and very small children, according to FDA scientists. Vaccine companies would need additional research on vaccination, infection rates, and other data to come up with who should receive a single shot versus a two-dose series.
The FDA outside panel will vote on whether all vaccines should target the same strains.
In 2020, the initial shots or the primary series from Pfizer and Moderna target the Alpha strain. The updated boosters introduced in October last year were also tweaked to target the dominant omicron strain.
The FDA’s proposal will make the agency, independent experts and manufacturers decide yearly on which strains to target by the early summer. This will allow manufacturers several months to produce and launch updated shots before the fall, similar to the way strains for flu vaccines are changed annually.
https://crystalclearnews.com/fda-wants-once-a-year-covid-shots-for-most-americans/
**************************************************25 January, 2023
Recent findings show that vaccination is much less protective against the latest Covid variants
A high-powered group of scientists employed at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Los Alamos National Laboratory submitted some correspondence to the New England Journal of Medicine declaring more challenges with the current mass vaccination program targeting COVID-19.
Reminding that the Omicron BA.5 variant was the predominant strain in circulation from July to November 2022, there was evidence of “substantial neutralization escapes as compared with previous variants.” This variant was followed by ensuing sublineages such as BA.4.6 as well as mutations from BA.5, including BF.7 and BQ.1.1, and mutations derived from BA.2.75.2 and the BA.2 lineages, including recombinant XBB.1. What’s in common with these variants? They all have the R346T mutation in the spike protein. Now, BQ.1.1 and XBB.1 have replaced the one dominant BA.5 around the globe. It’s not clear yet, however, how well these latest mutations evade vaccine-induced antibodies targeting the spike protein of both the original Wuhan variant and BA.5.
Enter the Study
The group of scientists embarked on a study to evaluate the neutralizing antibodies associated with the COVID-19 vaccines. The first study focused on 16 participants who were vaccinated as well as boosted with the monovalent mRNA vaccine BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNtech) in 2021.
Summary of findings
In the first investigation, the group looked at neutralizing antibody titers before and after receipt of the monovalent mRNA booster 2021 in 16 subjects finding:
“The median neutralizing antibody titers to the BQ.1.1 and XBB.1 variants were lower than the median titer to BA.5 by factors of 3 and 8, respectively.”
Study number two and three centered on neutralizing antibody titers before and after receipt of the monovalent mRNA booster as well as the bivalent booster in 2022. With 15 and 18 participants, respectively, a majority of the subjects had received three previous doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.
A third of the participants were infected with Omicron, but this was likely due to the high prevalence of circulation and ensuing infection in 2022.
The authors write:
“The median neutralizing antibody titers to the BQ.1.1 and XBB.1 variants were lower than the median titers to BA.5 by factors of 7 and 17, respectively, in the monovalent booster cohort and by factors of 7 and 21, respectively, in the bivalent booster cohort.”
Unfortunately, the authors continue:
“Our data show that the BQ.1.1 and XBB.1 variants escaped neutralizing antibodies substantially more effectively than the BA.5 variant by factors of 7 and 17, respectively, after monovalent mRNA boosting and by factors of 7 and 21, respectively after bivalent mRNA boosting. The neutralizing antibody titers to BQ.1.1 and XBB.1 were dramatically lower than titers to the WA1/2020 strain by factors of 53 and 127, respectively, in the monovalent booster cohort and by factors of 80 and 232, respectively, in the bivalent booster cohort.”
Furthermore:
These findings suggest that the BQ.1.1 and XBB.1 variants may reduce the efficacy of current mRNA vaccines and that vaccine protection against severe disease with these variants may depend on CD8 T-cell responses.”
The spike in neutralizing antibody titers against omicron variants associated with the monovalent boost in 2022 over 2021 suggests an accumulation of vaccination and natural immunity linked to prior infection, which was frequent.
Is convergent evolution a result of the propagation of the R346T mutation across variants? The authors believe so. This study again emphasizes the challenges with the current mass COVID-19 vaccine strategy chasing variants of concern.
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Bivalent Boosters Creating Adverse Childhood Experiences in Kids Ages 5-11
We often remember events from our childhood that came from physical experiences, such as a broken arm or falling into a stream. Most patients from yesteryear remember childhood rheumatic or scarlet fever. Parents bringing their children aged 5-11 years for COVID-19 vaccination may be creating adverse childhood experiences based on the most recent CDC safety data published by Hause et al. in MMWR:
"Safety Monitoring of Bivalent COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Booster Doses Among Children Aged 5-11 Years - United States, October 12-January 1, 2023"
Moderna, which had greater frequency of adverse events than Pfizer, for example, caused 30% of children to have fever and vomit. Combined, 22% reported that boosters had a negative health impact, 14% could not perform daily activities to return to school, and 2% were so sick they required acute medical care. Adverse childhood experiences can have lasting social and psychological ramifications later in life, particularly if they are repeated.
No vaccine, no matter how theoretically compelling, should be in public use with these symptomatic side effects. Vaccines should have acceptable safety profiles with <5% having any significant short-term symptoms, be safe over the long term, provide at least 50% protection against a disease, inhibit transmission, and last at least a year.
Faulty vaccines that underperform or make our kids sick should be rejected by parents and removed from the market to protect public safety.
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Australia: Conservative minor party to host controversial Covid sceptic
Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party will host a series of coronavirus vaccine conferences next month headlined by controversial American cardiologist Doctor Peter McCullough
Nations across the globe have “completely de-emphasised and almost obfuscated” effective coronavirus treatments in their public health approach to the pandemic, says professor of medicine Dr Peter McCullough.
Doctor Peter McCullough has been heavily criticised for controversial views on the coronavirus, with calls from some quarters for Australian immigration officials to deny him a visa to enter the country.
Numerous health officials and websites have criticised Dr McCullough, who gained widespread attention after an appearance on the podcast of American personality Joe Rogan where he made a series of provocative claims, including that the pandemic was planned as part of a conspiracy.
Several health industry websites have devoted sections to debunking Dr McCullough’s claims, which include statements that masks were useless against Covid and that test subjects in an Australian vaccination trial contracted HIV.
However, speaking on the Gold Coast on Tuesday, Mr Palmer said it was time to hear different points of view on the pandemic and vaccines and he expected conferences on the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast to sell out. He said Dr McCullough was a “well respected” cardiologist with “impeccable” credentials.
Mr Palmer, a high-profile opponent of coronavirus vaccines, said he was told he “had six hours to live” at one point during his own Covid health battle, but was treated with alternative therapies in hospital.
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24 January, 2023
No Help for the Vaccine Injured: The Government agency involved Is an Abject Failure
Summary:
TrialSite has tracked growing coverage of COVID-19 vaccine injuries by the mainstream media. From Reuters to CBC and even the BBC as well as local affiliated media across the United States such as NBC affiliate in Atlanta, Georgia, WXIA-TV television which recently showcased the plight of Allen Storey, injured by the COVID-19 vaccines.
Despite him and several thousand others filing claims with the U.S. government’s vaccine injury project for emergencies—the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP)—few have received any decisions. TrialSite has reported that no planning from either the Trump or Biden administrations went into the potential externalities of a mass vaccination program—side effects. That even with an injury rate of 0.005 per 100, over a million would be injured in America alone based on the number of procedures.
Enter Allen Storey, and yet another horror story about how the U.S. government has left its taxpayers (the people) left out of any care despite unprecedented mandates across American society.
In detail:
While he was glad he went ahead and got the COVID-19 vaccine to reduce the risk of severe illness or even death, Mr. Storey ended up having an acute brain stem stroke accompanied by numerous medical diagnoses, likely because providers don’t know how to even diagnose these injuries. According to reporter Rebecca Lindstrom, this process has left the vaccine-injured patient “financially and emotionally dazed and confused.”
Not so-called “Anti-vaxxers” by any means, both Mr. Storey, his wife, as well as their daughter, received the COVID-19 immunization. While Storey’s wife and daughter were left unscathed just days after the first jab, Storey’s response was noticeably different. While his doctors thought he might have vertigo, reports WXIA-TV (11Alive), “His mind was 100% working inside his body. His body just couldn’t move,” as he experienced a form of stroke-induced paralysis explained to his wife.
Both Storey and his wife were unemployed by this point, and given the lack of any support from the CICP, financial catastrophe was just around the corner. The family had to give up their home of 25 years as it wasn’t wheelchair accessible.
Storey’s wife Beverly told the local media, “The burden of proof on you, and that became a problem with cost and logistics.” With medical records scattered across five hospitals, navigating both the CICP application plus obtaining the documentation to advocate for her husband’s case became extremely challenging.
While not surprisingly, doctors refuse to officially connect the injury to the vaccine, they ironically are adamantly opposed to him getting a second jab.
And nearly two years later, the CICP’s response to Storey’s claims: crickets. Although it’s part of the executive branch and subject to congressional funding, Ms. Storey told the local news outlet, “You don’t get any answers. Nobody calls back, nobody has sent anything in the mail.”
Are politicians and governors aware of the situation?
Absolutely. The Storeys wrote not only a letter to President Biden but also to their U.S. Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. 11Alive reached out to Senator Ossof’s office, wrote Lindstrom, and apparently, the Senator did respond and request more information.
The Georgia media not only reached out to both Senators but also to Mike Lee, Sen. Utah, who has sponsored a bill making accessing COVID-19 vaccine injury claims easier. A hot potato-like topic, Lee’s office refused to talk, declining to speak on his own legislation, reports Lindstrom.
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New Zealand Population Study: Pfizer’s mRNA Vaccine Statistically Significant Linked to Myo/Pericarditis
Researchers from the New Zealand Ministry of Health as well as University of Auckland conducted a real-world observational study probing rates of adverse events of special interest (AESIs) associated with a primary dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, BNT162b2, in the New Zealand population aged 5 years and up vaccinated from February 19, 2021, to February 10, 2022. Tapping into electronic health records, the Kiwi investigators looked for risk within the period of day 0 to 21 days after the jab compared with expected rates based on background health data from 2014 to 2019. Deriving an ‘incidence rate ratio " or "IRR " for each AESI, the study team estimated with 95% confidence intervals (CI), adjusting by age to calculate a risk difference and ultimately estimate the excess numbers of AESIs per 100,000 persons vaccinated.
The results of this study recently surfaced via preprints with The Lancet.
Overall Study—Population-level Cohort Analysis
By February 10, 2022, 4,277,163 had received a first dose, and 4,114,364 second doses of BNT162b2 were administered to the eligible New Zealand population in the cohort covered by the study (age 5 and up). The study authors couldn’t find a statistical delta between the observed rates of AESI and the expected rates.
For example, the authors report:
“The IRR (95% CI) of myo/pericarditis following the first dose was 2.6 (2.2– 2.9) with a risk difference (95% CI) of 1.6 (1.1– 2.1) per 100,000 persons vaccinated and was 4.1 (3.7– 4.5) with a risk difference of 3.2 (2.6– 3.9) per 100,000 persons vaccinated following the second dose. The highest IRR was 25.8 (95% CI 15.6– 37.9) in the 5-19 years age group, following the second dose of the vaccine, with an estimated 5 additional myo/pericarditis cases per 100,000 persons vaccinated. An increased incidence of acute kidney injury (AKI) was observed following the first (1.6 (1.5– 1.6)) and second (1.7 (1.6– 1.7)) dose of BNT162b2.”
Clearly, the risks in the young persons cohort (age 5 to 19) were markedly higher post the second dose of the vaccine which corresponds with other real-world data suggesting risks of this cardiovascular-related set of conditions associated with mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. In fact, in the State of Florida the Surgeon General there has gone on the record recommending that healthy young people don’t receive the vaccine. The message from Florida—the risks of serious side effects are higher than the risk of COVID-19 infection for a healthy young population.
Interestingly, the New Zealand government-sponsored study also reports nominal increases in acute kidney injury, but less than the rates associated with myocarditis and pericarditis.
Interpretation
The New Zealand Ministry of Health reports from this study that while “rare” a “statistically significant association between BNT162b2 [Pfizer’s vaccine] and myo/pericarditis and AKI was observed.” They acknowledge that this association has been confirmed internationally but the Ministry of Health-funded investigators do recommend more research into the association with AKI.
Interestingly, the study authors point out that most of the AESIs identified were not associated with the Pfizer vaccine which offered them authors “reassurances around the safety of the vaccine.”
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23 January, 2023
Covid-19 drugmakers pressured twitter to censor activists pushing for generic vaccine
In mid-December 2020, Nina Morschhaeuser, a lobbyist for Twitter in Europe, emailed colleagues with a dire warning. The drugmaker BioNTech, along with the German government, had contacted her with news of an imminent “campaign targeting the pharmaceutical companies developing the COVID-19 vaccine,” she wrote.
“The authorities are warning about ‘serious consequences’ of the action, i.e. posts and a flood of comments ‘that may violate TOS’ as well as the ‘takeover of user accounts’ are to be expected,” wrote Morschhaeuser. “Especially the personal accounts of the management of the vaccine manufacturers are said to be targeted. Accordingly, fake accounts could also be set up.”
The campaign they were concerned about was the launch of an international push to force the drug industry to share the intellectual property and patents associated with coronavirus vaccine development. Making the patents available, in turn, would allow countries across the world to swiftly manufacture generic vaccines and other low-cost therapeutics to deal with the ongoing pandemic.
Morschhaeuser, while alerting several site integrity and safety teams at Twitter, forwarded on an email from BioNTech spokesperson Jasmina Alatovic, who asked Twitter to “hide” activist tweets targeting her company’s account over a period of two days.
Morschhaeuser flagged the corporate accounts of Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, and AstraZeneca for her colleagues to monitor and shield from activists. Morschhaeuser also asked colleagues to monitor the hashtags #PeoplesVaccine and #JoinCTAP, a reference to the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 Technology Access Pool, a program promoted by developing countries to accelerate the development of vaccines through the equitable sharing of research and manufacturing capacity. She noted that the group Global Justice Now was spearheading the action with an online sign-up form.
It is not clear to what extent Twitter took any action on BioNTech’s request. In response to Morschhaeuser’s inquiry, several Twitter officials chimed in, debating what action could or could not be taken. Su Fern Teo, a member of the company’s safety team, noted that a quick scan of the activist campaign showed nothing that violated the company’s terms of service, and asked for more examples to “get a better sense of the content that may violate our policies.”
But it shows the extent to which pharmaceutical giants engaged in a global lobbying blitz to ensure corporate dominance over the medical products that became central to combatting the pandemic. Ultimately, the campaign to share Covid vaccine recipes around the world failed.
The Intercept accessed Twitter’s emails after the company’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, granted access to several reporters in December. This is the second story I have reported through access to these files. The first centered on the Pentagon’s network of fake Twitter accounts used to spread U.S. narratives in the Middle East.
In reporting this story, as with the last, Twitter did not provide unfettered access to company information; rather, they allowed me to make requests without restriction that were then fulfilled on my behalf by an attorney, meaning that the search results may not have been exhaustive. I did not agree to any conditions governing the use of the documents, and I made efforts to authenticate and contextualize the documents through further reporting. The redactions in the embedded documents in this story were done by The Intercept to protect privacy, not Twitter.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. BioNTech’s Alatovic, in response to a request for comment, stressed that the firm “takes its societal responsibility seriously and is investing in solutions to improve the health of people regardless of their income.”
A spokesperson for the German Federal Office for Information Security, the cybersecurity agency that Morschhaeuser said contacted Twitter on behalf of BioNTech, emailed The Intercept after publication of this article to say that the agency had raised a “cyber security alert” out of concern the People’s Vaccine campaign amounted to a “DDoS attack.” The agency further claimed that this warning “independent of any content-related or political orientation of an online campaign such as the one planned here.”
IN NOVEMBER, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published a lengthy report showing that pharmaceutical companies went to great lengths to stifle efforts to share pandemic-related patents and IP, including threats to the leadership of Belgium, Colombia, and Indonesia. The Intercept has also detailed the domestic lobbying push to block support for a special World Trade Organization waiver necessary for the rapid creation of generic pandemic medicine. German media has similarly reported on the aggressive effort by BioNTech to build support from the German government in opposing the waiver at the WTO.
In May 2021, the Biden administration reversed its earlier position and that of the Trump administration and voiced support for the WTO waiver, making the U.S. one of the largest wealthy countries to support the idea, backed by a coalition led by India and South Africa. But infighting at the international trade body, along with staunch opposition from other wealthy countries, prevented any effective progress on the issue.
The largely successful assault against the creation of generic vaccines resulted in an unprecedented explosion in profit for a few select biopharmaceutical drug interests. Pfizer and BioNTech generated a staggering $37 billion in revenue from its shared mRNA vaccine in 2021 alone, making it one of the most lucrative drug products of all time.
Moderna, which made $17.7 billion from vaccine sales in 2021, recently announced its plan to hike the price of its Covid shot by about 400 percent.
The high cost of vaccines and concentrated ownership meant supplies in 2021 were hoarded in the European Union, United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Japan, and other wealthy countries, while much of the developing world was forced to wait for excess vaccines the following year.
“To try and stifle digital dissent during a pandemic, when tweets and emails are some of the only forms of protest available to those locked in their homes, is deeply sinister.”
“For more than two years, a global movement has been speaking out against pharmaceutical greed and demanding that everyone, everywhere has the tools to combat pandemics,” said Maaza Seyoum, a campaigner for the People’s Vaccine Alliance.
“Whatever nasty tricks companies and governments pull,” she added, “we cannot and will not be silenced.”
Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, noted that at the time of BioNTech’s censorship request, much of the world was under various lockdown orders, making digital forms of protest all the more vital for influencing public policy.
“To try and stifle digital dissent during a pandemic, when tweets and emails are some of the only forms of protest available to those locked in their homes, is deeply sinister,” he said.
Stronger, a campaign run by Public Good Projects, a public health nonprofit specializing in large-scale media monitoring programs, regularly communicated with Twitter on regulating content related to the pandemic. The firm worked closely with the San Francisco social media giant to help develop bots to censor vaccine misinformation and, at times, sent direct requests to Twitter with lists of accounts to censor and verify.
Internal Twitter emails show regular correspondence between an account manager at Public Good Projects, and various Twitter officials, including Todd O’Boyle, lobbyist with the company who served as a point of contact with the Biden administration. The content moderation requests were sent throughout 2021 and early 2022.
The entire campaign, newly available tax documents and other disclosures show, was entirely funded by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a vaccine industry lobbying group. BIO, which is financed by companies such as Moderna and Pfizer, provided Stronger with $1,275,000 in funding for the effort, which included tools for the public to flag content on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for moderation.
Many of the tweets flagged by Stronger contained absolute falsehoods, including claims that vaccines contained microchips and were designed to intentionally kill people. But others hinged on a gray area of vaccine policy through which there is reasonable debate, such as requests to label or take down content critical of vaccine passports and government mandates to require vaccination.
One tweet flagged by the BIO-backed moderation effort read, “if a vaccinated person and an unvaccinated person have roughly the same capacity to carry, shed and transmit the virus, particularly in its Delta form, what difference does implementing a vaccination passport actually make to the spread of the virus?”
Public health experts and civil libertarians strongly debated the constitutionality of such passports, an idea that was eventually discarded by U.S. policymakers.
Joe Smyser, the chief executive of Public Good Projects in charge of the Stronger campaign, said his organization’s work was a good-faith effort to battle disinformation. “BIO contributed money and said, ‘You guys are planning on running a pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine misinformation effort and we will give you $500,000 [per year] no questions asked,’” said Smyser.
Many pharmaceutical lobby groups made exaggerated claims about the danger of sharing vaccine technology. PhRMA, another drug industry lobby group, falsely claimed on Twitter that any effort to allow the creation of a generic Covid vaccine would result in placing all 4.4 million jobs supported by the entire American drug industry at risk.
I asked Smyser whether his group ever flagged any content distributed by the pharmaceutical lobby as “misinformation.”
Smyser agreed that policy debate was important, and if misinformation was spread by pharmaceutical companies, any global citizen “should be aware of it,” but that his organization never flagged or focused on any drug industry content.
“I understand why someone would be skeptical, because as a researcher, it matters where your money comes from,” Smyser said. But, he argued, “my job is, how do people figure out where to go get vaccinated? And how do I encourage them to get the vaccine? That was it.”
https://theintercept.com/2023/01/16/twitter-covid-vaccine-pharma/
**************************************************22 January, 2023
Not Just Misinformation: In Emails to White House, Facebook Admits Suppressing ‘Often-True Content’ on COVID-19 Vaccines
Facebook told an official at the Biden White House that the Big Tech company not only suppressed misinformation but took action against the “virality” of “often-true content” regarding the COVID-19 vaccines.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey released the documents earlier this week. Bailey obtained them through a court case, Missouri v. Biden, alleging that some of President Joe Biden’s top officials “colluded with Big Tech social media companies to violate Americans’ right to free speech under the First Amendment.”
“I want to protect Missourians and the freedoms they enjoy, which is why as attorney general, I will always defend the Constitution,” Bailey told The Daily Signal in an email Thursday. “This case is about the Biden administration’s blatant disregard for the First Amendment and its collusion with Big Tech social media companies to suppress speech it disagrees with.”
“I will always fight back against unelected bureaucrats who seek to indoctrinate the people of this state by violating our constitutional right to free and open debate,” the Missouri attorney general pledged.
In an email to the White House dated March 21, 2021, a Facebook staff member discussed “levers for tackling vaccine hesitancy content” with Andrew Slavitt, then a senior adviser on Biden’s COVID-19 response team, and Rob Flaherty, White House director of digital strategy.
“You also asked us about our levers for reducing virality of vaccine hesitancy content,” wrote the Facebook staffer, whose identity was redacted. “As you know, in addition to removing vaccine misinformation, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable information. This is often-true content, which we allow at the post level because it is important for people to be able to discuss both their personal experiences and concerns about the vaccine, but it can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking.”
“We’ll remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalized content,” the Facebook staffer added. He or she then promised, “More on this front as we proceed to implement.”
In this email to the White House, the Facebook representative admitted to preventing exposure of content that doesn’t violate Facebook’s policies—content that isn’t “actionable.” The staffer also suggested that the White House had asked Facebook to take these measures.
In an April 22, 2021, email, Flaherty told Google staff that the White House remains “concerned that Youtube [sic] is ‘funneling’ people into hesitance and intensifying people’s hesitancy. We certainly recognize that removing content that is unfavorable to the cause of increasing vaccine adoption is not a realistic—or even good—solution.”
The White House’s digital strategy chief added that combating vaccine hesitancy “is a concern that is shared at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the WH [White House],” an apparent reference to the president himself.
In an April 14, 2021, email to Facebook, Flaherty suggested the social media platform should take action to suppress Fox News host Tucker Carlson and conservative journalist Tomi Lahren.
“Since we’ve been on the phone—the top post about vaccines today is tucker [sic] Carlson saying they don’t work,” Flaherty wrote. “Yesterday was Tomi Lehren [sic] saying she won’t take one. This is exactly why I want to know what ‘Reduction’ actually looks like—if ‘reduction’ means ‘pumping our most vaccine hesitant audience with tucker [sic] Carlson saying it doesn’t work’ then … I’m not sure it’s reduction!”
In a May 12, 2021, email, the White House’s Flaherty faulted Instagram, which Facebook owns, for failing to remove “bad information” from its search function. He appears aggressive in pushing for censorship.
“You know and I know that the universe of undecided people searching Instagram for ‘vaccines’—as compared to, say, Google—is probably low,” Flaherty wrote. “But ‘removing bad information from search’ is one of the easy, low-bar things you guys do to make people like me think you’re taking action. If you’re not getting that right, it raises even more questions about the high bar stuff.”
“You say in your note that you remove accounts that discourage vaccination from appearing in recommendations (even though you’re using ‘primarily’ to give yourself wiggle room),” Flaherty added. “You also said you don’t promote those accounts in search.”
Then Flaherty compared Instagram to other social media platforms.
“Youtube [sic], for their warts, has done pretty well at promoting authoritative info in search results while keeping the bad stuff off of those surfaces,” the White House official said. “Pinterest doesn’t even show you any results other than official information when you search for ‘vaccines.’ I don’t know why you guys can’t figure this out.”
These documents confirm the close relationship between the federal government and Big Tech companies revealed in the recently reported “Twitter Files.”
Internal Twitter documents, released under the direction of new CEO Elon Musk, showed the Justice Department and FBI pressuring tech companies such as Twitter to stifle and suppress “misinformation,” particularly on the COVID-19 pandemic. In some cases, Twitter executives and government officials took aim at scientists who shared their professional opinions on the social media platform.
The FBI also paid Twitter more than $3 million while the intelligence community was pressuring the tech company to suppress news about Hunter Biden, the president’s son.
Big Tech’s censorship has not abated, either. In December, YouTube removed a video presentation featuring two doctors and a Heritage Foundation expert, claiming the video violated its misinformation policy on COVID-19 vaccines. YouTube didn’t identify which of the four speakers supposedly had violated the policy.
Roger Severino, former director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services and currently vice president for domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation, called the move “Kafkaesque.” (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation’s news outlet.)
“I wish I knew exactly what triggered YouTube’s ire, but they remain imperiously vague,” Severino told The Daily Signal. “It is Kafkaesque to be placed in YouTube jail and not be told what the alleged crime was or even who committed it.”
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Covid’s warped model: Injured people mean big business for Big Pharma
Rebecca Weisser
‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’ That’s what Goldman Sachs analysts asked in an April 2018 report on ‘The Genome Revolution’. The analysts didn’t think so, arguing that there was little money to be made on ‘one shot cures’. But there is endless money to be made from chronically injured people, they argued.
A recent report analysing Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US up to November 2022 by the Phinance Technologies Team shows a dramatic increase in disabilities in people aged 16-64 which coincides with the rollout of the vaccines. Treating those people will certainly be a viable business model for Big Pharma for the foreseeable future.
How does this relate to the extraordinary level of injury and death that experts say the Covid vaccines are causing?
Dr Richard Ennos, a retired professor of evolutionary biology at Edinburgh University, is the latest eminent academic to call for the immediate withdrawal of the mRNA Covid vaccines writing that ‘Glaring safety signals are apparent, indicating harm to the lymph system, the heart and to female reproduction.’
Dr Ennos came to this conclusion after conducting a thorough analysis of detailed data collected by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) through its Covid-19 Yellow Card vaccine adverse event database which the agency finally agreed to release after stalling for more than 18 months. It claimed that it would be too onerous to pass on the raw data despite the fact that the raw data is sent immediately to Pfizer and Moderna.
Dr Ennos is scathing about the MHRA writing that its regular summary of Yellow card reporting has been ‘an exercise in defending the Covid-19 vaccines from criticism rather than defending the UK public from the Covid-19 vaccines’. He damns the reports as lacking any scientific rigour, not providing a single piece of statistical analysis to support conclusions and calls them ‘an affront to the huge number of individuals who have been injured or killed doing what they believe to be “the right thing”’.
Ennos dedicates his report to the innocent UK public and to the dedicated physicians who filed the Yellow Card reports, writing, ‘I would like you to know that your suffering and endeavours have not been in vain.’
The work of Ennos bookends an open letter sent by Dr Tess Lawrie in June 2021 to Dr. June Raine, chief executive of the MHRA, demanding the halt of the mass rollout of COVID vaccines after discovering a ‘high number of COVID-19 vaccine-attributed deaths and adverse drug reactions that have been reported via the Yellow Card system’.
Dr Ennos and Dr Lawrie are not alone. In the last fortnight Dr Joseph Fraiman, lead author of peer-reviewed research re-analysing the Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccine trial data, called for an immediate suspension of the vaccines saying, ‘We have conclusive evidence that the vaccines are inducing sudden cardiac death.’ Before him, prominent UK cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra, who also conducted a peer-reviewed study of the vaccines, called for their suspension. Top US cardiologist Dr Peter McCullough has also called for an immediate suspension of the vaccines saying, ‘I’m going to be very clear about this. The vaccine is killing people and it’s killing large numbers of people.’
Masanori Fukushima, a distinguished oncologist, professor emeritus at Kyoto University, and Director of the Translational Research Informatics Centre, agrees. Together with other eminent Japanese professors he has called for an immediate halt to the use of the mRNA vaccines which he describes as ‘an unprecedented disaster’ saying he can’t imagine how many people have really died in Japan and the report of 2,000 deaths is just the ‘tip of the iceberg’.
Masanori is a specialist in pharmacy-epidemiology, which he describes as the ‘study of stopping drug disasters’. He has been actively involved in evaluating the Covid vaccines and is planning to sue the Japanese government for refusing to disclose vital information that could save lives.
Masanori says he asked government officials to disclose Covid mortality in the vaccinated compared with the unvaccinated on 1 August 2022. After stalling for two months, they refused. Apparently, the government disclosed this information earlier and it had shown that in people under 65 years the mortality rate was lower for unvaccinated people than for vaccinated people. Masanori thinks this was embarrassing for the government so they have refused to disclose any further information.
Interestingly, from May to December 2022, the NSW government also disclosed Covid deaths by vaccine status and these statistics also showed a slightly lower rate of mortality for the unvaccinated compared with the vaccinated. Like Japan, NSW will also no longer disclose Covid deaths by vaccine status.
Yet when the Centres for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration investigated a possible link between Pfizer’s bivalent Covid/flu vaccine and an increased risk of stroke, they stated within days that it was ‘very unlikely’ that the vaccine was the cause. Yet as one pundit observed, the Securities and Exchange Commission repeatedly investigated Bernie Madoff without finding evidence of fraud.
Part of the problem appears to be regulatory capture on a grand international scale.
Dr Raine gave a speech in which she boasted that the MHRA had gone from being a watchdog to being an ‘enabler’ and that in regulating the Covid vaccines the MHRA ‘tore up the rule book’.
In the US, there is a revolving door between big pharmaceutical companies and the regulatory agencies of whom Scott Gottlieb is only the most prominent example. He worked at the FDA, then in the private sector, returned to be FDA commissioner and since 2019 has served on the board of Pfizer. Similarly, Stephen Hahn served as the head of the FDA from 2019 to 2021 before becoming the chief medical officer of Flagship Pioneering, the venture firm behind Moderna.
Another problem is the fact that the vaccines have been authorised under emergency use authorisation in the US and provisionally in Australia, giving pharmaceutical companies indemnity which appears to have made them indifferent to the harms vaccines have caused. And control of social media by the Biden administration in the US and the Trusted News Initiative internationally have shielded vaccine manufacturers from almost all criticism. So far, it appears to be a more sustainable business model than curing patients.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/01/covids-warped-model
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The Ongoing Mutation of SARS-CoV-2 & Attempts at Vaccination-based Control
Summary:
Top scientists investigating the crossroads of genomics, immunology, microbiology, and infectious disease concluded the extreme difficulty of RNA virus immunization in a 2018 research paper titled “Immune Responses to RNA Viruses,” all but cautioning public health agencies’ responses to most RNA viruses and their respective threats to public safety. They wrote that in the aggregate, RNA pathogens, including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), Ebola virus, Zika virus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), influenza viruses, yellow fever virus, dengue virus, rhinoviruses (common cold), human T-lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-I), poliovirus, and measles virus take hundreds of millions of lives daily worldwide. Published just a year-and-a-half before the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, the authors acknowledged the current state of science: “that at the present time, no vaccine or specific treatment is available for many of these viruses, and some of the available vaccines and treatments are not highly effective.” So, this is for viruses known to human science for decades in some cases. What about a brand-new pathogen with certain heretofore not seen qualities making the RNA virus far more transmissible? How could government research entities and industry be so confident as to a blockbuster vaccine response that would control the pathogen, leading to herd immunity? After all, this was the initial impetus behind the mass vaccine development as evidenced by underlying drivers to control the virus by achieving a 70% vaccination rate. Well-intentioned to rapidly respond to a deadly pathogen, time is now to critically evaluate options with a willingness to let go of any faulty assumptions.
In Detail:
The human innate immune system represents a key force in sensing RNA viruses and, thus, a considerable influence on the antiviral responses and the pathogenesis of diseases caused by such RNA viruses. Yes, special attention needs to be directed toward the immune response to RNA viruses and SARS-CoV-2. In that 2018 piece, the authors Said et al. introduce an RNA virus, HIF, as an example of the interaction between an RNA virus and the immune system and how such interactions control the pathophysiology of the disease caused by the virus.
While in the COVID-19 response to the novel RNA virus called SARS-CoV-2, health authorities across public agencies and their apex research institutes sought to use an mRNA vaccine developed across the finish line in just about 10 months as a means of mass controlling the pathogen as evidenced by repeated targeting of 70% of vaccination rates by the World Health Organization initially to achieve herd immunity to stop the spread of the pathogen, not just to protect the highest risk populations viral surges with bolstered human antibody responses.
No, early on it was clear that from health authorities to governments and elected officials to the vaccine developers (pharma) that the vaccine was a means of eradicating the viral pathogen from existence. Even with clear evidence by the spring of 2021 that the novel vaccines would not stop viral transmission, intense public campaigns commenced, including announced mandates by POTUS precisely to stop viral spread.
Despite these intensive public health initiatives seeking to control the COVID-19 pandemic, wave after wave of viral mutation, starting first with the Delta variant of concern, followed by a series of Omicron subvariant mutants, the recent entry of the highly infectious, considerably resistant, and intensely immune system-evading XBB.1.5 SARS-CoV-2 subvariant merely represents the latest such pathogen, not something that should be surprising the scientific community at this point, yet the popular press treats it as a novelty.
The latest RNA-based viral mutation comes out of the XBB lineage, which emerged after a natural co-infection of a human host with two key Omicron subvariants, including BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.7 first identified in India several months ago (summer 2022). The “fifth grandchild” of the first XBB variant, it could be the most genetically sophisticated and contagious of the Omicron subvariants to date since the initial advent of this version of SARS-CoV-2 in November 2021.
In circulation in nearly 40 nations, as reported by the World Health Organization (WHO), it’s now dominating in the United States. Importantly, the current vaccine booster (Omicron bivalent BA.4/BA.5) was developed for a version that is on its way toward extinction while this untargeted mutant surges, especially on the east coast. XBB.1.5 will more than likely become the predominant SARS-CoV-2 pathogen, that RNA class of virus that scientists all along have suggested is extremely difficult to stop.
Current SARS-CoV-2 Viral Variants Across the USA
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report on variant representation and distribution across America.
XBB.1.5 now represents 43% of all SARS-CoV-2 variants in circulation as of January 14, 2023, reports the CDC.
There is limited data about the ability of XBB.1.5 to cause serious illness. According to the World Health Organization, XBB.1.5 does not have any specific mutations that make it any more dangerous than its ancestral subvariants.
Nonetheless, XBB.1.5 is perceived as being equally capable of causing serious illness in elderly and immunocompromised persons compared to previous Omicron subvariants of concern.
It’s not clear how dangerous this particular variant will be as measured by contribution to morbidity and mortality rates, but evidence suggests higher transmission rates yet likely, lower mortality rates.
But while public health messaging continues to declare repeatedly that vaccination is the best means of stopping serious SARS-CoV-2 illness, XBB.1.5 and other variants such as XBB.1 under the Omicron umbrella, represent the pathogens with the most immune-evasive properties as discussed by WHO directly.
Initial laboratory study results didn’t bode well for the prospects of the Omicron bivalent BA.4/BA/5 booster vaccine targeting this latest mutation (XBB.1.5). TrialSite reported that a notable team at University of Texas Medical Branch reported that a group of scientists at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, Texas reports the mutating Omicron subvariants such as BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1., and XBB.1 feature additional spike mutations, further inhibiting COVID-19 vaccine booster effectiveness. Led by Pei-Yong Shi, Ph.D., UTMB’s Vice President for Research, co-corresponding authors Ping Re, Ph.D., an epidemiologist, and Xuping Xie, Ph.D., an assistant a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, the UTMB investigators reported that this particular vaccine now aggressively promoted by the U.S. government failed to generate robust neutralization against the newly emerged BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1, or XBB.1. At the time (Dec 7), TrialSite reported that unfortunately, BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 represent the fastest growing Omicron subvariants across America.
This media also reported on a study with disturbing results from a large retrospective cohort study sponsored by the Cleveland Clinic, tapping into robust data associated with the hospital’s electronic health records. The data suggests a growing number of SARS-CoV-2 infections associated with number of vaccination boosters. But several confounding factors could influence that outcome.
TrialSite reported on the lab results from Columbia University’s David Ho, revealing declining bivalent BA.4/BA.5 booster performance against XBB.1.5, 155-fold lower than against the wild-type virus after a boost targeting the monovalent strain. See TrialSite’s “Bivalent Bombshell? BA.4/BA.5 mRNA Booster Dose Fails Comparative Antibody Titer Test: Could it be Antigenic Sin?”
Even renowned vaccine expert and FDA Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) member, Dr. Paul Offit, has gone to the press announcing the current COVID-19 vaccine trajectory has all but failed at this point.
One other recent study result shows concerns such as “T-cell exhaustion” that implies with multiple boosters comes the prospect of externalities with unknown implications, although the study may be underpowered.
So, what degree of protection does the current booster doses offer people against XBB.1.5?
Regardless of point of view, the unfolding science appears clear now that both monovalent and bivalent booster jabs cannot be counted on for sufficient protection against XBB.1.5, yet government scientific agencies’ stance continues to remain to the contrary.
Some state level health officials have moved in the direction of the unfolding science such as in Florida, subjecting all involved to intense public scrutiny and pressure. There in the Sunshine State, given the large percentages of the American population have either been previously vaccinated and/or infected, even the State of Florida’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo now recommends against healthy young people getting the COVID-19 vaccine booster. This recommendation, however, goes against CDC, and other major medical associations and societies that remain steadfast that boosting with the latest dose, even if BA.5 is not much in circulation, offers some degree of protection for at least, the handful of cold winter months where populations will be more vulnerable.
Back to the scientific challenges posed with RNA viruses at the onset of this article, any attempt to use vaccination thus far as means of actually controlling the SARS-CoV-2 based pandemic hasn't worked out well. More people have died during the first year of mass vaccination versus the first year of the pandemic, although vaccination does provide a surge of antibodies that does protect people from more serious hospitalization, at least temporarily. But how long remains an open question—part of an unfolding science. As of August 2022, the Washington Post itself reported that the pandemic was no longer one of the “unvaccinated,’ as more deaths involved the vaccinated than the unvaccinated.
Of course, this is explained in part by the fact that about 70% of the American population is fully vaccinated. But this also demonstrates how mutating variants such as XBB.1.5 more easily evade neutralizing antibodies. Assessments of the U.S. [and world] pandemic response are in order. See TrialSite’s founder Daniel O’Connor’s “Pandemic Response 2.0---How Could it be Better: A Review of What We Know.”
We do now that commonsensical measure for protection range from good hygiene practices—such as handwashing, respect of people’s space [distancing], masking--although controversial [at least indoors in public spaces], and if one has an upper respiratory infection, remaining at home and resting and not increasing the probability of spreading the virus to others is a good start.
Existing monoclonal antibodies don’t work well, if at all, against the mutating variants such as XBB.1.5, meaning the ongoing intense evolution of this RNA virus makes it difficult for pharmaceutical products designed against a specific variant of concern. The antiviral Paxlovid offers some protection for some cohorts fitting in the inclusion criteria for the drug although rebound cases are reported.
David Boulware recently reported to TrialSite that metformin appears to have supportive effect against SARS-CoV-2—more so than even fluvoxamine. While TrialSite reported this on the day after Christmas the mass media was strangely silent on this good news. See TrialSite’s “Bramante & Boulware Deliver an Early Christmas Gift: Metformin Lowers Risk of Long COVID.”
Front line physicians independent of health systems have taken matters into their own hands. For example, the controversial but much loved Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) Alliance, or Dr. Peter McCullough, treats patients with various protocols involving repurposed medicines.
In typical times, licensed physicians and consenting patients can without controversy use off label drugs to treat conditions so long as this is done responsibly with full patient consent, and the like. But during the pandemic, with an unprecedented centralizing of medicinal response, discussing off label regimen such as ivermectin is classified as “misinformation,” and in states like California with its new law in effect, can lead to the loss of licensure for physicians that dare to utter alternative approaches.
Meanwhile, no medicinal products are perfect. Some vaccines may have rare side effects. In the case of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, given the magnitude and scale of the pandemic response with 225 million plus fully vaccinated, even a 0.2% serious side effect rate equals nearly half-a-million vaccine-injured persons. Due to intense social pressures doctors and health systems are not recognizing this problem, leading to stigmatization and a lack of care. Groups such as React19 have been formed to represent vaccine injured. They should be properly funded, advocating for the injured as the vaccines were mandated on the population. A much larger long COVID group needs attention and care as well as nations attempt now to transition to an endemic reality.
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19 January, 2023
Moderna and Regulatory Agencies Caught Leaving Out Bivalent Vaccine Data, Physicians Skeptical of Timing
Moderna and regulatory agencies did not present clinical data on bivalent shots at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) committee meetings in June and September 2022, respectively.
Presentations to the FDA and CDC advisory committee excluded data from Moderna’s own clinical study that showed bivalent boosters may be no better at preventing infections than previous booster shots.
The data showed that among people who were never infected, 3.2 percent who took the bivalent booster got infected afterward, while 1.9 percent who took the monovalent booster were later infected.
Advisors to the FDA and CDC expressed concerns of lack of transparency.
Dr. William Schaffner from Vanderbilt University, a nonvoting member of the CDC advisory committee, said that he was disappointed that the data were not presented.
“I think in the interests of transparency, those data should have been presented,” Schaffner said, “though they were very limited, and early data.”
FDA advisor and a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of California San Diego, Dr. Mark Sawyer, said that he understands people’s concern with the data being excluded, but not all information can be presented.
The committee has limited time, so the information presented must be relevant to the big picture.
“Seeing that data would not have changed my opinion about the outcome,” said Sawyer, “and it would certainly have distracted from the discussion.”
The four advisors for the FDA and CDC who were contacted by The Epoch Times agreed that if the data were presented, it may have prolonged the discussion, but would not have changed the voting outcomes.
Both the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meeting and the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meeting approved Moderna bivalent boosters.
The excluded data come out of a Moderna study with 772 participants. The study compared bivalent boosters containing mRNA components of the original and the BA.1 Omicron strain against the original Wuhan-strain booster.
The study primarily investigated the safety and immunogenicity of boosters, but also looked into the infection and reactogenicity of the subjects.
Immunogenicity, the focus of the study, is defined as the ability of the vaccine to trigger an immune response. Though the study authors reiterated that the trial does not examine vaccine efficacy, the authors acknowledged that immunogenicity has been used to infer efficacy.
Three days before the FDA VRBPAC meeting on June 28, 2022, Moderna published the study as a preprint, and in September, published the study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
Both the preprint and peer-reviewed study included data on immunogenicity, safety, reactogenicity, as well as infection.
Moderna’s spokesman Christopher Ridley also told CNN that the company shared the infection data with the FDA and published the study before the FDA panel meeting.
At the VRBPAC meeting, Moderna president Stephen Hoge made several references to the study’s immunogenicity data, which showed that people who took the bivalent shots had a higher antibody level than those who took the monovalent booster, as an argument for the bivalent booster’s superiority.
Hoge also made references to the same study’s data on safety and reactogenicity, but infection rates were excluded.
The FDA’s documents provided to the committee panel on the same day, also referenced the study’s data on immunogenicity, safety, and reactogenicity, yet the infection data were similarly excluded.
According to CNN, the FDA spokesman explained in an email that the data on infection were not included, as “the FDA received the preprint less than a day prior to the advisory committee meeting,” and “generally the FDA only discusses data at advisory committee meetings that the agency has had the opportunity to substantively review.”
This means that the FDA could review the study’s data on immunogenicity, safety, and reactogenicity, but had no opportunity to examine infection data.
VRBPAC member and professor of microbiology and immunology from the University of Iowa, Dr. Stanley Perlman, said that with the absence of these data, there is always the concern that the public will lose trust in the health care system.
At the end of the meeting, the VRBPAC committee ruled in favor of using the Omicron variant’s mRNA in boosters to produce the bivalent COVID-19 vaccines in a 19-2 motion.
It is worth noting that by the time of the FDA committee meeting, the BA.1 strain of the Omicron variant was no longer dominant.
Though the presentations referenced data on bivalent boosters composed of the BA.1 and Wuhan mRNA components, the boosters that were later FDA-emergency authorized contained BA.4 and BA.5 components rather than BA.1.
None of the presentations on Moderna boosters contained clinical data on participants who were inoculated with BA.4/BA.5 bivalent boosters.
The CDC’s meeting with members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) on Sep. 1, 2022, presented by Moderna staff Dr. Jacqueline Miller, also excluded data on infection rates in the presentation (pdf).
Hours into the CDC meeting, voting member of the ACIP Dr. Sybil Cineas asked whether there were any data on breakthrough infections between two experimental groups.
Miller said that between the overall cohort of people who received the bivalent vaccine, the infection rate was 2.5 percent, and for the monovalent group, the rate of 2.4 percent.
However, she failed to mention that for people who never had a previous infection, 3.2 percent of those who took the bivalent vaccine became infected, while 1.9 percent of subjects who took the monovalent developed an infection.
The ACIP members approved Moderna bivalent boosters being made available to people aged 18 and over in a 13-1 vote.
Limitations of Study
Dr. Cody Meissner, a VRBPAC member and a professor in the division of infectious diseases and international health from Dartmouth Health Children’s, also pointed out that the infection data came out of a non-randomized and non-blinded study.
This introduces the risk of bias into the study, as those assigned to bivalent or monovalent boosters were not based on random chance, and trial administrators would know what booster participants received.
While this possibly discounts the significance of the data on infection rates, it can also affect the validity of the findings on immunogenicity, safety, and reactogenicity.
Biochemist and mRNA platform inventor Dr. Robert Malone raised the point that immunogenicity data that only look at antibody levels are not good surrogate measures for vaccine efficacy.
Antibody levels are also not a good measure of immunity, as antibodies will and should wane with time. The long-term immunity they provide is therefore unknown.
It is also unconfirmed if the antibodies produced are neutralizing antibodies that can block the virus and spike proteins, or if they may actually prevent the immune system from killing and controlling the virus, a scenario known as antibody-dependent enhancement.
Increasing Scrutiny of Bivalent Boosters
Bivalent boosters have come under increasing scrutiny for their rapidly declining effectiveness.
A December 2022 preprint study on bivalent vaccines, authored by the Cleveland Clinic, found that the higher the number of previous vaccinations, the greater the risk of contracting COVID-19.
In a letter to the editor (pdf) published in the NEJM, researchers from Columbia University compared antibody serum responses among people who received bivalent boosters, monovalent boosters, and those who were infected.
The authors found that there was no significant difference in neutralizing abilities among these groups when tested against Omicron and other variants.
Dr. Paul Offit, an advisor on the VRBPAC committee who voted against bivalent boosters at the meeting, also published a commentary, saying that young and healthy people shouldn’t get the latest boosters.
“I believe we should stop trying to prevent all symptomatic infections in healthy, young people by boosting them with vaccines containing mRNA from strains that might disappear a few months later,” wrote Offit, also an FDA vaccine panel adviser and professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in the NEJM on Jan. 11, 2023.
In his article, Offit cited two studies suggesting that bivalent boosters, which target the original COVID-19 strain and two Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA. 5, do not “elicit superior immune responses.”
“Why did the strategy for significantly increasing BA.4 and BA.5 neutralizing antibodies using a bivalent vaccine fail?” he asked.
“The most likely explanation is imprinting. The immune systems of people immunized with the bivalent vaccine, all of whom had previously been vaccinated, were primed to respond to the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2. They therefore probably responded to epitopes shared by BA.4 and BA.5 and the ancestral strain, rather than to new epitopes on BA.4 and BA.5.”
Meissner, likewise, expressed that healthy people younger than 65 years of age may not need bivalent boosters.
“We don’t know … how many or how often boosters are necessary. And could there be consequences from giving multiple vaccine doses that we don’t fully understand at this time?”
A peer-reviewed study published on Jan. 12 in Germany also showed that people who received higher numbers of mRNA vaccines had a higher IgG4 antibody response. The authors did not further discuss what these antibody levels may indicate, but studies have associated IgG4 antibodies with immune tolerance, which is when the body reduces its immune response to fight off an infection.
People who had a previous infection or vaccination with the adenovirus COVID-19 vaccine had zero or low IgG4 antibody responses, respectively.
The Timing of Discovery of Excluded Data Is Dubious: Physicians
Retired clinical trialist and epidemiologist Dr. Andrew Bostom was skeptical of the timing of the discovery of the withheld data.
“Why did it take so long to follow up on these findings?” Bostom asked.
Bostom himself noticed the infection data signals when the study was published in the NEJM on Sep. 16, 2022, and posted his findings on his now-reactivated Twitter account.
Even before the FDA’s announcement of emergency-use authorizations of the bivalent vaccines on Aug. 31, 2022, pharmacies and health centers were already being encouraged to take preorders for the bivalent boosters.
“In many ways, the U.S. government was already committed. They already bought these before they knew the results,” board-certified internist and cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough said.
McCullough argued that it is far too late to discuss the nuances of withheld data and immunogenicity, with increasing reports of vaccine injury and adverse events.
Meissner and Sawyer said that the VRBPAC committee is following the rapidly emerging research on the boosters and that there would be further discussion of all available data at the meeting on Jan. 26.
The FDA, CDC, and Moderna did not respond to requests for comment.
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18 January, 2023
DOJ Still Fighting in Court for Forced Masking on Transportation
On April 18, 2022 U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck down President Joe Biden's mask mandate for air and rail transportation. The Department of Justice quickly appealed the decision after a request from the Centers for Disease Control.
"To protect CDC’s public health authority beyond the ongoing assessment announced last week, CDC has asked DOJ to proceed with an appeal in Health Freedom Defense Fund, Inc., et al., v. Biden, et al. It is CDC’s continuing assessment that at this time an order requiring masking in the indoor transportation corridor remains necessary for the public health. CDC will continue to monitor public health conditions to determine whether such an order remains necessary. CDC believes this is a lawful order, well within CDC’s legal authority to protect public health," the CDC released in a statement.
At the time, the White House admitted the appeal was to preserve the power of the federal government.
When the mandate was lifted, flights erupted with cheers.
Nearly a year later, federal attorneys are still working to force masking on transportation.
The Eleventh Circuit of Appeals will hear arguments over a federal mask mandate on Tuesday, Jan. 17.
Beginning at 9 a.m., attorneys will present arguments over the transportation mask mandate.
The appeal drew criticism from the U.S. Travel Association, which along with other industry groups had been pressuring the Biden administration for months to end the mask mandate for travel.
The Health Freedom Defense Fund outlined arguments in court documents, stating they believe the CDC has no legal authority to adopt a mask mandate.
Following today's hearing, the court will decide whether to affirm the decision to strike down the mask mandate. A judge will draft a written decision which may go through several rounds before a majority of the court agrees and the written decision is published.
DOJ continues this fight despite President Joe Biden declaring the pandemic is over and after a recent admission from White House COVID Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha that masks don't work to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.
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Omicron Subvariant XBB.1.5 Could Be More Likely to Infect Vaccinated: NYC Health Officials
The Omicron XBB.1.5 variant of COVID-19 is more likely to infect individuals who have been vaccinated, according to New York City health officials.
“Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5 now accounts for 73 percent of all sequenced COVID-19 cases in NYC. XBB.1.5 is the most transmissible form of COVID-19 that we know of to date and may be more likely to infect people who have been vaccinated or already had COVID-19,” the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene wrote on Twitter on Jan. 13.
Despite this, the department urged New Yorkers to get vaccinated and receive the updated COVID-19 booster shot, stating that doing so “is still the best way to protect yourself from hospitalization and death from COVID-19, including from these new variants.”
The XBB.1.5 variant is quickly becoming the dominant subvariant in the United States. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that XBB.1.5 accounted for an estimated 43 percent of COVID-19 cases in the country for the week ending Jan. 14.
World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said earlier this month that the subvariant is on the rise in the United States and Europe and has now been identified in more than 25 countries.
The subvariant has now overtaken the BQ.1.1 subvariant, which was first identified in September, and which now accounts for an estimated 28.8 percent of cases in the country, according to CDC data.
XBB.1.5 Unlikely to Increase Severity
Although there has been a surge in XBB.1.5 cases, the WHO has stated that the variant does not have any mutations known to increase the severity of the virus in individuals.
In a risk assessment (pdf) published on Jan. 11, the health body said that XBB.1.5, based on its genetic characteristics and early growth rate estimates, may contribute to a surge in cases around the world but it “does not carry any mutation known to be associated with potential change in severity.”
Barbara Mahon, head of the CDC’s proposed Coronavirus and Other Respiratory Viruses Division, also told CBS News on Jan. 6 that there is no suggestion that XBB.1.5 is more severe than previous strains of Omicron.
The WHO in its risk assessment did, however, note that “the overall confidence in the assessment is low” owing to a lack of data on the subvariant, most of which come from the United States, and said that more data and laboratory testing is needed to know for sure how severe the subvariant is.
The health body also noted that XBB.1.5 is one of the COVID-19 subvariants that is most resistant to antibodies acquired from vaccination or previous infection.
According to the CDC, approximately 666,511,603 vaccine doses have been administered in the United States, of which 268,556,888 people have received at least one dose of the vaccine and 229,359,062 have completed the primary series of vaccinations.
Vaccine Effectiveness Only Lasts 3 Months
Additionally, 15.9 percent of the U.S. population aged 5 and over have received the updated bivalent booster shot.
In an interview with Science News on Jan. 13, infectious diseases specialist Peter Chin-Hong of the University of California, San Francisco, stated that vaccinations are likely to provide just three months of protection against the XBB.1.5 variant of COVID-19.
“The new updated boosters generally work a little better than the old vaccines in terms of overall efficacy and preventing infection. But with these new slippery variants like XBB.1.5 … if you’re looking to prevent infections, even a mild infection, the vaccines are probably going to last maybe three months,” Chin-Hong said.
“But if you’re talking about preventing me from dying or going to the hospital, those vaccines are going to give me a boost of protection for many, many months, probably until next winter for most people. For older people, older than 65, if they’re not boosted today, then it’s a problem,” the infectious diseases specialist added.
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Here's Why the CDC Just Launched 'Additional Investigation' of COVID Vaccine Safety
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on Friday afternoon — in something of a pre-weekend news dump — that the agency's Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) has "met the statistical criteria to prompt additional investigation into whether there was a safety concern for ischemic stroke in people ages 65 and older who received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent."
It's worth noting that the CDC's VSD is different from its Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
The CDC's Friday updated emphasized that "[t]o date, no other safety systems have shown a similar signal and multiple subsequent analyses have not validated this signal" and that "[n]o change is recommended in COVID-19 vaccination practice" at this time while an additional investigation is conducted.
The CDC explains more about the signal that met its threshold for additional investigation:
Rapid-response investigation of the signal in the VSD raised a question of whether people 65 and older who have received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent were more likely to have an ischemic stroke in the 21 days following vaccination compared with days 22-44 following vaccination.
This preliminary signal has not been identified with the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent. There also may be other confounding factors contributing to the signal identified in the VSD that merit further investigation.
Furthermore, it is important to note that, to date, no other safety systems have shown a similar signal and multiple subsequent analyses have not validated this signal:
A large study of updated (bivalent) vaccines (from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) using the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services database revealed no increased risk of ischemic stroke
A preliminary study using the Veterans Affairs database did not indicate an increased risk of ischemic stroke following an updated (bivalent) vaccine
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) managed by CDC and FDA has not seen an increase in reporting of ischemic strokes following the updated (bivalent) vaccine
Pfizer-BioNTech’s global safety database has not indicated a signal for ischemic stroke with the updated (bivalent) vaccine
Other countries have not observed an increased risk for ischemic stroke with updated (bivalent) vaccines
Although the totality of the data currently suggests that it is very unlikely that the signal in VSD represents a true clinical risk, we believe it is important to share this information with the public, as we have in the past, when one of our safety monitoring systems detects a signal. CDC and FDA will continue to evaluate additional data from these and other vaccine safety systems. These data and additional analyses will be discussed at the upcoming January 26 meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.
So while the CDC is firm in its belief that a "true clinical risk" does not exist in terms of ischemic stroke in the three weeks after a person over 65 received the Pfizer COVID vaccine, there have been enough reports for a signal to trigger further investigation which has not yet allowed the potential risk to be ruled out.
Dr. Marty Makary shared the CDC's update on vaccine safety and issued a call for the raw data that prompted the additional level of review to be made public, allowing Americans and their doctors to have all the information that exists to use in their decisions about vaccination.
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17 January, 2023
Evidence of Serious Adverse Events in What Is Believed to Be One of the Most Effective Vaccines
The decline of public trust in COVID-19 vaccines significantly impacts vaccination rates against routine childhood diseases. This multiple-part series explores the international research done over the past two decades on the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine—believed to be one of the most effective vaccines developed to date.
Summary of Key Facts
This multiple-part series offers a thorough analysis of concerns raised about HPV vaccination following the global HPV campaign, which commenced in 2006.
In the United States, the HPV vaccine was reported to have a disproportionately higher percentage of adverse events of fainting and blood clots in the veins. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) acknowledges that fainting can happen following the HPV vaccine, and recommends sitting or lying down to get the shot, then waiting for 15 minutes afterward.
International scientists found that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) logged a substantial increase in reports of premature ovarian failure (POF) from 1.4 per year before 2006 to 22.2 per year after the HPV vaccine approval, yielding a Proportional Reporting Ratio of 46.1.
The HPV vaccine is widely regarded as one of the most effective vaccines developed to date. Nevertheless, safety issues have been raised following its approval, and in response, additional research has been published and litigation has been brought on behalf of those with a vaccine injury.
In this HPV vaccine series, Parts I and II explain how the vaccine works and the evidence suggesting there may be legitimate safety concerns. The remaining parts present questions about real-world vaccine effectiveness and identify specific ingredients which may pose harm.
The information presented here is drawn from peer-reviewed scientific literature from the United States, Australia, Denmark, Sweden, France, and Japan, as well as statistics published by public health agencies in each of these countries. More than 100 hours of research and internal peer review among scientists with experience in infectious diseases, virology, clinical trials, and vaccine epidemiology have been invested in presenting this summary of the evidence.
Large registry-based studies have identified plausible associations between HPV vaccination and autoimmune conditions, including premature ovarian insufficiency or failure (POI/POF), Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), and chronic regional pain syndrome (CRPS).
While it is easy to be enthusiastic about recent advances in human vaccine technology, we should keep in mind that achieving real and lasting good health is much more than just the absence of a certain virus.
What Is Human Papillomavirus (HPV)?
According to the CDC, HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection (STI) in the United States.
HPV is a small DNA virus infecting human cutaneous epithelial cells in the mucosa and skin. More than 150 strains of the HPV virus have been identified.
HPV infection is so common that the majority of sexually active people will get it at some point in their lives, even if they have only one or very few sexual partners. It can spread through sexual intercourse and oral sex. It can also pass between people through skin-to-skin contact, even by people who have no symptoms.
HPV infection causes genital warts, some of which can turn into cancer. For the most part, however, HPV infection is benign. More than 90 percent of HPV infections cause no clinical symptoms and are self-limited, meaning the virus is cleared by the body via natural immunological defenses.
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Pentagon Appears to Have No Plan to Reinstate Troops Discharged for Refusing Vaccine Mandate
The Department of Defense has rescinded the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for service members. But the Pentagon doesn’t appear to have a plan to reinstate military personnel who lost their jobs for refusing the vaccine.
The Daily Signal asked the Defense Department whether there would be an effort to bring military personnel who had been discharged for refusing the vaccine back into the military.
“Regarding your final question, former service members may petition their Military Department’s Discharge Review Boards and Boards for Correction of Military or Naval Records to individually review and correct personnel records, including records regarding the characterization of their discharge,” Pentagon spokesperson Lisa Lawrence told The Daily Signal in an email Wednesday.
The Defense Department issued a memo Tuesday explaining that military members dismissed for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine may be eligible to receive an honorable discharge, but the memo did not acknowledge any plan to reinstate those men and women.
The Pentagon confirmed to The Daily Signal in December that a total of 8,424 military members have been discharged for refusing the vaccine.
“[Defense] Secretary Lloyd Austin’s rescinding of the military vaccine mandate is long overdue,” the newly-elected head of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., told The Daily Signal in an email Wednesday.
“Service members punished for refusing the mandate should be reinstated,” said Green, a three-tour combat veteran. “Those who do not wish to return should receive full veteran benefits where appropriate for their service to our country, and service members who were ineligible for these veteran benefits should also retroactively receive them in full.”
The military vaccine mandate came to an end Dec. 23, with the signing of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2023.
More than two weeks after the vaccine mandate expired, but within the allotted 30-day period to release the new guidance, the Pentagon issued a memo announcing the official end of the mandate.
“Section 525 of the NDAA for [fiscal year] 2023 requires me to rescind the mandate that members of the armed forces be vaccinated against COVID-19 …. I hereby rescind that memorandum,” Austin wrote in the memo.
The memo explains that “individuals currently serving in the armed forces” will not be dismissed “solely on the basis of their refusal to receive the COVID-19 vaccination if they sought an accommodation on religious, administrative, or medical grounds.”
Lawrence, the Pentagon spokesperson, told The Daily Signal that “Secretary Austin is directing the secretaries of the military departments to cease any ongoing reviews of current service members’ religious, administrative, or medical accommodation requests solely for exemption from the COVID-19 vaccine or appeals of denials of such requests.”
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Ahead of Congress’ vote on the NDAA in December, Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin introduced an amendment that would have allowed those who refused the vaccine to be reinstated and provided with back pay. The amendment failed.
“This vaccine mandate never should have been put in place,” Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., told The Daily Signal. “It has negatively impacted recruitment and the ability to maintain the amount of military men and women needed to keep our country safe.”
Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., said that forcing military members to choose between getting vaccinated and having a livelihood “was completely inappropriate and contrary to the very freedoms those service members defend.”
“Just as troubling is this apparent delay for the [Pentagon] to formally issue its memo on the rescission of the mandate, more than two weeks after this was directed through the NDAA,” he added.
Mike Berry, director of military affairs for First Liberty Institute, said in a statement Wednesday that while the “secretary of defense did as Congress directed,” it was “the bare minimum owed to our brave service members.”
“In fact, the secretary’s memo still permits military commanders to require the vaccine in making decisions regarding unvaccinated service members,” Berry said. “There are still far too many in our military who were forced out or are still facing career-ending actions because of the COVID vaccine mandate. America owes it to those who defend our Constitution and our freedoms to ensure they do not lose theirs.”
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FDA Adviser Says Young and Healthy People Shouldn’t Get Latest COVID Boosters
A vaccine adviser to the Food and Drug Administration is questioning whether young, healthy people should get new COVID-19 boosters, arguing those shots should be used for older individuals.
“I believe we should stop trying to prevent all symptomatic infections in healthy, young people by boosting them with vaccines containing mRNA from strains that might disappear a few months later,” wrote Dr. Paul A. Offit, an FDA vaccine panel adviser and professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in New England Journal of Medicine on Jan. 11.
In his article, Offit cited two studies suggesting that bivalent boosters, which target the original COVID-19 strain and two Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA. 5, do not “elicit superior immune responses.”
“Why did the strategy for significantly increasing BA.4 and BA.5 neutralizing antibodies using a bivalent vaccine fail?” he asked. “The most likely explanation is imprinting. The immune systems of people immunized with the bivalent vaccine, all of whom had previously been vaccinated, were primed to respond to the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2. They therefore probably responded to epitopes shared by BA.4 and BA.5 and the ancestral strain, rather than to new epitopes on BA.4 and BA.5.”
Offit noted that based on those studies, “boosting with a bivalent vaccine is likely to have a similar effect as boosting with a monovalent vaccine” but stressed that “booster dosing is probably best reserved for the people most likely to need protection against severe disease.”
Another doctor appeared to agree with Offit’s conclusions regarding “imprinting.” Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told U.S. News that “it may be that people’s immune systems are so primed to respond to the ancestral strain spike protein that a reformulated booster is unable to fully stimulate the immune system because it has been ‘imprinted’ by the original version of the virus.”
Data and studies have shown that older adults and people who have compromised immune systems are most at risk of developing severe COVID-19 symptoms, hospitalization, and death. Children, meanwhile, have long been shown to have the lowest chance of death, hospitalization, or developing severe symptoms since the pandemic started.
Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and FDA said that everyone over the age of 6 months get updated boosters at least two months after their last doses of the vaccine. The bivalent boosters were authorized under emergency use for children aged 6 months to 4 years on Dec. 9.
Meanwhile, a small number of Americans have received the updated boosters, according to the CDC. As of Jan. 4, some 15 percent of individuals aged 5 and older received the bivalent shots, while about 38 percent of adults aged 65 and older have gotten them.
That same CDC data also shows that about 80.9 percent of all Americans received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine since they were rolled out two years ago, while 69 percent have completed their initial, “primary series.”
An FDA spokesperson Abigail Capobianco responded to Offit’s article this week, telling NBC News that Offit allegedly used “selective” data to reach his conclusions and that “we strongly believe that the totality of the available evidence continues to support the use of these vaccines in all age groups.”
“Dr. Offit is entitled to his opinion about the effectiveness of the COVID-19 bivalent vaccines used as boosters,” Capobianco also said.
Earlier this week, Offit told CNN that the CDC and FDA said they were not provided with real-world data on how well the bivalent booster performs at blocking transmission of the virus before those boosters were approved by the federal agencies. Data showed that about 1.9 percent of people who got the first booster were infected, compared with 3.2 percent who got the bivalent shot, CNN reported.
“I was angry to find out that there was data that was relevant to our decision that we didn’t get to see,” Offit told CNN. “Decisions that are made for the public have to be made based on all available information—not just some information, but all information.”
The FDA’s vaccine panel is scheduled to meet on Jan. 26 to determine future vaccination regimens to address COVID-19.
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16 January, 2023
Medical researcher Calls for Withdrawal of Pfizer, Moderna COVID-19 Vaccines Following New Research
An American doctor is joining the calls for the withdrawal of the messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccines, pointing to new research that highlights a connection between the shots and adverse events.
Dr. Joseph Fraiman, a doctor based in Louisiana who also conducts research on COVID-19 and other health issues, says it’s time to halt the administration of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines until new clinical trials prove the benefits from the vaccines outweigh the harms.
The new research, including a reanalysis of the trials for the vaccines, raise concerns about whether the benefits from the vaccines outweigh the harms, according to the doctor.
“I don’t see how anyone couldn’t be certain that the benefits are outweighing the harms on a population level, or even in the high-risk groups. I don’t see the evidence to support that claim,” Fraiman told The Epoch Times. “But I also can’t say that there’s evidence to support that it’s potentially more harmful, but there’s also uncertainty here. … Given that scenario, I believe that people should not be given the [vaccines] outside of a clinical trial, because we need to figure out … if their benefits outweigh harm or if harm outweighs benefits.”
“The only thing that can answer that question is going to be a randomized trial,” he added.
Pfizer and Moderna did not respond to requests for comment.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which cleared the shots and has never stopped promoting them, did not return an inquiry.
The Data
Fraiman led a study that reanalyzed the original Pfizer and Moderna trials. He and his colleagues concluded in a study published following peer review that the vaccinated were at higher risk of serious adverse events.
That’s one data point. Another is the identification of safety signals, or adverse events, that are potentially caused by the vaccines but require further study. The FDA revealed in December 2022 that the Pfizer vaccine was linked to blood clotting in elderly individuals. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which recommends the vaccines for virtually all Americans, found hundreds of other signals in its research, according to records obtained by The Epoch Times.
Several serious problems that can lead to death have been causally linked, or proven to be caused by the vaccines. They include myocarditis, or heart inflammation.
While U.S. health officials have repeatedly downplayed the severity of myocarditis and a related condition, pericarditis, German researchers who dug into the deaths of 25 people who died suddenly at home after vaccination ruled out every potential cause except for vaccination for five of the people. They reported their results in a study that was published after peer review in late 2022.
“Given alternative causes are unlikely to cause myocarditis within one week of vaccination, this is essentially conclusive evidence that we’re seeing sudden cardiac deaths from the vaccines,” Fraiman said.
Fraiman also noted that excess mortality, or deaths from all causes, have risen during the pandemic—with spikes correlating with the introduction of the vaccines. Vaccines may not have caused the additional deaths, he says, but some researchers, including British professors Norman Fenton and Martin Neil, have examined the data and found a signal that the vaccines were linked to at least some of the excess deaths. U.S. officials say some of the deaths may be from COVID-19.
Initial Thoughts
When the vaccines were first introduced, Fraiman backed giving them to the elderly and others at high risk from COVID-19, or people of all ages with serious underlying health conditions. He says he also did not recommend against vaccination for any ages, though he told younger family members he was not sure if it was a good idea to get a jab.
Fraiman also says the vaccines likely reduced hospitalizations in the first two quarters of 2021, recalling how he did not see a single vaccinated person in his hospital until June of that year.
When he and the other scientists discovered the vaccinated were at higher risk of serious problems, he shifted to a stance of the harms likely outweighing the benefits among healthy people.
With the new evidence of harm, along with Omicron being less dangerous and more likely to evade vaccine immunity, Fraiman questions whether the benefits outweigh the serious harms even among the elderly and otherwise infirm.
“I see the likelihood that the harm could outweigh the benefit in the group who stood to benefit the most from the vaccine,” he said.
Standards Fall
Clinical trial data on the vaccines have been hard to come by, especially trials not run by the vaccine makers themselves, and the standards for the trials have been lowered over time.
The FDA authorized shots for children based on immunobridging, or trial data that found the vaccines triggered a similar antibody response in kids than that in adults. For the new bivalent boosters, created because the original vaccines have been providing much lower levels of protection against Omicron and its subvariants, no clinical data, not even antibody measurements, was provided at all. Months later, that data is still not available to the public.
Some observational studies have estimated the boosters provide subpar protection against infection and solid protection, at least initially, against hospitalization. Randomized, controlled trials are typically considered superior.
Fraiman recommends withdrawing the vaccines and U.S. officials going to the vaccine makers and asking them to demonstrate the benefits outweigh the harms in light of the changed dynamics of the pandemic. The trials should feature investigators looking closely at each COVID-19 hospitalization to distinguish whether they were caused by COVID-19, or the COVID-19 diagnosis was incidental. That distinction is known widely as being hospitalized, or dying, with COVID-19 versus from COVID-19.
The trial would take five or six months, similar to the original ones, Fraiman says.
Other Calls
Some countries, such as Denmark, meanwhile, have stopped offering booster shots to certain segments of the population. A growing number of experts, meanwhile, are calling for the administration of the Moderna and Pfizer shots, which are by far the most administered in the United States, to be halted.
The group includes Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a British doctor who turned against the vaccines in 2022 due to the growing evidence of side effects. Malhotra’s citations included the Moderna and Pfizer trials, which showed no reduction in mortality or severe disease, and the research led by Fraiman.
Linda Wastila, director of policy and research of the Peter Lamy Center for Drug Therapy and Aging at the University of Maryland, said she agrees with Fraiman, pointing to the research as well as data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Reports of thousands of post-vaccination deaths have been lodged with the system, in addition to hundreds of thousands of injuries.
“I’m a data scientist, and I’m overwhelmed by the congruence of all these data coming together so rapidly, all painting a horrific picture of vaccine harms that really cannot be ignored,” Wastila told The Epoch Times via email.
Wastila called for the removal of the vaccines from the market immediately, at least until safety signals identified by the CDC and FDA are closely studied.
“In not doing so, FDA and the rest of government agencies pushing these products are not only placing millions at risk for injury or death, they also are successfully encouraging rapid distrust of the institutions that are supposed to protect us,” she said.
There are other experts, such as Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who have recommended against certain populations getting vaccinated, such as healthy young men, because they’re at higher risk of one or more side effects and stand to gain little benefit against a disease that already poses minimal risk to them. Still, other experts continue to back the vaccination of virtually all people, including Dr. Ashish Jha, coordinator of the White House COVID-19 response.
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Oh, So That’s What Moderna Forgot to Tell Us About Their COVID Vaccine
The more we learn about these COVID vaccines, the more I sort of regret getting the vaccine. I already survived the virus pre-vaccine, but still got vaccinated and boosted. I’m shocked that I haven’t had a cardiac event, given how scores of young people are “dying suddenly.” I’ll have more about that later, but the death rates for young Americans have spiked, and there may be some inquiries into how these vaccines might be a factor.
Today, we’re going to piggyback off something our friends at RedState touched upon concerning Moderna not being forthcoming about some data about the vaccine. Information about the reinfection rate was buried, and an FDA panel member is not too pleased about that development. What’s even more surprising is that CNN is the outlet who reported on the incomplete disclosure of Moderna’s vaccine:
“I was angry to find out that there was data that was relevant to our decision that we didn’t get to see,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, a group of external advisers that helps the FDA make vaccine decisions. “Decisions that are made for the public have to be made based on all available information – not just some information, but all information.”
At a meeting of this FDA advisory group in June and a meeting in September of a panel that advises the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the experts were presented with reams of information indicating that the new vaccine worked better than the one already on shelves, according to a review of videos and transcripts of those meetings and slide presentations made by Moderna, CDC and FDA officials.
That data – called immunogenicity data – was based on blood work done on study participants to assess how well each vaccine elicited antibodies that fight off the Omicron strain of the virus that causes Covid-19.
The data that was not presented to the experts looked at actual infections: who caught Covid-19 and who did not.
Streiff adds:
There are a few observations that can be made here. First, omitting critical data to the FDA advisory committee isn’t an oversight. Moderna’s team either knew the proposed vaccine had nearly double the current vaccine and deliberately didn’t flag that data, or they are idiots. It isn’t easy to come up with other alternatives.
The reason they did it is pretty simple. Money.
And let’s not forget that these pharmaceutical companies have full immunity from legal action. These companies can get a legal shield, but there shouldn’t be the same protections for the gun industry which has enemies at the gates looking to litigate them into extinction. They didn’t disclose all the data over money and for the sheer fact that no legal fallout could ever occur. I’m sadly not shocked there was a failure to disclose all the data before the political class, Fauci, and the Democrats forced this down our throats by threatening our employment.
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15 January, 2023
The official response to Covid was modern-deay Lysenkoism
Comment from Australia
‘Truth, like all other good things, may be loved unwisely – may be pursued too keenly – may cost too much.’ (Spigelman, 2004).
Has this statement by Vice-Chancellor Knight Bruce in 1846 become the principle to which governments, health regulators, and the pharmaceutical industry proclaim?
Well, perhaps Dr Kerryn Phelps and her wife, in their disclosure just before Christmas 2022 admitting that they had suffered severe side effects from their Covid vaccines, would agree. But why are we no longer seeing the daily media parade at 11 am from Health Ministers, regulators, and fringe-dwelling health bureaucrats with little to no clinical experience with Covid addressing the serious adverse effects and deaths from vaccines?
If we recall, government Ministers and bureaucrats across the country all marched to the beat of the same drum – get vaccinated as the alternative of being ostracised. Losing your livelihood and being publicly ridiculed was too much for the majority. We could not move outside a 5km radius, work, or visit loved ones for fear of transmitting the virus unless we were injected. Strangely the Supreme Court held that this was not coercion, because apparently you had a choice as to whether you wanted to work or travel outside the ‘5km bubble’, but of course, this was predicated on whether you had the jab.
Daily briefings similar to a kindergarten roll call for Australians became a generic message about the importance of addressing Covid in the community with no response to genuine concerns from those seeking relevant, accurate, and scientifically proven data.
It is ironic that given we are entering the third year of the Covid era, Public Health Officials continue to use the only two weapons in the fight against the continual increase in Covid Infections: facemasks and further boosters for prior injections that did not stop transmission, hospitalisations, or deaths.
Meanwhile, antivirals with decades of safety data are now being prescribed despite being made previously illegal and/or banned by regulators, all in an effort to socially construct a perception that the only thing that could save humanity was an untested mRNA injection. Or was this to ensure the Bio Security Act 2015 (Commonwealth) was complied with, ensuring that ‘no other medications were available’, thereby perceivably justifying a national campaign of social and medical coercion? I will leave this logical conundrum for you to grapple with, as many still need help understanding this line of reasoning.
Could the flood of experimental vaccines mandated upon the Australian population have, in effect, put ordinary Australians on trial? Greg Hunt, the former Federal Health Minister, said of the Pfizer and other Covid injections, ‘The world is engaged in the largest clinical vaccination trial.’ (Roberts, 2022) I would go further and say, in history…
The phrase ‘on trial’ does not solely relate to being tried in a court of law. It can apply when a government observes people to see whether they succeed or fail. It seems that government priorities now depend on getting people to act differently through enforced compliance whilst reducing transparency and accountability measures. (Shergold, 2007; Boughey, 2021)
One could assume that following the rollout of the injections, there are now two groups of people:
Those who complied with the government’s policy to get injected; and
Those that have now been put on Santa’s naughty list.
In return, they cannot work or engage in what was normal life free from government intervention, harassment and, in some cases, State-sponsored police brutality, similar to that of paramilitary organisation exacting extra curial punishment for not complying with the edicts of their grand masters.
Reminiscent of Trofim Lysenko (Lysenkoism), whose maligned ideological influence dominated biology in the Soviet Union, Lysenko, like the health bureaucrats of today, owe their ascendancy to the repeated promises of fear, doom, and insecurity, topics that worked well in Marxist-driven society.
As Lysenko’s power grew, he smothered scientific debate despite the fact that his strategy was and remains an epic failure. He crushed all opposition by deploying the State’s apparatuses to censor, intimidate, arrest, and execute scientists until the only scientists left standing were those who sold their souls to the Lysenkoism doctrine.
The result was the development of an ideology-based pseudo-science (a mere semblance of science wrapped in politics, State-run media marketing, and ideology) that did not base itself on evidence. Instead, ideology was enforced through coercion and paramilitary doctrines. State apparatuses such as Courts (if one made it to the court) were not there to hear the evidence; rather, they were used to sanitise the public record and act as gatekeepers of truth, holding back knowledge. They held back knowledge using State-sponsored experts rewarded through promotions for their loyal adherence to the cause.
The Lysenko phenomenon is the most extreme but by no means the only example of the perversion of science by ideology (as seen in Germany during the second world war and later prosecuted through Nuremberg), often with the acquiescence of the scientific community. Over the past three years, legislation has been introduced to silence medical practitioners/scientists in California (USA) and Queensland (Australia), which does not give us confidence that nothing of the kind could happen today in what used to be legally obliged participatory democracies. Perhaps the parliamentary Ministers and health bureaucrats during Covid have aligned themselves with this doctrine…?
It is apparent that politicians and so-called experts had not seen any scientific data to support their claim that the vaccines were safe and effective because we know now that the manufacturer did not have this data. So, what evidence did ATAGI, State-sponsored experts, and the TGA rely on to approve these vaccines if the manufacturer did not have that data available? The TGA states on its website:
Before any Covid-19 vaccine is approved for use in Australia, it will be subject to the well-established and rigorous assessment and approval processes of the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).
One of the most poignant examples relates to the experts and high-level politicians all over Australia and the world stating that the science supported their claims when in fact, no such science existed.
We heard many notable prominent people go on the public record and state (words to the effect), ‘if you get vaccinated you will not get the virus’ or ‘get vaccinated to save your grandmother and family’.
Well, all you have to do is refer to the statement of Greg Hunt above relating to the World’s biggest ‘clinical trial’. So who is telling fibs? The manufacturer, doctors, health bureaucrats, and/or politicians? Or, is this a well-coordinated program where it is the consumer who must work out the dangers as to who is responsible (similar to the Abbott and Costello movie): ‘Who’s on first? No… Who is on second!’ Or will the doctors and injectors be thrown under the bus and held to account under the learned intermediary doctrine (LID)?
The Lysenko affair stands as a classic example of how politics can corrupt and undermine the rational, proven approach of the evidence-based scientific method. Subtle subversion of the scientific method occurs at many levels, but as with Lysenko, there must be a root and branch adoption by the highest institutions of power to ensure that the burden of proof for the ‘commoner’ is perceivably futile. And those who question the ideology are publicly ridiculed by the Fourth Estate (media) and reprimanded for daring to challenge ‘their’ agenda with evidence.
The traditional common law method of induction in our legal system is the principle of a fair trial (Spigelman, 2004) yet, according to Phelps in her recent submission to Parliament:
‘The burden of proof seems to have been placed on the vaccine injured.’ (Phelps, 2022)
I too have written previously about the burden of proof being shifted so far that the consumer must prove a product or medical device is dangerous rather than well-resourced multi-national pharmaceutical companies to prove they are safe. In simple legal terms, the bar is so high, it is difficult for anyone to suggest that any future plaintiffs may have a fair hearing.
The High Court has provided an opinion relating to the burden of proof and how it can be managed in Kuczborski v Queensland (2014) inter alia, in which it was noted that the Parliament may reverse the onus of proof, but will this be enough if its interpretation is misguided?
For people to have confidence in any system, it needs to be perceived as open, balanced, transparent, and operate without fear or favour; this is something that has yet to occur because all we have seen is censorship, exclusion, ridicule, and propaganda which is creating the impression of an alternate reality, one where truth has been manipulated to become misinformation, and misinformation has become truth.
Many may not be aware from the Kassam Judgement that 6,000 individual patient medical records, 50 per cent vaccinated and 50 per cent not vaccinated were before the court. Of the 6,000, only four people passed away due to advanced Covid (that is, they arrived at the hospital too late). More telling is that Dr Bryan Tyson provided the (anti-viral) treatment protocol to the Supreme Court of NSW that assisted the remaining patients (5,996) in recovering. Yet the State expert Prof Kristine Macartney was declared an impressive witness even though Prof Macartney conceded that she had never treated a Covid patient. Still, we know that this was a golden opportunity for the administrative bodies to take notice for the sake of community safety, but did they? Indeed, the mystery of Lysenko’s Australian-adopted science continues to evade logic.
Evidence is now emerging from NSW Health data indicating that it is the jabbed presenting high levels of hospital admissions. The media have not hyped the message that the unjabbed may not be at significant risk, but the data is telling if anyone decides to examine it closely without bias
Almost 18 months later from the plaintiffs in Kassam adducing evidence and placing their stake in the sand, documents emerged from Pfizer revealing this untold truth to all that there was never any research to support the experts making representations that the injections reduced or stopped transmission; a topic very quickly deflected or ignored in the legacy media networks. Indeed, Australia’s chief health officers conceded they had never read the Pfizer nonclinical report, so where on earth did experts and politicians get their information from if it was not the manufacturer?
Perhaps government experts should have called upon the Kassam plaintiffs’ experts, who had demonstrated extraordinary insight when they made submissions in the NSW Supreme Court to Chief Justice Beech-Jones at CL that lockdowns do not stop transmission, nor does the Covid injection provide lasting immunity or stop transmission rates, thereby rendering any lockdowns and fines nugatory and legally unreasonable. However, anyone questioning such anomalies were labelled ‘anti-vaxxer’, a bullying term that strangely also attaches to those who have been vaccine injured.
But who benefits from this forced clinical trial – Big Pharma! Perhaps this is why the burden of proof has shifted from the manufacturer to the consumer. Or could this be a military operation whereby the military, acting as prime movers, deployed vaccines as militaristic countermeasures against a perceived biological attack? (Altman et al, 2022). In either case, both do not accord with transparent democratic processes and appear to contravene the Nuremberg code. The court created this code (U.S.A. v. Karl Brandt et al.: The Doctors’ Trial) to combat gross institutionalised overreach and mass experimentation on populations. It has become clear that there are apparent complexities associated with institutions providing a balanced approach to accessing information to allow consumers to meet the burden of proof.
Presently the consumer has an insurmountable task to establish any causal link between injury or death. Rather than engaging in an adversarial struggle with the opponent, they find themselves battling a government-sponsored ideology promulgated by the legacy media that places pressure on institutions to toe the line, thereby unreasonably shifting the burden of proof on the consumer. Perhaps next, we will see the vehicle manufacturers rely on consumers to do their own car crash tests, too; only time will tell.
By virtue of the preponderance of the evidence, the burden of proof has been switched so much that it has legally muzzled the consumer/patient/doctors, and scientists in what should be a balanced system governed by the Rule of Law. Even where a consumer may seek information, it is often an unreasonably tedious and costly threshold because it is difficult for a consumer to gain access to the data under Freedom of Information laws. A sentiment shared by Sir Anthony Mason (2007), who stated: ‘The Freedom of Information Act 1982 had proven to be a “substantial disappointment.’
This has placed a disproportionate disadvantage on individuals who cannot have confidence in a system perceived to be broken by the significant erosion of certain key administrative institutions and values. Some of these issues involve the institutions of government withholding key documents such as vaccine procurement contracts from the public or the documents relating to the discussions of the National Cabinet meetings about the federal and state government rollout of jabs.
Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical industry has been able to establish with governments a special type of privilege within the legal system, which has made it very difficult for consumers to demonstrate that vaccines (along with many other pharmaceuticals) can ever be at fault for anything.
This privilege often carried through lobbying and grants, has been aided to a great extent by medical regulatory bodies such as the TGA and APHRA, silencing those that seek to question or challenge the increasing concerns surrounding the safety and efficacy of these drugs. (Burger, 2020)
These facts raise a very relevant question as to whether the onus of proof has shifted to such an extent that pharmaceutical companies are just ‘too big to fail’ or is it just part of a counterfeit business plan where million-dollar settlements are factored into the business plan – yes! Preempted.
Without engaging in litigation and risking costs orders, consumers are held hostage by an almost prohibitive costs regime restricting access in matters of significant public interest. Perhaps this is the goal of Lysenkoism, or perhaps not? The same cannot be said for multi-national companies who are prepared to defend their special privileges at any cost!
Australians like Phelps and many others before her, who fell into line to take their shots, are suffering. Many only took their shots to save their jobs, but now they are still waiting for compensation. All over the world, millions of people have died, and hundreds of millions are living with severe adverse reactions, including the suspected deaths of ‘children’. These people are not just statistics in some database – no, they are human beings, family members, and loved ones that deserve to be heard, but is it an uncanny coincidence that cases coming before Courts ‘globally’ appear to be dismissed often with adverse costs orders, despite the laser-focused temporal correlations being evident?
Individuals now face difficulties after suffering a vaccine-related injury. Many Australians are still awaiting compensation after more than one year of lodging their report to the TGA. Indeed, a forensic pathologist report of patient (X) (also tendered in the Kassam case) directly linked a vaccine to the death of a 51-year-old father. This family is still waiting for compensation and still waiting for the TGA to list the death on their public website. Perhaps these delays are not intentional due to a large number of reports that have clogged the system. But suppose the daily media parades announcing the deaths of the elderly with comorbidities on the hour were sufficient, then why are we not seeing the same treatment for those injured by the so-called vaccine or gene therapy now?
Has the ‘pat on the back’ given to many Australians from the government for complying with their policy to get vaccinated become a ‘slap in the face’?
As suggested in the journal articles reviewed, what is becoming increasingly clearer is that the experts claiming boosters improve protection against the XBB variant may be the ones engaging in disinformation, and this squarely places them at potential risk of breaching the California and Queensland legislation relating to disinformation.
Why were government officials left in the dark if the Kassam plaintiffs knew this truth from publicly available scientific data 18 months ago? This is clear, the state of scientific knowledge was available in 2020, and by the time Kassam went to the hearing, that knowledge had progressed sufficiently to provide protections for Australian citizens. But, this was not to be. Since our letter dated July 7, 2021, to Brad Hazzard and Co in response to community concerns about the safety and efficacy of the various Covid vaccines, we have unfortunately seen these numbers increase considerably. We raised questions relating to the conduct of some of Australia’s highest institutions, such as the TGA and AHPRA, aligned universities, and health bureaucrats all vying for research grants and recognition.
Our letter, written before vaccine-related injuries and deaths were as bad as they are now, clearly articulated these risks and essentially puts politicians and courts on notice. We are still waiting for a response from the government addressing these concerns.
Sadly, many Australian citizens have paid the ultimate price as a result, and many families were unaware of the true state of scientific knowledge because it was censored, ridiculed, and shunned. Although a clear vindication of the Kassam plaintiff’s position is on the cards, it is too late for many families who have lost loved ones, something we warned would occur. However, there are many courageous and ethically minded senators and politicians from all over the world, such as Senators Gerard Rennick, Alex Antic, Malcolm Roberts, Matt Canavan, Ralph Babet, Pauline Hanson, Craig Kelly (former MP), Senator Rand Paul, Rob Johnson (USA), and European parliamentarians who have continually voiced concerns over the manner in which the injections were rolled out across their respective continents.
Lawyers from around the world have united, strongly driven by perceived injustices against humanity, such as Aaron Siri, Thomas Renz, and Reiner Fuellmich et al., and have launched actions and continue to do their duty to ensure the Rule of Law is followed internationally.
Lessons learnt over the past few years have taught us that the idea of informed and valid consent has become a thing of the past with relentless labelling of people as ‘anti-vaxxers’ that chose to seek information about the safety and efficacy of these vaccines. In fact, what Dr Kerryn Phelps and others injured by the vaccine have come to know is that in exchange for speaking out about their vaccine injury, they are rubber-stamped as anti-vaxxers, the go-to attack line by the captured legacy media.
We have been directly involved with matters concerning long-serving police members (without disciplinary records) who have been dismissed from employment for electing, under their ‘informed consent rights’, not to comply with the Commissioner’s Direction to be vaccinated. These hardworking Police Officers, who only 12 months earlier were labelled heroes, cannot find employment in other industries, such as the security industry, because the Commissioner has sacked them for misconduct and classified them as not having sufficient ‘integrity’. Minister Paul Whelan MP, in his second reading speech to Parliament, on November 13, 1996, said:
‘The vast majority of police are, of course, hardworking and honest. They are constantly let down by the corrupt and incompetent. It is essential that these undesirable elements are removed to allow talent to blossom and performance to improve.’
He further stated:
‘The government recognises that the authority to terminate employment under the Commissioner’s confidence provisions vests considerable power in the Commissioner … checks, and balances are required to ensure that it is only used as it is meant to be, and is neither exceeded nor abused.’
Whilst we deeply respect our Police forces, I merely point out that Lysenkoism appears to be thriving in Australia in 2023.
Similar to Maoist China we have also seen Fair Work Commission members sent into reeducation for towing the party line. One stark example is Jennifer Kimber v Sapphire Coast Community Aged Care Ltd[2021] FWCFB 6015 Deputy President Lyndell Dean stated that mandatory immunisation could not be justified in ‘almost every workplace in Australia’.
‘All Australians should vigorously oppose the introduction of a system of medical apartheid and segregation in Australia,’ she said. ‘It is an abhorrent concept and is morally and ethically wrong, and the antithesis of our democratic way of life and everything we value.’
In a move from Maoist China, Deputy President Dean was removed from hearing any further vaccine-related cases and was required to undertake ‘re-education’. Anyone who understands history will tell you that similar conduct occurred in China if one did not adhere to the Communist party line.
Many brave professionals worldwide risked their livelihoods to fulfil their duty to raise the alarm about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing Covid policies. These ethically minded doctors, scientists, and social advocates, such as Prof Jay Bhattacharya, Prof Gupta, Prof Martin Kulldorff, Dr Peter McCullough, Prof Clancy, Dr Malhotra, Dr Phillip Altman, Dr Hobart, Dr Sabine Hazan, Dr Maryanne Demasi, Dr Chris Neill, Dr Cosford, Prof Brighthope, Dr Ryan Cole, Dr Bryan Tyson, Dr Michael Palmer, the late Dr Zelenko, Prof Robert Clancy, Dr Geert Vanden Bossche, Ivor Cummings, Dr Ah Khan Syed, Arkmedic, Nicki Evans, and JikkyLeaks (to name a few); along with tens of thousands of others, signed the Great Barrington Declaration. Many social media personalities also spoke out about the experimental vaccines’ effects on ordinary Australians’ daily lives, such as Graham Hood, John Larter, and prominent journalists Alan Jones, Rowan Dean et al. I dread to think how worse our society would be if it were not for these individuals.
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13 January, 2023
Vaccinated people still getting Covid
Officials in Washington state recorded jumps in post-vaccination infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in mid-2021, according to newly disclosed internal emails.
Fifteen percent of COVID-19 cases and 25 percent of COVID-19 hospitalizations from July 1 to July 20, 2021, were vaccinated—up from 2 percent between February and June that year, Chris Spitters, the health officer for the Snohomish County Health District, wrote in one of the messages. A fifth of the deaths attributed to COVID-19 were vaccinated.
Spitters also detailed a COVID-19 outbreak in a long-term care facility with over a dozen breakthrough, or post-vaccination, cases.
Dr. Yuan-Po Tu, of The Everett Clinic, responded by saying that about 20 percent of people testing positive in the clinic were fully vaccinated. “ALL 3 vaccines are breaking through,” Tu wrote.
Dr. James Cook, chief medical officer at the Providence Regional Medical Center Everett, told Spitters and Tu that some hospitalized patients were vaccinated and the majority of workers who were testing positive were fully vaccinated.
“I don’t think any have been hospitalized but I’m not 100% sure,” Cook wrote.
The emails, all sent on July 30, 2021, were obtained and published recently by Ari Hoffman, a 570 KVI radio host and an editor for The Post Millennial. They were reviewed by The Epoch Times, which confirmed their authenticity.
The emails were sent after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study showing that 74 percent of COVID-19 cases from an outbreak in Massachusetts occurred among fully vaccinated people, undercutting claims from top health officials that the vaccinated would not get infected. The outbreak investigation prompted the agency to recommend vaccinated people wear masks indoors, a reversal from about two months prior.
Spitters said in his missive that the outbreak study provided “sobering news” and predicted a “rocky road ahead.”
“We really need to reframe our public education approach to emphasizing vaccination along with the other prevention measures rather than the faded illusion of vaccination instead of other prevention measures. The stellar individual protection afforded by vaccination is no longer, nor is the dream of getting out from under COVID on July 1,” he said, referring to President Joe Biden declaring that COVID-19 “no longer controls our lives” and that the country had achieved “independence from COVID-19” thanks to vaccination.
“Effectiveness is still good compared to many other vaccines and higher coverage would still do us a lot of good, but the vaccine effectiveness is clearly no longer what it was just a couple of months ago and folks should manage themselves accordingly,” Spitters added.
Snohomish County officials had said in June 2021 that the county’s COVID-19 metrics were dropping “thanks in large part to the growing number of people getting vaccinated.” Spitters had said that “relief is on the horizon.”
Just weeks later, with metrics rising, the county’s health agency acknowledged that people who were vaccinated could still become infected, but described breakthrough infections as “occasional” and the vaccinated as better off when it came to illness, hospitalization, and death.
“Local public health officials were publicly discussing breakthrough infections in summer 2021, as were many healthcare professionals, researchers, and scientists. Throughout the COVID-19 response, local public health has consistently been in communication about the best disease prevention measures to keep our communities healthy,” Dr. Dennis Worsham and Dr. James Lewis, now the top two health officials in the country, told The Epoch Times via email in response to a query about the internal messages.
“It is not a surprise to have breakthrough infections. Even vaccines that work very well are not a 100% guarantee against infection, and we don’t expect them to be. What we continue to see, though, is that fully vaccinated (and now boosted, particularly with the new bivalent booster) individuals are much less likely to require hospitalization or die of COVID-19 related complications,” they added.
Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, in August 2021 imposed COVID-19 vaccine mandates for public workers, healthcare workers, and teachers, claiming that the mandates would be crucial in “defeating this deadly disease.” When the vaccines first rolled out, experts hoped the shots would work well enough to drastically diminish or even eliminate the virus, or reach herd immunity. But by the end of 2021, with the vaccines performing worse than expected, they were acknowledging that may not be possible.
Other Emails
In another jurisdiction in Washington state in July 2021, Lewis flagged the rising number of breakthrough infections in a separate email chain.
Lewis, at the time an epidemiologist with Seattle and King County’s health department, told colleagues he’d been speaking with contact tracers who “are hearing stories all day from people who are vaccinated and getting COVID.”
One example, he said, was a party to celebrate vaccination that forced attendees to provide proof of vaccination to enter.
Tracers identified at least nine people who attended the party who had tested positive, Lewis said in an email.
The Facebook listing for the event called it “Operation Inoculation: A Critical Community Vaccination Celebration” and said 258 people registered to go.
“You did it! You’ve survived one of the worst pandemics and presidencies in U.S. History. There’s no question we’ve only yet begun to deal with the fallout, but thanks to all of you who have fulfilled your Civic Responsibility to get vaccinated, we’re on the road to recovery, and we think that’s something to celebrate. If you’ve had your shots, join us for a good old-fashioned, party-like-it’s-2016 Burner Party,” the listing stated.
“Sorry for the bad news,” Lewis wrote, adding that the tracers wanted to know what guidance on masking and quarantining they should give to vaccinated people.
Another set of messages released by Hoffman showed Worsham, at the time the interim director of the Seattle and King County Public Health, reporting a spike in metrics to then-Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, who asked for more information on how many breakthrough cases were happening and what the severity of the disease was like in the vaccinated. Worsham asked health workers for information.
“We do have information and are working on talking points for Jeff—should be ready tomorrow,” Sargis Pogosjans, one of the workers, wrote. “I think the context is extremely important—an increased proportion of fully vaccinated cases should be expected since the vaccine is not 100% effective against infection and now, the population of fully vaccinated residents outnumber unvaccinated residents.”
“I agree with you Sargis—we are being clear in our conversations that we do expect people who are vaccinated to become infected with COVID,” Worsham replied. “As our population becomes more vaccinated—we do anticipate we will see more given that more people are vaccinated AND that vaccines are not 100% effective in protecting you from the virus.”
The talking points were not included in the emails.
Dr. Jeff Duchin, the health officer for Seattle and King County, told The Epoch Times via email that breakthrough infections were discussed nationally in the summer of 2021 and that the county communicated publicly about the trend.
“The fact that breakthrough infections occur does not mean vaccines do not work or provide important protection against serious COVID-19 infections. Vaccines provide substantial protection against serious COVID-19 even though protection against transmission is lower, and vaccination plus other layered protections are most effective at preventing transmission,” Duchin said, pointing to studies from the CDC and a study from Nature that estimated vaccines reduce transmission.
Clinical trials have not shown that vaccines reduce transmission and a Pfizer executive recently acknowledged that was not studied.
The papers from the CDC and other researchers have also shown that the vaccines provide little protection—the effectiveness even turns negative after time—against infection, and worse shielding against severe illness, since the Omicron variant emerged in late 2021. Observational data indicate the latest boosters, authorized and recommended in late 2022, protect poorly against infection and solidly against hospitalization.
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Robert F. Kennedy and others Files Antitrust Lawsuit Against "Trusted News Initiative"
A first-of-its-kind antitrust action was filed Tuesday against the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), The Washington Post, Reuters, and Associated Press, seeking damages totaling millions of dollars based on the collusive censorship of online health and political news publishers who dared to question the narrative relating to vital matters such as COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine mandates. TrialSite has been at the forefront of researching, analyzing, and reporting on medical research and was invited directly by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to participate in this groundbreaking action targeting dangerous censorship.
Background
The lawsuit reveals that by March 2020, a partnership was created called the Trusted News Initiative (TNI) between Big Tech and legacy media to exclude rival publishers from the dominant internet platforms. On Dec. 10, 2020, TNI agreed to focus on combatting the spread of harmful vaccine disinformation. This coordinated effort is, by definition, a classic unlawful “group boycott” to damage the ability of smaller publishers to compete or even survive. Members of the TNI include legacy media outlets the BBC, The Washington Post, Reuters, Financial Times, and Associated Press, along with social media and tech giants—Twitter, Meta (Facebook/Instagram), Microsoft/LinkedIn, and Google/YouTube. TNI members collectively hold 90% of the overall social media market, a 90% share of the social networking market, 75% of the video hosting market, and over 90% of the search-engine market.
Antitrust Violations
The complaint points to multiple examples of what plaintiffs’ state violates antitrust laws. “By their own admission, members of the ‘Trusted News Initiative’ (‘TNI’) agreed to work together, and have in fact, worked together, to exclude from the world’s dominant Internet platforms rival news publishers who engage in reporting that challenges and competes with TNI members’ reporting on certain issues relating to COVID-19 and U.S. politics. For example, TNI members deemed the following to be ‘misinformation’ that could not be published on the world’s dominant Internet platforms: (A) claims that COVID originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China; (B) claims that the COVID vaccines do not prevent infection; (C) claims that vaccinated persons can transmit COVID to others; and (D) claims that compromising emails and videos were found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. …The TNI did not only prevent Internet users from making these claims; it shut down online news publishers who reported that such claims were being made by potentially credible sources, such as scientists and physicians.” Dr. Ben Tapper, Dr. Joseph Mercola, founder of The Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft, independent journalists Ben Swann and Erin Elizabeth Finn, independent news outlets TrialSite News and Creative Destruction Media, and health-freedom activists Ty and Charlene Bollinger join Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Children’s Health Defense (CHD) as plaintiffs.
Kennedy Goes on the Record
“My uncle, President Kennedy, and my father, the Attorney General, sought to prosecute antitrust laws that are still on the nation’s books with vigor,” said Kennedy. “As private enforcers of those laws, we are confident that the Federal Court in Texas will vindicate our bedrock freedom to compete with legacy media in the marketplace of ideas.”
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12 January, 2023
On America’s moral compass in the face of covid
At long last, media censorship of the scientific debate during the covid-19 pandemic has become undeniable. Censoring portrayed an illusion of consensus and intimidated scientifically valid disagreement. Policymakers and citizens were deceived by those suffocating scientific data and perspectives on risk, mitigation effectiveness, biological immunity, lockdowns, and especially the impacts of covid and the policies themselves on children.
Perhaps censorship explains why the standard recommendations fifteen years prior to this pandemic remain unknown to the public. Henderson’s 2006 classic review clearly stated two related, but separate, conclusions: lockdowns were not effective, and lockdowns were extremely harmful, including: “Closing schools for longer periods (greater than ten to fourteen days at the beginning of an epidemic) in hopes of mitigating the epidemic by decreasing contacts among students is not warranted”; “There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods”; and “The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme . . . that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.”
All honest leaders, all individuals with integrity, should acknowledge that people were directly damaged and even died from the censorship of truth.
But as important as the censorship revelations have been, we may be witnessing yet another misdirection. Focusing on social media as the main culprit permits a flee from responsibility by lockdown advocates, including Drs. Fauci, Birx, Walensky, and countless academics filling America’s “expert class.” If that deflection of responsibility is swallowed by the public, then reintroduction of similarly reckless, destructive, and morally indefensible policies by those in power remains a viable possibility.
The factual record must be clarified, or history will undergo an Orwellian rewrite and the truth will vanish. The United States has been a shameful outlier among its peer nations. America uniquely sacrificed its children by closing in-person schools in 2020 and 2021, forcing testing and quarantining of asymptomatic, healthy students and requiring injection of experimental drugs in schoolchildren with no clear benefit to them.
Uncertainties existed in early 2020, but one fact was already clear—healthy children did not have significant risk of serious illness or death from this virus. Since spring 2020, cdc data had shown those under twenty years of age have a 99.997 percent chance of survival. From studies from early 2020 and through today in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, France, Australia, Germany, Greece, South Korea and the United Kingdom confirmed the miniscule risk to children and further that almost all coronavirus transmission to children comes from adults, not the other way around. And opened schools never showed significant dangers to children, the community, or teachers—a demographically low-risk group with half its members younger than forty-one and 82 percent under fifty-five. Known in 2020, those facts were verified in multiple studies, including from Brown University, Duke University, Norway, and others.
At this point, no one should need to cite the January 2023 analysis of the pre-vaccination period, until the end of 2020, also corresponding to when the virus was in its most lethal form. It showed the median ifr (infection fatality ratio) was 0.0003 percent for those zero to nineteen years of age, meaning a survival rate of 99.9997 percent. Consistent with the very low ifr, Levitt et al. (2022) showed no excess deaths among children and adolescents during the pandemic in almost any country that has reliable death registration data. For perspective, analyzing only the younger age groups, Iuliano et al. (2018) estimated the absolute numbers of fatalities were lower than seasonal flu fatalities based on data from ninety-two countries over pre-pandemic years (Ioannidis, 2022). Perhaps our university scientists will admit in one of their signed group letters that the ifr of the flu is higher for children—it is deadlier—than covid, even in this virus’s most lethal form and before any vaccination, according to cdc data over ten years?
After the first two months of closures in March and April of 2020, data also showed what was common sense to any parent—distance learning was already a proven failure, and closing schools severely harmed children, especially in low-income and single-parent families. Reading and math losses approached 30 to 50 percent after spring 2020 closures. In Fairfax, Virginia, F-grades increased by 83 percent; two F-grades were up 300 percent in middle school and 50 percent in high school. Failing grades surged in Los Angeles, especially among disadvantaged kids. Losses beyond learning were predictable, because schools are where we often first detect hearing/vision impairment; nutrition is a key need for poor children that is met in school; conflict resolution, language, social skills, physical activity, and more are learned from in-person schooling.
From the spring 2020 social isolation, serious health harms were already inflicted on our children—noted by the cdc itself, including spikes in mental illness, drug abuse, and suicidal ideation. That’s besides the nearly 300,000 cases of child abuse, unreported to authorities in spring 2020 because schools are the number one agency where child abuse is noticed. Longer-term harms were also recognized back in 2020, especially for kids in lower income families.
While most peer nations in western Europe opened schools for the 2020–21 school year, even during their otherwise stringent lockdowns, the vast majority of America’s governors closed in-person schools for the school year. Ignoring all the data and the August 12, 2020 White House public event I helped organize with experts, parents, and educators detailing the importance of children returning to school, America’s officials followed the extreme views of White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Deborah Birx and niaid Director Anthony Fauci. As of September 10, 2020, only 18 percent of U.S. K-12 students were attending in-person schools, while over 60 percent of U.S. students were attending schools that were virtual—only during that period, according to Burbio. Only 15% of California’s more than 6 million children in public elementary and secondary schools were in-person that 2020 school year. That contrasts to Florida, where 100 percent of students were offered in-person school.
Inept government bureaucrats and academics doling out guidance contrary to science were not the sole impetus for the malfeasance. The largest teachers’ unions actively pressured schools to remain closed for in-person learning in the fall of 2020, even in the face of low local case rates. It was not until spring of 2021 where more than half of America’s K-12 schools offered full-time in-person learning, according to Burbio school tracker, although California still lagged, ranking dead last of all fifty states for in-person schooling through 2021–2022. Pressure for school closure continued even into 2022 by the Chicago Teachers Union and New York Federation of Teachers. Teachers who insisted—even back in the fall of 2020—that they were at higher risk than other professions were either lying or simply did not understand the facts; either way, they proved wholly unworthy of being entrusted to teach children.
A March 2021 nationwide analysis of insurance claims revealed the horrifying toll on our children from that uniquely American school closure policy of 2020. Mental health care visits for teenagers and college-aged children skyrocketed; self-harm visits by teenagers to doctors (e.g., extinguishing cigarettes on skin, slashing wrists) doubled to tripled versus 2019; manic-depressive and anxiety disorder visits to doctors by college-aged kids skyrocketed; overdoses and substance use disorders in teenagers increased by 40 percent to 120 percent. Our college-aged kids now have an obesity crisis—more than half reported an unwanted weight gain during the 2020 lockdowns, and it averaged twenty-eight pounds, according to the American Psychological Association.
The scandalous legacy of those who convinced officials to close schools was highlighted in the October 2022 naep Report Card on America’s school performance, reporting the largest score drops in math since the initial assessments more than thirty years ago, worse in children from low-income families. unicef’s The State of Global Learning Poverty: 2022 Update confirmed that sinful outcome: “The increases (in learning poverty) have been especially large in . . . the regions where schools have been closed the longest”; “remote learning was largely ineffective and a poor substitute for in-person schooling. . . . Widespread school closures have disproportionally affected students from disadvantaged backgrounds”; and “recent analysis suggests that learning losses are concentrated among poor students.” Was I mistaken when I thought we especially cared about poor children in this country?
In what might be the most unforgivable action to date, more than one thousand universities forced healthy college students to receive experimental vaccines for a disease that poses miniscule risk to young people. That went well beyond forced testing of students—what the cdc itself had already declared “illegal and unethical” in its now-removed post of October 13, 2020. Then, in a frightening illustration of the unethical extensions of science denial, several top academic medical centers—Duke, Johns Hopkins, Stanford—ran a clinical trial injecting the financial sponsor’s covid vaccines into healthy infants and toddlers for an illness from which those subjects have miniscule risk for serious consequence. The researchers justified the drug’s success on indirect evidence of serum antibodies, rather than true clinical protection, because it prevented infection in only 37 to 51 percent, and because no subject, not even in the placebo group, had serious illness or death.
In Kafkaesque fashion, the America’s fda granted an emergency use authorization, or eua, on December 8, 2022, at a time when there is not a public health emergency from covid for children. Do most Americans realize that dating back to 2021, several other countries did not recommend, and some even forbade, covid vaccines in children without underlying illnesses—Finland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and others? Has the United States become a society that wants to use children as shields by injecting them with experimental drugs? It is not an overstatement to suggest that university scientists today have become this century’s Flat Earthers, but with an added dose of serious ethical and moral failure.
Finally, many elite American universities disqualified themselves on the most basic requirements of conduct for being trusted with our nation’s most precious assets—the minds of our younger generation. Professors engaged in censure, bullying, and character assassination to win arguments by comparing scientifically valid ideas, all of which have been proven correct, including targeted protection, to “eugenics” and the “Tuskegee syphilis experiments.” While this is not the first episode in American history to remind us of Joseph Welch’s famous lament “Have you no sense of decency?”, to many it illustrates today’s most disturbing deficit in our country—a lack of simple civility to others.
Nelson Mandela observed “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” America failed the test. From school closures to the reprehensible injection of experimental drugs into our own children as shields for adults, the heinous legacy of all who recommended and implemented those policies is serious physical and psychological damage to our children, especially the poor, the totality of which will not be known for decades. We urgently need to restore moral leadership of our nation’s institutions across the board, or the free and ethical society ideal of the United States has lost its legitimacy.
https://newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/sins-against-children
**************************************************11 January, 2023
Pfizer Board Member Pressured Twitter to Censor Posts on Natural Immunity, Low COVID Risk to Children
A Pfizer board member who used to head the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lobbied Twitter to take action against a post accurately pointing out that natural immunity is superior to COVID-19 vaccination, according to an email released on Jan. 9.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb wrote on Aug. 27, 2021, to Twitter executive Todd O’Boyle to request Twitter take action against a post from Dr. Brett Giroir, another former FDA commissioner.
“This is the kind of stuff that’s corrosive. Here he draws a sweeping conclusion off a single retrospective study in Israel that hasn’t been peer reviewed. But this tweet will end up going viral and driving news coverage,” Gottlieb wrote.
Giroir had written that it was clear natural immunity, or post-infection immunity, “is superior to vaccine immunity, by ALOT.” He said there was no scientific justification to require proof of COVID-19 vaccination if a person had natural immunity. “If no previous infection? Get vaccinated!” he also wrote.
Giroir pointed to what was at the time a preprint study from Israeli researchers that found, after analyzing health records, that natural immunity provided better protection than vaccination. The study was later published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases following peer review.
Researchers said the data “demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.” BNT162b2 is the trade name for Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, which is the main shot used in Israel.
Gottlieb’s email triggered messages on Jira, Twitter’s internal messaging system, according to journalist Alex Berenson, who was granted access to Twitter’s internal files by CEO Elon Musk.
“Please see this report from the former FDA commissioner,” O’Boyle wrote.
A Twitter analyst who reviewed the post determined it did not violate any misinformation rules but Twitter still put a tag on it, claiming to all users who viewed it that it was “misleading” and directing them to a link that would show “why health officials recommend a vaccine for most people.” The tag prevented people from replying to, sharing, or liking Giroir’s post.
Gottlieb later defended his actions, saying he targeted posts that he thought included “false and inflammatory” information. Giroir said “my tweet was accurate then, and it remains so now” and that Twitter never responded to him.
Another Message
Gottlieb later messaged O’Boyle again, flagging a post from Justin Hart, a critic of lockdowns and a skeptic of COVID-19 vaccines, Berenson reported.
Gottlieb took issue with Hart writing that “sticks and stones may break my bones but a viral pathogen with a child mortality rate of <>0% has cost our children nearly three years of schooling.”
COVID-19 poses little mortality risk to young, healthy people, studies and data show.
Gottlieb did not detail why he wanted to censor Hart, but the objection came shortly before the U.S. government authorized and recommended Pfizer’s vaccine for children aged 5 to 11.
O’Boyle sent the request to Twitter analysts, failing for a second time to disclose Gottlieb’s ties to Pfizer. The complaint did not trigger any action.
“Our team of ragtag analysts, activists, moms and dads have been going after Scott since April 2020 when he repeatedly advocated for school closures and lockdowns. He doesn’t like people pushing back on the narrative,” Hart told The Epoch Times in a Twitter message.
Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.
Tried to Get Journalist Banned
Gottlieb also tried to get Berenson, a former New York Times reporter who now authors a Substack, banned from Twitter, a message released in 2022 showed.
The message showed that Gottlieb forwarded a blog post from Berenson to a Twitter worker, writing that Berenson calling Dr. Anthony Fauci arrogant was an example of why Fauci, at the time the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, needed a security detail.
Four days later, and a day after Gottlieb met with Twitter workers, Twitter banned Berenson for allegedly violating its rules on COVID-19 misinformation.
Gottlieb defended his actions.
“I’ve raised concerns around social media broadly,” Gottlieb said during an appearance on CNBC. “And I’ve done it around the threats that are being made on these platforms, and the inability of these platforms to police direct threats, physical threats about people, that’s my concerns around social media, and what’s going on in that ecosystem.”
“I am very concerned with physical threats being made against people’s safety and the people who gin up those threats against individuals,” he also said.
Berenson responded that he’d never threatened Fauci or Gottlieb and referred to Gottlieb’s comments.
In the post that triggered Gottlieb’s email, Berenson criticized Fauci for saying that “attacks on me are attacks on science” and how he handled the U.S. pandemic response.
Berenson was reinstated to Twitter in 2022 as part of a settlement of a lawsuit he brought against the company. Berenson obtained Gottlieb’s email about Fauci’s post during discovery. Before the settlement agreement, a judge had concluded that Berenson plausibly alleged Twitter failed to abide by a policy of five strikes before banning the journalist.
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Covidians And Their Paper-Thin Skins
In the pre-Musk Twitter days, pencil-necked leftist overlords would simply censor dissidents for daring to cite inconvenient facts. That’s because they don’t like to be challenged or even politely questioned openly. They know their dumb ideas can’t stand up to scrutiny, so instead of rethinking and revising those dumb ideas they look for ways to ‘win’ the debate by silencing the opposition.
Now, since silencing the opposition - on Twitter at least - is a bit more difficult, many leftists have developed a particularly silly habit of simply blocking en masse anyone who disagrees with them. This is especially true of the Covidian Left, whose notoriously thin skin makes Donald Trump’s notoriously thin skin seem like rhinoceros hide.
If you want an example of this, simply go to a random Covidian’s 2,476th post about how everyone should “mask up” to avoid the literal plague and post a reply countering that view with data and/or maybe even a slight bit of mockery. If that reply gains any traction at all - and sometimes even if it doesn’t - you’ll be blocked faster than you can say “Fauci ouchie,” never again granted the privilege of seeing that Covidian’s wise and virtuous tweets (without a burner account anyway).
I’ve found this out the hard way more times than I can count, probably because I have a hard time abiding stupidity and I just can’t leave well enough alone. The pro-mask stuff is particularly loathsome. It was bad enough in 2020, but spouting the same nonsense in 2023 has about the same scientific credibility as a bird-beak-wearing plague doctor from the Middle Ages who want to treat what ails you with bloodletting and a fine tonic of arsenic and mercury. These morons just won’t let it go, and countering their nonsense has become a civic duty at this point. Which triggers THEIR ‘civic duty,’ which is to immediately block me.
Cases in point: In response to a Covidian posting a picture of her negative test and absurdly declaring party guests would have to do the same along with eating with the windows open and wearing masks between bites, I helpfully wrote, “I’d hate for someone to get a sniffle. Can’t be too careful.” Blocked. In response to a Covidian telling us how she managed to avoid Covid until she couldn’t avoid it any longer, I empathetically wrote, “My instinct is to make fun of you but what I feel is sadness for you. Imagine living this way for years to avoid a cold. It’s unsustainable, as you’ve found out, and even if it ‘worked,’ you’ve now wrecked your immune system. How could all that be worth it?” Again, blocked. In response to a Covidian asking those still masking to “raise their hand,” I simply pointed out that it was “an IQ test” that they “failed miserably.” Predictably, blocked. Heck, I’ve even been blocked by Taylor Lorenz and to my recollection, I’ve never once engaged with her feed.
Enter “Dr.” Lucky Tran, a leftist “science communicator” at Columbia University who is an ardent member of the masking cult. I thought I had bucked the trend with this guy when he followed me even after a particularly snarky response to one of his calls for not just masking, but a return to mask mandates. Just trying to be helped out of a genuine concern for this clown’s state of mind, I replied, “Masks and mask mandates would make zero difference regarding transmission. Zero. You are in a cult. Seek help.”
After that, Tran followed me. I then followed him back, because I’m always open to dialogue and debate with those who disagree with me. Shortly after, another Tran post caught my eye:
“A leftist told me their excuse for not masking was that shaming individuals were not a good way to build solidarity,” he wrote. “You know what breaks solidarity? Locking the most vulnerable out of society because you won’t do the bare minimum.” To which I replied, “Your or anyone else’s health is not my responsibility. If the vulnerable think masks work, they are welcome to wear as many masks as they like, or even a respirator or hazmat suit. Nobody is stopping them.”
What happened after that? You guessed it, insta-block. I’m thinking Tran had meant to block me on the previous post but accidentally clicked ‘follow’ instead. Fine. He has a full right to do so. But it just bolsters my point that conservatives welcome debate while leftists stifle it to protect their obnoxious, untenable positions.
My timeline on Twitter includes plenty of people posting to disagree, call me names, and even make fun of my receding hairline (that cuts deep, Shrek!). Unless they are an obvious bot - and by obvious bot I mean some glamour shot with 0 followers whose profile says to contact her for a great time - I don’t block them. When I have time, I occasionally even engage them in the discussion, because that’s what Twitter is supposed to be about. The fact that virtually none of these people do the same tells you everything you need to know.
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10 January, 2023
The White House covid censorship machine
Newly released documents show that the White House has played a major role in censoring Americans on social media. Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, and social-media executives prove the companies put Covid censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House—not voluntarily. The emails emerged Jan. 6 in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private plaintiffs represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
On March 14, 2021, Mr. Flaherty emailed a Facebook executive (whose name we’ve redacted as a courtesy) with the subject line “You are hiding the ball” and a link to a Washington Post article about Facebook’s own research into “the spread of ideas that contribute to vaccine hesitancy,” as the paper put it. “I think there is a misunderstanding,” the executive wrote back. “I don’t think this is a misunderstanding,” Mr. Flaherty replied. “We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy—period. . . . We want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game. . . . This would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us.”
On March 21, after failing to placate Mr. Flaherty, the Facebook executive sent an email detailing the company’s planned policy changes. They included “removing vaccine misinformation” and “reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation.” Facebook characterised this material as “often-true content” that “can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking.” Facebook pledged to “remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalised content.”
In that exchange, Mr. Flaherty demanded to know what Facebook was doing to “limit the spread of viral content” on WhatsApp, a private message app, especially “given its reach in immigrant communities and communities of colour.” The company responded three weeks later with a lengthy list of promises.
On April 9, Mr. Flaherty asked “what actions and changes you’re making to ensure . . . you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse.” He faulted the company for insufficient zeal in earlier efforts to control political speech: “In the electoral context, you tested and deployed an algorithmic shift that promoted quality news and information about the election. . . . You only did this, however, after an election that you helped increase scepticism in, and an insurrection which was plotted, in large part, by your platform. And then you turned it back off. I want some assurances, based in data, that you are not doing the same thing again here.” The executive’s response: “Understood.”
On April 14, Mr. Flaherty pressed the executive about why “the top post about vaccines today” is Tucker Carlson “saying they don’t work”: “I want to know what ‘Reduction’ actually looks like,” he said. The exec responded: “Running this down now.”
On April 23, Mr. Flaherty sent the executive an internal memo that he claimed had been circulating in the White House. It asserts that “Facebook plays a major role in the spread of COVID vaccine misinformation” and accuses the company of, among other things, “failure to monitor events hosting anti-vaccine and COVID disinformation” and “directing attention to COVID-sceptics/anti-vaccine ‘trusted’ messengers.”
On May 10, the executive sent Mr. Flaherty a list of steps Facebook had taken “to increase vaccine acceptance.” Mr. Flaherty scoffed, “Hard to take any of this seriously when you’re actively promoting anti-vaccine pages in search,” and linked to an NBC reporter’s tweet. The executive wrote back: “Thanks Rob—both of the accounts featured in this tweet have been removed from Instagram entirely for breaking our policies.”
President Biden, press secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy later publicly vowed to hold the platforms accountable if they didn’t heighten censorship. On July 16, 2021, a reporter asked Mr. Biden his “message to platforms like Facebook.” He replied, “They’re killing people.” Mr. Biden later claimed he meant users, not platforms, were killing people. But the record shows Facebook itself was the target of the White House’s pressure campaign.
Mr. Flaherty also strongarmed Google in April 2021, accusing YouTube (which it owns) of “funnelling” people into vaccine hesitancy. He said this concern was “shared at the highest (and I mean the highest) levels of the WH,” and required “more work to be done.” Mr. Flaherty demanded to know what further measures Google would take to remove disfavoured content. An executive responded that the company was working to “address your concerns related to Covid-19 misinformation.”
These emails establish a clear pattern: Mr. Flaherty, representing the White House, expresses anger at the companies’ failure to censor Covid-related content to his satisfaction. The companies change their policies to address his demands. As a result, thousands of Americans were silenced for questioning government-approved Covid narratives. Two of the Missouri plaintiffs, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, are epidemiologists whom multiple social-media platforms censored at the government’s behest for expressing views that were scientifically well-founded but diverged from the government line—for instance, that children and adults with natural immunity from prior infection don’t need Covid vaccines.
Emails made public through earlier lawsuits, Freedom of Information Act requests and Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter Files had already exposed a sprawling censorship regime involving the White House as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies. The government directed tech companies to remove certain types of material and even to censor specific posts and accounts. Again, these included truthful messages casting doubt on the efficacy of masks and challenging Covid-19 vaccine mandates.
The First Amendment bars government from engaging in viewpoint-based censorship. The state-action doctrine bars government from circumventing constitutional strictures by suborning private companies to accomplish forbidden ends indirectly.
Defenders of the government have fallen back on the claim that co-operation by the tech companies was voluntary, from which they conclude that the First Amendment isn’t implicated. The reasoning is dubious, but even if it were valid, the premise has now been proved false.
The Flaherty emails demonstrate that the federal government unlawfully coerced the companies in an effort to ensure that Americans would be exposed only to state-approved information about Covid-19. As a result of that unconstitutional state action, Americans were given the false impression of a scientific “consensus” on critically important issues around Covid-19. A reckoning for the government’s unlawful, deceptive and dangerous conduct is under way in court.
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Serious post-Covid syndrome hits a LOT of people
Rounding on three years into the coronavirus pandemic, scientists project there are over 100 million COVID long haulers worldwide. A recent Brookings Institution study estimated that around 16 million working-age Americans currently have Long COVID, costing $168 billion a year in lost earnings, not to mention the missed personal and professional opportunities and the high toll it takes on families. And countless more will suffer from it before the pandemic is in our collective rearview mirror.
It isn’t just life or death. Even a mild case of the virus can disable many of us for the rest of our lives. And our leaders had no idea.
On March 11, 2020, I was shadowing a producer on the Anderson Cooper 360° show. During the eight-hour shift, the producer frequently used sanitizing wipes to clean every inch of the workstation in our small edit bay. The day was spent preparing for President Donald Trump’s address from the Oval Office. Much of the speech was an attempt to project a Reaganesque optimism, broadcasting the idea the virus was no match for the greatest nation on earth.
Later that night as I walked out of the CNN Center, a building to which I’d reported nearly every day for five years, I didn’t realize that as the whole company shifted to working from home, it would be 17 months before I set foot in the office again.
A week later, I began what would become a year-long assignment as a features writer for CNN primarily focused on science, health and wellness. As with nearly everyone on earth, just about every conversation I would have over the next year revolved around the virus.
On the night of his Oval Office address, Trump focused his comments toward “the vast majority of Americans,” explaining that “the risk is very, very low. Young and healthy people can expect to recover fully and quickly if they should get the virus.” I knew those words to be inadequate then. And over the ensuing months, I would continually publish stories reporting on a growing group of survivors who would come to be called COVID-19 “long haulers.”
It would turn out to be true that the majority of patients infected with the virus would get better quickly, but that number would fall short of being the VAST majority. Public health leaders’ early comments about most people getting better, which reflected the prevailing public belief at the time, didn’t begin to capture the full picture of the disaster that would happen in the lives of many of the pandemic’s survivors.
In the weeks after lockdowns began, I received a disquieting message from Linda Tannenbaum, executive director of the Open Medicine Foundation, a nonprofit organization in California dedicated to funding research for complex chronic diseases. She’d been a friend and a source for my stories for nearly a decade. The scientists her organization worked with were prestigious forward thinkers, and she was alarmed at what they could already see. She confided that she expected the novel coronavirus, which had been designated SARS-CoV-2, could cause years or even decades of disability in some sufferers. So many other long-time sources reached out with the same warning that I began to dread picking up my phone.
COVID-19 had its predecessor in the first severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus, which mainly terrorized Asia in the early years of the new millennium. For many patients, Tannenbaum explained, that virus had left years of wreckage in its wake. A 2009 study of 369 SARS survivors published in JAMA Internal Medicine showed that four years after initial infection, some 40 percent had a chronic fatigue problem, and 27 percent met the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s diagnostic criteria for chronic fatigue syndrome. If the second SARS virus— which causes COVID-19—were to prove as wicked in the long term as the first, it might mean years of disability for a swath of humanity.
And looking at scientific literature about previous epidemics, I saw similar trends in history. Before researcher Jonas Salk pioneered a vaccine in the 1950s that led to the disease being virtually eradicated, the polio virus fueled terrifying outbreaks around the world for millennia, accounting for many deaths among children and causing irreversible paralysis in about one in 200 patients. But, less commonly acknowledged, the virus also caused post-polio syndrome in 25 to 40 percent of survivors, leading to muscle aches and fatigue that could last for decades. Likewise, the Ebola virus, which caused more than 28,000 cases during its 2014–2016 epidemic, left its own post-viral syndrome. During that outbreak, Ebola killed more than a third of those it infected, and more than 70 percent of survivors were left with a constellation of symptoms including headaches, joint pain, fatigue and menstrual cessation.
In 2020, as health care systems around the world were overwhelmed with dying patients, thousands of very sick people dealing with the ongoing effects of COVID-19 began gathering in online support groups offering each other guidance as months passed and their expected recovery never came.
In July, the CDC released a study of 292 COVID-19 patients showing that 35 percent of them still had symptoms after two or three weeks; among younger people between ages 18 and 34, about one in five included in the study had not fully recovered. Assuming that data generalized to the wider population, it was evidence showing that COVID-19 could linger beyond its two-week recovery time and longterm symptoms were a possibility.
The next month, a science writer colleague sent me a study from the United Kingdom that burned itself into my consciousness. It appeared to show that about three-quarters of those hospitalized for COVID-19 experienced symptoms beyond the 12-week mark. Another long hauler symptom study out of the U.K., which has now tracked five million patients via a symptom-tracking app, showed that one in 10 people were sick for at least three weeks.
The fears that my sources and friends had expressed to me were being realized.
https://blendle.com/i/newsweek/canaries-in-a-coal-mine/bnl-newsweek-20221216-12_1
**************************************************January 09, 2023
Health Care Workers Cry Foul on FDA Claiming It Didn’t Prohibit Ivermectin for COVID-19
Dr. Yusuf Saleeby has practiced medicine for more than 30 years. He serves patients in South Carolina and until recently had never faced an investigation from his state medical board.
But after Saleeby started prescribing ivermectin to his patients, he was reported to the board, which opened an investigation, despite the state’s attorney general’s promise that his office wouldn’t prosecute doctors who prescribed off-label medications.
Jennifer Wright, a nurse practitioner and clinical director who practices in Florida, but can prescribe across state lines, told The Epoch Times she received a letter from the Office of the Attorney General of New York ordering her not to prescribe ivermectin.
“You know, basically threatened me. If I don’t stop prescribing, then they’re going to fine me,” Wright said about the letter, which threatened legal action with fines of up to $5,000 per violation.
The letter stated that the Food and Drug Administration only authorized ivermectin for use in humans when treating “parasitic worms and head lice and skin conditions like rosacea.”
The citation in the letter appears to be from an FDA advisory issued in March 2021 titled “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19.”
That advisory and other anti-ivermectin messaging from the FDA are now the subject of a lawsuit brought by three doctors against the agency. The doctors argue that the FDA illegally interfered with their ability to treat patients. The suit was dismissed but an appeal has been filed by the plaintiffs.
During a hearing in 2022, attorneys defending the government argued that the agency’s missives were just a recommendation.
“They did not say it’s prohibited or it’s unlawful. They also did not say that doctors may not prescribe ivermectin,” Isaac Belfer, one of the lawyers for the government, said during a Nov. 1, 2022, hearing in federal court in Texas.
The government’s arguments differ greatly from the reality many doctors faced for prescribing ivermectin. Some lost their jobs, others were investigated by state medical boards, and many received threats from the New York attorney general because they were prescribing across state lines.
Matthew Dark, a spokesperson for Roots Medical and Colorado Healthcare Providers for Freedom, which has more than 275 physicians in the group, stated that several doctors in Colorado are facing investigations by the state medical board.
When asked about the FDA’s new claim, Dark stated: “They knew it was safe for humans, and they made that very accusatory thing if you were a doctor prescribing this, you were an idiot. You were practicing like a hillbilly. So that message was loud and clear.”
Dark referred to Twitter posts from the FDA, one of which said: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”
“Pharmacies were responding to the practice and providers trying to write [ivermectin] the same way the FDA was behaving,” Dark said.
Wright concurred, and pointing to her letter from the New York attorney general, said, “It clearly states in this letter that according to the FDA, you must cease and desist in prescribing ivermectin to New York State residents.”
Dr. Miguel Antonatos, a board-certified internal medicine physician who practices out of Illinois, but can prescribe to other states, told The Epoch Times via email that he, too, received a letter from the New York attorney general.
Nicole Sirotek is a registered nurse and founder of American Frontline Nurses, a patient advocacy network that boasts 22,000 nurses. She told The Epoch Times that her nurses often work with doctors in hospital settings.
At the height of the pandemic, Sirotek said patients would reach out to her advocacy network and beg for ivermectin, either for themselves or their loved ones dying in the hospital.
She stated that in five separate instances, doctors were fired or forced to resign for prescribing ivermectin as a home medication for nurses to administer in hospitals.
“That happened five times, and each physician was fired. That’s five physicians in five different states and five different hospital systems.”
Julie McCabe, a registered nurse and director of advocacy services for American Frontline Nurses, told The Epoch Times that the above doctors include Dr. Edith Behr in Pennsylvania, Dr. John Witcher in Mississippi, Dr. Mary Bowden in Texas, Dr. Robert Karas in Arkansas, and Dr. Paul Marik in Virginia. Bowden and Marik are two of the three doctors suing the FDA over its stance on ivermectin.
Bowden told The Epoch Times that Houston Methodist Hospital suspended her for merely writing on Twitter about ivermectin, and she had to overcome “numerous obstacles” when prescribing it to patients.
“The FDA was the key creator of these hurdles when it launched a social media campaign stating that ivermectin is dangerous and only for horses. When faced with a lawsuit, the FDA now claims it was merely making suggestions—suggestions that have threatened my ability to practice medicine and more importantly, interfered with life-saving early treatment of COVID patients,” Bowden said.
Sirotek said members of the group Team Halo targeted her because of her stance on ivermectin. The group describes itself as “volunteer scientists and healthcare professionals from around the world, working to end this pandemic by contributing our time to address concerns and public health misinformation.”
Members of the group filed several complaints to Nevada’s state medical board, which Sirotek said costs her $5,000 per complaint to fight.
With tears streaming from her eyes, Sirotek said she’d also received death threats, pictures of her house, and threats to murder her children. Sirotek provided copies of these threats to The Epoch Times. Team Halo didn’t respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
In the spring of 2020, with COVID-19 spreading like wildfire through the population, finding a viable treatment was paramount in many doctors’ minds. And as no drug was approved to treat the novel virus, they turned to off-label use, a standard medical practice even in non-pandemic times.
In March 2020, a group of leading critical care specialists joined forces and formed the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC). Their mission was to examine different therapies and drugs and recommend possible COVID-19 treatments based on best medical practices and emerging data.
Almost immediately, ivermectin was put forward as a possible treatment. First approved for human use in 1987 and dispensed billions of times since then, ivermectin is traditionally prescribed to treat parasites. But it’s safe and was already known to have an effect on viruses.
“This is a medication that is safer than Tylenol, safer than stuff we sell over the counter,” Wright said.
Saleeby agreed.
“[Ivermectin is] probably one of the most prescribed drugs. It’s given out like candy in Sub-Saharan Africa and Amazon basin or anywhere around water. … It’s doled out to children and pregnant women. … As far as safety, it’s probably safer than baby aspirin. It’s probably the safest drug on the planet, to be honest.
“I was using [ivermectin] sporadically in some of my Lyme patients. It’s effective against Lyme. We knew it had effectivity against viruses and other pathogens like Borrelia and Babesia.”
Sirotek told The Epoch Times that, especially as the Delta strain increased hospitalizations and deaths in the United States, she and several nurses questioned why some countries seemingly remained unaffected. The answer, she believes, was widespread ivermectin use.
At first, prescribing ivermectin and obtaining it from a regular pharmacy wasn’t an issue, Wright said. More importantly, it worked.
“We started using it very early on, and I could prescribe it to the pharmacy. I would prescribe it according to the FLCCC recommendations because they were the ones doing the research. I was just validating that, you know, this has some real stuff behind it.”
When the pandemic began, ivermectin as an effective treatment was primarily a theory. But as health care workers reported that it worked, more and more studies were conducted to back up those early successes.
There have been 189 ivermectin COVID-19 studies, according to the aggregate site C19ivm.org. Of those studies, 139 have been peer-reviewed, and 93 compare treatment and control groups.
In the 93 studies, which had more than 133,838 patients in 27 countries, there were “statistically significant improvements are seen for mortality, ventilation, ICU admission, hospitalization, recovery, cases, and viral clearance,” a real-time meta-analysis states.
Simply put, as health care workers saw firsthand that ivermectin worked in their practices, studies were simultaneously confirming the medicine’s effectiveness.
Dr. Peter Raisanen, a naturopathic medical doctor in Arizona, said that once he started his patients on ivermectin, they typically started feeling better within a few days.
“It seemed like it was within three to four days, like they [started feeling] better,” Raisanen told The Epoch Times.
Raisanen said he treated about 200 patients with ivermectin, and none died. Almost all stayed out of the hospital. That’s an experience several doctors attested to witnessing.
“We’ve probably collectively [at Roots Medical], treated 1,000 people with early COVID,” Dark said.
He said that when a patient was treated early on in their illness, there was a clear improvement—often within hours.
“It’s within two hours of that first dose that people start feeling noticeably better. And within two days, most symptoms are gone. Again, this is with starting early treatment, say days one to three, one to four, of infection or symptoms,” Dark said.
Sirotek said the nurses in her network partnered with My Free Doctor’s Dr. Ben Marble and his network of physicians. Altogether, the group treated more than 300,000 patients with early ivermectin intervention. She said of those 300,000, only three died.
Saleeby didn’t specify the exact number of patients treated.
“I’ve seen some miraculous things in the patients that I prescribed ivermectin to, who follow our instructions, and get on it right away at the appropriate dose and do the nutraceutical bundles,” he noted. “[They] are not going into the hospital and they’re not dying.”
Saleeby said that he treated himself with ivermectin when he caught COVID-19. He credits its use with keeping him out of the hospital.
Pharmacies Impede Treatment
While ivermectin was obtainable from traditional pharmacies at the start of the pandemic, health care providers soon started to get pushback. “As I started prescribing [ivermectin] to more and more people, I started getting calls from pharmacists,” Wright said.
Susan Julian, a nurse practitioner and certified functional medicine practitioner with a practice in Indiana, said the first time she realized something was amiss was when one of her patients contacted her after she prescribed him ivermectin.
Julian said that when her patient tried to have his prescription filled, the pharmacists asked him if it was for parasites. When the patient said it was for COVID-19, the pharmacists “hassled him right there in the store,” she told The Epoch Times. “Pharmacists are not supposed to ask people, ‘Why are you taking this medication?’ It’s not their business unless you make it their business,” Julian said.
Shortly after, the pharmacies started calling Julian and stating they wouldn’t fill her prescriptions for patients.
Dark, whose Colorado Healthcare Providers for Freedom network includes 275 doctors in Colorado, added that the pushback from pharmacies on ivermectin fulfillment was without precedent.
“There has never been a drug, like ivermectin, so singular at being picked out and said that ‘we will not fill under any circumstances.’ That has never happened before,” Dark said.
The refusals to fulfill prescriptions soon turned to threats.
“I had pharmacists tell me that they’re recording me for misinformation. For doing harm to my patients,” Wright said.
Circling back to the FDA and opposing ivermectin, Saleeby said: “[The FDA] really did go way out of the way to make it difficult for doctors to feel comfortable using it. By threatening their licenses, by kind of bullying them, if you will, into not prescribing it. To just go along with the narrative.”
Answering the ‘Why’
The FDA’s website states that if a viable treatment exists for an illness during a health emergency, neither medications nor vaccines may be approved using an emergency use authorization.
While there isn’t concrete proof for their position, some doctors and nurses interviewed by The Epoch Times theorized that the FDA’s pushback against ivermectin was motivated by the need to secure an emergency use authorization for the COVID-19 vaccines.
“They had an agenda. And the agenda was to push this new form of vaccine, this mRNA vaccine, because it was going to make the industry billions of dollars. And in order for them to promote this because they didn’t have the time to do randomized control trials for efficacy and safety, they had to use Emergency Use Authorization [EAU],” Saleeby said.
“It completely destroys the vaccine position,” Dark concurred. “One thing that’s written very clearly is that you cannot have a known acceptable form of treatment out there available to the public and still be operating under emergency use.”
“If there was a possible treatment for COVID-19, the vaccine would not be able to obtain emergency authorization use,” Wright said. “If there’s any possible treatment, then the vaccines would have to go through rigorous testing.”
The Epoch Times sought comment from the FDA, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the state medical boards in Colorado and South Carolina, CVS, Walgreens, King Soopers, and the New York Attorney General’s office.
The Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies stated, “Any complaint that may have been received by the Colorado Medical Board as part of an investigation is confidential and unavailable for public inspection pursuant.”
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
January 08, 2023
More Than 270 Deaths in US Athletes After Vaccination
Over 270 athletes and former athletes in the United States have died from cardiac arrests or other serious issues after taking COVID-19 vaccines, according to data from a recent peer-reviewed letter to the editor.
Authored by structural biologist Panagis Polykretis, and board-certified internist and cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, the letter’s cited data found that from 2021 to 2022, at least 1,616 cardiac arrests or other major medical issues have been globally documented in vaccinated athletes, with 1,114 of those being fatal.
The global data also showed that between 2021 to 2022, former and current American athletes made up 279 of the mortalities.
Athletes have a lower chance of cardiac arrest and sudden cardiac death as compared to nonathletes. A 2016 U.S. study calculated that nonathletes, compared to athletes, have a 29 times higher chance of sudden cardiac death.
One of the reasons is because “athletes are screened out for the common causes of sudden death on the playing field,” McCullough told The Epoch Times.
Players are screened for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which makes up almost 50 percent of sudden cardiac deaths in athletes, as well as other less common heart abnormalities.
The intensive screening is what makes competitive-level sports safer than everyday sporting activities, McCullough argued.
Sudden Cardiac Deaths in Athletes Increased After Vaccination
McCullough pointed to a European study that tracked sudden cardiac deaths in European athletes over 38 years from 1966 to 2004. The study reported 1,101 sudden cardiac deaths over the interval, which Polykretis estimated would be around 29 deaths per year.
In the United States, it is estimated that 100 to 150 athletes die every year from sudden death.
The data cited in the letter, however, showed that in 2022 alone, over 190 deaths from cardiac arrests or other factors have been reported in current and former athletes.
This does not include the deaths of athletes with unknown vaccine statuses and those whose names did not make it into the media.
McCullough said looking at the data, “there’s no doubt,” that sudden cardiac deaths have increased following vaccinations.
However, since most of the sudden cardiac deaths in the media are of professional competitive players, McCullough added that collecting data from athletes in colleges, high schools, and other international leagues would give a more comprehensive picture.
He pointed to studies that have shown high myocarditis increases following COVID-19 vaccinations.
Prior to the pandemic, a 2017 study in Finland found that myocarditis rates were 19.5 per million for children 15 years of age and younger. Another 2012 Japanese study on pediatric admissions reported even lower rates of 2.6 cases per million in children aged 1 month to 17.
In the data released by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention in June 2021 (pdf), researchers expected myocarditis rates in vaccinated 12- to 17-year-old males to be 63 cases per million. By the following year, researchers at the CDC noted that myocarditis numbers in young males were exceeding the background rates (pdf).
A study by researchers from Kaiser Permanente (pdf), published in August 2022, estimated myocarditis would be 186 cases out of a million, after a second dose of vaccine in 12- to 17-year-old children. In males, this number was raised to 377 cases out of a million.
However, in prospective studies, one Thai study found that 2.3 percent of children who received two shots of mRNA doses had a heart injury. Another study evaluated 777 health care workers who were boosted and 2.8 percent reported a heart injury.
This means that if the results are extrapolated, around 25,000 people per million could suffer from heart injuries after two or three doses of COVID-19 vaccinations, according to McCullough.
“I’m very concerned,” said McCullough, “This is a public health problem. I think it is incumbent upon individuals to disclose the vaccine status.”
“We see the report of public figures or athletes one after another, dying suddenly, with no explanation. It’s incumbent upon the families, the medical staff, the doctors, and the reporters to disclose the vaccine status. They are investigational vaccines, and they are linked to death in peer-reviewed studies.”
A German autopsy study evaluated 25 people who died unexpectedly within 20 days of being vaccinated. Four of the individuals were found with myocarditis without any other disease signal that may have caused the unexpected death.
The authors concluded that their autopsy studies indicated that deaths were due to cardiac failure, and that myocarditis could be “a potentially lethal complication following mRNA-based anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.”
It should also be noted that myocarditis events have also been reported in unvaccinated COVID-19 patients in 2020, and studies have shown that the virus can cause heart damage. But it is debatable if the heart injuries patients experience are caused by myocarditis or some other reasons.
A study published in April 2022 found that increases in myocarditis and pericarditis are statistically insignificant among unvaccinated individuals after COVID infection. The researchers evaluated around 197,000 unvaccinated patients, and there were 9 and 11 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis, respectively.
A French study that tracked cardiac arrests in athletes pre-pandemic from 2005 to 2018 also found that the rate of cardiac arrests in sports has remained constant, while survivability of these events has increased due to help from bystanders.
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Twitter Suppressed Early COVID-19 Treatment Information and Vaccine Safety Concerns: Cardiologist
Thanks to Elon Musk, the public is now aware that Twitter suppressed early treatment options for COVID-19, and vaccine safety concerns, Dr. Peter McCullough alleged in an interview that aired on Newsmakers by NTD and The Epoch Times on Dec. 14.
Further, thanks to the Twitter Files—a collection of internal emails and communications made public by Musk—the cardiologist said there’s proof that government agencies were working against him (McCullough) personally.
“I didn’t violate any of Twitter’s rules,” McCullough stated. “And what we’re learning is that secret emails between government agencies and Twitter were working to, in a sense, shadow-ban me, censor me, and inhibit my ability to exercise my rights to free speech and disseminate scientific information.”
McCullough said Musk’s takeover of Twitter is a “welcome change,” especially for healthcare professionals like himself.
“Twitter had become an incredibly biased and censored platform, where the public knew they weren’t getting a fair, balanced set of information on a whole variety of developments—including the early treatment of SARS-COV2 infection and a balanced view of safety and efficacy of the vaccines,” McCullough claimed.
The cardiologist further claimed that he was censored and finally suspended for sharing scientific “abstracts and manuscripts,” which didn’t fit the accepted political view. Plus, McCullough remarked, he wasn’t the only doctor targeted.
Musk lifted the suspensions of McCullough and mRNA vaccine technology contributor Dr. Robert Malone—suspended from Twitter in 2021 after criticizing the effectiveness of the mRNA vaccines—after completing his Twitter purchase.
Social Media and Censorship
According to McCullough, when a social media company has a COVID-19 warning or labels a post “misinformation,” that’s a sign of government censorship and control.
“Facebook, Instagram, and the other platforms. … Anytime a message is posted, and it says, ‘See the COVID information center,’ or it labels it ‘COVID misinformation,’ that actually indicates that there’s government interference. There’s government censorship going on,” McCullough asserted.
He added that when a user witnesses the above, they need to call out that platform. Moreover, McCullough believes there needs to be a “complete overhaul” of social media leadership and a “cleansing” of all forms of censorship on social media sites.
He said explicitly regarding healthcare that a past U.S. Supreme Court ruling guaranteed physicians free speech and medical authority, and social media platforms are violating that ruling.
“Physicians, including myself, our rights to free speech were guaranteed in a Supreme Court ruling. We have medical authority, and the public is looking to our analyses and our guidance through the rest of this pandemic.”
Drug and Vaccine Lies
Regarding the safety of vaccines and the pushback he received when he voiced his concerns, McCullough stated, “There is no drug or vaccine that is free of side effects. There’s no drug or vaccine that’s perfectly effective.
“So, when Americans were seeing advertisements that said ‘safe and effective,’ of course, immediately, we were jumping and making the case based on the peer-reviewed literature that that’s not correct.”
McCullough further noted that he and author John Leake have released a book called “The Courage to Face COVID-19?—detailing the true story of the “intentional suppression of early treatment [of COVID-19] by what we call the biopharmaceutical complex.”
McCullough explained that what he meant by “biopharmaceutical complex” is the amalgamation of Big Pharma, government interests, and foundations, including everything up to the World Economic Forum.
He further alleged that this complex had one mission—mass vaccination—so they purposefully buried early treatment “to favor the vaccine strategy.” McCullough acknowledged that his allegation was “complex and mind-blowing” but said Americans know it’s reality and not a conspiracy.
McCullough also stated that creating a Public Health Integrity Committee by Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis (ostensibly to make sure politics don’t suppress public health information in the future) is a validation of doctors like himself.
The Twitter Files
Since taking over Twitter, Musk has become increasingly vocal about transparency and the need for people to see what happened behind the scenes at the tech company. To that end, he released secret emails and discussions about shadow-banning or removing accounts that didn’t toe the party line.
As part of its reporting, The Epoch Times sought comment from the DOJ and FBI on the Twitter Files revelations and their involvement with social media companies.
The FBI National Press Office replied, “The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities.
It is not based on the content of any particular message or narrative. Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them.”
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January 06, 2023
Breathing Trouble
New research shows the risks from prolonged use of face masks
There’s an old story about a guy who jumped into a thorn bush: He wanted to collect berries, but he failed to consider the adverse effects of the plan. Something similar happened with face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic: Masks were promoted, and often mandated, as necessary safeguards for reducing the chance of infection, while their possible adverse effects were brushed aside. While the science on the benefits of masking is still inconclusive, the latest research now shows that the prolonged use of face masks—especially those with tighter fits like the N95s—could harm wearers by exposing them to dangerously high levels of carbon dioxide.
The risks appear to be especially pronounced for young people. As part of a team of scientists, one of the authors of this article conducted a randomized study of the effects of masking on healthy school aged children in Germany. The results of this research, published in September 2022 in the peer reviewed journal Environmental Research, concluded that wearing masks raised the carbon dioxide (CO?) “content in inhaled air quickly to a very high level in healthy children in a seated resting position that might be hazardous to children’s health.”
These results should not have come as a surprise. It has long been suspected that mask-wearing poses risks. In Germany, for instance, workers required to wear an N95/FFP2 respirator must get a certificate verifying their ability to do so, and even with said certificate, those workers are mandated to take a 30-minute break every 90 minutes.
Only in the 19th century, with the development of germ theory, did masks begin being used as health devices. Then in the early 20th century, masks gained a foothold in hospitals, usually worn by doctors and nurses. The “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918-20 was perhaps the first case of masks being worn by the general public, but we only have scattered photographic pictures of masked people and don’t know how frequently they were worn.
During the 20th century, most scientists believed that masks could be useful only in hospitals for the prevention of surgical wound infections in high-risk cases. Still in 2010, a study overseen by Dr. Ben Cowling, a professor of public health at the University of Hong Kong, found weak evidence, if any, that masks could be a useful tool for stopping airborne infections.
There’s thus every reason to believe that, in March 2020, when Dr. Anthony Fauci discouraged Americans from wearing masks, he was simply stating a widely accepted medical orthodoxy. Population-level mandatory face masking had never been attempted before, and there was no reliable data proving its effectiveness, nor data detailing its adverse effects. It was reasonable to be cautious before recommending such a drastic and untested solution.
Yet this attitude rapidly changed, most likely because of political factors. It is not that politicians were directly meddling with medicine; more likely, they simply wanted to be seen as “doing something.” Masks offered visible evidence that the leaders were acting against the pandemic, and so masks appeared to be a good idea. The medical authorities rapidly sensed what was expected of them—back up the politicos—and they complied, even in the absence of data supporting the decision.
After more than two years of widespread masking, which remained mandatory for young school children long after it was abandoned by the politicians who imposed such measures, we are starting to see more data. But many studies are of poor quality, performed on small populations, based on questionable assumptions, using debatable statistical methods, and often using air that is unnaturally saturated with viral particles.
Some studies do indicate that, at least in some conditions, masks can slow down the diffusion of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Masks are not, however, a miracle device that can fully stop the virus. As doctors were saying in early 2020 before the public health establishment reversed its position on the issue, aerosol particles carrying the coronavirus are simply too small to be completely stopped by the filtering tissue of standard masks, and even less so because of how often masks are worn incorrectly.
It is our view, then, after considering the available scholarship, that we cannot establish any clear and conclusive benefits to widespread masking.
Can we establish the presence of any harmful effects? Here, we enter a complicated field of study, as it is difficult to determine the adverse effect of masks on wearers. Such a gap in knowledge is part of a pattern: In the history of medicine, there have been some glaring failures in detecting adverse effects. You may remember, for instance, the story of thalidomide, a drug marketed in the 1950s as a sedative, that was later found to cause birth defects. It had not been properly tested on pregnant women.
One problem with determining adverse effects is that you can’t knowingly expose people to something that you suspect causes serious harm, not even in the name of science. The Nuremberg Code, a set of international ethical principles created after the Doctors Trial for Nazi medical war crimes, prohibits experimentation on human subjects without their explicit consent. Another problem is that adverse effects are often delayed in time. Think of the health effects of cigarettes. Nobody ever died because they smoked one cigarette. After several decades of studies, however, it was possible to determine that if you are a smoker your life expectancy is reduced by a significant number of years.
Just like smoking a single cigarette never killed anyone, wearing a face mask for a few hours or a few days does not cause irreversible damage either. But the immediate short-term physiological effects are detectable: A recent study led by Pritam Sukul, senior medical scientist at the University Medicine Rostock in Germany, found masks to cause hypercarbia (high concentration of CO? in the blood), arterial oxygen decline, blood pressure fluctuations, and concomitant physiological and metabolic effects.
On a time scale of weeks or months, these effects appear to be reversible. But how can we know what can happen to people who wear masks for several hours a day for several years? Will we have to wait for decades before concluding that masks are bad for people’s health, as was the case with cigarettes?
Not necessarily, for we are able to assess face masks in terms of the air quality breathed by the wearers. One important parameter for air quality is CO? concentration. Over the years, a lot of data has been accumulated in this field from miners, astronauts, submariners, and other people exposed to high concentrations of CO?.
Measurable negative effects on mental alertness already occur at CO? concentrations over 600 parts per million (ppm), which is only slightly higher than the average concentration in open air (a little more than 400 ppm). Values higher than 1,000-2,000 ppm are not recommended for living spaces, especially for children and pregnant women. 5,000 ppm is the commonly accepted limit in working environments or in submarines and spaceships. Concentrations in the range of 10,000-20,000 ppm are not immediately life-threatening but can only be withstood for short periods. Even higher concentrations may lead to loss of consciousness and death.
So what kind of CO? concentration are people exposed to when they wear a face mask? Measuring the concentration of CO? inside the small volume of a face mask while it is being used poses practical problems, and there are no standardised methods and procedures to evaluate this. Nevertheless, during the past few years, several papers dealing with this subject were published.
Some of these papers were criticised, but often baselessly. For instance, some fact checkers claimed that the same amount of CO? could be found without face masks in exhaled breath. This is true, but trivial. The studies mentioned above measured the amount of CO? in the inhaled air under face masks; the fact checkers measured the air exhaled. Other fact checkers provided a priori statements by “experts,” including a sports reporter.
Meanwhile, studies that rely on robust capnographic methods that calculate inhaled CO? levels from the end-tidal volume of CO? under strictly controlled conditions have corroborated our findings about elevated CO? levels in masks. In short, there is strong evidence that people wearing face masks, especially the FFP2/N95 type, breathe a concentration of carbon dioxide several times higher than the recommended concentration limits, in the range of over 5,000 ppm and often over 10,000 ppm. In other words, masks may multiply the external CO? concentration by a factor of 10, if not more.
Individuals wearing a tight, N95-style face mask are thus breathing air of comparable quality to the air in spacecrafts and submarines. Astronauts and submariners, though, are well trained and in peak physical condition; masks, meanwhile, are often worn by the elderly, the young, and people affected by chronic pathologies. A recent study of more than 20,000 German children who wore masks for an average of more than four hours per day showed that 68% of them reported these kinds of problems.
There are additional risks associated with face masks that should be considered, such as psychological effects and infections from pathogens accumulated in the mask tissue, but we believe that the increased concentrations of CO? breathed by mask-wearers is a clear and demonstrated adverse effect that should be known and considered when deciding policies. In short, face masks are not harmless.
Wearing a face mask is not a purely symbolic gesture like wearing a lapel pin or waving a flag, as some people have come to believe. It is not simply an expression of social solidarity, belief in science, or support for health care workers. It can have important adverse effects on health—especially in the case of N95s—and, at the very minimum, citizens should be alerted to the downsides of masking before they make up their minds on the issue. Face masks should be mandated only in special circumstances, and ordinary citizens should wear them only when there is a real and evident risk of infection.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/breathing-trouble
*******************************************************Australian woman opens up about her devastating vaccine injury
The wife of high-profile doctor Kerryn Phelps has detailed the horrific side effects in her first interview about her battle with a debilitating Covid vaccine injury.
Jackie Stricker-Phelps told Daily Mail Australia her life as she once knew it is gone and there is no prospect of recovery from her vaccine injury.
The former schoolteacher's symptoms started minutes after her first Pfizer jab in May 2021 and she is still unable to walk without pain.
She is one of thousands of Australians who suffer devastating long-term side effects, but feel like the government and medical regulators deny it's happening.
'I have had debilitating neurological and rheumatological effects since the initial Pfizer vaccine,' she said.
'I had a surge of heat in my head, my face went bright red, my gums and sinuses started to throb, I felt my hands and feet go numb and I developed pins and needles all over my torso, arms and legs. 'I could hardly walk, and so begin the next 19 months of hell.'
Ms Stricker-Phelps said she saw a neurologist the next day, who closely monitored her symptoms, and later also visited a rheumatologist.
'I have had visual disturbance, nerve pains, burning gums, flushed face, hair loss, musculoskeletal inflammation, and night sweats,' she said. 'I tried multiple prescribed medications, steroid injections into my spine and hips for pain.
'Two of my specialists have confirmed it is a vaccine injury and say they see other people with the same adverse events.'
Both she and Dr Phelps, who also suffered a serious vaccine injury from her second Pfizer jab, investigated the possible risks before getting vaccinated.
'We were told the most common symptoms were a sore arm with maybe a temperature for a few days and a rare possibility of anaphylaxis. We were both told it was far safer to get the vaccine than the illness,' she said.
To manage the risk of anaphylaxis, Ms Stricker-Phelps had her shot in a hospital and was observed afterwards by Dr Phelps, another doctor, and a registered nurse.
When her symptoms began, she claimed the nurse told her 'this is not anaphylaxis so you can go home' despite her barely being able to walk.
Ms Stricker-Phelps said her symptoms had not shown any significant improvement and frequent flare-ups made her unable to perform many basic tasks.
In the midst of a recent flare-up, she found it extremely painful to walk, communicating was difficult, and she struggled to leave the house.
'Flareups are even harder to deal with as there are no protocols in place for treatment,' she said.
To deal with the latest one, her specialist sent her for 'yet another spinal injection' to try to reduce inflammation across her body.
Even when the flare-ups subside, exercise is difficult because of the pain she suffers throughout her body.
But she said the hardest thing was having to live an isolated life to avoid catching Covid.
'I cannot receive any more of the current vaccines so am not protected from Covid,' she said. 'I have to isolate from family and friends, and avoid group activities such as parties or the theatre as the virus is transmissible even from vaccinated people.'
Ms Stricker-Phelps said she had no idea if and when her condition would improve, let alone recover, because so little was known about it. 'The best chance of recovery is for more effort and funding into research to find the underlying mechanism of the injury and for specific treatments to be developed,' she said.
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January 05, 2023
‘Twitter Files’ Reveal How the Left Uses Big Tech to Create an Illusion of Scientific Consensus and Stifle Debate, Especially on COVID-19
The Left has long used the notion of scientific consensus as a tool to silence debate on controversial issues, but the Twitter Files revealed just how far some Big Tech companies have gone to suppress legitimate scientific dissent—particularly on COVID-19 pandemic policy.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of health policy who wound up on a Twitter Trends blacklist after he argued for focused protection of the vulnerable and an end to lockdowns, opened up in an article for The Free Press about the lesson he learned in 2022.
“I learned in a very concrete and painful way the effects of Washington and Silicon Valley working together to marginalize unpopular ideas and people to create an illusion of consensus,” Bhattacharya wrote.
The Stanford professor recalled that after he and his allies published the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins dismissed him and his allies as “fringe epidemiologists” and asked Anthony Fauci for “a quick and devastating published takedown” of the declaration. Collins and Fauci collaborated to delegitimize the declaration, even though it was based in scientific principles and even though it predicted much of the now-acknowledged fallout from the lockdowns.
Twitter’s COVID-19 censorship spread far beyond Bhattacharya, as the Free Press journalist David Zweig revealed in an installment of The Twitter Files.
Twitter cast aspersions on the medical opinion of Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, because he disagreed with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines on the COVID-19 vaccine.
“Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should,” Kulldorff wrote. “COVID vaccines are important for older high-risk people, and their care-takers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children.”
Even though Kulldorff’s statement represented both an expert opinion and the rationale behind vaccine policies in other countries, Twitter deemed it “false information” because it differed from CDC guidelines.
In a particularly egregious example, Twitter took action against a tweet that corrected actual misinformation, using the CDC’s own data.
A user wrote that “since December of 2021 COVID has been the leading cause of death from disease in children.” Kelley Kga, a self-proclaimed public health fact-checker, responded with data from the CDC demonstrating that COVID-19 was not the largest disease-related cause of death among children.
Twitter flagged the tweet as “Misleading,” disabling replies and likes. The platform added a note about health officials supporting the COVID-19 vaccines, an issue the tweet in question did not address.
Rhode Island physician Dr. Andrew Bostom found himself permanently suspended from Twitter after receiving five strikes for misinformation. After Bostom’s attorney contacted Twitter, the company’s internal audit found that only 1 of his 5 violations had been valid.
Yet even that tweet contained legitimate data: Bostom had cited data showing that the flu is more lethal than COVID-19 for children, and that COVID-19 vaccination causes more serious morbidity than flu vaccination for kids.
In another egregious example, Twitter executives seem to have been tempted to censor former President Donald Trump merely for expressing optimism about the pandemic. On Oct. 5, 2020, Trump tweeted that he was leaving Walter Reed Medical Center and said he was “feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”
Jim Baker, then Twitter’s deputy general counsel, asked Yoel Roth, then Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety, “Why isn’t this POTUS tweet a violation of our COVID-19 policy (especially the ‘Don’t be afraid of Covid’ statement)?”
While Roth has a history of advocating censorship, he stood with common sense on this case. He noted that “this tweet is a broad, optimistic statement. It doesn’t incite people to do something harmful, nor does it recommend against taking precautions or following mask directives (or other guidelines). It doesn’t fall within the published scope of our policies.”
Zweig noted that “Twitter made a decision, via the political leanings of senior staff, and govt pressure, that the public health authorities’ approach to the pandemic—prioritizing mitigation over other concerns— was ‘The Science'” and targeted information that challenged that view for moderation or suppression.
Yet Big Tech has taken action to suppress dissent from liberal narratives on science on far more topics than just COVID-19.
As I reported for Fox Business in 2021, Facebook has promoted false claims about a climate change consensus by adding fact-check-style “information” notes to various posts.
Facebook launched the “Climate Science Information Center” in February 2021 in the United Kingdom an expanded the effort to more than 100 countries ahead of the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland.
Facebook put a note reading, “See how the average temperature in your area is changing” to certain climate-related posts. The note directs users to a climate center, which states that “the cause of climate change is widely agreed upon in the scientific community.”
“At least 97% of published climate experts agree that global warming is real and caused by humans,” the Facebook center claims. “The myth that scientists disagree on climate change sometimes comes from misleading petitions that don’t accurately represent the climate science community.” Facebook warns that such petitions “typically include non-scientists and scientists working in unrelated fields.”
Other graphics on the Facebook climate center argue that “no natural factors can explain how fast the planet is warming today.”
The 97% claim is not just unreliable, it’s patently false. Facebook’s claim traces back to a study led by John Cook entitled “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature” and published in the journal Environmental Research Letters in 2013.
The study analyzed all published peer-reviewed academic research papers from 1991 to 2011 that used the terms “global warming” or “global climate change.” The study organized these papers into seven categories, combining three categories to come up with 3,896 papers, comparing those with other categories, which made up 118 papers. Yet the study completely discounted the vast majority of the papers it analyzed (66.4%, 7,930 of the 11,944 papers). Only by excluding these papers did the authors come up with a 97% figure.
Many of the scientists who wrote the original papers Cook’s team analyzed complained that this study mischaracterized their research. The survey “included 10 of my 122 eligible papers. 5/10 were rated incorrectly. 4/5 were rated as endorse rather than neutral,” complained Richard Tol, professor of the economics of climate change at Vrije Universiteit.
Big Tech platforms have also promoted pro-abortion messages and speakers over pro-life ones.
A month after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, YouTube announced that it would “remove content that provides instructions for unsafe abortion methods or promotes false claims about abortion safety under our medical misinformation policies.”
While it makes sense to suppress videos encouraging dangerous self-managed abortions, this statement also applies to YouTube’s policy against content that contradicts “expert consensus” on “chemical and surgical abortion methods deemed safe by health authorities.”
Google has used this policy to ban Live Action’s ads promoting the abortion pill reversal, a practice that has saved at least 2,500 children, according to Live Action President Lila Rose.
Google has agreed to delete location history for those visiting abortion clinics, and in 2018, a Slate writer bragged that her email to Google encouraged the company to change its YouTube search algorithm for “abortion,” promoting groups like Planned Parenthood over videos exposing the gruesome reality of abortion.
Big Tech has also targeted dissent from transgender orthodoxy. In October 2018, the platform expanded its “hateful conduct” policy to include “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” Many news outlets, including Focus on the Family’s Daily Citizen, The Christian Post, and PJ Media, along with the Christian satire site The Babylon Bee, have found their Twitter accounts suspended for the crime of referring to Dr. Rachel Levine, a Biden administration official and biological male who identifies as female, as a man.
YouTube has also moved against The Daily Signal and The Heritage Foundation, censoring the testimonies of a doctor and a man who previously identified as a woman. (The Daily Signal is the Heritage Foundation’s news outlet.)
Levine, the assistant secretary of health at the federal Department of Health and Human Services, has urged medical professionals to advocate for transgender identity and even urged them to pressure Big Tech to “create a healthier, cleaner information environment.” He said this right after lamenting the spread of “misinformation” on “gender-affirming care” and falsely claiming that “the positive value of gender-affirming care for youth and adults is not in scientific or medical dispute.”
While COVID-19 provides the most recent and arguably most egregious example, each of these cases shows how the Left and Big Tech use the illusion of scientific consensus to stifle public policy debates. On the pandemic, climate change, abortion, and transgenderism, the science is not settled in favor of the Left’s policy agenda, and Big Tech themselves are spreading misinformation when they claim that it is.
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Immunity from previous infection protects from new Covid strain
Only one in five people who reported an infection in December were known to have had COVID-19 previously, according to the ACT government.
While data is unavailable for most of the country, the numbers from the ACT suggest that past exposure to the disease provides some protection against the prevailing strains.
This contrasts with widely publicised fears that newer COVID-19 subvariants are highly effective at evading the body's immune defences.
The ACT is one of few jurisdictions that reports its reinfection rate, though its outbreaks largely mirrored those in New South Wales and Victoria last year.
About 46 per cent of Australians had already had COVID-19 by June last year, according to an analysis of antibodies in blood samples.
That proportion is almost certainly far higher today. This, combined with the ACT data, suggests a previous infection is strongly associated with avoiding infection during this latest surge.
Infectious diseases specialist Sanjaya Senanayake, an associate professor at the Australian National University, said the ACT data reflected what was happening overseas.
Singapore, for example, was also reporting that about 20 per cent of known new cases were reinfections.
Dr Senanayake said this relatively small number of reinfections showed that immunity — whether from vaccines or past exposure — was working for most people.
"It's hard to differentiate, in a place like Australia, between purely vaccine-induced immunity and infection-induced immunity, because many of us have both been COVID-19-infected and have had [several] vaccines," he said.
"This is hybrid immunity we're seeing.
"And what it tells us is that, even though in laboratory settings … these new subvariants have the potential to evade the immune system, this hybrid immunity is providing good protection."
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January 04, 2023
Long COVID: 4 Contributors and the Possible Root Cause
It has been more than two years since long COVID manifested, and scientists are still far from settled on its cause.
However, based on common clinical manifestations and emerging research, clinicians have identified several contributors to long COVID symptoms.
Spike Protein Appears to Be the Leading Contributor
Spike protein can exist in the immune cells of long COVID patients for up to 15 months after infection.
The spike protein sits on the surface of the COVID-19 virus and is the key to breaking into cells and causing the virus to spread in organs and tissue.
An increasing number of studies are pointing to it (1, 2) as a contributing factor to long COVID.
Studies in mice and human cell cultures revealed that the spike protein could travel into the brain by bypassing the blood-brain barrier.
Autopsy reports on people who died from COVID-19 have found spike protein in the brain, heart, pancreas, liver, kidney, thyroid, reproductive organs, adrenal glands, lungs, nasal and oral cavities, blood, fat, bone, muscle, skin, and even the eyes.
However, the symptoms and laboratory test results vary depending on the patient. Clinicians have therefore developed various hypotheses on the reasons behind these symptoms.
1. Inflamed Immune Cells and Blood Vessels
The spike protein contributes to pathologies. The primary pathology is inflammation (1, 2, 3).
Inflammation is not harmful if controlled and short-term; it is essential to a person’s immune defense. But in the case of long COVID, inflammation is chronic, and this causes cells to become stressed and damaged.
A significant contributor to long COVID may be inflammation within and of the blood vessels.
When interviewed by The Epoch Times, Dr. Bruce Patterson, a viral pathologist and the CEO and founder of IncellDx, a diagnostic company, and internal medicine physician Dr. Jessica Peatross each pointed out the relationship between inflammation and long COVID.
Peatross voluntarily surrendered her medical license in November 2022 to the Medical Board of California due to facing disciplinary actions for approving two vaccine exemptions—one for a child with severe eczema and asthma, and one for a child who had previously experienced side effects to vaccines, according to Peatross’s own statement.
She pointed to studies on acute COVID as a systemic disease driven by inflammation of the lining of the blood vessel walls.
Patterson found spike protein in long COVID patients’ non-classical monocytes. Non-classical monocytes are immune cells. They can attach to blood vessel walls and cause inflammation.
Patterson’s other studies have found high levels of cytokines in long COVID patients’ blood, indicative of inflammation, particularly vascular inflammation.
Inflammation of blood vessels can reduce blood flow to tissues and organs, causing pain and impaired organ function. Low blood flow also means fewer nutrients are supplied to the cells, causing fatigue and weakness.
Unsurprisingly, significant symptoms of inflammation in blood vessels are fatigue, and joint and muscle pain, which overlap with long COVID symptoms.
Symptoms vary depending on where the inflammation occurs.
Vascular inflammation in the superficial layers of the skin may cause clusters of red dots, bruises, or hives.
Inflammation in blood vessels that supply the eyes may cause the eyes to become sensitive to light or even cause vision impairment.
2. Mitochondrial Dysfunction
California physician Dr. Jeffrey Nordella told The Epoch Times that mitochondrial dysfunction is another major contributor to long COVID symptoms.
It should be noted that all of the symptoms, from inflammation to mitochondrial dysfunction, can overlap. Mitochondria can become stressed from low oxygen due to blood vessel inflammation or nearby inflammation.
Mitochondria are present in practically all cells in the body. Mitochondria make energy for the cell by concurrently burning fuel—carbohydrates, proteins, and fats—and consuming oxygen. However, this process can also produce toxic oxygen species that are highly reactive and damaging to mitochondria.
These oxidants must be immediately neutralized, but in the case of many long COVID patients, this is often not resolved quickly enough.
Common long COVID symptoms, like fatigue and dyspnea, then appear. In laboratory studies, cells exposed to spike protein led the mitochondria to become dysfunctional and stressed (1, 2). This would impact mitochondrial energy output.
A recent study on long COVID patients suggested that mitochondrial dysfunction may cause fats to be poorly metabolized for energy needs. The authors found that many of the study’s participants had fatigue, brain fog, and dyspnea; all had high lipid levels, suggesting poor lipid breakdown and utilization.
Interestingly, these patients had both low protein and carbohydrate-related substances in their blood. This pattern is also seen in type 2 diabetes. At the same time, weight gain and an increased risk of developing metabolic diseases have been documented in post-COVID patients.
3. Inflammatory Allergic Response
Mast cells, which are involved in allergies, may contribute to long COVID symptoms.
Mast cells are highly reactive, like many immune cells. They carry ACE2 receptors, which allow entrance to the virus or spike protein. Once activated, mast cells can send vast amounts of histamine and inflammatory cytokines into circulation.
A 2021 study that surveyed 136 long COVID patients about their laboratory test results showed that over 30 percent had high biomarkers that may be indicative of mast cell problems. These patients had high histamine and prostaglandin levels, which are often elevated in people with mast cell problems.
Histamine can cause an increase of cytokines, which can contribute to the cytokine storm and endothelial inflammation present in acute COVID.
Histamine also causes many allergic symptoms, leading to swelling, redness, pain, and fever in the regions of its release.
High histamine levels can bring about itching, abdominal cramps, and even brain fog. If concentrated in the heart muscles, histamine may also contribute to rapid heart contractions, causing arrhythmias and tachycardia.
Many of these symptoms overlap with long COVID symptoms.
Mast cell disorders have also been associated with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, commonly known as POTS. Research shows that 2 to 14 percent of long COVID patients report POTS symptoms of lightheadedness, fainting, and rapid heartbeat upon standing up.
Psychiatrist Dr. Adonis Sfera, who has led several studies on COVID-19, said that there might be shared pathways between long COVID and mast cell disorders.
Some studies have shown that COVID-19 patients on drugs that block mast cell activation did better than patients who were not on such drugs.
An example Sfera gave is the antihypertensive drug losartan. The drug works by blocking ACE2 receptors and lowering histamine activation. COVID patients who took this drug had a lower risk of death from COVID-19 early in the disease than patients who did not.
4. Gut Dysbiosis
Gut dysbiosis, an imbalance of the microbes in the gut, has been extensively documented with long COVID, sometimes occurring for several months (1, 2, 3).
Gastroenterologist and CEO of Progenabiome Dr. Sabine Hazan runs a research lab and conducts fecal tests for long COVID patients.
She found that these patients carried COVID-19 genetic material in their guts months after the initial infection. Their gut microflora would be in a state of imbalance called dysbiosis.
Dysbiotic guts can lead to gastrointestinal symptoms such as diarrhea, constipation, bloating, abdominal pain, and indigestion.
Gut dysbiosis is also associated with chronic diseases such as poor mental health, obesity, diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease.
The gut plays a critical role in physical well-being. A consequence of gut dysbiosis is the breakdown of the gut barrier (a condition called “leaky gut”). Bacteria can leave the gut and enter the bloodstream, leading to an immune response.
Sfera said that many bacteria in the gut are similar in structure to the body’s own cells. So when the immune system attacks bacteria, it may also mistake healthy tissues for bacteria, triggering an “autoimmune inflammation, in which the body attacks itself.”
Autoimmune diseases associated with gut dysbiosis include Lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis (arthritis of the joints and ligaments of the spine), and inflammatory bowel disease, all of which have been reported after a COVID infection.
Some Reported Symptoms May Not Be From Long COVID
Patterson’s studies on cytokines suggest that many people who report “long COVID” symptoms may not be experiencing long COVID but rather a reactivation of latent viruses.
Studies have shown that infection with COVID-19 can cause dysregulation and suppression of the immune system (1, 2).
When the body’s immune system becomes dysregulated, viruses and infections—such as herpes and Lyme disease—that had been under control may suddenly develop as opportunistic infections.
A patient, Mary Lee, had been experiencing long COVID symptoms since December 2021.
Her cytokine test revealed elevated cytokine levels with results indicating long COVID. However, a subsequent blood test showed that she was also positive for Lyme disease.
Elevated cytokines have been observed with both long COVID and Lyme disease. The diseases have similar symptoms, including headache, fatigue, joint pain, and brain fog, amongst others.
Lee has been suffering from migraines and fatigue for many years. She suspects that her untreated Lyme disease contributed to developing long COVID.
The cause of long COVID is far from settled, and a great deal of the evidence clinicians use to support their hypotheses is anecdotal. Given its complicated clinical symptoms, research will likely continue for many years.
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3 January, 2023
Once-favored Covid drugs ineffective on Omicron may be putting millions at risk
The lack of specialized Covid-19 treatments for people with weak immune systems has left millions of Americans with limited options if they get sick as the pandemic heads into an uncertain winter.
Once heralded as game-changers for Covid patients considered at risk for getting seriously ill — one was used to treat then-President Donald Trump in 2020 — monoclonal antibodies are now largely ineffective against current Covid variants. Easier-to-administer antiviral drugs, such as Paxlovid, have largely taken their place but aren’t safe for all immune-compromised people because they interact with many other drugs.
But the federal government funding that drove drug development in the early days of the pandemic has dried up, and lawmakers have rebuffed the Biden administration’s pleas for more. Without that, there’s little incentive for drugmakers to work on new antibody treatments that could be more effective.
And without a government program like Operation Warp Speed to develop second-generation vaccines and treatments, at-risk patients could be in danger of developing severe cases of Covid and flooding hospitals when the U.S. health care system is already strained, thanks to an influx of patients with an array of respiratory illnesses, including flu and RSV.
“Just because we have exited the emergency phase of the pandemic does not mean that Covid is over or that it no longer poses a danger,” said Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University and former Baltimore health commissioner. “There are millions of Americans who are vulnerable to severe illness.”
The FDA pulled authorizations for four antibody treatments in 2022 as Omicron and its myriad subvariants wiped out their effectiveness. The treatments were geared toward adult and pediatric patients with mild-to-moderate Covid who were considered at risk of developing severe disease and ending up hospitalized.
While antiviral pills are plentiful and remain an option for some with weak immune systems, they won’t work for everyone — Pfizer’s Paxlovid interacts with many widely prescribed drugs.
Monoclonal antibodies — which have been made by companies like Regeneron, Eli Lilly and Vir — are lab-created molecules designed to block a virus’ entry into human cells. But they must bind to the virus’ spike protein to neutralize it, and the coronavirus’ many mutations since its 2019 emergence have gradually rendered the available products ineffective.
“It’s a bit risky to develop this,” said Arturo Casadevall of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, pointing to how quickly some Covid variants have surfaced before quickly receding.
A massive spending bill that lawmakers passed before Christmas left out the administration’s $9 billion request for more money to fight the pandemic, meaning there are fewer dollars to be spread around to address emerging Covid needs.
“Due to congressional inaction and a lack of funding, HHS does not have the resources it needs to fund the development of new treatments, and we could find ourselves with a very limited medicine cabinet at a time when we need more tools to combat Covid-19,” a department spokesperson told POLITICO, adding that HHS is working with providers and other groups “to ensure that Americans are able to take advantage of all available treatment options.”
The Biden administration has strongly promoted oral antiviral regimens like Paxlovid, which debuted a year ago and marked a turning point in managing the virus for most Americans.
Immunocompromised individuals — who are either born with immune-suppressing conditions or acquire them after organ transplants or by taking certain drugs — also may not mount sufficient immune responses after vaccination, making treatment options like antibody therapies a critical tool for them.
A CDC alert issued Dec. 20 to clinicians and public health professionals warned of the lack of viable monoclonal antibody treatments — including the diminished efficacy of a prophylactic antibody, Evusheld — and the availability of the antiviral options that to date have seen lackluster uptake. The agency urged providers to consult the National Institutes of Health’s Covid treatment guidelines for ways to potentially manage drug interactions with Paxlovid, such as temporary pauses or reductions in dose.
Remdesivir, an antiviral administered intravenously, is another treatment option for the immunocompromised, but it requires infusions over three days in either hospital or outpatient settings. HHS is urging states to support its health departments and systems in setting up infusion clinics to expand access to remdesivir, especially on an outpatient basis, and is working with maker Gilead to broaden the types of providers eligible to buy the drug.
Covid convalescent plasma remains an option for immunocompromised people who contract the virus, but its availability is scattershot across the country, Casadevall said. The treatment has pros and cons, he said — it’s less likely to be defeated by any one variant and can adapt to different strains, but it’s difficult to administer and requires blood-typing to be done for the recipient.
Still, Casadevall said, the main issue is educational because its use has changed since the pandemic’s early days, when treatments were scarce. Some hospital systems, like Hopkins, use it routinely, while some doctors don’t know plasma is still an option, he said.
The FDA has authorized the emergency use of convalescent plasma containing high Covid antibody levels for immunocompromised patients. But NIH has remained neutral on the treatment in that population, which Janet Handal, president of the Transplant Recipients and Immunocompromised Patient Advocacy Group, says has led to some hospitals balking at administering it.
NIH spokesperson Renate Myles pointed to the agency’s treatment guidelines for Covid, which are developed by an expert panel.
The recommendations for Covid convalescent plasma, last updated on Dec. 1, say there’s “insufficient evidence” to recommend for or against the treatment’s use in immunocompromised patients, while noting some panel members would use plasma to treat an immunocompromised person “with significant symptoms attributable to COVID-19 and with signs of active [viral] replication and who is having an inadequate response to available therapies.”
“In these cases, clinicians should attempt to obtain high-titer [Covid convalescent plasma] from a vaccinated donor who recently recovered from Covid-19 likely caused by a … variant similar to the variant causing the patient’s illness,” the guidelines say.
Casadevall, who leads the Covid-19 Convalescent Plasma Project, says NIH’s stance on plasma is inconsistent with its previous recommendations of monoclonal antibodies, which were made without clinical efficacy data, since Covid antibodies are the active component in both therapies. He led a petition earlier this month — signed by several doctors, including past and current presidents of the Infectious Diseases Society of America — asking NIH to change its recommendations.
Handal’s group also has asked the NIH and the White House to convene a meeting with scientists on the issue.
“To just not be having a dialogue about it is infuriating to us,” Handal said. “People are dying while people are just going through this bureaucratic dance.”
The FDA and European Medicines Agency held a virtual workshop this month to bring doctors, industry and regulators together to discuss supporting novel monoclonal antibody treatments.
“The FDA is committed to working with industry sponsors to expedite the development of new drug products to meet unmet needs, such as the need for new preventive therapies for immune-suppressed patients who are unlikely to respond to vaccination,” an agency spokesperson said.
In the meantime, Regeneron spokesperson Tammy Allen said the company, whose antibody cocktail’s use was limited in January, is committed to evaluating antibody treatment options as the coronavirus evolves.
“We believe monoclonal antibodies have played an important role in the COVID-19 pandemic to date and may again in the future, particularly among people with immunocompromising conditions,” Allen said.
Vir, which partnered with GSK on sotrovimab, continues to study whether the treatment could work against emerging variants and is also evaluating next-generation antibodies and small-molecule therapies, said spokesperson Carly Scaduto.
Still, pharmaceutical companies may be more inclined — both financially and practically — to pursue developing better antiviral pills that pose fewer drug interactions and are easier to administer, said Jason Gallagher, a clinical pharmacy specialist in infectious diseases at Temple University Hospital. Antivirals also hold up better against an ever-changing virus, he added.
“There’s way more money in Paxlovid than there is in any monoclonal” antibody treatment, Gallagher said, and it may take incentives to drugmakers to encourage their development. “They’re not going to make anyone really rich.”
https://news.yahoo.com/once-favored-covid-drugs-ineffective-120000716.html
******************************************************Infection Fatality Rate of COVID-19 Was 0.0003 Percent At 0–19 Years: Study
A study that looked into the age-stratified infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID-19 among the non-elderly population has found that the rate was extremely low among young people.
“The median IFR was 0.0003 percent at 0–19 years, 0.002 percent at 20–29 years, 0.011 percent at 30–39 years, 0.035 percent at 40–49 years, 0.123 percent at 50–59 years, and 0.506 percent at 60–69 years,” the study conducted across 29 countries stated. “At a global level, pre-vaccination IFR may have been as low as 0.03 percent and 0.07 percent for 0–59 and 0–69-year-old people, respectively.”
The study aimed to accurately estimate the IFR of COVID-19 among non-elderly populations in the absence of vaccination or prior infection.
For every additional 10 years in age, the IFR was observed to increase by roughly four times. After including data from nine more nations, the median IFR for 0–59 years came in at 0.025 to 0.032 percent and for 0–69 years was at 0.063 to 0.082 percent.
According to the study, the analysis suggests a “much lower” pre-vaccination IFR in the non-elderly population than had been suggested previously. The large differences found between nations were pegged to differences in factors like comorbidities.
Vaccination Dangers Among Youth
A recent study that analyzed children between the ages of 5 and 17 who had received Pfizer COVID-19 shots found an elevated risk of heart inflammation among children as young as 12 years old.
Myocarditis and pericarditis met the threshold for a safety signal for children aged between 12 and 17 following the second and third doses. These heart conditions can cause long-term issues and even death.
“The signal detected for myocarditis/pericarditis is consistent with published peer-reviewed publications demonstrating an elevated risk of myocarditis/pericarditis following mRNA vaccines, especially among younger males aged 12-29 years,” the researchers said.
In an interview with Fox News back in January, MIT researcher Stephanie Seneff had said that it was “outrageous” to give COVID-19 vaccines to young people as they have a “very, very low risk” of dying from the infection.
When looking at the potential harms of these vaccines for children, they don’t make “any sense,” she added. With repeated boosters, such treatment will be “devastating” in the long term.
Parents should do “absolutely everything they can” to avoid getting their children vaccinated against COVID-19, the research scientist advised.
Vaccinating Children
Some countries have stopped their COVID-19 vaccine programs for children. In October, the Swedish Public Health authority ceased recommending vaccination for 12- to 17-year-olds except under special circumstances. The agency acknowledged that very few healthy children have been affected seriously by the virus.
“Overall, we see that the need for care as a result of COVID-19 has been low among children and young people during the pandemic, and has also decreased since the virus variant omicron began to spread,” Soren Andersson, head of a unit at the Public Health Authority, told broadcaster SVT at the time. “In this phase of the pandemic, we do not see that there is a continued need for vaccination in this group.”
Meanwhile in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is pushing ahead with vaccinating children, allowing emergency clearance of vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna for children as young as just six months old.
Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that it is the vaccinated population that made up most of the COVID-19 deaths in August.
During that month, 6,512 deaths were recorded, of which 58.6 percent were attributed to vaccinated or boosted individuals. Back in January, COVID-19 deaths among the vaccinated and boosted had only made up 41 percent of the total mortalities.
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2 January, 2023
Farewell 2022: the year of vindication for Covid skeptics
If 2020 and 2021 were a living nightmare, 2022 was the beginning of the awakening. After two years of being labelled every name under the sun, the time has finally arrived when the dissidents can say that they were right, in large part due to information being released by Elon Musk.
On the Covid front, the initial criticisms about vaccines appear sound. Statistically, they are some of the most ineffective and inefficient vaccines released to market with side effects that many consider unacceptable, especially to children. The full extent of the health risk they pose is not yet known.
A recent study undertaken on over 260,000 individuals in the State of Indiana demonstrated that vaccinated individuals are 2-3 times more likely to be infected with Covid than unvaccinated individuals with natural immunity (from prior infection), a concern that was dismissed as conspiracy.
Natural immunity, initially discounted and laughed at, has won out against Covid vaccines for re-infection, particularly regarding new mutations. ‘Conspiracy theorists’ have been saying this all along, including those in the medical profession.
One of the starkest admissions of the year came from Pfizer executive Janine Small, president of international developed markets. It came in response to a question raised by Dutch Member of the European Parliament Rob Roos: ‘Was the Pfizer Covid vaccine tested on stopping the transmission of the virus before it entered the market?’
Small answered:
‘Did we know about stopping immunisation [sic: should read transmission] before it entered the market? No … we had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market.’
Her answer presented an admission that the vaccine Pfizer manufactured was initially never tested to see if it prevented transmission, yet prevention of transmission was the premise on which governments and unelected bureaucrats justified arbitrary Covid measures, including lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
Remember when medical authorities told us that we needed to get vaccinated to keep everyone else safe? Remember when they said that if we didn’t take the vaccine we were literally killing grandma? That was all based on (at best) debunked guesswork and (at worst) a fabrication. Our health representatives and government ministers did not know if the vaccine prevented transmission when drafting health directives. And, as it turns out, it never did.
While most mandates have since been dropped, some remain in place, despite being completely devoid of logic or reason. Those who were forced to take the vaccine have been left duped. Many have come to regret taking it, venting their frustration on the (now liberated) social media platform Twitter. Others who had their first two or three doses have sworn off getting any further doses, a declaration that is reflected in low fourth and fifth dose figures.
The vaccines have also been side-eyed in connection with an increase in heart conditions, including myocarditis. The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) knew this early on, and has quietly pulled the Moderna vaccine off the market in Australia months behind other countries. What was the reason for this delay?
Former MP and vaccine advocate Dr Kerryn Phelps recently revealed that she and her partner both suffered significant neurological side effects after taking the Pfizer vaccine. Phelps noted these adverse effects were reported to the TGA. Phelps subsequently claimed that her concerns were never followed up, although the TGA have not commented. She also raised concerns that doctors have been prevented from speaking up about adverse effects presenting in their patients due to fears of being reprimanded.
Failure to live up to transmission claims and ongoing investigations into the #DiedSuddenly medical phenomenon of statistically significant unexplained deaths, is only the beginning of what is increasingly being dubbed a scandal.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has traditionally sat slightly Left of politics, emerged as the unlikely unmasker of Big Pharma.
Some joke that Elon Musk paid $44 billion just to blow the whistle on the absolutely horrifying actions of Twitter under its previous management. Detailed were the complex entanglements with federal agencies that formed a web of genuine collusion to the detriment of free speech and undermined the sanctity of free and fair elections.
Over the past couple of months, Elon has enlisted several independent journalists to help release inside information from the Twitter archives. This has included the dissemination of private conversations between Twitter employees and government officials. Also released were email correspondence and evidence of conversations with federal agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and ‘Other Government Agencies’ (eg. the CIA), and evidence of conversations with the government.
These are known as The Twitter Files.
What has come to light thus far has demonstrated that Twitter was actively working with the government and federal agencies to potentially violate the First Amendment rights of Americans who chose to speak out against the accepted narrative. We have been shown, in considerable detail, how Twitter executives, including former head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth and former head of Legal and Policy Vijaya Gadde, made critical decisions that former CEO Jack Dorsey may not have even been aware of. The tools they used to censor and silence individuals, in particular Conservative accounts, have been confirmed as real despite former Twitter spokespeople denying their existence.
These revelations have highlighted a number of truths that were cast off as ‘conspiracy theories’.
Alex Berenson, who was skeptical of the Covid vaccine, was specifically targeted by the Biden administration, who put pressure on Twitter to take action on his account among other ‘anti-vaxxer accounts’. This ultimately led to his suspension. Only after bringing a lawsuit against Twitter did Berenson have his account restored.
According to the Atlantic:
This was not the end of the drama, though. Last week, Berenson published a Substack post that included screenshots of a conversation on Twitter’s internal Slack messaging system from April 2021, obtained during the course of the lawsuit. The images show employees discussing a recent White House meeting at which members of the Biden administration were said to have posed a “really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform,” as one Slack message put it. Another alleges that Andy Slavitt, who was at the time a senior adviser to Joe Biden on the administration’s COVID-19 response, specifically mentioned a “data viz that had showed [Berenson] was the epicenter of disinfo.”
Berenson has since declared that he will sue the Biden administration for infringing upon his free speech by compelling Twitter to take action against his account.
Once again, legal experts say that his case is unlikely to succeed. Berenson faces a “very high bar” in proving that a private company behaved as a state actor, Evelyn Douek, an Atlantic contributor and assistant professor at Stanford Law School, told me. According to both her and Goldman, the Slack messages that Berenson published don’t amount to proof that the government pressured Twitter to remove Berenson’s account. But Douek is generally perturbed by the evidence of informal pressure by government officials to constrain speech. “It does strike me as unusual,” she said. “It’s certainly unusual to get records of it.”
Other medical experts were targeted, including Harvard Medical School epidemiologist Dr Martin Kulldorff, who tweeted that vaccines should only be taken by those who were most at risk, including the elderly and their care-takers, and that children and those who had already been infected should not have it. His tweet was hit with a ‘misleading’ label.
Dr Andrew Rostom, a Rhode Island physician, was permanently suspended for ‘misinformation’, including a tweet referring to a peer-reviewed study on mRNA vaccines. Other accounts that pointed out the truth on the matter of Covid and vaccines were also hit with ‘misleading’ labels, even if they were merely tweeting findings released by the CDC.
As we move into 2023, more revelations will come to light and the ‘conspiracy theorists’ will likely continue to be proven right over and over again.
While it would be easy to look back on this year as one giant ‘I told you so’, it would be better to take heed of what we have learned and use it as justification to push back against those who would wish us to just move on with our lives as if none of it happened. Yes, these revelations are a good thing, but I cannot help but feel as if this conversation is not over yet.
We cannot become complacent about past abuses because the truth is finally coming out. We must continue to pursue that truth and ensure that it is spread far and wide, if only to ensure justice for all those who have been wronged.
2022 was the year of vindication. 2023 must be the year of accountability. The tangled web of darkness that has been constructed around The Science must be eradicated for good and never allowed to be rebuilt again.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/12/farewell-2022-the-year-of-vindication/
************************************************The Cult of Masked Schoolchildren
There is still some pressure on kids to wear masks in school. Some private schools have gone beyond cloth-masking and mandated N95 (or equivalent) masks for children as young as 4. The Berkeley Unified School District in California recently began transitioning students to N95-level masking. This isn’t a matter of protecting children, their teachers, or their grandparents; it’s delusional and dangerous cultlike behavior.
The way to reduce scientific uncertainty when it comes to practices like masking young children is to conduct randomized studies. When it comes to masking kids in schools, the global scientific community has launched no such studies during the pandemic. The U.K. government commissioned a report on the efficacy of masks in school settings, which failed to identify any clear evidence in favor of this practice. Moreover, the authors write:
Wearing face coverings may have physical side effects and impair face identification, verbal and non-verbal communication between teacher and learner. This means there are downsides to face coverings for pupils and students, including detrimental impacts on communication in the classroom.
Let’s start with cloth masks, which have been the most common type of facial covering used to cover kids’ faces in school. In the only cluster randomized trial conducted during the pandemic among adults, cloth-masking failed to improve the primary outcome of COVID cases that were confirmed with a blood test. In an umbrella review I conducted with Jonathan Darrow of Harvard and Ian Liu of the University of Colorado, we concluded that cloth-masking simply doesn’t work. A month later, the former health commissioner of Baltimore told CNN the same:
The United States is uniquely aggressive in masking young kids. Contrary to scientific evidence, the Centers for Disease Control and the American Academy of Pediatrics advise that children as young as 2 should wear masks. Europe has always been more relaxed on this issue, and the World Health Organization advises against masks for kids under 6 and only selectively for kids under 11.
Data from Spain on masking kids is sobering. The figure below shows the R value—a measure of how fast the virus spreads—by age. Spain mandated masks at a specific age cutoff. If masks have a visible effect, we should see a step down in the graph at the age kids start to wear them (i.e., the spread should drop at the age masking begins). But as you can see, there is only a slow, deliberate, upward trend with no steps down. Based on the evidence only, it would be impossible to guess which age groups are wearing masks and which are not.
This simply means that masking was not associated with a large effect in slowing spread. (If you’re curious, kids started to wear masks in this study at age 6.)
Now let’s consider N95 or equivalent masks that are designed to filter a high percentage of particles. To achieve this goal, N95 masks require a snug fit and validation. Notably, there are no approved N95s for kids because these masks have not been subject to validation for young people. All masks sold with this moniker are merely “N95-style” masks thought to be equivalent, possibly. Berkeley and other school districts have mandated them anyway, even though no study suggests the policy can slow the spread of COVID.
What is the goal of masking policy? Does it at least help to “slow” the spread? Pre-vaccine, it made sense to try to delay infection until all those who wished could be vaccinated, the latter being an intervention that does have a demonstrable effect on rates of serious disease and death. While cloth-masking does little if anything to delay infection, universal N95-masking might have indeed been helpful. But does this goal still make sense after vaccines and omicron?
Omicron has shown it is able to infect even vaccinated people relatively easily (even though, yes, vaccines do still appear to protect from severe disease). The fact that omicron is widely spread by vaccinated people, coupled with its rapid rate of spread, means that sooner rather than later we will all be infected—a conclusion shared earlier by Anthony Fauci. But if infection is inevitable for everyone, then it no longer makes sense to wear a mask. Even the most effective mask can’t avert infection; it can only delay it while causing inconvenience, discomfort, and difficulty speaking, all of which are detrimental to the educational and emotional well-being of schoolchildren.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/cult-masked-schoolchildren
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Boosted Worse Off Than Vaccinated in Many States, Data Show
People in the United States who have received COVID-19 boosters in many states are more likely than those who have gotten just a primary series to get infected, receive hospital care, and die, according to an Epoch Times investigation.
Cases, hospitalizations, and deaths among the boosted have been increasing since the booster shots were first introduced in 2021. The boosters were promoted as bolstering protection against adverse outcomes. But, compared to the vaccinated who have not received any boosters, boosted people are testing positive, being hospitalized, and dying at higher levels in many states, according to the review, which went over data in the first two quarters of 2022.
In California, for instance, the boosted population made up 72 percent of the COVID-19 cases among vaccinated people in June. In Vermont that month, the boosted population made up 90 percent of the COVID-19 deaths among the vaccinated.
The number of boosted people has continued to rise since the extra shots were first cleared in 2021. But in some of the states, one or more metrics among the boosted exceed their population.
In Wisconsin, boosted people made up 43 percent of the cases, 43 percent of the hospitalizations, and 46 percent of the deaths in June—well above the boosted population, which was 35 percent of the state as of late August.
“It is unassailable that a very large fraction of highly inoculated [people] are among those being hospitalized or dying,” Dr. Robert Malone, who helped invent the messenger RNA technology that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines utilize, told The Epoch Times. “So, at a minimum, the effectiveness in preventing hospitalization or death does not appear to be aligned with the official policy position.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration have continued to recommend COVID-19 vaccination for virtually all Americans, including multiple boosters, stating that the known and potential benefits outweigh the known and potential risks. New, untested boosters replaced the old ones in the fall, but the primary series is still comprised of the old vaccines.
Higher Among Boosted
In 18 of the 19 states that provided or already list sufficient data, the boosted made up a majority of one or more metrics among the vaccinated, The Epoch Times found through reviewing publicly available data and public records requests after reporting how vaccinated people were more likely, when compared to the unvaccinated, to get sick, hospitalized, or die in a number of states.
In seven states, the boosted population even made up a majority of all three metrics—cases, hospitalizations, and deaths—among the vaccinated.
All data are from 2022. Only percentages or numbers were available for some states. Data for June were preferred, followed by data for July. Rates were adjusted for age. Fully vaccinated refers to people who received a primary series and no booster. Boosted refers to people who received one or more boosters
Adjusted Data
Some experts say one can’t derive much from state-level data, particularly if it has not been adjusted.
“The problem with these data is that there are so many missing variables which could confound (bias) the outcomes being followed,” Dr. Andrew Bostom, a former associate professor of medicine at Brown University, told The Epoch Times via email.
For data regarding vaccination, it’s best to utilize randomized or randomized controlled trials, he added, pointing to a paper that found vaccinated people were more likely to suffer a serious adverse event after analyzing data from the original clinical trials.
Some states did adjust data for age, accounting for the fact that older people are more likely to receive not only the original vaccine series, but boosters. All eight states which provided or listed age-adjusted rates showed higher rates for at least one metric among the boosted when compared to the fully vaccinated. In Wisconsin, for example, the rate of hospitalizations among the boosted was 9.2 per 100,000—nearly double the fully vaccinated.
In two of the states—Minnesota and New Mexico—rates for cases among the boosted were even higher than the unvaccinated.
To be included in the review, states needed to report figures for at least one metric broken down by vaccination status, and a breakdown by time. States that would only provide data since the beginning of the pandemic, or would not provide data by daily, weekly, or monthly increments, were excluded. So were states that would not separate the boosted from the fully vaccinated.
In the other states with sufficient data, none of the metrics were higher in the boosted compared with the fully vaccinated.
The data covers a period of time before new boosters were available. The old boosters became unavailable in the fall when regulators authorized the new, bivalent boosters. There remains no clinical trial data for the new boosters but real-world studies have estimated they provide suboptimal protection against infection and good protection, at least initially, against hospitalization.
Negative Effectiveness
The data dovetails with a growing body of research that has detected negative vaccine effectiveness after a period of time and a higher likelihood of getting infected among people with more doses.
Researchers with the Cleveland Clinic, for instance, reported this month in a preprint study (pdf) that each successive dose heightened the chance a person tested positive.
The researchers called the finding “unexpected” and cast doubt on the “simplistic explanation” offered by some that people at higher risk from COVID-19 are more likely to receive more doses.
Another study, published in November (pdf), found people who received three doses of a vaccine tested positive more than people who received two doses.
“This finding suggests that the immune response against the primary omicron infection was compromised by differential immune imprinting in those who received a third booster dose, consistent with emerging laboratory science data,” the authors, including Laith Abu-Raddad, an infectious disease expert at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, wrote.
A growing number of researchers fear that people’s immune systems are trained by the shots to react to older virus strains. The shots targeted the original Wuhan strain for years. The updated shots, which are only available as boosters, target the Wuhan strain and a sublineage of the BA.4/BA.5 Omicron subvariants. Those subvariants are already being displaced by newer, more immune-evasive strains (pdf).
“The literature predicted that there was a high risk of exacerbation of immune imprinting using this booster strategy,” Malone said, “and the data are consistent with that.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/health/boosted-worse-off-than-vaccinated-in-many-states-data-show_4920614.html ?
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Australian Cardiologist Calls to Halt mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines, Citing Heart Damage
COVID-19 Vaccines Cause Myocarditis and Pericarditis
A growing body of peer-reviewed scientific evidence links heart issues with the mRNA vaccines.
So much so that the CDC and other government authorities in the United States and around the world now recognize that the COVID-19 vaccines are causing myocarditis—heart inflammation which is considered more severe than pericarditis because it causes inflammation of the heart muscle.
In June 2022, the FDA’s Tom Shimabukuro, M.D., M.P.H., M.B.A., identified as part of the CDC COVID-19 Vaccine Coordination Unit, reported that: “Current evidence supports a causal association between mRNA COVID-19 vaccination and myocarditis and pericarditis.”
Six months later, as of Dec. 2, 2022, there have been a total of 35,718 cases of myocarditis/pericarditis reported to the government’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System.
An Australian Cardiologist Speaks Out
After witnessing as many as 70 cases of vaccine-related heart conditions similar to Eskandar’s, Australian Cardiologist Dr. Ross Walker is now saying publicly that he believes there should be a ban on the use of mRNA booster vaccines.
According to Walker, the mRNA vaccines are “very pro-inflammatory,” he told Daily Mail Australia. “ He contended that The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunization should never have mandated mRNA vaccines.
“I’ve seen many people getting vaccine reactions, who get symptoms for about three to six months afterwards,” Walker said. “I’ve seen 60-70 patients in my own practice over the past 12 months who have had similar reactions.”
Those reactions have included shortness of breath, heart palpitations, and chest pain, he continued.
Changing Recommendations
After conducting a thorough review of the scientific evidence, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the Florida Surgeon General, directed his state to no longer recommend any COVID-19 vaccines for men under 39 because of safety concerns.
Drs. Walker and Ladapo are not the only medical professionals voicing concerns about the safety, efficacy, and necessity of the COVID-19 vaccines, especially for children and young adults.
Among the doctors who have called for the COVID-19 vaccination campaigns to be halted is Japanese cardiovascular surgeon Dr. Kenji Yamamoto. In a letter published in the peer-reviewed journal Virology, Yamamoto argued that the COVID-19 booster shots are not safe.
In particular, Yamamoto voiced concern over an adverse effect of the vaccine known as vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT). Not only that, but since the administration of the vaccine, Yamamoto has seen an increase in the risk of infection among his patients at the Okamura Memorial Hospital in Shizuoka in Japan. Specifically, he cites that many of his patients have contracted severe infections due to “inflammation after heart surgery.” Yamamoto believes that his patients’ suppressed immunity is a result of COVID-19 vaccination.
A Turning Tide?
Several high-profile medical doctors have themselves experienced severe side effects after being vaccinated.
Vaccine researcher Dr. Gregory Poland from Rochester, Minnesota has been struggling with life-debilitating tinnitus.
Belgian immunologist, whom The Atlantic described as “one of Europe’s best-known champions of medical research,” Michel Goldman, was battling lymphoma. He had devastating side effects after his third Pfizer vaccine: severe night sweats, exhaustion, and engorged lymph nodes.
A scan taken after the vaccine revealed that the 67-year-old had a barrage of new lesions, “like someone had set off fireworks inside [his] body.”
Goldman suspected that the COVID booster had made him sicker. His brother, who is also a doctor as well as the head of nuclear medicine at the Université Libre de Bruxelles hospital, suspected as much as well.
The rapid progression of Goldman’s angioimmunoblastic T cell lymphoma following the BNT162b2 mRNA booster was published as a peer-reviewed case report in the journal Frontiers in Medicine in November 2021. Since its publication, the case study has been viewed 383,411 times.
While Poland and Goldman still seem to be champions of COVID-19 vaccines, many doctors who once advocated for universal COVID-19 vaccination have since changed their minds.
British cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra initially encouraged the widespread use of COVID-19 vaccines.
But then Malhotra’s father passed away suddenly of cardiac arrest after receiving the jab.
His father’s death prompted Malhotra to begin researching the safety profile of the vaccines. Based on his findings, he no longer believes the theoretical benefits of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh the very real risks.
Politicians are also becoming more vocal about ending vaccine mandates.
On Dec. 7, 2022, Senator Ron Johnson led a roundtable discussion called Covid-19 Vaccines: What They Are, How They Work, and Possible Causes of Injuries.
The next day, the House voted for an $858 Billion Defense Bill that included a repeal of the vaccine mandate for the military.
COVID-19 Infection Milder, COVID-19 Vaccines Not Safe or Effective
Cardiologist Dr. Ross Walker called to halt only the mRNA vaccines for young adults in favor of non-mRNA options. But a growing body of scientific literature (some of which has been retracted for political reasons), as well as state data and testimony from clinicians, has shown that none of the existing COVID-19 vaccines is as safe or effective as advertised.
At the same time, with Omicron and other strains replacing the other, more virulent SARS-CoV-2 variants, COVID-19 infection seems to be becoming milder.
Dr. Malhotra said in a recent interview “… this vaccine is not completely safe, and has unprecedented harms”. He concluded in a peer-reviewed article published in the Journal of Insulin Resistance that a “pause and reappraisal of global vaccination policies for COVID-19 is long overdue.”
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