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 July, 2023. To access the backups in earlier years, click here
31 July, 2023
Pediatrician Fired After Raising Alarm on COVID-19 Vaccines During US Senate Event
A medical expert was terminated by one of her employers after raising concerns about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines during an event held by a U.S. senator, according to newly disclosed documents.
After Dr. Renata Moon (who will appear on "American Thought Leaders" premiering Mon. Aug. 30, 7:30pm ET) testified during the December 2022 event on Capitol Hill, Washington State University officials told her that they were alerting a state medical commission because she allegedly promoted misinformation, one of the documents shows.
The Washington Medical Commission (WMC) has said that doctors who offer misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines, treatments, and preventative measures "erode the public trust in the medical profession and endanger patients," that people should lodge complaints against doctors who allegedly provide misinformation, and that it may revoke the licenses of doctors who are found to have spread misinformation.
Drs. Jeff Haney and James Record, Washington State University officials, referenced the commission in a letter to Dr. Moon dated March 3, 2023.
"The WMC has asked the public and practitioners to report possible spread of misinformation. There are components of your presentation that could be interpreted as a possible spread," they wrote. "As such, we are ethically obligated to make a report to the WMC to investigate possible breach of this expectation."
The university informed Dr. Moon in June 2023 that it was effectively firing her by not renewing her appointment as a clinical associate professor of medicine, according to other documents reviewed by The Epoch Times.
"At this time, the needs of the college are moving in a different direction and your participation is no longer required," Drs. Haney and Record wrote.
More detailed reasoning was not provided.
"This is not about my personal situation with the school. This is about freedom of speech for all Americans," Dr. Moon told The Epoch Times in an email. "We must create an ethical healthcare system that is concerned only with the well being of individual patients and not the financial interests of massive corporations. We are dealing with conflicts of interest that are larger than any of us ever imagined."
Testimony
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) convened Dr. Moon and other experts, including Drs. Peter McCullough and Robert Malone, to talk about COVID-19 vaccines. The event was titled, "COVID-19 Vaccines: What They Are, How They Work, and Possible Causes of Injuries."
Dr. Moon testified that she had only seen two or three cases of myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation, while practicing for more than 20 years. But after the COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out, she said, she has been seeing more cases, and heard about others from fellow doctors.
"There's clearly been a massive increase," Dr. Moon said.
Dr. Moon also pulled out the package insert for the vaccines, or a piece of paper that typically outlines warnings, ingredients, and other information for a vaccine. The insert for the COVID-19 vaccines has no information and says, "intentionally blank," the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has acknowledged.
"How am I to give informed consent to parents when this is what I have?" Dr. Moon said.
Regulators say people can access the information that is usually on the paper on the administration's website. One of the vaccine manufacturers has said that the COVID-19 vaccine inserts were left blank because the information was being updated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"I have a government telling me that I have to say 'safe and effective' and if I don't, my license is at threat. We're seeing an uptick in myocarditis. We're seeing an uptick in adverse reactions. We have trusted these regulatory agencies—I have—for my entire career up until now," Dr. Moon testified. "Something is extremely wrong, and that is the anecdotal story that I have."
Myocarditis is caused by the COVID-19 vaccines, U.S. officials have confirmed. The heart inflammation primarily affects younger males and can cause death.
"It's my obligation to speak out. It's the obligation of any physician who thinks that there is a problem with a product to speak about that product, whether, honestly, whether they're right or wrong," Dr. Moon said on EpochTV's "ATL: Now." "And in this case, everything I said was completely factual."
Other Concerns
Drs. Haney and Record claimed Dr. Moon failed to request and report an absence in order to travel to Washington and testify on the panel, which would violate faculty rules.
They also said that Dr. Moon did not make clear she was not speaking on behalf of Washington State University, another possible rule violation, and that other parts of the roundtable were "inconsistent with expectations of the evidence-based medical education expected in developing a future generation of physicians."
They added, "The expressed views will require us to review your teaching assignments in the frame of the education of our students."
Emails reviewed by The Epoch Times show Dr. Moon did not list the university in a bio she provided Mr. Johnson's office. The bio stated that her views were her own and that she was not speaking on behalf of any institutions with which she has or is affiliated.
Mr. Johnson, in introducing Dr. Moon, did not mention any institution but also did not mention the latter part of the bio.
Dr. Moon's placard did not list an institution. One of the video streams of the panel listed Washington State University. A university investigator noted that in one email.
"I was unaware of this happening and did everything in my power to prevent it by sending the press release and making sure not to mention the name of any employer either with my words or on the cardboard placard in front of me," Dr. Moon told The Epoch Times.
According to other emails, Dr. Moon requested substitutes for Dec. 6, 2021, and Dec. 8, 2021, the days before and after the panel. She was not scheduled to teach on the day of the panel. University employees responded to the messages by saying they were looking for or had found substitutes, and the university investigator confirmed that substitutes were ultimately found for both days.
"I did it the way we've always done it. My senior physicians approved it; we had substitutes for my classes," Dr. Moon told The Epoch Times.
A university spokesman declined to comment on the situation.
"As a matter of policy WSU does not comment on personnel matters," the spokesman told The Epoch Times via email.
It's unclear if the university ultimately referred Dr. Moon to the medical commission. Dr. Moon is part of a lawsuit against the commission for enforcing its misinformation statement without proper adoption. She says the threat of having her license revoked caused her to not renew her license and has impacted her constitutional right to free speech.
Trend?
Dr. Moon said she's concerned about medical schools no longer serving as venues for discussion and critical thinking.
She recalled being called into the office of a superior over student complaints. She learned that the students complained about Dr. Moon noting correctly that some information about the COVID-19 vaccines was unknown, such as where in the body the ingredients were distributed and whether they would cause certain health problems.
"I just engaged in some critical thinking with my students. I thought it was something that we're supposed to do in discussion groups, and they had asked me, right?" Dr. Moon said.
"They said that I had caused them trauma and harm by telling them that the vaccines might not be 100 percent safe. Again, these are medical students. This is a medical school. Nothing is 100 percent safe, not even aspirin is 100 percent safe. Everything has the potential for a reaction. So to have that be a complaint against me really surprised me and it really concerned me."
Another complaint related to how Dr. Moon, after students asked how her week in the clinic had gone, relayed how she had seen anxious and depressed children.
Dr. Moon attributed the problems to the harsh lockdowns imposed in Washington state, like much of the country, and questioned why those policies were put into place when children face little risk from COVID-19.
"I just said to my students, I think we need to rethink this masking that we're doing and the social distancing and isolating, I wonder if CDC has considered that we need to think about isolating our more vulnerable in our communities and keeping them more safe and keeping them at home but letting our kids go out there," Dr. Moon said, referring to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"My students again stated that they were traumatized and harmed by that discussion, in a discussion group in a graduate-level medical school," Dr. Moon said. "This is happening nationwide. Our students have lost that ability, I think, to tolerate critical thinking, and to hear perspectives that are different than the main narrative or the main party line that is being pushed."
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A completely dishonest scientific paper
"We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible." That's the key sentence in an article published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, titled "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2."
It's also a prime example of eminently credentialed and government-subsidized scientists saying the exact opposite of what they believed in an attempt -- successful at the time, but now, three years later, exposed -- to deceive the public.
The article appeared, as the date indicates, just as the spread of COVID was becoming apparent. It also appeared after Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said in January 2020 that the virus could have leaked from "China's only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world's most deadly pathogens" in Wuhan.
Cotton was careful to say that a lab leak was not proven and that the virus could also have been transmitted through an animal, and he dismissed the possibility of an intentional leak.
The Washington Post quickly dismissed A lab leak origin as a "fringe theory" and a "conspiracy theory" by The New York Times. Those characterizations were attributed to government and government-financed scientists -- the same bunch who would shortly produce the "Proximal Origin" paper.
The pushback against the lab leak theory has now been revealed as a fraud, thanks to the work of journalist Matt Taibbi, academic Roger Pielke Jr., and the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
The real conspiracy had roots in a February 2020 conference call led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the time, and Dr. Francis Collins, his boss as head of the National Institutes of Health, and including the four scientists who would co-author the "Proximal Origin" paper.
In February, as the House subcommittee documents reveal, all four were expressing thoughts directly contrary to what they put their names to in March.
-- "I really can't think of a plausible natural scenario," wrote Dr. Robert Garry. "In the lab it would be easy."
-- "The only thing here that strikes me as unusual," wrote Dr. Andrew Rambaut, "is the furin cleavage site," something much more likely to be produced by a lab than by natural transmission.
-- Dr. Edward Holmes wrote he was "60-40 lab."
-- The main work over the last couple of weeks wrote Dr. Kristian Andersen, "has been focused on t(r)ying to disprove any type of lab theory, but we are at a crossroads where the scientific evidence isn't conclusive enough to say we have high confidence in any of the three main theories."
Not exactly "We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible," eh?
Why the change? As one conference call participant put it, "further debate about" a lab leak would "do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular."
Unstated but known to every one of the scientists was that Collins and Fauci had approved cooperation with the Wuhan lab and controlled millions in research dollars coveted by every scientist.
Their intentions were not in doubt. On April 16, Collins told Fauci he hoped "Proximal Origin" would put down "the very destructive conspiracy" of the lab leak theory and on April 17, Fauci recommended it to reporters as the product of a "group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists," without mentioning his own role.
That same month, Andersen, in emails, admitted that a lab leak was possible and bragged about misleading New York Times reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr.
I found the cynicism revealed in these emails shocking, even though I have written critically, in July 2021 and March 2023, about government scientists' attempts to discredit the lab leak theory. I note that statistics guru Nate Silver, not a member of any right-wing conspiracy, is now similarly appalled.
"I'm deeply disappointed by the scientists' conduct here and how unmoored they were from any attempt at truth-seeking," he wrote last week. "The COVID origins story has also been a journalistic fiasco," he added, opining that "journalists are more prone toward being manipulated by bad apples in academia and science than they were ten or twenty years ago."
Evidence for that predilection comes from New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who last week tweeted that a House Republican hearing "raised thorny questions about free speech in a democratic society: Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment? When is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?"
Leave aside the deliciously Orwellian flavor of her verb "tamp down" and her astonishing ignorance of First Amendment law and reflect on how "Proximal Origin" suggests that the government and government-financed credentialed experts are often better at generating misinformation and falsehoods than at detecting them.
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30 July, 2023
Covid cover-up: how the science was silenced
America’s top infectious diseases adviser, Anthony Fauci, deliberately decided to downplay suspicions from scientists that Covid-19 came from a laboratory to protect his reputation and deflect from the risky coronavirus research his agency had funded, according to his boss, one of the most senior US health officials during the pandemic.
In an exclusive interview, Robert Kadlec – former assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the US Department of Health – told The Weekend Australian that he, Dr Fauci and National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins privately discussed how to “turn down the temperature” on accusations against China in the early days of the pandemic while they were trying to encourage Beijing to co-operate and share a sample of the virus.
But the senior US health official – who worked for George W. Bush and Donald Trump and went on to lead American efforts to develop a Covid-19 vaccine – said Dr Fauci mostly kept his knowledge of virologists’ concerns about a lab leak from Wuhan to himself.
The Weekend Australian revealed in 2021 that the National Institutes of Health and other US agencies funded 65 scientific projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology over the past decade, many involving risky research on bat coronaviruses.
‘Vaccine research was the proximate cause’
Dr Kadlec’s comments give the closest insight to date on how Dr Fauci – who led coronavirus policy for two presidents and influenced the worldwide approach to the pandemic – handled the link between Covid-19 and China. They came as US congressional investigations in the past month revealed how scientists worked to silence concerns about a lab leak.
“I think Tony Fauci was trying to protect his institution and his own reputation from the possibility that his agency was funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers who, beyond the scope of the grants received from the National Institutes of Health, may have been working with People’s Liberation Army researchers on defensive coronavirus vaccines,” Dr Kadlec said.
“I think it’s evident from his later released emails (obtained via Freedom of Information requests) that he had more sense of what his institute had funded at that moment. This was a reputational risk to him and his institute and certainly he probably sided with the international scientists that believed that false or unsubstantiated accusations could have a chilling effect on scientific collaboration between the western world and China.”
Dr Kadlec, in his first ever media interview, added: “We think vaccine research resulted in the pandemic – that vaccine research was the proximate cause.”
In an extraordinary admission, Dr Kadlec said they decided to try to encourage a group of leading international scientists to calm down speculation on the origins of the virus.
The scientists held a phone call on February 1, 2020, in which they discussed concerns that SARS-CoV-2 looked like it may have been genetically engineered.
“When we talked about this in advance of that call, he (Fauci) would just try and see if he could get the scientists to take the temperature down, turn the rhetoric down. to at least find, we’re going to look into this but we don’t know,” Dr Kadlec said.
As both Mr Bush’s biodefence adviser and Mr Trump’s assistant health secretary for preparedness, Dr Kadlec has decades of experience in fighting public health crises. He created Operation Warp Speed, the plan to accelerate the development of a Covid-19 vaccine, and is credited for leading the push to vaccinate Americans. In 2018, he warned Congress the US was ill-prepared for a pandemic.
‘Turn the temperature down’
Dr Kadlec’s personal approach was to ask the National Academy of Sciences in late January 2020, to formally examine the sequence of SARS-CoV-2, to understand its origin. But publicly, he felt it was important to achieve co-operation from China from a public health perspective. Beijing had not yet shared a sample of the virus, critical for developing an effective vaccine.
“We decided to engage our national experts to look at this, the National Academy of Sciences,” he said. “It would take time to figure out what was going on. We were trying to prevent people from saying this was a bioweapon when we didn’t really know. That was my intent. It was Dr Fauci’s idea to see if he could get international scientists to examine the origins in a similar fashion. The object was to prevent speculation and turn the temperature down. There was something that could be said to turn the temperature of rhetoric down and avoid the wild speculation, of a bioweapon, that had already started at that point in time.”
That phone call was at the instigation of Dr Fauci after he spoke with scientist Kristian Andersen who expressed concern that SARS-Cov-2 may have been genetically engineered, because of its unusual features. In an email, Dr Andersen said “some of the features (potentially) look engineered” and several leading virologists “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
Dr Kadlec said Dr Fauci kept these suspicions, privately expressed by leading virologists that the virus had been engineered in a laboratory, mostly to himself.
The full extent of those suspicions is now laid bare in emails subpoenaed by US congress and published in recent weeks. In those emails, some scientists discussed the “shit show” that would eventuate if anyone serious accused China of, even accidentally, starting the pandemic. They also discussed the impact such an accusation would have on scientific research and international relations. But, publicly, they insisted the possibility of an inadvertent laboratory leak was a conspiracy and authored a paper published in Nature Medicine, that argued SARS-Cov-2 was almost certainly a natural virus. Dr Kadlec acknowledges the power of that paper, titled the Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2, as becoming the official word that a laboratory leak was a conspiracy theory.
“Their paper did result in casting the die for what would then be the international scientific response going forward,” he said.
“I found it really odd that in light of the now revealed private musings of some of the scientists indicated the sequence looked unusual, that the authors decided to draft a letter as an opinion piece.
“Many people were confused or mistaken by what they wrote as more of a peer-reviewed paper.”
Wuhan ‘fingerprints’
Dr Kadlec accused the scientists of having personal agendas that might have influenced their decision to author a paper that suggested a laboratory leak was a conspiracy theory. “Their initial opinion was likely shaded by their personal professional equities or the belief that what was going on in the US – statements by political leaders- could be problematic for world relations for China but also their professional interests in science,” he said.
Dr Kadlec alluded to the febrile political atmosphere in the US under Mr Trump as a likely influence on the scientists, although the scientists’ deliberations began in late January, and the former president did not make any public comment about a potential laboratory origin of Covid-19 until April.
The authors of the Proximal Origins paper have argued in the media and congressional hearings that later virus research had led them to scotch their first fears of a lab leak – and to conclude instead that the origins of Covid-19 were zoonotic: i.e. the virus had been passed from animal to human, possibly via a Wuhan wet market.
However, new emails and posts over the Slack messaging platform that have surfaced in recent weeks pinpoint the moment this group began steering world attention away from the Wuhan lab. It was not months, or even weeks, but within days and hours of their realisation that the virus may contain “fingerprints” that connected it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The scientists are facing allegations that they embarked on a campaign of subterfuge that has rocked Washington.
’Blueprint for Covid-19’
Dr Kadlec has now spent a year and a half formally investigating the origins of the pandemic, putting together an A and B team to gather evidence for both a natural and laboratory origin respectively.
Gain-of-function research was banned by the Obama administration but lifted during the Trump era. Dr Kadlec says this was at the behest of the NIH. “Francis Collins and Fauci both had a similar world view which was scientists know best and there should be few restrictions on research,” he said.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth Alliance drew up a proposal for grant funding for coronavirus research, which international scientists now believe could be the “blueprint” of Covid-19. Dr Kadlec chaired a committee to authorise whether gain-of-function could proceed. The proposal from the Wuhan institute was bouncing around US Government agencies, in search of funding, but it never went through his committee. “It shows you the fallibility or vulnerability of the oversight system,” he said.
Dr Fauci has denied his agency funded gain-of-function research, but Dr Kadlec said this wasn’t true. “It’s evident NIH supported research that has the potential for, and it at least one case resulted in gain of function,” he said.
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Who made Covid? US spy agencies have a name
US intelligence agencies are understood to be examining the possibility that Chinese military scientist Zhou Yusen’s research to develop a coronavirus vaccine led to the creation of Covid-19, and the first cluster of the pandemic.
The decorated Chinese scientist died about May 2020 in circumstances that Five Eyes intelligence agencies have long suspected was at the hands of the People’s Liberation Army. The Weekend Australian can reveal that the FBI has, on at least two occasions since mid-last year, spoken with a close relative of Zhou who is now residing in the US. The individual is understood to be a crucial new witness.
For the individual’s safety and protection, The Weekend Australian has chosen not to name the relative, who is understood to be “nervous”. The family member did not respond to requests for comment in the weeks leading up to publication of this article.
FBI director Christopher Wray has said publicly that a laboratory leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology led to the pandemic. “The FBI has assessed for quite some time that the origins … are a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Mr Wray told Fox News in April. “You’re talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab that killed millions of Americans.”
’Highest-risk’ vaccine research
In June 2021, The Australian revealed that Zhou was listed as the lead inventor on Chinese patent documents, translated by The Australian, for a Covid-19 vaccine. The patent was dated February 24, 2020.
Zhou died about three months later. Despite his illustrious career, there were no published mentions of this celebrated military scientists in the Chinese press.
Five Eyes intelligence agencies suspected he had been killed.
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28 July, 2023
The truth about myocarditis and Covid vaccines: After Bronny James' cardiac arrest and Elon Musk pushing anti-vaxx theory, leading doctors insist jabs are NOT to blame
The presentation below is reasonable but it depends to an extent on the veracity of official statistics -- which is a very weak reed to lean on indeed. Very often dying WITH Covid has been conflated with dying OF Covid
First the anti-vaxxers jumped on Christian Eriksen, alleging the Covid vaccines were to blame when the Danish footballer suffered a cardiac arrest at Euro 2020.
Then, less than 12 months later, they claimed Pfizer's 'clot shot' was behind Australian cricket icon Shane Warne's sudden heart-related death.
And when NFL safety Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest during a Buffalo Bills match in January, so-called 'truthers' brandished it as the icing on their Covid conspiracy cake.
Now, however, the anti-vaxx mob have a new target: Bronny James, son of legendary NBA hooper LeBron.
The 18-year-old, expected to follow in his father's footsteps, was rushed to hospital on Monday after suffering a cardiac arrest during practice at the University of Southern California.
Despite it being unconfirmed when, or if, Bronny had a Covid jab, critics were quick to establish a potential link.
Even Elon Musk chipped in, fuelling the conspiracy even further.
Posting on Twitter under a news story about Bronny's cardiac arrest, Musk wrote: 'We cannot ascribe everything to the vaccine, but, by the same token, we cannot ascribe nothing. Myocarditis is a known side-effect. The only question is whether it is rare or common.'
But leading doctors have dismissed the theory.
Two facts — both of which are widely misinterpreted — are central to the claims.
One is that mRNA jabs, like Pfizer's and Moderna's, can cause myocarditis, an extremely rare complication that causes inflammation of the heart muscle. Young people, especially boys, are most at risk.
The other? That heart-related deaths are massively above levels seen pre-pandemic.
Cardiologists and heart health charities say conflating the two is not only incorrect, but irresponsible.
No drug is risk-free. And while there is a very small chance of developing myocarditis from a Covid vaccine, experts insist the benefits, in the form of the tens of thousands of lives saved, clearly outweigh any potential dangers.
Myocarditis can, in some cases, damage the pumping function of the heart, leading to disturbance issues later in life.
But an overwhelming majority of vaccine-induced myocarditis cases are mild, real world evidence shows.
Symptoms generally appear within a week of being jabbed and most patients make a full recovery shortly thereafter, according to the British Heart Foundation.
The charity, which has funded various projects into the hugely controversial topic, also insists there is no evidence vaccine recipients are at increased risk of cardiac arrest afterwards, regardless of whether it is days, or months, later.
Any such link, they argue, would have been spotted by now, given that the jabs — delivered to billions across the world — were first rolled out almost three years ago.
Infections, including Covid itself, can also trigger myocarditis. This, experts argue, is a point conveniently dismissed by anti-vaxxers.
Challenging the second point, that cardiac-related deaths are massively above pre-pandemic levels, proves trickier.
Data undisputedly shows an uptick in England since the unprecedented virus crisis began.
Even the BHF acknowledges there have been nearly 100,000 excess cardiovascular disease deaths since the beginning of the pandemic.
Yet, when broken down by age, overall death rates among young men have not risen significantly compared to pre-pandemic levels — debunking one of the main anti-vaxxer theories that swathes are being mercilessly laid low by jabs.
And they claim the rise in excess deaths, most obvious among over-45s, is partly down to the ailing state of the NHS.
Delays in heart health screening during the pandemic, knock-on disruption of Covid lockdowns themselves, and poor ambulance response times are just some obvious factors at play.
A BHF spokesperson said: 'Every second counts when someone has a heart attack.
'Average ambulance response times for suspected heart attacks and strokes have been above 30 minutes in all but one month since the beginning of 2022, and in December 2022 they even breached 90 minutes.'
They added: 'The pandemic has caused significant disruption to the detection and management of conditions that put millions of people at much greater risk of a heart attack or stroke, like high blood pressure.'
Experts also suspect the lingering health impacts of Covid could have also played a role in total excess deaths
A study from January found people who got infected before the vaccine roll-out were 40 per cent more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, and five times more likely to die in the 18 months after infection.
So, what about data showing heart-related deaths in younger men, the group at the centre of concerns about myocarditis risk, have shot up since the pandemic kicked off?
Well, rates were either highest in 2020 — or no different to levels seen pre-Covid, according to data collated by the Office of National Statistics (ONS).
Rates for young cardiac deaths, defined medically as a person under 35, have since fallen to around pre-pandemic norms.
Then, what is to blame for what feels like a spate of cardiac emergencies among stars of the sporting world? Undeniably, before Covid, instances similar to Bronny's felt few and far between.
In fact, the only high-profile incidents involved footballers Marc-Vivien Foé and Fabrice Muamba, who both collapsed on the field due to a cardiac emergency nine years apart, stick out in people's memory, though over a dozen high-profile incidents, mainly in America, have also been recorded in the past 40 years.
Renowned experts in cardiac health issues in young athletes told MailOnline bluntly — there has been no rise in deaths, or incidents, since Covid vaccines were put out en masse.
A 2012 study in the journal Circulation found that a young athlete dies of a sudden cardiac event every three days on average in the US, totalling between 100 to 150 fatalities each year.
Dr Raghav Bhatia, research fellow at the globally respected cardiovascular clinical academic group at St George’s University of London — one of the world's most renowned sites in this specialist branch of cardiology — said: 'There is no published literature that supports this claim.
'A clear distinction needs to be made between peer-reviewed robust medical literature and hear-say or individual case-reports, which are often found on social media and may often represent misinformation.'
Usually, these are down to undetected cardiac problems, he said.
For example Eriksen's collapse was pinned on an undetected ventricular fibrillation, a heart rhythm disruption.
Meanwhile, Hamlin's was down to case of commotio cordis, where the heart stops due to a high velocity impact from an object like a ball to the chest.
Global reports of myocarditis following Covid vaccination, particularly in young men, spooked health chiefs in 2021, when the vaccines first started being dished out to younger demographics.
But rates in Britain were eventually found to be lower than in the US and Israel, where concerns peaked.
Some experts attributed this to the UK's longer intervals between doses, eight weeks compared to four, and this giving the body greater time to recover.
This, followed by data showing the risk of myocarditis from a jab was much lower than that from a Covid infection itself, led to the jabs continuing to be recommended.
British data on vaccine safety is gathered through the UK Government's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).
Its latest report, from November, found there had been 851 reports of myocarditis following a Covid vaccination in the UK since the start of the rollout, of which 15 were fatal.
Considering the millions of jabs that have been dished out to Britons, this provides an overall risk of 10 suspected cases of myocarditis per million doses.
Yet this is likely to be an undercount because not all cases would have been logged or reported to official channels, though reports don't necessarily mean a confirmed case.
The MHRA states that studies show the risk of myocarditis from contracting the virus itself has been estimated at about 1,500 cases per million patients.
Officially less than 100 deaths from Covid vaccines have been recorded the UK. Only a tiny fraction, about three, occurred in under-30s.
While such deaths are tragic, they pale in comparison to the almost 230,000 lives estimated to have been saved by Britain's historic Covid inoculation campaign.
And that's not to mention the knock-on benefits, with jabs credited for ending the cycle of paralysing lockdowns that crippled the economy and the NHS.
Globally, Covid vaccines have been credited with saving almost 20million lives during the first year of their existence.
Like with any medication or vaccine, however, the jabs do have risks. The majority are mild, such as a sore arm, flu-like symptoms and headaches.
Some concerns were raised after vaccines were found in extremely rare cases to trigger myocarditis and pericarditis — inflammation of the heart — especially among young people.
But leading heart experts insist the majority of cases are mild and temporary, and that contracting the virus itself can also cause the condition.
So what is the risk of getting myocarditis or pericarditis after the vaccine? How would I know if I had any heart damage? And is the vaccine safe for people with heart conditions or taking heart medications?
Since 2020 has there been an increase in heart-related deaths?
Yes. A report by the British Heart Foundation in November revealed that there has been just over 30,000 excess deaths involving heart disease in England since the start of the pandemic.
This is, on average, over 230 additional deaths a week above expected.
However, causes of this 'relate to being unable to access care for high blood pressure, heart tests and treatment for heart disease,' according to Dr Martin Lowe, a consultant cardiologist at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London and consultant paediatric cardiologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital, London.
He said the possible effects of Covid on the heart may also be to blame.
Now Covid's threat has been drastically blunted, the virus is no longer thought to be a driving force behind the excess heart disease death rate.
Instead, 'significant and widespread disruption to heart care services' — including rapidly rising ambulance response times and 'unacceptably long waits for diagnosis and treatment of conditions' — is to blame, the BHF warned.
NHS data also shows 2million fewer people were recorded as having controlled hypertension in 2021 compared to the previous year.
Modelling indicates that this reduction in blood pressure control could lead to an estimated 11,190 and 16,702 additional heart attacks and strokes, respectively, over a three year period.
Can the vaccines affect the heart? In short, yes.
Although it is 'very rare', an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis has been found with mRNA Covid vaccines — such as Moderna or Pfizer/BioNtech.
Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle, while pericarditis is inflammation of the lining around the heart, also known as the pericardium, he added.
But, the majority of cases that occur after vaccination 'are mild with a complete recovery', Dr Lowe said.
Only in 'extremely rare' cases of severe myocarditis do people require hospitalisation and treatment, he added.
'Importantly, most people who get myocarditis or pericarditis have mild disease and the vast majority make a complete recovery, even children,' said Professor Amitava Banerjee, an honorary consultant cardiologist at University College London.
How common is that side effect?
The risk is low. UK data suggests a risk of one case in every 20,000 vaccine doses in most studies', Dr Lowe added.
Those aged 18-29, particularly young men, appear to be at higher risk. And it is most common after the second dose.
But a 2022 review on myocarditis and pericarditis following vaccination, published by the University of Alberta, found there were up to 15 cases recorded per 100,000 young men.
A 2021 review carried out by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also showed that per million second doses of mRNA Covid vaccine administered to men aged 12–29, it may trigger between 39 and 47 expected cases of myocarditis.
However, it would also prevent 11,000 Covid infections, 560 hospitalisations, 138 intensive care hospital admissions and six deaths.
The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) asks doctors to report side effects via its 'Yellow Card' scheme.
According to latest figures shared by UKHSA, as of November 23 the MHRA had received 851 reports of myocarditis and 579 of pericarditis linked to the Pfizer vaccination.
By comparison, there were 241 reports of myocarditis and 226 reports of pericarditis linked to Oxford's AstraZeneca jab and 251 reports of myocarditis and 149 of pericarditis, with Moderna.
'It is important to note that Yellow Card data and similar vaccine surveillance data from other countries cannot be used to compare the safety profile of Covid vaccines as many factors can influence reporting,' UKHSA said.
Treatment of myocarditis depends on the symptoms experienced, but can include painkillers for the chest pain or medication to calm the inflammation, as well as drinking plenty of fluids and resting.
Do the benefits of vaccination outweigh the potential risks of myocarditis and pericarditis?
'Absolutely yes. Anybody who says otherwise does not understand how to analyse the data,' Professor Banerjee said.
'The risk of heart disease after Covid is much greater than the risk of heart disease after vaccination,' he added.
Among people hospitalised with Covid, around one in 50 people per year will have pericarditis, he said.
Covid also carries a risk of myocarditis – and one that is far higher than the vaccine, at 1,500 cases per million infections.
'Other cardiovascular disease, such as heart failure, is more common and the associated risk is much higher with Covid,' he said.
'Thankfully the vast majority of the these patients have mild heart inflammation only and make a full recovery,' Dr Lowe added.
Some people have reported feeling a faster heartbeat in the days after their Covid vaccine. This can be part of the body's normal immune response to the vaccine and is not normally a cause for concern.
Is the vaccine safe for people with heart conditions and taking heart medications or blood thinners like warfarin, clopidogrel or other antiplatelet drugs?
Yes. People who have heart conditions or who take heart medication such as anti-hypertensives or statins should still get the Covid vaccine, both experts said.
They 'absolutely' agree that the vaccine is 'safe and effective' for people who take blood thinning medication.
It is 'indeed recommended to protect against the effects of Covid infection', Dr Lowe said.
For people with heart diseases, chronic kidney disease or other chronic conditions and those over the age of 70, 'vaccination is especially important', Professor Banerjee added, as their risk of hospital admission from Covid is higher.
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27 July, 2023
Chase Shuts Down Accounts for Dr. Joseph Mercola’s Companies
JPMorgan Chase is shutting down accounts for companies owned by prominent COVID-19 vaccine critic Dr. Joseph Mercola.
The primary accounts for several Mercola-owned businesses, including Mercola Market, are being shut down in August, according to notices reviewed by The Epoch Times.
“Financial institutions have an obligation to know our customers and monitor transactions that flow through our customers’ accounts,” the notices state. “After careful consideration, we decided to close your account because of unexpected activity on these or another Chase account.”
Accounts for Mercola, CEO Steven Rye, Mr. Rye’s wife, chief financial officer Amalia Legaspi, Mrs. Legaspi’s husband, and Mrs. Legaspi’s son are also being closed.
The accountholders are being given until Aug. 11 to move funds to another institution. They have struggled to get answers on what exactly precipitated the harsh action.
Anthony Anesi, a Chase vice president, told Mr. Rye in a voicemail that he asked for the reason and “was told for legal reasons they can not tell me why they are closing the account.”
Mr. Anesi requested copies of the notices so he could file for reconsideration. “It’s not a guarantee, once we put in for reconsideration, that they will keep the accounts open. There’s no guarantee of that. But we are going to try because you’re a good client of our institution,” Mr. Anesi said.
Mr. Rye told The Epoch Times that in phone calls with Chase representatives, they said changes were made in the backend and that they cannot access the backend to see the changes.
Mr. Rye said that he believes Chase either based its decision on illegal acts from accountholders, which he says did not take place, or from Chase itself, which could run afoul of a new Florida law that bars banks from denying services to people for their religious, political, or social beliefs.
Dr. Mercola has been a strong critic of the government’s response to COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccines. Some of his articles are republished by The Epoch Times.
Chase has “refused to provide any reason” for the debanking, Dr. Mercola said in a statement. “They won’t say, ‘Hey, what’s this wire for? What’s this transaction for?” Mr. Rye said. “We’ve been doing business for them forever, right? Even in that voicemail, Tony, who we’ve known forever, says, ‘You guys are great customers.’ I don’t know what’s happening.”
He added: “I think it was a little bit surprising to the timing. The COVID stuff has kind of died down. So I found that a little bit unusual. So I can only speculate. I don’t know exactly why they did it. But we’ve looked at everything within our records. There’s nothing that we did.”
Even if the decisions are reversed, it would be hard to trust Chase enough to keep the accounts, Mr. Rye said. He and others are preparing to move their money to other institutions before the deadline.
A spokesperson for Chase told The Epoch Times in an email that most account closures are done for anti-money laundering or identify verification purposes.
“For privacy reasons, we can’t discuss customer relationships, but we don’t close accounts because of political affiliations, and we didn’t do so in this case,” the spokesperson said.
Mr. Anesi did not respond to a request for comment.
Robert F. Kennedy, a Democrat running for president who has also been critical of the vaccines, was among those decrying what happened.
“Looks like Chase shut down long-time accounts of Mercola’s company, employees, and their family members. No reason given. I wonder if it has anything to do with their medical dissent?” Mr. Kennedy wrote on Twitter. “No payment platform should be allowed to discriminate against people for exercising their right to free speech.”
Chase has a history of shutting down accounts of people with certain beliefs. Chase shut down accounts of three right-wing personalities in moves that did not appear to be based on any official company policies, The Epoch Times reported in 2019.
That included an account for Martina Markota, a performing artist-turned-reporter who had worked for the Daily Caller and The Rebel, and an account for Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio.
Chase stopped providing services to Mr. Tarrio just one day after a reporter claimed an online store he owned was linked to the Proud Boys, which was described as a “hate group.”
A spokeswoman for Chase said at the time the events were unrelated. “He has gotten an email from us, and we have repeatedly talked to him with very clear reasons why. He knows why,” the spokeswoman told The Epoch Times in an email. “If he agrees in writing that I can share that email with you, I’m happy to do so. But as it stands, I’m not able to share it.”
She also said, “We have never, and would never, shut down any account due to political affiliation.”
In a recording of a call between Mr. Tarrio and a Chase representative, the Chase representative called the account closure “mind-boggling,” adding, “I see nothing that indicates any reason why the account should be closed.”
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COVID Vaccines Show 24 Times More Adverse Reactions Than Others
The latest report on adverse reactions to vaccines in Western Australia has revealed that COVID-19 vaccinations have 24 times the rate of adverse reactions in the state compared to all other vaccines.
According to the state’s vaccine safety surveillance report (pdf), COVID-19 vaccines showed that for every 100,000 COVID-19 vaccines administered, 264 adverse events following immunisations (AEFIs) were recorded.
For all other vaccinations, 11.1 AEFIs were recorded, making the COVID-19 vaccines 23.8 times more likely than non-COVID-19 vaccines to result in adverse events.
The rate of adverse events varied among different types of COVID-19 vaccines.
The Spikevax (Moderna) vaccine recorded 281.4 AEFIs per 100,000 doses, Comirnaty (Pfizer) recorded 244.8, and the Vaxzevria (AstraZeneca) vaccine, which was removed from the vaccine program after reports emerged of blood clotting in younger people, recorded 306.
Adverse events following vaccination can range from mild, such as a sore arm, to serious conditions, such as anaphylaxis, thrombosis with thrombocytopaenia syndrome (TTS), Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), myocarditis, and pericarditis.
Collaboration Continues With 3-in-1 Super Jab
Meanwhile, despite these concerns, the Australian government’s partnership with Moderna to produce vaccines using experimental messenger RNA technology to prepare for the next pandemic means these vaccines are here to stay.
The company has been forming a trifecta jab to address the main respiratory viruses—influenza, COVID-19, and RSV to maintain its market share amid the falling revenue of vaccine companies as the health crisis subsides.
Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine sales of US$18.4 billion in 2022 are expected to dive to $5 billion this year.
Recently, it was granted expedited approval by Australia’s authority for medicines for its mRNA-1345 (RSV vaccine), meaning that the company will be able to launch the vaccines in Australia before any other country in the world.
A spokesperson from Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration told the Epoch Times that Moderna was granted an accelerated approval process on March 30 after satisfying all of the following criteria:
the medicine is new
the medicine is for the treatment, prevention, or diagnosis of a life-threatening condition
no other medicines that are intended to treat, prevent or diagnose the condition are included in the Australian drug register or there is substantial evidence that this medicine provides a significant improvement in efficacy or safety of the treatment, prevention or diagnosis of the condition compared to those goods already included in the register
there is substantial evidence that the medicine provides a major therapeutic advance.
However, phase 3 clinical trials for Moderna’s mRNA version of the seasonal influenza vaccine have been underwhelming, showing a high rate of side effects.
Although the vaccine generates a strong immune response against the A strains of the flu, its efficacy against B strains is not better than existing approved vaccines.
Additionally, 70 percent of trial participants who received the shot reported adverse reactions such as headaches, swelling, and fatigue compared to 48 percent for the conventional flu vaccine.
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Yale Study Finds Death Rates for Covid Higher for Republicans
Probably a social class effect
In the fall of 2022, with the United States politically divided over Covid, the Yale University School of Public Health released a report about a working study which found excess deaths due to the Covid pandemic were along partisan political lines even after the coronavirus vaccines were made available to the public. The study was released as a working paper and emphasized the fact that Republican voters in two U.S. states had more deaths than Democratic voters after vaccines for Covid-19 became widely available to counter the disease.
Additionally, this discrepancy didn’t exist prior to the vaccines. The two states were Ohio and Florida. The study found the excess death rate for Republican voters was 5.4 percentage points, or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democratic voters. “The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available,” the authors said in the study.
The authors, Jacob Wallace, assistant professor of public health, Jason L. Schwartz, associate professor of public health and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, assistant professor at the Yale School of Management conducted the research using a novel linkage of political party affiliation and mortality data to assess whether there were differences in COVID-19 excess death rates between Republican and Democratic voters. Now, the authors have published their study.
Final study published
The cohort study itself was published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine. The Yale researchers examined the deaths of 538,139 people 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio, between January 2018, and December 2021, with researchers linking them to party registration records. Researchers found the excess death rate for Republicans and Democrats was about the same at the start of the pandemic in March 2020. The following winter members of both political parties experienced a similar sharp increase in deaths, but after April 2021, the number of Republicans who died exceeded the number of Democrats by 7.7% which came out to a 43% rise in deaths for members of the GOP. The median age of death was 78.
“In this cohort study evaluating 538?159 deaths in individuals aged 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio between March 2020, and December 2021, excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults, but not before. These differences were concentrated in counties with lower vaccination rates, and primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio. The differences in excess mortality by political party affiliation after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults suggest that differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake between Republican and Democratic voters may have been a factor in the severity and trajectory of the pandemic in the US.” The study was a “cross-sectional comparison of excess mortality between registered Republican and Democratic voters between March 2020, and December 2021 adjusted for age and state of voter registration was conducted. Voter and mortality data from Florida and Ohio in 2017 linked to mortality records for January 1, 2018, to December 31, 2021, were used in data analysis.”
Conclusion
As reported by the study’s authors:
“In this cross-sectional study, an association was observed between political party affiliation and excess deaths in Ohio and Florida after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults. These findings suggest that differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake between Republican and Democratic voters may have been factors in the severity and trajectory of the pandemic in the US.” The data didn’t look at voters without a political party affiliation and was limited to Ohio and Florida. “We’re not saying that if you took someone’s political party affiliation and were to change it from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party that they would be more likely to die from Covid-19,” Jacob Wallace said. However, “Our study found evidence of higher excess mortality for Republican voters compared with Democratic voters in Florida and Ohio after, but not before, COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults in the US. These differences in excess death rates were larger in counties with lower vaccination rates. If differences in COVID-19 vaccination by political party affiliation persist, particularly in the absence of other pandemic mitigation strategies, the higher excess death rate observed among Republican voters may continue through subsequent stages of the pandemic.”
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26 July, 2023
Qatar National Study: mRNA Bivalent Booster Bomb! Natural Immunity Superior against XBB
Population health scientist Hiam Chemaitelly and team at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar have conducted yet another large population level study. TrialSite has tracked the efforts of this impressive group throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In their latest study results uploaded to medRxiv the Qatar-based group uses a matched, retrospective, cohort study to evaluate the effectiveness of the bivalent booster mRNA vaccines targeting BA.1 strains. The study included 11,482 persons in the bivalent booster cohort and 56,806 persons in the no-recent vaccination cohort. They found 65 infections recorded in the bivalent cohort and 406 recorded in the no-recent-vaccination cohort. Not one of the Omicron-based infections advanced into a more severe condition, including no deaths.
So, what did Chemaitelly and team find?
The cumulative incidence of infection equaled 0.80% (95% CI: 0.61-1.07%) in the bivalent cohort and 1.00% (95% CI: 0.89-1.11%) in the no-recent- vaccination cohort at 150 days after the start of follow-up.
Furthermore, the outcomes, which haven’t been reviewed yet, lead to the observation that omicron XBB subvariants, including XBB, XBB.1, XBB.1.5, XBB.1.9.1, XBB.1.9.2, XBB.1.16, and XBB.2.3, predominated the cases.
They found that when calculating and applying adjusted hazard ratios to compare incidence of infection in the bivalent cohort to that in the no-recent-vaccination cohort the outcome equaled 0.75 (95% CI: 0.57-0.97).
The Qatar-based Weill Cornell team reports:
Bivalent vaccine effectiveness against infection was 25.2% (95% CI: 2.6-42.6%). Effectiveness was 21.5% (95% CI: -8.2-43.5%) among persons with no prior infection and 33.3% (95% CI: - 4.6-57.6%) among persons with prior infection revealing the superiority of prior infection in the context of this study and its limitations.
The Moderna product (mRNA-1273.214) reduced incidence of SARS- CoV-2 infection, but Chemaitelly and team report that such protection was “modest” at best at 25%.
The modest protection may have risen because of XBB immune evasion or immune imprinting effects, or combination of both.
Study & Support
The study authors were supported both with internal Weill Cornell resources as well as external government and private sector sources.
For example, the Biomedical Research Program and the Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Biomathematics Research Core, both at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar supported the authors.
And externally so did the Ministry of Public Health, Hamad Medical Corporation, and Sidra Medicine. The authors are also grateful for the Qatar Genome Programme and Qatar University Biomedical Research Center for institutional support for the reagents needed for the viral genome sequencing.
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A journalist records Covidian Australia's pandemic over-reach
Medically idiotic, economically ruinous, socially disruptive and embittering, culturally dystopian, politically despotic: what was there to like in the Covid era? Billions, if you were Big Pharma. Unchecked power, if you were Big State. More money and power over the world’s governments and people, for the WHO. Template for action for climate zealots. Dreamtime for cops given free rein to indulge their inner bully. Anguished despair, if you were a caring, inquisitive reporter.
In Australia Breaks Apart, John Stapleton, a retired journalist with over 25 years’ experience with the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian, chronicles the collective madness that suffocated Covidian Australia, but also the resistance movement that began hesitantly and grew organically. It is a tale of the many villains complicit in tyranny and the few heroes of resistance. ‘What will you tell UR kids? Did you rise up or comply’, asked a sign during the Canberra protests. It’s a story of venal, incompetent politicians and brutish police – thugs in uniform – acting at the behest of ‘power drunk apparatchiks’.
If you want to know or recall what happened, read the book. If you questioned and resisted from the start, take heart at the documentation for the record. If you belong to the Covid class in slow retreat from the wastelands you created and now leave behind, take evasive action. An extract was published in the Weekend Australian. Among more than 900 online commentators, one quoted Tony Abbott that in two world wars, many risked their lives to protect our freedoms, but in the last three years, so many gave up freedoms to prolong lives. Some took Stapleton to task for failing to thank our great and good leaders and public health authorities for keeping us safe through the terrifying ordeal of the ‘rona wars. The persistence of the last attitude justifies the book’s publication. It’s an effort to chronicle and, if possible, come to terms with how an entire population was terrorised into fearing a virus and complying with arbitrary and draconian rules. Stapleton laments this is not the Australia he knew and loved. There evolved a co-dependency between the uber surveillance state and a Stasi-like snitch society in which ‘we are all guilty until proven uninfected’.
The unleashing of state violence on peaceful protestors included militarised responses on the streets and in the air that drew gasps of disbelief from around the world. State over-reach included ‘an insane level of micromanagement’. All was done without providing any evidence and cost-benefit analyses in support. It’s all here in grim detail, possibly with generous dollops of hyperbole. But who can blame Stapleton, writing amidst the ‘height of totalitarian derangement’ syndrome.?
Stapleton uses the narrative device of a fictional character called Old Alex who watches what is happening with detachment and growing disenchantment. In 444 pages divided into 19 chapters, he provides a comprehensive catalogue of the milestones, lies, and obfuscations on the relentless march to medical tyranny and vaccine apartheid. He puzzles over the left’s embrace of the Pharma-state’s over-reach. Struggles for words strong enough to convey the depth of contempt for the ‘shameless’, ‘odious’ and ‘loathed’ Scott Morrison, whose name became synonymous for some with the act of defecation as shouts were heard from inside a lavatory: ‘I’m doing a ScoMo, I’m doing a ScoMo’. Readers will encounter many writers from the Spectator Australia and Brownstone stables, which clearly sustained Stapleton through the dark Covid years with emotional connections to many of the world’s leading fellow-dissidents. They will be reminded of many characters whose horror stories were illuminated briefly during the long darkness, such as Anthony and Natalie Reale who run the Village Fix café in Shellharbour, NSW. I wrote about them in the Speccie on 15 January 2022. We encountered the big-hearted and generous family on the drive up from Canberra to our new home in the Northern Rivers in December 2021.
Australia broke apart most obviously in the way in which the Morrison government was complicit in the fracturing of the federation into mini-fiefdoms run by wannabe warlords aka Premiers and their palace courtiers of CHOs and Police Commissioners, some of whom have since been pushed upwards into Governors’ mansions. But it was more. Trust was also broken, perhaps irreparably, with respect to parliaments, the judiciary, human rights machinery, police, medical establishment, experts, and the media. The significant switch to independent media reflects disillusionment as much with social media’s Big Tech platforms that turned into narrative enforcers as with the legacy media that turned into fear-mongering Big State mouthpieces and Big Pharma shills.
It was important for someone to write this instant history under time pressure, an accessible work of record, lest we forget. Or rather, lest they be allowed to forget and move on. This is neither a book by nor for academics. Therein lies some of its failings and much of its strength. ‘The Government is my enemy’, laments a disillusioned citizen. Do not trust politicians and bureaucrats. ‘They lie for a living’, says the cynical reporter. In the years to come a flood of scholarly tomes can be expected, analysing in excruciating detail the excesses of lockdowns, masks, and vaccines and systematic assessments of their successes and failures. Given the paucity of critical journalism, it’s useful to have a record of contemporaneous events before memories fade and stories are conveniently rewritten. The journalistic strengths include on-the-ground reporting from protests like the Canberra Convoy, observation skills, an eye for the human interest story, jargon-free writing, and analysis uncluttered by theoretical explorations. His stories of the personalities encountered during the massive Canberra protests in early 2022 bring out vividly the electric atmosphere, energy, and camaraderie of what became a festive, exultant celebration of shared emotions and commitments to securing the freedoms of future generations of Australians.
This is a book to read, display prominently on the coffee table or discreetly on the bookshelf, recommend for purchase to the public library, and spread awareness by word of mouth. It contains many literary quotations and allusions. It’s appropriate therefore that I am left at the end recalling these lines from Dylan Thomas that apply very much to ‘Old Alex’: ‘Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rage at close of day;Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/the-government-my-enemy/ ?
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25 July, 2023
CDC Changed Definition of Breakthrough COVID-19 After Emails About ‘Vaccine Failure’
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) altered its definition of COVID-19 cases among the vaccinated, leading to a lower number of cases classified as a breakthrough, according to documents obtained by The Epoch Times.
The CDC in early 2021 defined the post-vaccination cases as people testing positive seven or more days after receipt of a primary vaccination series, according to one of the documents.
The definition was changed on Feb. 2, 2021, to only include cases detected at least 14 days after a primary series, another document shows.
“We have revised the case definition,” Dr. Marc Fisher, the lead of the CDC’s Vaccine Breakthrough Case Investigation Team, wrote to colleagues at the time.
The rationale for the change was redacted.
A CDC spokesperson defended the altered definition.
“CDC made the change to the definition of a breakthrough infection time period due to the most current data that showed that the 14-day period was required for an effective antibody response to the vaccines,” Scott Pauley, the spokesman, told The Epoch Times in an email.
“That, in combination with the data showing that many cases of COVID-19 were incubating for up to two weeks before becoming symptomatic, required the change to refine the time period to eliminate cases where exposure happened before the vaccination response would be effective,” Mr. Pauley added.
Dr. Harvey Risch, professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, said there was “no cogent rationale” for excluding early cases and other events among the vaccinated, whether they occurred within seven days or 14 days.
“With either of these delays, CDC addressed what is the theoretical best that the vaccination could achieve. If the vaccines don’t work for the first 7 or 14 days or increase risk of getting Covid-19 during that period, that is part of what happens when they are deployed in a population,” Dr. Risch told The Epoch Times via email.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor health policy at Stanford University, said that the CDC should have been focused on advising people that they weren’t as protected immediately after vaccination.
“Rather than playing games with the definition of breakthrough cases,” Dr. Bhattacharya told The Epoch Times in an email, the CDC should have warned “recently vaccinated vulnerable older people that they were at higher risk for being infected during that period.”
The CDC excluded some postvaccination cases because they did not meet the updated definition, the documents show, providing an inflated view of vaccine effectiveness.
One document, for instance, shows that Kansas in early 2021 reported 37 cases among the vaccinated.
Thirty-four were not counted because they occurred after receipt of one dose, not two. A primary series for both vaccines was two doses until recently, with the second dose not advised until at least 21 days after the first dose.
The other three cases happened after a second dose, but they were not counted as breakthrough cases by the CDC because they happened within 13 days of completion of a primary series, Dr. Fisher informed colleagues in an email.
On Jan. 29, 2021, the CDC learned in a call with Maryland health officials that a cluster appeared to stem from a person who was vaccinated with a single dose before experiencing symptoms. A CDC official said it was a “possible breakthrough case,” but the case would not have been counted under the earlier or later breakthrough definition.
In another likely form of suppression of the true number of cases, states weren’t able to report cases through the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System until February 2021, according to one of the emails. Kansas was the first state to send info through the system, according to a Feb. 1, 2021, email reporting the 37 cases.
States could also report cases outside of the system through calls, as could health care providers, according to another email. Reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System were also analyzed for possible inclusion.
The CDC started reporting the number of breakthrough cases on April 15, 2021. Some of the breakthrough cases led to hospitalization and death. CDC officials discussed breakthrough cases sporadically in public settings, but also made false claims about vaccine effectiveness, including claiming in March 2021 that vaccinated people did not get sick.
The breakthrough case definition was revised after multiple CDC officials emailed about the vaccines failing to prevent infection.
Dr. Fisher said in one missive on Dec. 21, 2020, that he was directed by a superior “to start working on a protocol to evaluate COVID vaccine failures or breakthrough cases.”
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director at the time, highlighted an editorial on Jan. 30, 2021, that described variants as a “growing threat” of escaping the protection from vaccines and said she’d spoken to the head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health about the matter.
Around the same time, CDC officials circulated a one-page document about investigating post-vaccination cases.
“What? There is a 1-pager from Tom about vaccine failures?” Dr. Nancy Messionnier, another top CDC official, said on Jan. 27, 2021, after hearing about the document, which was being distributed by CDC medical officer Dr. Thomas Clark.
The version of the document The Epoch Times received was fully redacted. After Dr. Clark was asked for an unredacted version, the CDC declined to provide any other versions of the document.
Dr. Fisher also made a presentation near the end of January 2021 on breakthrough cases and sent those slides to colleagues after emphasizing he’d developed them “for internal use” and that the slides “have not been reviewed or cleared by anyone.” Dr. Fisher did not respond when asked for the slides.
Soon after the change, the CDC was alerted to a college athlete who tested positive for COVID-19 about three weeks after completing a Pfizer primary series. One CDC official described it as a “potential breakthrough case” and said data would have to be reviewed to see whether it would be counted.
In a document distributed to states, the CDC outlined a number of ways post-vaccination cases, even one detected at least 14 days after a primary series, would not be counted. That included excluding people who received a vaccine that was not authorized in the United States, people with only a positive antibody test, and people who tested positive within 44 days of their latest test.
Time Exclusion
The CDC initially floated (pdf) counting a person as “fully vaccinated” as early as seven days after completion of a primary series but ultimately settled on 14 days after completion.
The CDC declined to provide the name of the official who decided on the definition of fully vaccinated. The agency, in response to a Freedom of Information Act, also said it did not have any records on deciding to exclude cases that occur in what amounts to at least 35 days after the first vaccine dose.
Officials pointed to U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) materials that outlined the results from clinical trials from Pfizer and Moderna, which make the vaccines that the FDA authorized in 2020.
The trials found efficacy against symptomatic COVID-19 was much lower within days of vaccination. In Pfizer’s trial, for instance, suspected cases within seven days of a vaccine dose were 409 among the vaccinated versus 287 among placebo recipients. Moderna estimated a 50.8 percent efficacy within 14 days of dose one, compared to 92 percent efficacy 15 or more days after the dose.
Observational data have also indicated lower or negative shielding in the days after vaccination, and almost immediately after the vaccines were rolled out, some vaccinated people were reporting getting infected anyways.
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Rubio: Stop the Moderna & Chinese mRNA Deal
TrialSite recently reported on Moderna’s deal with the Chinese government to research and manufacture novel mRNA medicines and vaccines. Importantly, the deal was termed exclusively only for the Chinese people. It’s important to note that China classifies life sciences industry generally as a matter of national security. While China’s biotech industry has made great strides with a modernization of regulations and a rapidly maturing life science-focused investment ecosystem, the country has tailed America and Europe when it comes to the development of mRNA technologies. Now, the latest Moderna deal is meant to change that.
But given growing geopolitical tensions between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, was this deal a smart thing to do? Moderna is seeking to tap into and exploit the Chinese market for medicines and vaccines, the second biggest worldwide according to some sources. For its investors, Moderna's move makes sense. But let us not forget that Moderna’s financial position now is far better thanks to U.S. government contracts both before, during and now, after the pandemic. The company went from money loser to highly profitable because of government contracts during COVID-19.
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio has gone on the record, openly questioning the wisdom of allowing such a deal. Rubio sent a letter to Stéphane Bancel, the company’s CEO, regarding the national security implications of the agreement and requested information on the details of the arrangement, including how the company plans to protect technology funded by American taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars.
Rubio and team fret publicly that China’s “genocidal regime” benefits with “exclusive access to critical intellectual property.” The Florida senator correctly identifies China's policy of enticing investment in Mainland China, only to leverage or exploit intellectual property insight, transferring such knowledge from Western investment to mainland monetization.
But Rubio goes a step further, playing the blame game of the COVID-19 pandemic itself. The Florida senator points to “significant evidence that COVID-19 came from a government-run lab in China” and continues to cover up such a connection.
TrialSite has accumulated enough evidence suggesting that the U.S. government (which includes Rubio) has likely covered up elements of the COVID-19 pandemic along with the Chinese government, but likely, for different reasons. We continue to refer to the DARPA memo sent to us, authored by a military officer explicitly calling out that SARS-CoV-2 was a unique American development. After requesting an explanation from DARPA, a communications chief could not verify nor refute the veracity of the memo that included the official DARPA seal. Interestingly, the DARPA officer cited that the DoD’s research agency was not funding EcoHealth Alliance. It was EcoHealth Alliance, that coronavirus specialist, that served as an intermediary between the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, (NIAID), part of the National Institute of Health, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Lots of evidence points to a complicated entanglement between elements of both the Chinese and U.S. governments, despite the public positioning of both to the opposite. It’s likely that both the Chinese and American governments are covering up aspects of the deadly pandemic, one that took nearly 7 million lives worldwide. America experienced more COVID-19 mortality than any other nation, with 1.12 million deaths. It is likely, however, that this number would be markedly lower if those deaths that were primarily due to other reasons were counted. Regardless, the pandemic wreaked havoc on nations, economies and human life.
Now, Rubio calls out to Moderna’s chief, that “Allowing the PRC to monopolize the benefits of research and production that Moderna performs on Chinese soil is a betrayal of the American taxpayers whose hard-earned dollars made this technology possible.”
https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/floridas-rubio-stop-the-moderna-chinese-mrna-deal-4b4ff355
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Important Study on Masking & Evidence: Does CDC Use Junk Science to Promulgate Mask Mandates?
A trio of well-respected University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)-affiliated medical researchers recently conducted a retrospective cross-sectional study of regular weekly reports generated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) known as the MMWR publication with a focus on the subject of masks covering the time period of 1978 to 2023.
This study’s main question concerns mask effectiveness. The importance of this investigation uploaded to the preprint server medRxiv should not be understated—the MMWR reports have substantial influence on American public health policy, if not beyond. While not peer reviewed, TrialSite has suggested in multiple analyses how MMWR output was exploited during the pandemic by political forces to effectuate various policies and agendas. Hence, the importance of a critical vetting of the scientific process associated with the CDCs output. The topic of concern with this latest piece concerns mask policies during COVID-19. Ultimately, 77 studies published since 2019 met the authors’ study design inclusion criteria, with 97.4% of these studies originating in the United States. Not surprisingly, observational studies without a comparator group 22/77 (28.6%) were most frequent. As was the case often with COVID-19 vaccine analysis in MMWR, community settings in this systematic analysis were most common (36/77; 45.5%). Not one randomized study was identified even though this category of study generates the strongest evidence. Of the analysis, 23/77 (29.9%) assessed mask effectiveness, with 11/77 (14.3%) being statistically significant, yet the great majority 58/77 (75.3%) stating masks as effective. Out of those, 41/58 (70.7%) used causal language. The authors found that just one mannequin study actually employed use of causal language in the appropriate manner (1.3%). 72/77 (93.5%) of the studies related to SARS-CoV-2 only, and none of these studies cited randomized data. Just one study (1/77 (1.3%) cited conflicting evidence.
The bombshell finding: “MMWR publications pertaining to masks drew positive conclusions about mask effectiveness over 75% of the time despite only 30% testing masks and <15% having statistically significant results. No studies were randomized, yet over half drew conclusions were most often unsupported by the data. Our findings raise concern about the reliability of the journal for informing health policy.”
The study makes important points that cannot be ignored, let alone discounted. While the results are not yet peer reviewed, and generally evidence needs that validation (and this is no exception), TrialSite has monitored the CDC’s use of the MMWR during the pandemic and repeatedly reported on what appeared to be successful attempts at influencing various societally important decisions without the necessary evidence. Put another way, these CDC reports appear to serve as a justification for various decisions and policies, less the sufficient evidence justifying any particular decision or policy.
For example, during November 2022, TrialSite introduced, “CDC Releases Limited Data Snapshot: White House Exploits for Sweeping Declarations of Bivalent Vaccine Booster Success.” This MMWR output was timed conveniently to coincide with a White House COVID-19 press briefing touting the success of the bivalent BA4/BA5 mRNA booster vaccines. The product had just been authorized two months previous, and uptake was slow. While the data in this MMWR had severe limitations which are explained in the TrialSite article, the White House used the data output for backing sweeping declarations of vaccine success.
The subject: masking
In this latest study, corresponding author Tracy Høeg, M.D., Ph.D. Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at University of California, San Francisco, (UCSF), and two colleagues, also from UCSF Alyson Haslam, Ph.D. and Vinay Prasad, M.D., MPH convey that before the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence was lacking for surgical and N95 respirator masks in the community and healthcare setting. In fact, prior to the pandemic, the CDC had never recommended mask wearing for health members of the population, which aligns with the general advisory of the Surgeon General.
Background
Yet, despite the lack of evidence Høeg and colleagues shared in the United States, “Over several weeks in March and early April 2020, a coordinated social media campaign to recommend masks began.” By April 3, 2020, the CDC then recommended that persons aged 2 years and up wear a cloth face covering in public. By July 15, then CDC director Rochelle Walensky issued the recommendation that all Americans don a mask as a means to “get the epidemic under control.”
The evidence backing this claim: a MMWR study involving two hairstylists in Missouri. Universal masking ensued by the fall of 2020—in schools and day care facilities for example per CDC recommendations. Next came the widespread mandates enacted at the state, county and school district levels for children down to the age of two. By January 2021, federal mandates led to mandates for masking on public transport.
Conclusion
Despite the overwhelming influence of the MMWR during the COVID-19 as described above, less than 20% of these weekly reports targeting masks were based on any statistical evidence of mask effectiveness. The CDC used no randomized studies while 75% of their weekly tracking output led to a favorable conclusion about the use of masks and SARS-CoV-2. As TrialSite has explained with these same reports and the COVID-19 vaccines, MMWR data output are used by health authorities and governing agencies to support and back various policy measures.
This, despite the fact that there was a complete lack of any evidence for mask effectiveness according to the authors’ study. In this important study, the trio of well-respected San Francisco-based authors point out the need for caution and output from the MMWR. Their findings lead them to observe “the journal’s lack of reliance on high-quality data and a tendency to make strong but unsupported causal conclusions about mask effectiveness.” The systematic embrace and use of subpar scientific evidence to back profound societal policies, emergency or not, must be critically vetted.
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‘Serious Doubt’ About COVID-19 Vaccine Safety After Forced Release of 15,000 Pages of Clinical Trial Data: Legal NGO
Conservative public interest advocacy group Defending the Republic (DTR) has obtained almost 15,000 pages of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial data, claiming the data show an “utter lack of thoroughness” of the trials and calls the vaccine’s safety into “serious doubt.”
As a result of successful Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the group recently announced it had obtained—and is releasing—nearly 15,000 pages of documents relating to testing and adverse events associated with “Spikevax,” Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.
Since 2022, the group has been involved in litigation against the FDA relating to the production of data submitted by Moderna in support of its application to federal regulators for approval of its vaccine.
As a result, the FDA agreed to produce around 24,000 pages of the Moderna records by the end of this year, with the 15,000 pages being the first instalment.
The records, some of which relate to adverse events related to the vaccine, include important information related to the safety profile of Spikevax, which was first authorized for emergency use in the United States in December 2020 and in January 2022 received full approval for adults.
“The public can be assured that Spikevax meets the FDA’s high standards for safety, effectiveness and manufacturing quality required of any vaccine approved for use in the United States,” Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock said in a statement earlier this year.
But the new data call this view into question. The advocacy group says that the tens of thousands of pages of clinical trial data released by the FDA supports the conclusion that there is “serious doubt” about both the safety of Spikevax and the FDA’s standards for approval.
Neither Moderna nor the FDA immediately responded to a request for comment.
More Details
DTR filed its FOIA lawsuit after the FDA rejected requests to produce the Moderna COVID-19 records, justifying its decision by claiming there was no pressing need for the public to review the information.
The documents obtained as part of the group’s litigation against the FDA are the first significant release of data from Moderna’s COVID-19 clinical trials.
The studies reveal the causes of deaths, serious adverse events, and instances of neurological disorders potentially associated with Spikevax.
One of the key takeaways from the documents is that many of those who died after receiving the Moderna vaccine were not given an autopsy.
“According to one study, 16 individuals died after being administered the Moderna vaccine. The study’s authors indicated that out of those 16 deaths, only two autopsies were performed, five of the dead were not autopsied, and the autopsy status of nine of the dead was ‘unknown,’” DTR said in a statement.
“Yet this did not stop those running these ‘studies’ from concluding, despite the absence of evidence, that the Moderna vaccine was not related to these deaths,” the group added.
As an example, the group gave the case of a 56-year-old woman who experienced ‘sudden death’ 182 days after receiving the second dose of the Moderna vaccine.
“The cause of death was unknown, and no autopsy was conducted. It seems they purposely decided not to investigate suspicious deaths in case the Moderna vaccine might be the cause,” the group stated.
There were also numerous examples in the clinical trial data of participants diagnosed with post-vaccination Bell’s Palsy and Shingles, with numerous vaccinated trial participants seeing the onset of Shingles less than 10 days after getting the shot.
The studies also showed that there were a number of serious adverse events noted in the vaccinated groups, with a number of participants experiencing heart attacks, pulmonary embolisms, and spontaneous miscarriages.
Overall, the group concludes that the 15,000 pages of data create “serious doubt concerning the safety of the Moderna vaccine and the FDA’s standards and approval of the Moderna vaccine.”
The 15,000 pages or so of data released by DTR, all of which can be found here, add to the growing body of evidence suggesting that the COVID-19 vaccines may not be as safe as advertised.
FDA Ordered to Speed Up Release of COVID-19 Data
Elsewhere, a federal judge in Texas ordered the FDA to make public data it relied on to license COVID-19 vaccines at an accelerated rate, requiring all documents to be made public by mid-2025 rather than, as the FDA wanted, over the course of about 23.5 years.
In a May 9 decision hailed as a win for transparency by the lawyer representing the plaintiffs (the parents of a child injured by a COVID-19 vaccine) in a lawsuit (pdf) against the FDA, the agency was ordered to produce the data on Moderna’s vaccine for adults and Pfizer’s for children about 10 times faster than the agency wanted.
“Democracy dies behind closed doors,” is how U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman opened his order (pdf), which requires the FDA to produce the data on Moderna’s and Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines at an average rate of at least 180,000 pages per month.
The FDA had argued it would be “impractical” to release the estimated 4.8 million pages at more than between 1,000 and 16,000 pages per month, which would have taken at least 23.5 years.
The January 2022 order (pdf), also issued by Pittman, forced the FDA to produce all its data on Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for those aged 16 and older at a rate of 55,000 pages per month, or much faster than the 75 years the agency had sought.
“That production should be completed in a few more months,” Siri said in a statement, referring to the earlier Pfizer data for those aged 16 and up.
The latest order requires the FDA to produce all of its data on Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for 12- to 15-year-olds (and Moderna’s product for adults) by June 31, 2025.
FDA officials didn’t respond to a request for comment on the ruling.
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23 July, 2023
Study Shows Breast Milk Conferred Immunity to Infants Against Covid-19
Previous studies have indicated that breast milk of women who’ve been vaccinated against Covid -19 can transfer immunity to their infants. “The data suggests a likely positive impact as measured by antibodies which are imputed to imply protection against COVID-19.” There is some disagreement on the long term effects of a vaccinated mother breast feeding her infant. “Post-marketing studies have shown that mRNA passes into breast milk and could have adverse effects on breast-fed babies. Long-term expression, integration into the genome, transmission to the germline, passage into sperm, embryo/fetal and perinatal toxicity, genotoxicity and tumorigenicity should be studied in light of the adverse events reported in pharmacovigilance databases.” Now, a recent study confirms breast milk conferred immunity to infants against Covid-19.
The study
A multi-national peer reviewed study published in Cureus found that “the abundance of immunoprotective characteristics found in breast milk, coupled with the lower incidence and severity of infections in breastfed children, suggests that breastfeeding may play an important role in protecting infants from COVID-19.
The presence of antibodies, particularly IgA, in breast milk, can provide passive and active immunity to the infant, thereby aiding in the prevention of respiratory diseases.
Recent findings indicate that breast milk from mothers who have been vaccinated or recovered from a SARS-CoV-2 infection contains maternal antibodies against the virus, offering acquired protection for the newborn and a low risk of infection. Although rare instances of detecting SARS-CoV-2 RNA in breast milk samples have been reported, the virus has not been successfully cultured from these samples, suggesting a minimal risk of transmission to breastfed babies.
Nevertheless, additional research is required to comprehensively understand the extent of protection provided by breast milk against COVID-19 and the potential impact of different stages of lactation.
Large-scale cohorts are needed to investigate the timing of viral shedding in milk and the neutralizing capacity of transmitted antibodies to draw appropriate conclusions on breastfeeding-acquired immunity against COVID-19. However, based on the current evidence, breastfeeding is considered safe and beneficial for both newborns and mothers during the ongoing pandemic. Promoting breastfeeding, along with appropriate safety measures, can contribute to the overall health and well-being of infants in the face of COVID-19.”
Method
The study team employed systematic review of multiple studies, seeking to better understand the scientific evidence involving breast milk and immunity against COVID-19.
The team conducted a systematic review of 55 articles published over the past 27 years, tapping into PubMed and Science Direct.
Breast milk
The study emphasizes that human breast milk is an important factor in a newborn’s development. “Although the newborn's immune system is exposed to the mother's microbial flora during pregnancy, the infant's microbial environment undergoes abrupt changes during and after birth, making the infant highly vulnerable to illnesses. The components of breast milk assist newborns in developing immunocompetence and provide active and passive immunity. With the rapid evolution of pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 and the infant's immature immune system, infants rely on defense factors from their mothers. Immune transfer is achieved through the transplacental transport of immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies during the fetal period and the transport of immunoglobulin A (IgA) antibodies through breast milk after birth.”
The study concludes by saying human breast milk is renowned for its qualities in providing infant nutrition and provides a wide range of antimicrobial components, including virus-neutralizing antibodies which offer numerous health benefits to protect a newborn. Regarding Covid-19, the researchers point out more study is needed but breast feeding is a necessity for the health and wellbeing of a newborn even during the Covid pandemic.
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Australia: Many censored social media posts did not contain Covid-19 misinformation
Many of 4000 social media posts secretly censored by government during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic contained factual information and reasonable arguments rather than misinformation, new documents reveal.
Digital posts released after Freedom of Information applications show the censored information shared facts such as the ineffectiveness of vaccines in preventing Covid-19 infection and transmission or argued against measures such as mask mandates and lockdowns.
For instance, the then Coalition government sought the removal of an Instagram post in April 2021 that claimed “Covid-19 vaccine does not prevent Covid-19 infection or Covid-19 transmission”.
That statement clearly was accurate yet the official intervention via the Home Affairs Department claimed it breached Instagram’s community guidelines because it was “potentially harmful information” that was “explicitly prohibited” by the platform.
A large proportion of posts the government targeted for removal by the digital platforms promoted wild conspiracy theories and misinformation but many others simply questioned the effectiveness of lockdowns and masks, shared information now accepted as accurate, and urged people to protest against pandemic measures.
An April 2021 tweet was challenged because it claimed “Covid-19 was released or escaped from Wuhan laboratory in China and that it was funded by the US government”.
The Home Affairs Department claimed this was “explicitly prohibited” under Twitter’s rules because it might “invoke a deliberate conspiracy by malicious and/or powerful forces”, yet American intelligence agencies have found the most likely source of the virus was the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and it has been revealed that some work at the laboratory was funded by the US.
Over three years up until last month, the federal government paid World Services Australia, an arm of London-based global communications firm M&C Saatchi, more than $1m to monitor Covid-19 posts online and alert it to controversial material.
The Weekend Australian previously revealed how the federal government, under the Coalition and later Labor, intervened more than 4000 times seeking the removal of social media posts by digital giants such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, using the companies own community standards as the trigger.
The information came to light as a result of FOI applications by Liberal senator Alex Antic.
Questions on notice from Senator Antic have now produced details of these interventions, revealing extensive efforts to suppress even factual information.
Senator Antic said this had confirmed his worst fears. “During the Covid period, Home Affairs actively sought censorship of true statements such as ‘lockdowns are ineffective’ and compelled social media companies to penalise dissent from the government’s position,” Senator Antic said.
“This is gravely concerning for all Australians who care about freedom of speech.”
One Facebook video post in January 2021 was targeted for removal because it encouraged “civil disobedience”.
It depicted a “recognised misinformation influencer” in Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens “blatantly walking up to signs that ask people to maintain physical distancing and hiding them from view”.
Many other social media posts were censored for opposing mask mandates and questioning the effectiveness of lockdowns and vaccines.
This was censorship on an industrial scale, with the private contractor tasked to trawl through social media posts 24/7.
Senator Antic said the revelations were “gravely concerning” to all Australians who cared about freedom of speech.
He said this amounted to a “censorship industrial complex” and raised fears about this type of intervention being expanded under the proposed Misinformation Bill that would allow for the issuing of multimillion-dollar fines against platforms found to be hosting “misinformation or disinformation”.
“It’s never been more imperative that we protect freedom of speech in Australia and reject this bill,” Senator Antic said.
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Left Demands Boycott of In-N-Out Burgers Over Mask Policies
Conservatives successfully boycotted Bud Light, due to the organization’s explicit political goal. However, it now appears the left has discovered an alternative boycott objective after becoming enraged with In-N-Out Burger.
By informing staff that the coronavirus crisis has ended, meaning there is hardly a need for masks in work environments, the fast food behemoth has drawn the wrath of the left.
Really, why couldn’t the gigantic burger chain do this? There is no serious evidence that proves masking prevents the transmission of COVID. Masks simply don’t work as they should.
Left-wing Dr. Lucky Tran became so enraged that he began a lengthy Twitter stream in which he bemoaned the burger chain and exhorted his fellow leftists to engage in online harassment of the business.
Tran, a mask fanatic who refers to himself as “a global scientist,” was upset after a judge in the state of California decided that staff members are unable to sue their employer if they contract COVID-19 while at their jobs.
Then, Tran wrote that this week, In-N-Out prohibited its workers from using masks. This is awful, he complained. On top of that, the doctor began displaying links to the burger joint’s comments area.
Other Democrats picked up the onslaught against In-N-Out. Babs, a Twitter user, encouraged leftists to contact the hotline number of the business and voice their complaints.
Liberals were encouraged to “BE LOUD” in their criticism of In-N-Out for its masking practice by another strident leftist.
“On this, we must fight back. We must voice our disapproval LOUDLY! Email and phone In-n-out! Instruct them that this is not appropriate.”
“Organizations and policymakers should voice their opinions. Businesses can’t ban masks while endangering the lives and health of their employees,” she stated.
Boycotts Demanded
Additionally, “oh dear”, a user of Twitter demanded a boycott against the fast food restaurant.
https://thedailybeat.org/left-demands-boycott-of-in-n-out-burgers-over-mask-policies/ ?
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21 July, 2023
US Military Confirms Myocarditis Spike After COVID Vaccine
Cases of myocarditis soared among U.S. service members in 2021 after the COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out, a top Pentagon official has confirmed.
There were 275 cases of myocarditis in 2021—a 151 percent spike from the annual average from 2016 to 2020, according to Gilbert Cisneros Jr., undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, who confirmed data revealed by a whistleblower earlier this year.
The COVID-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation that can lead to mortality, including sudden death. COVID-19 also can cause myocarditis.
The diagnosis data comes from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database.
Mr. Cisneros provided the rate of cases per 100,000 person-years, a way to measure risk across a certain period of time. In 2021, the rate was 69.8 among those with prior infection, compared to 21.7 among members who had been vaccinated.
“This suggests that it was more likely to be [COVID-19] infection and not COVID-19 vaccination that was the cause,” Mr. Cisneros said.
No figures were given for members who had been vaccinated but were also infected. The total rate, 20.6, also indicates that some members weren’t included in the subgroup analysis.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who has been investigating problems with the database, questioned how the military came up with the figures.
“It is unclear whether or how it accounted for service members who had a prior COVID-19 infection and received a COVID-19 vaccination,” Mr. Johnson wrote to Mr. Cisneros.
Department of Defense (DOD) officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Johnson asked for the information no later than Aug. 2.
Dr. Peter McCullough, a cardiologist and president of the McCullough Foundation, looked at the newly disclosed data.
“The large increase in myocarditis cases in our military in 2021 was most likely due to ill-advised COVID-19 vaccination,” he told The Epoch Times via email, pointing to a study from Israel that found no increase or myocarditis in COVID-19 patients.
Some other papers have found COVID-19 vaccines increase the risk of myocarditis. COVID-19 has been linked elsewhere to myocarditis, although the vaccines have never prevented infection and have become increasingly ineffective against it.
The military encouraged COVID-19 vaccination after U.S. regulators cleared the vaccines for use in late 2020. Military officials were among the first in the world to raise concerns about myocarditis after vaccination and published an early case series of 22 previously healthy members who suffered myocarditis within four days of receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. U.S. officials have since said the vaccines definitely cause myocarditis.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin mandated the vaccines in 2021, a requirement that remained in place until Congress forced its withdrawal.
Military officials have struggled to provide accurate data on 2021 diagnoses.
Whistleblowers revealed in 2021 that myocarditis, as reflected in the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED), had soared to 2,868 percent higher than the average from 2016 to 2020. They downloaded the data in August 2021.
The number of 2021 myocarditis diagnoses, though, had plummeted from 1,239 to 263 when the data was downloaded later, prompting concerns of manipulation.
Military officials said they reviewed the data and found it was “faulty.” They said the data for the years 2016 to 2020 were “corrupted” during a “database maintenance process,” which resulted in the display of only 10 percent of the actual medical encounters for that time period.
Officials told Mr. Johnson in 2022 that the problem had been fixed. The fix significantly changed the records. Instead of a 2,181 percent increase in hypertension in 2021, for instance, the increase was just 1.9 percent. Female infertility, instead of increasing 472 percent, increased 13.2 percent.
The updated percentages, though, were called into question when another whistleblower looked at the database in 2023 and found they were different.
Testicular cancer, initially pegged as increasing 369 percent, was placed at 3 percent by the military. But the actual increase was 16.3 percent, the whistleblower found. Pulmonary embolism was among the other conditions that occurred more often in 2021 than the military had conveyed.
The whistleblower alerted Mr. Johnson, the top Republican on the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, who asked military officials for answers.
Mr. Cisneros acknowledged that the data given to the senator was incomplete. He said the change stemmed from December 2021 figures not being available when the corrected data was offered. There was a data “lag by about three months,” meaning the data wasn’t available in February 2022, when officials provided Mr. Johnson with the corrected data, Mr. Cisneros said.
Pentagon officials replicated the analyses from the whistleblower and found the data “are similar” to the data the whistleblower sent to Mr. Johnson, Mr. Cisneros said.
Military officials hadn’t previously mentioned any data lag previously while communicating with Mr. Johnson or the public, and they didn’t incorporate the available data when they sent him another missive in mid-2022.
“Without the whistleblower’s disclosure, I doubt DOD would have ever acknowledged that it provided incomplete information to my office in February 2022 and again in July 2022,” Mr. Johnson said.
He said the DOD had demonstrated “a complete disregard for transparency” and urged officials to make clear whether it has investigated whether any of the medical conditions for which diagnoses spiked are associated with the vaccines.
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Healthcare Provider Tracks Rising Number of Cardiac Arrests in Israel in the Last Two Years
In the era of post Covid vaccination, perhaps the ramifications of an emergency-driven accelerated vaccine may be emerging. In Israel, which is one of the most highly vaccinated countries in the world during the pandemic, a flaw was detected with the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA (BNT162b2) vaccine. An Israeli doctor discovered a high rate of myocarditis among adolescent men, for example. When he reported his findings to Pfizer, he was ignored. It was only after the doctor authored an article in The New England Journal of Medicine when the pharmaceutical giant started noticing. It appears the connection between myocarditis and the Covid vaccine has continually been played down. This has been a trend in multiple nations during the pandemic. The impact of the adverse effects of this novel vaccine becomes more apparent in the eastern Mediterranean nation.
Cardiac arrest diagnosis rises in Israel
In a recent tweet, Dr. Eli David, a tech entrepreneur and a co-founder of Marpai Health in Israel, posted a chart of the significant rise in cardiac arrest diagnosis in the Middle Eastern Country. The chart chronicles the years 2021 and 2022, and the rise in cardiac arrest is significant.
In his tweet, Dr. David asks the question, “What could have possibly caused the huge surge in 2021 and 2022?” The graph is based on information from Clalit Health Fund, the largest healthcare provider in Israel.
This coincides with a study published in Scientific Reports in April of 2022, which examines the increased emergency cardiovascular events among the under 40 population in Israel during the vaccine rollout and third Covid-19 wave.
However, the publication does make the disclaimer that “readers are alerted that the conclusions of this article are subject to criticisms that are being considered by the editors.” The study is a “retrospective population-based study that leverages the IEMS data system and analyzes all calls related to CA and ACS events over two and a half years, from January 1st, 2019, to June 20th, 2021. The IEMS call data are coupled with data on COVID-19 infection rates, as well as the respective vaccination rates over the same period of time.”
The results of the study were, “Of the 30,262 cardiac arrest and 60,398 ACS calls included in the study population (see Supplemental Results for details), 945 (3.1%) and 3945 (6.5%) calls were for patients of age 16–39, respectively, from a population of close to 3.5 million people in this age group.”
Era of sudden deaths
It seems in the current era of commonplace Covid vaccination, there are a lot of sudden unexplained deaths. A celebrity doctor in Mexico with his own television show who was also a huge vaccine proponent dies in his sleep. He was only 42 years old. Another case is that of a professional basketball player who died during a stress test. It is believed he had myocarditis and blamed the Covid vaccine. He was only 28 years old.
Yet on the other hand, sensationalists routinely review the obituaries to point out the cause of death, irrespective of substantiation.
Growing numbers are convinced that there are no coincidences and a growing statistical pattern associating the COVID jabs and myocarditis. How linked these dynamics are is complex, and unfolding, with different points of view depending on material interests.
The issue here is, it seems these are not coincidences and now there appear to be statistics to verify the relationship between the Covid vaccine and myocarditis.
One pressing question involves the responsibility for the skepticism about the association between inflammation of the heart and the Covid vaccine? The answer is obvious.
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20 July, 2023
Bivalent Booster Bomb: Latest mRNA Vax Only 30% Effective—More Doses Equals Greater Risk for COVID-19
A group of prominent Cleveland Clinic physicians and biomedical researchers have led a few major, real-world data-driven studies, the results of which have fundamentally challenged the official COVID-19 vaccine narrative. Infectious disease doctor Nabin Shrestha, MD along with infection control practitioner Patrick Buke, MPH CIC and biomedical researcher Amy Nowacki, PhD and colleagues first demonstrated in early summer 2021 in a study of 52,238 health care employees at the prestigious Cleveland integrated health system the power of natural immunity.
TrialSite was the first media to showcase the findings and no other major media or trade press such as STAT bothered to cover such results at the time. Why? The data went counter to politics given under the national public health emergency the executive branch was driving a specific agenda. Then by late 2022 in a bombshell of a study the trio and their colleagues were at it again. This time conducting a large retrospective study of 51,977 subjects, including 10,804 healthcare employees receiving the bivalent mRNA booster dose, Cleveland Clinic investigators’ data revealed that the greater the number of mRNA doses, the more the incidence of SARS-CoV-2, in what TrialSite declared was not a good look for the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
TrialSite authored multiple reports on this troubling unfolding set of data that was picked up on by some conservative media by this point. The major media and trade press remained generally silent on the matter. Last month the Cleveland Clinic team uploaded to the preprint server more troubling COVID-19 vaccine data. Finding that among 51,011 Cleveland Clinic employees, the bivalent COVID-19 vaccine booster was 30% in preventing infection during the time when the virus strains predominant in circulation in the Cleveland area was also factored into the vaccine.
True, all of the aforementioned research remained in preprint form, meaning for whatever reason these large, well-designed observational studies were not peer reviewed. But many times, neither were many study/press releases industry released during the pandemic, which the New York Times and trade news like STAT pounced on. What’s going on? Is Cleveland Clinic’s large data set not worthy of mention?
The Latest Bombshell Data
Tracking 51,011 employees of the integrated health system, the trio of study authors and their colleagues sought to understand the level of protection the bivalent mRNA vaccine produced by Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna would afford the 51,011 study subjects.
Examining the cumulative incidence of COVID-19 over the weeks after administration of the bivalent BA.4/BA.5 vaccine—the only version of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines now available in the United States—the study authors ran Cox proportional hazard regressions against vaccine protection time-dependent covariants of the data.
Shrestha and colleagues do note an overall vaccine effectiveness of 30% (95% CI, 20-39%). These are not very good results, and most certainly were not touted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or for that matter, not surprisingly, the White House press office.
They finalize that for the retrospective study subjects last exposure 6-9 months previously associates with twice the risk of COVID-19. Moreover, those subjects that were last exposed 9-12 months previously faced a 3.5 times higher risk when comparing both to the last exposure to COVID-19 within 90 days of the study.
But the bombshell, the elephant in the room cannot be ignored by the major media and trade press anymore. The authors reiterate their findings which first surfaced in 2022:
“Risk of COVID-19 increased with time since the most recent prior COVID-19 episode and with the number of vaccine doses previously received.”
Limitations
Like all studies this latest Cleveland Clinic observational investigation brought with it limitations. In the preprint manuscript the study authors explain the limitations followed by possible mitigating factors. TrialSite reminds that the scientific community is not supposed to take study findings that haven’t been peer-reviewed and claim as evidence. Although this practice occurred all the time during the pandemic. The CDC would often provide limited data for example, not peer reviewed and the White House would embrace and use in their COVID-19 press conferences justifying the mass vaccination program.
Importantly the real-world investigators acknowledge that more systematic study of persons that have received multiple doses of COVID-19 vaccine must be further studied.
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Uncovering COVID-19’s Origins: How Team Biden Is Stonewalling
The Biden administration is stonewalling efforts to get to the bottom of the origins of the pandemic that has been blamed for the loss of over 1.1 million American lives.
Pursuant to the unanimously enacted COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023, the administration is required to provide Congress with detailed, declassified information on specific research activities of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, especially the institute’s coronavirus experiments on behalf of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and incidents of early illness among the institute’s researchers. But the administration hasn’t complied with the law as written and has only released a portion of the information that it has.
Anticipating such obstruction, on June 14, Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Mike Braun, R-Ind., the act’s authors, strongly reminded President Joe Biden that the law requires the administration to “declassify any and all information” relating to these issues.
“The act does not allow for redactions based on your administration’s view of ‘national security’ broadly defined, as you claimed in your signing statement,” the senators wrote to the president. “Rather, the act only provides for much narrower redactions to protect intelligence sources and methods. Your administration should comply with the law as written and not undermine clear congressional intent to provide as much transparency to the American people as possible.”
Team Biden missed the June 18 deadline and then released an underwhelming declassified report after hours on Friday, June 23—the standard “Friday-Night Dump,” a well-honed Washington ploy to evade media and congressional notice at the end of the weekly news cycle.
In their follow-up June 27 letter to Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, Hawley and Braun noted that the Biden administration’s response was a “paltry” five pages of information, plus a cover page and a glossary of terms. “Obviously,” they declared, “the U.S. government is in possession of more information than that. This half-baked effort falls woefully short of the statutory requirements and undermines congressional intent.”
The senators also told Haines that if she failed to provide the legally required information, “we would welcome your testimony before Congress on this matter so you may answer questions under oath. The American people deserve to know the truth about China’s role in the origins of COVID-19.”
Regardless of how Haines or other administration officials respond, Congress must probe deeper and secure the underlying documents and individual testimony of federal officials under oath, either publicly, if appropriate, or in executive session.
Section 3 of the act requires disclosure of information on work the Wuhan Institute of Virology performed with the People’s Liberation Army. The Biden administration’s thin report confirms that the institute had teams of researchers focused on coronaviruses: “Both teams separately used transgenic mouse models to better understand how the viruses infect humans as well as related vaccine and therapeutics research” (Page 4).
However, the report also claims that while the work between 2017 and 2019 was designed to “enhance China’s knowledge of pathogens,” including coronaviruses, the report says that none of these “could plausibly be a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 [the COVID-19 virus].”
The report also says that the intelligence community has no information that any “genetic engineering work” involved SARS-CoV-2 or a “close progenitor” of SARS-CoV-2 or any “backbone virus” that is “closely related enough to have been the source of the pandemic” (Page 4). The report does note, however, that “some of the WIV’s [Wuhan Institute of Virology’s] genetic engineering projects on coronaviruses involved techniques that could make it difficult to detect intentional changes” (Page 5).
The report also confirms a widely known problem at the Wuhan lab: “Some WIV researchers probably did not use adequate biosafety precautions at least some of the time prior to the pandemic in handling SARS-like coronaviruses, increasing the risk of accidental exposure to viruses” (Page 5).
The timing of COVID-19’s onset and earliest infection among Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers is a crucial piece of the pandemic puzzle. That is why Section 3 of the act also requires disclosure of the researchers’ names, symptoms, role at the institute, their involvement with coronavirus research, and records of hospitalization.
The Biden administration report does meet these statutory requirements. It does not contain the names of any of the researchers and only states that they experienced COVID-19-like symptoms in the “Fall of 2019.” The administration’s key declaration on this point is that “some of their symptoms were consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19” (Page 6)—an obvious issue for a deeper probe.
The report also says that American intelligence has “no indications” that any of these researchers were hospitalized with COVID-19-like symptoms. Moreover, the report notes that Dr. Shi Zhengli (known as the “Bat Woman”), the lead coronavirus researcher at Wuhan, said that her lab employees’ samples “all tested negative” for COVID-19 antibodies (Page 6).
Since Jan. 3, 2020, as The Heritage Foundation noted, Communist Chinese officials forbade the release of any COVID-19-related information without government approval. Congress, therefore, obviously has no business taking such an assertion seriously, even if it is repeated in an official American intelligence report. (The Daily Signal is the news and commentary outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
The issue of patient identification is a crucial point of inquiry. The Biden administration report fails to provide legally required identifications. But independent journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag have already published the names of “patients zero”: Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu.
Among the journalists’ sources is an unnamed federal official who insists, with “100 Percent” certainty, that their patient identification is correct. Among others, Congress must question this unnamed government official, perhaps in executive session.
While acknowledging the plausibility of either a natural or a laboratory origin for COVID-19, the Biden administration report reconfirms the division within the American intelligence community over the issue.
Particularly troublesome is the failure of the Central Intelligence Agency to make an assessment of the lab leak theory. In contrast to the Department of Energy and the FBI, which have assessed the probability of a lab leak, the CIA still claims that it has gathered insufficient information to provide Congress with a formal assessment of the pandemic’s origins.
That stance is entirely unjustifiable, and the consequences are intolerable. Congressional investigators must compel Haines and other members of the intelligence community to testify under oath to find the true answers on the origins of COVID-19.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/07/12/uncovering-covid-19s-origins-how-team-biden-is-stonewalling
*************************************************19 July, 2023
Anthony Fauci accused of perjury: Former White House doctor 'LIED under oath about funding gain-of-function research in China - which is feared to have started Covid pandemic', Republican Senator claims
Dr Anthony Fauci was tonight accused of lying under oath over his knowledge of dangerous virus research in China — which is feared to have caused the pandemic.
DailyMail.com can reveal Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland last week calling for an investigation into whether Dr Fauci, 82, committed perjury when he testified in front of a Senate committee in 2021.
In a showdown with Republicans, including Sen Paul, in July that year, Dr Fauci testified that his former ‘has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.'
Dr Fauci was the former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) until the end of 2022 and was responsible for signing off on research grants.
Yet newly released emails dated February 1, 2020 show Fauci acknowledged that 'scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine that molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan.'
Perjury is a federal offense that carries up to five years in prison. While the emails show that Fauci was aware of gain-of-function going on in the lab, he never admitted that the NIH funded it.
But the Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined last month that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Wuhan University did receive NIH funding, Sen Paul said in his letter to AG Garland.
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Covid: Gambling with Australian lives
At the beginning of the Covid vaccination rollout in Australia on 21 February 2021, then Prime Minister Scott Morrison declared the vaccines to be ‘safe and important’. The official narrative is that the vaccines are safe and efficacious. Yet there is compelling evidence that the official narrative, fanatically promoted by politicians and health bureaucracies, and ruthlessly enforced by politicised police forces, is misleading and neglectful in the light of the side effects.
Freedom of information documents acquired by Senator Alex Antic show that the former Morrison Government, under domestic terrorism response protocols, colluded with social media companies to censor people who dared to question the safety of vaccines, the utility of lockdowns and vaccine mandates including doctors who disagreed with official public health information. Deregistering doctors who provided vaccine exemptions and/or prescribed ivermectin to treat COVID was especially egregious. According to Emeritus Professor Robert Clancy AM, the nation’s leading clinical immunologist:
As patients were being treated in Sydney and Melbourne with impressive results … the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) in Australia made the extraordinary move to shut down the prescription of IVM by front-line doctors for the treatment and prevention of Covid-19. The TGA had form, as they made a similar ruling for hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), the other re-purposed off-patent drug shown to be effective in treating Covid-19.
The UK government admits that the vaccines damaged the natural immune system of those who were vaccinated. In its ‘COVID-19 Vaccine Surveillance Report’ for Week 42 the UK Department of Health Security states, on page 23, that ’N antibody levels appear to be lower in people who become infected after two doses of vaccination’ and the reduction in antibodies is essentially permanent.
It was evident within months of vaccination that the vaccinated can still catch and transmit the virus. A study conducted by the Upper Midwest Regional Accelerator for Genomic Surveillance, which is founded by the Rockefeller Foundation, confirmed that they are as likely to infect others as the unvaccinated.
Writing in The Lancet, Carlos Franco-Paredes, an American professor of infectious diseases, comments:
There is growing evidence that peak viral titres in the upper airways of the lungs and culturable virus are similar in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals… [R]esearchers in California observed no major differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in terms of SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in the nasopharynx, even in those with proven asymptomatic infection.
A member of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisations (ATAGI) has acknowledged that ‘the more doses you get, the less benefit you derive from them, and then we start to worry about causing side effects’.
It’s not just that you get less benefit, according to a study by Cleveland Clinic researchers of 48,344 Cleveland Clinic employees, people who received two or more doses of the mRNA vaccine are more likely to get Covid and those not up-to-date on vaccination had a lower risk of infection.
This makes vaccine mandates incomprehensible and immoral. As Dr Jayanta Bhattcharya, a professor of medicine and health research and policy at Stanford University put it, ‘If a vaccine fails to stop disease transmission, then the idea that you need to vaccinate other people so that I’m protected is just false.’
It gets worse. There has been a surge of sudden and unexpected age-inappropriate deaths in at least 30 countries in the industrialised world. In his book Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths, Ed Dowd argues that ‘The sudden deaths in young people in industrialised countries are due to mRNA vaccines.’
The suspicion that official claims of safety and efficacy are false has been strengthened by the discontinuation of official reporting on unvaccinated and vaccinated populations. For example, New South Wales ceased to publish weekly surveillance reports about the vaccination status of those who were hospitalised at the end of 2022. The data in the last two weeks showed that of the 1,779 patients admitted to hospitals with a COVID-19 diagnosis, none of those who died were unvaccinated. In addition, mathematician and Covid commentator Igor Chudov calculated that the risk of hospitalisation increased dramatically with each dose and was highest for those who had received four or more doses and had a 217 per cent relative risk of death compared with the unvaccinated.
A cost-benefit analysis by a senior research scientist at MIT looked at publicly available official data from the UK and the US for all age groups to determine all the factors leading to the risk of dying from COVID-19. She writes,
All age groups under 50 years old are at greater risk of fatality after receiving a COVID vaccination than an unvaccinated person is at risk of a COVID death…. (And ) all age groups under 80 years old have virtually not benefited from receiving a COVID vaccine, and the younger ages incur significant risks.
Yet the Australian government continues to listen to ATAGI which recommends COVID-19 vaccination for everyone starting with babies aged 6 months and advises parents to tell their children that, ‘The COVID-19 vaccine is a safe way to protect you, your family, and your friends from getting sick,’ and that parents would allow their children to be injected if the vaccines ‘were not safe’. This is deeply disturbing because some children have died directly after vaccination.
On 19 July 2021, the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advised the UK Department of Health Security against the mass rollout of vaccines to children under the age of 18 warning that,
JCVI is of the view that the health benefits of universal vaccination in children and young people below the age of 18 years do not outweigh the potential risks.
One serious risk is myocarditis – inflammation of the heart. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledges that mRNA vaccines have caused many types of heart conditions, including myocarditis. Even Pfizer scientists acknowledge that there have been increased cases of myocarditis after vaccination. On 24 November 2022, Dr Ross Walker, a practicing cardiologist with 40 years of clinical experience said:
I don’t think we should be having the mRNA vaccines. I’ve seen in my own practice as a private cardiologist 60-70 patients over the past 12 months who have had similar reactions to this. Whether it’s pericarditis or the more serious myocarditis. I’ve seen a lot of people get chest pain, shortness of breath, heart palpitations.
Given the already known potential harms of the Covid vaccines, of which myocarditis is just one, and their entirely unknown long-term adverse effects, the decision of the Australian Government to continue to vaccinate everyone, regardless of age or health conditions, is wrong. As Gareth Iacobucci wrote in relation to the vaccination of teens aged 12-15 in September 2021 in the British Medical Journal:
From a public health standpoint, it makes poor sense to impose vaccine side effects on people at minimal risk of severe COVID-19. The argument that it protects others is weak or contrary to the evidence.
Yet about half of all Australian children aged 5 to 15 are now vaccinated. This might explain why the TGA has been ‘slow to update‘ the country’s Database of Advance Event Notifications (DAEN) despite the deaths of children aged as young as 7 and 9 being reported to the TGA as being suspected of being caused by the vaccine. As Professor Clancy noted:
There is a push to vaccinate children under 12 who neither get severe disease nor significantly spread it. The cost/benefit of immunising children has been widely criticised, while misinformation continues to be delivered through the press.
According to Dr John Ionnidis, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University, the fatality rate for Covid for most of the population could be as low as that of influenza when adjusted for age and the fact that more than 80 per cent of those who get the virus have mild or no symptoms.
With such low risks for most people, why has the entire population of Australia been coerced into getting vaccinated with experimental vaccines? This question is important given the potential for side effects that can lead to death.
Australia closely followed the WHO guidelines during the pandemic and, by the end of 2021, 80 per cent of the population was vaccinated. Yet last year, there were 190,775 deaths according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which was 25,235, and 15.3 per cent more than the historical average. This represents the highest number of excess deaths on record since the end of the Second World War.
So why does the website of the Department of Health and Aged Care tell all Australian adults they should get a booster for ‘additional protection against severe illness from COVID’ and why parents are advised that their children aged 5 to 17 years should get a booster dose ‘if it has been 6 months since their last dose or COVID-19 infection’.
The official government narrative which placates people’s concern about the safety of the vaccines is based on research conducted by the pharmaceutical companies selling the vaccines. Unsurprisingly, it has financially benefited the pharmaceutical companies, with the stock price of Pfizer and Moderna soaring. The question which should be asked however is why this pharmaceutical research has been accepted unquestioningly by the government, academia, and the media. Professor Clancy writes:
The media has a concerning role in the propagation of misinformation, preferring to support an ideological narrative, rather than to engage in responsible journalism. Misinformation driven by pharmaceutical companies to protect their vaccines, and strongly reinforced by academic, government, and health authorities leads to many unnecessary hospital admissions and deaths.
It is difficult to know how many Australians have died from these vaccines. The many accounts of the tragic consequences of Covid vaccination, mandatory or voluntary, are entirely credible. Those responsible must be held fully accountable for the loss of Australian lives and livelihoods.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/gambling-with-australian-lives/
*************************************************18 July, 2023
COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Impacts on Menstrual Cycles—The Unfolding Science
A recent study led by researchers at Boston University (BU) looked into the impact of COVID-19 vaccines on menstrual cycles.The researchers sought to better understand what have been many anecdotal reports that vaccines were changing women’s periods. Reports of cycles arriving earlier with heavier bleeding were relatively commonplace. Interestingly, the recent study results represented by corresponding author Amelia Wesselink, Ph.D., MPH Department of Epidemiology, BU’s School of Public Health reported that indeed, there can be observed changes in menstrual cycle, however, such changes are likely not the fault of the COVID-19 vaccines but rather the result of individual’s immune system reacting to the vaccine.
Yet this very answer implies an impact of the vaccine. What do other studies suggest? The overall data ranges but generally, point to some impact of COVID-19 vaccination on menstrual cycle, at least temporarily. Of course, long term study data is needed.
In an underlying prospective cohort study, the BU-led researchers found one-day average delay I menses plus a higher incidence of long menstrual cycles post COVID-19 vaccination. However, these deviations mostly were resolved by the next menstrual cycle. The study team argued, “Other menstrual cycle characteristics, including cycle regularity, bleed length, heaviness of bleed and menstrual pain, were not strongly associated with COVID-19 vaccination.”
What are the findings of another research?
TrialSite has covered the topic as objectively as possible, chronicling several studies involving menstrual cycles and COVID-19 vaccines. For example, a retrospective study published in the journal Women’s Health found some interesting results. Led by Maria Christina Martinez-Avila, a clinical epidemiologist at the BIOTOXAM Research Group, University of Cartagena, the team conducted via survey across targeted social networks. The Columbian investigators queried 950 women in the 18–41-year age range between July and September 2021, to better understand the impact of COVID-19 vaccination on menstrual cycles. Ultimately, 408 of the subjects met the inclusion criteria. The study authors concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 vaccination can influence the menstrual cycle and cause alterations.” This class of study comes with limitations.
In another piece in 2021, TrialSite surveyed unfolding reports of menstrual cycle issues possibly linked to the COVID-19 vaccines.
In the heavily vaccinated Mediterranean nation social media was abuzz during 2021, with women sharing their experiences, ranging from irregularity to unusual amounts of bleeding. In other cases, postmenopausal women report bleeding. At the same time, medical establishment experts cannot explain the observations or even link such a phenomenon to the jabs, perhaps in part, because these observations could be associated with any number of other causes.
Regardless of the ever-growing number of complaints after vaccination by 2021, clinical investigators sought to study the situation in more detail. For example, the American government has put $1.76 million to study the subject in a study led by Johns Hopkins University’s Mostafa Borahay, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of gynecology and obstetrics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In Israel, chairman of the Israel Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Professor Roni Maimon of Shamir Medical Center, initiates Israel’s first investigation into the matter.
By early 2022, another major National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded study sponsored by Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) and led by Dr. Alison Edelman, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, demonstrated that COVID-19 vaccination can cause changes to the timing of menstruation. A survey conducted by anthropologists found numerous reports of unusually heavy flows and even breakthrough bleeding among some people who hadn't menstruated in years. However, the results of the study also show the effects are temporary.
By quarter one 2023, Dr. Peter McCullough reported that according to the “EVA Project,” 78% of participating women reported at least some menstrual changes post COVID-19 vaccination. In regard to both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, McCullough wrote, “Both forms of the vaccine use lipid nanoparticles which for years have been known to be taken up by reproductive glands (ovaries and testes) and dump their payload of genetic code for the WIV BA4/BA5 Spike protein which starts producing the tissue damaging Spike within an hour .” The mainstream fact checkers would label this “misinformation” but was it fully that?
The outspoken critic of the COVID-19 vaccines continued:
“The mRNA is now known to circulate in the bloodstream for 28 days and continues to bombard the ovaries with more mRNA throughout the ovulatory cycle. Genetic vaccines loaded on lipid nanoparticles, are almost by design as depicted by Wang et al. destined to influence ovulatory cycles, gametocyte production and viability, thus interfering with the complex and delicate reproductive cycle of human beings.”
By April 2023, TrialSite reported that even the mainstream Washington Post was allowing editorials with a critical view of the mRNA jabs. Were they impacting women’s menstrual cycles?
Arnie Mazer reported for TrialSite that in the recent editorial, Kate Clancy, a biological anthropologist and professor at the University of Illinois, wrote about how after she received her first dose of the Covid vaccine she got her period, and the bleeding was so heavy she “was swapping out overnight-strength pads every hour.”
In one TrialSite reporter’s review of possible COVID-19 vaccine side effects, Simay Bayatli shared case series involving alternations to menstrual cycles associated with the COVID-19 vaccine. Yet this evidence isn’t as strong.
In an opinion piece, Ronald Kostoff showcases the high number of menstrual issues reported in association with the COVID-19 vaccines when compared to influenza vaccine. This data was derived from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which was designed to detect safety signals, but individual cases are often not conclusive proof as often they are not adjudicated.
A group of outspoken critics of the COVID-19 vaccines, including McCullough and women’s health physician Dr. James Thorpe and others, again used VAERS data to identify safety signals involving menstruation.
The group, criticized by the medical establishment, reported that “COVID-19 vaccines, when compared to the Influenza vaccines, are associated with a significant increase in AE with all proportional reporting ratios of > 2.0: menstrual abnormality, miscarriage, fetal chromosomal abnormalities, fetal malformation, fetal cystic hygroma, fetal cardiac disorders, fetal arrhythmia, fetal cardiac arrest, fetal vascular mal-perfusion, fetal growth abnormalities, fetal abnormal surveillance, fetal placental thrombosis, low amniotic fluid, and fetal death/stillbirth (all p values were much smaller than 0.05). When normalized by time-available, doses-given, or persons-received, all COVID-19 vaccine AE far exceed the safety signal on all recognized thresholds.”
Thorpe et al. concluded in a preprint that pregnancy and menstrual abnormalities are significantly more frequent following COVID-19 vaccinations than that of influenza vaccinations.” Again, mainstream critics would argue that self-reported cases in VAERS isn’t necessarily conclusive proof.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) organized a working group looking into the matter. The VSD Menstrual Irregularities Working Group (MI-WG) protocol sought an evaluation of possible association between COVID-19 vaccination and abnormal uterine bleeding. In partnership with Kaiser Permanente, their researchers included Stephanie Irving, Tia Kauffman, Allison Naleway, Kim Vesco, Michelle Henninger while CDC VSD Site Investigators included Heather Lipkind, Malini DeSilva; and CDC Investigators included Naomi Tepper, Christine Olson and Eric Weintraub.
The CDC-sponsored investigation included “Background Reports” acknowledging that “menstrual irregularities following COVID-19 vaccine have been increasing, especially on social media platforms and in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.”
The reports prompted the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to release a Notice of Special Interest for investigating these claims. While there are a handful of publications around menstrual changes and COVID-19 infection, the conclusions range from “women should be reassured that SARS-CoV-2 has no impact on abnormal uterine bleeding (AUB) of any type including the symptoms of heavy and/or irregular menstrual bleeding” to “patients had various extents of transient menstrual changes, mainly manifesting as prolonged cycles and decreased volume.”
This research team shared a report of one study indicating 16% of female or non-binary patients with COVID-19 infection reported changes in menstruation, which correlated with a greater number of COVID-19 symptoms. See the link.
A large observational study in Sweden found that COVID-19 vaccination was not tied to an increase in hospital admissions or visits with a healthcare professional due to menstrual changes or bleeding in premenopausal women. This study included 2,946,448 Swedish participants aged 12 to 74 years.
The study team did report, “Postmenopausal women were more likely to have contact with the healthcare system because of vaginal bleeding in the months following their shot compared with when they were unvaccinated, with the highest risk after the third dose, although the associations were weak.”
“These findings do not provide substantial support for a causal association between SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and healthcare contacts related to menstrual or bleeding disorders,” the researchers wrote in The BMJ.
The EMA COVID-19 vaccine safety update identified the distinct possibility of an association of menstrual irregularities, such as heavy menstrual bleeding, to the Moderna mRNA vaccine (mRNA-1273).
Prasad S. Nishtala, Department of Life Sciences, University of Bath and colleague conducted a systematic review of safety incidence associated with COVID-19 vaccines including menstrual cycle and other related issues.
One cohort study examined reports made to V-Safe, finding that from 63,815 respondents who reported irregularities or vaginal bleeding, 41.9% received the mRNA-1273 vaccine, demonstrating a plausible link between mRNA-1273 and menstruation. See the study.
One study suggests that “many of these reports could be a case of positive rechallenging where the menstrual change has occurred after the first dose and has resumed following the second dose, indicating the possibility that the vaccine has triggered the irregularities.” See EMA report.
Prasad Nishtala and colleague reports that the study could confirm this hypothesis, meaning more monitoring is necessary.
According to another study, menstruation represents “a process of endometrium shedding, which occurs monthly as the body discards the buildup of the uterus lining and is regulated by levels of estrogen and progesterone hormones.” See the link.
The UK-based study authors point out that the immune response to the Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccine may lead to the endometrium (a component of the immune system) to adapt its immune environment to protect the uterus leading to abnormal menstrual changes such as those observed, as suggested in a piece published by the University of British Columbia.
Yet the phenomenon of menstrual irregularities, common with women, can also be observed in the absence of COVID-19. Can a true correlation between Moderna’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and such irregularities be established, especially if select studies cannot compare incidence with baseline rates? See the link.
In another study, Edelman A, Boniface ER, Benhar E, et al., “Association between menstrual cycle length and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination: a U.S. Cohort Obstet Gynecol. 2022,” the group investigated menstrual cycle data between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals finding that less than 1-day change in cycle length in association with both COVID-19 vaccine doses (0.64 day-increase (98.75% CI 0.27–1.01). Of this population, 35% had received the mRNA-1273 vaccine. The authors suggest the boost in cycle length is mostly driven by persons who received their COVID-19 vaccine doses within a single cycle period.
In 2023, Iranian investigators from University of Tehran had their systematic review published in the August 2023 edition of the Journal of Reproductive Immunology, finding that 1) many women experience menstrual disturbances post COVID-19 jab 2) vaccine-induced menstrual disturbances raises the concern among reproductive-age women and 3) COVID-19 vaccines can lead to menstrual disturbances through changes in immune and endocrine pathways.
As observed above, is it a bit disingenuous to evade vaccine root cause by pointing to an immune system response?
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17 July, 2023
Fauci’s Fraudulent ‘Cover-Up’ of the True Origins of Covid Revealed In Un-Redacted Docs
After the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic unearthed newly redacted documents this week, a former State Department pandemic investigator suggested there is proof Dr. Anthony Fauci knew about the gain-of-function research.
In the redacted documents, Fauci wrote a letter on February 1, 2020, to "folks,” suggesting that the viral sequence found in the coronavirus strain contained "mutations in the virus that would have been most unusual to have evolved naturally in bats," adding there had been "suspicion that this mutation was intentionally inserted.”
He said it was possible the Coronavirus could have evolved naturally with these mutations.
Additionally, the scientists at Wuhan University are known for working on gain-of-function experiments that lead to the determination of the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection and the Covid-19 outbreak, which originated in Wuhan.
Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) suggested that Fauci intentionally misled the public.
“He absolutely knew what was going on,” McCormick said. “As a matter of fact, several scientists were discussing this and agreeing with each other that it made no sense that it came from a natural selection process.”
The Republican was unsurprised that Fauci has shied away from the lab leak theory because as more and more evidence comes to light, theory is beginning to ring true.
Earlier this year, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) claimed Fauci didn't want to draw attention to the lab-leak theory because his office had supported and allegedly funded gain-of-function research with U.S. taxpayer funds for years.
“He's even quoted as saying in 2012 if a pandemic should occur if a scientist should be bitten by an animal and the virus gets out of the lab, it would be worth the knowledge," Paul said in March.
Citing emails between Fauci and now-retired NIH Director Francis Collins, Paul said another reason the corrupt Democrat didn’t want the damming evidence revealed is that it would not be good for China or “the money that changes hands.”
Former State Department investigator Dr. David Asher also accused Fauci of covering up significant facts behind the true origins of COVID-19, telling Fox News Fauci orchestrated an extensive cover-up to his the fact he was involved in COVID’s release.
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Affordable Diabetes Drug Reduces Long-COVID Risk by 41 Percent
Is there a way to prevent long COVID? A new study in the United States found that taking metformin, an affordable first-line Type 2 diabetes drug, shortly after diagnosis of COVID-19 can reduce the risk of developing long COVID by about 41 percent.
The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Minnesota, and the paper was published in the international medical journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases in June.
Long COVID refers to persistent discomfort for weeks or months after being infected with COVID-19. Common symptoms include fatigue, shortness of breath, cognitive impairment, headache, chest pain, and joint pain, among others, which affect daily life.
Through remote recruitment, the researchers screened 1,126 participants who agreed to long-term follow-up. They were overweight and obese people aged 30 to 85, had symptoms of COVID-19 infection for fewer than seven days, tested positive for COVID within three days of trial enrollment, and had no previous known SARS-CoV-2 infection.
In this randomized trial, about half of the participants took metformin, and the other half took a placebo. They were also randomly assigned to receive either ivermectin, fluvoxamine, or placebo.
After 300 days of follow-up, 10.4 percent of participants who took the placebo were diagnosed with long COVID, while 6.3 percent who took metformin were also diagnosed.
The results of the study showed that taking metformin reduced the risk of developing long COVID by 41 percent. In subjects who took metformin within three days of symptom onset, the risk of developing long COVID was reduced by 63 percent.
The study also proved that taking metformin reduced the risk of developing long COVID in people infected during the peak period of the three SARS-CoV-2 variants, Alpha, Delta, and Omicron.
However, the study found that taking ivermectin or fluvoxamine showed no signs of protection against long COVID.
Metformin, originally developed from the French lilac (Galega officinalis), is inexpensive and has no significant side effects. For decades, it has been the drug of choice for Type 2 diabetes treatment worldwide.
Researchers believe metformin could be used as a therapeutic drug for outpatients infected with COVID-19. It has the merits of proven clinical efficacy, is available all over the world at a low cost, and is safe to use.
It is important to note that the trial did not demonstrate whether metformin was effective in preventing COVID-19 in patients requiring emergency treatment or hospitalization due to COVID-19, nor did it prove that metformin was effective in people who already had long COVID.
The study is not without its limitations. First, there is an obvious sample selection bias, because the people who participated in the clinical trial and completed the 10-month follow-up survey may not represent the general population affected by COVID-19 and long COVID. The trial also excluded low-risk groups for severe COVID-19, namely adults with a normal body mass index (BMI), and people under the age of 30. Whether the above findings apply to these groups remains to be seen.
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Risk of Autoimmune Diseases Triples After COVID-19 Infection, 6 Tips to Reduce Susceptibility to Long COVID
The long-term chronic effects of COVID-19 cannot be ignored. Studies have shown that six months after being diagnosed with COVID-19, the risk of developing an autoimmune disease is three times that of an uninfected person. Virology experts say following six health guidelines can help reduce the incidence of long COVID.
A research team analyzed data from TriNetX, a global electronic medical records database, which included more than 3.81 million participants (880,000 confirmed and more than 2.9 million undiagnosed) who underwent PCR screening from 2020 to 2021. After tracking them for 180 days, the risk of autoimmune diseases in those diagnosed was three times that of those not infected.
Compared with the undiagnosed control group, the probability of suffering from various immune system diseases in confirmed patients was as follows:
2.98 times for rheumatoid arthritis
3.21 times for ankylosing spondylitis
2.99 times for systemic lupus erythematosus
1.96 times for vasculitis and dermatopolymyositis
2.58 times for systemic sclerosis
2.62 times for Sjögren’s syndrome
3.14 times for mixed connective tissue disease
2.32 times for Behçet’s disease
2.90 times for polymyalgia rheumatica
2.91 times for psoriasis
1.78 times for inflammatory bowel disease
2.68 times for celiac disease
2.68 times for Type 1 diabetes
1.20 times for mortality rate
The research results were published in EClinicalMedicine, a sister journal of The Lancet Discovery Science.
Dr. Wei Zhengzong, the paper’s author and vice director of the Affiliated Hospital of Chung Shan Medical University in Taiwan, said that a confirmed case of COVID-19 will activate the immune response, resulting in a cytokine storm. The structure of the virus antigen may also be similar to one’s self-antigen, causing a cross-reaction that attacks self-tissue cells and organs, inducing autoimmune diseases.
Dr. Wei said that if the diagnosed person suffers long-term joint pain, skin rash, unexplained hair loss, fever, mouth ulcers, etc., after recovery, he or she is advised to seek medical attention immediately.
Pathogenesis of Long COVID
An article published in Nature Immunology in 2022 explored the pathogenesis of long COVID, including the persistent chronic inflammatory state the disease induces, autoimmune system abnormalities, and the virus’ long-term existence in the body.
Dr. Dong Yuhong, a European expert in virology and infectious diseases, explained on the NTDTV program “Health 1+1” that although the virus may no longer be detected in the respiratory tract, it does not mean it is no longer in the body. It may lurk in relatively hidden tissues like the brain and gastrointestinal tract.
A study published in Nature showed that about four months after the infection of 14 asymptomatic infected persons, half of them had the COVID-19 virus’ nucleic acid in their intestines, indicating that the virus can remain in the body for a long time.
In addition, some inflammatory factors will still be present in the patient’s body. One of these is interleukin-6, related to many diseases, including mental anxiety and depression.
Moreover, COVID-19 patients’ inflammatory cells will continue to be activated, causing dysfunction of monocytes, T cells, and dendritic cells. This activation is closely related to immune system dysfunction, leading to pulmonary fibrosis and chronic inflammation of the neurological system.
6 Health Guidelines to Reduce Risk of Long COVID
Dr. Dong emphasized that long COVID is primarily a result of insufficient immunity, leading to the loss of one’s normal ability to clear the virus. An unhealthy lifestyle will further aggravate long COVID. The more severe the inflammatory state, the harder it is for the body to eliminate the virus.
She cited a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine that indicates adhering to the following six guidelines can reduce your risk of developing long COVID. If you follow at least five of these six, you will reduce the risk of developing long COVID by 49 percent:
Maintain a healthy body mass index (BMI): This is your weight in kilograms divided by the square of height (in meters). A healthy BMI is between 18.5 and 24.9.
Don’t smoke: This includes e-cigarettes.
Exercise regularly: Get at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity weekly.
Drink alcohol in moderation: Consume only 5 to 15 grams (0.2 to 0.5 ounce) of alcohol daily. Dr. Dong pointed out that drinking a small amount of alcohol may stimulate blood circulation but that everyone’s ability to metabolize alcohol differs.
Eat a high-quality diet: Dr. Dong said a high-quality diet should be based on natural, unrefined whole foods. The less processed the food, the more nutrients available.
Get enough sleep: An average adult needs at least seven hours of sleep every day. However, more sleep is not always better. Studies have found that people who sleep less than seven hours have a 12 percent higher risk of death, and those who sleep more than nine hours have a 30 percent higher risk of death. More sleep does not equate to quality sleep.
Dr. Dong added that a healthy lifestyle can prevent other common chronic diseases, such as hyperlipidemia, high blood pressure, and hyperglycemia.
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16 July, 2023
Case Series: 3rd Pfizer mRNA Booster Triggers Giant Cell Arteritis
A group of physicians at Toho University in Tokyo, Japan conducted a case series study concerning a 77-year old male who developed fever, general fatigue and headache after receiving the third dose of COVID-19 vaccination (Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2). Observing nodular (lump-like) swelling plus tenderness of the bilateral temporal arteries, the study team determined that an autoimmune vasculitis affecting large and medium-sized blood vessels known as giant cell arteritis (GCA) was the culprit, likely linked to the mRNA vaccination.
It turns out, although not widely published in American trade media and especially not in mainstream press, COVID-19 mRNA vaccines have been associated with the development of immune-mediated diseases, such as this one--a condition that if left undiagnosed can lead to blindness and stroke due to inflammation and damage to the affected blood vessels.
What is giant cell arteritis?
GCA can also be called temporal arteritis and represents a chronic inflammatory disease mostly impacting the large arteries, but especially the temporal arteries located in the head. Characterized by inflammation and damage to the arterial walls, it can lead to other symptoms and complications. Importantly, if left undiagnosed, GCA can lead to serious complications ranging from permanent vision loss or stroke.
The case series
The Toho University-based group of physician-researchers report in the peer-reviewed journal Medicine that the patient was given methylprednisolone 1000 mg for 3 days. That regimen was followed up with prednisolone 1 mg/kg/d, which was decreased by 10 mg every week to 30 mg. From day 16 of hospitalization, the patient received tocilizumab 162 mg/wk every other week. After a 38-day hospitalization, the doctors tapered his regimen of prednisolone to 30 mg/d as the patient’s condition improved.
Takeaway
The COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are associated with the development of immune-mediated diseases. In this case, the Pfizer-BioNTech third dose triggered immediately thereafter an incident of GCA.
Corresponding author Kaichi Kaneko, based in the University of Toho Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Rheumatology, and colleagues note that doctors should be on the lookout for the signs of mRNA vaccine induced GCA including fever, fatigue and headache, even though these are also standard side effects as well. Should these symptoms persist, GCA may be a factor.
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New Omicron Vaccine will be Obsolete on Arrival
From Rita Rubin, Science Reporter for JAMA: “On June 15, members of the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) voted unanimously to recommend updating the COVID-19 vaccine composition to a monovalent XBB lineage.”
On June 16, the FDA announced that it had advised manufacturers planning to update their COVID-19 vaccines that they should specifically target XBB.1.5. Scientists from Moderna, Novavax and Pfizer had told the FDA and its advisory committee that their XBB.1.5 monovalent vaccines could be ready to inject into arms by late July or early fall.
Although the FDA decides what antigens the COVID-19 vaccines should include, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is responsible for deciding who should get them and when. As soon as the FDA greenlights an XBB.1.5 vaccine, “I’m sure the ACIP will have a specially called meeting to decide how it should be used,” William Schaffner, M.D., chair of the department of preventive medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, said in an interview.
ACIP stands for the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, on which Schaffner serves as the liaison representing the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, where he is medical director. At the ACIP meeting on an XBB.1.5 vaccine, “I think there will be a rather elaborate discussion on who will receive this vaccine,” Schaffner predicted.”
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Australia: Protecting children takes courage: Just ask Dr Jillian Spencer, a child and adolescent psychiatrist
Julie Sladden
The announcement of the Labor Government’s proposed ‘misinformation’ Bill, while alarming, is not surprising. Anyone paying attention in recent years, especially the last three, will have noticed that our ‘freedom of speech’ has already been significantly curtailed through online censorship, government censorship (thank you, Department of Home Affairs), and self-censorship.
Nowhere has this been more palpable or alarming than the censorship of freedom of inquiry in science and medicine. During the Covid years, we discovered just how captured the medical profession is. Like lifting the lid on Pandora’s box, anyone who spoke out soon discovered the evil treasures in store for those who dared to question the narrative. The result was spectacular and tragic. Doctors who wanted to keep their jobs had to shut up, roll up their sleeves, and work on it. Those who spoke up or questioned the forced jab were marginalised, censored, sacked, or suspended. The message was clear, speak out at your peril. Despite the messaging, I was still shocked at how many capitulated. Surely this was the time we were meant to speak up and ask questions? Especially the hard ones. Isn’t this what we trained for?
Every so often, I meet someone who helps restore my hope in the medical profession. Last week that person was Dr Jillian Spencer, a senior staff Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist who was recently suspended from clinical practice at the Queensland Children’s Hospital. She now faces serious threats to her position, professional career, and livelihood, including potential regulatory action. Her crime, it seems, is to question out loud the affirmation model of transgender care.
Spencer says she is not alone in her concerns, ‘I would say that the vast majority of Child and Adolescent psychiatrists hold very serious concerns about the affirmation model, but to speak up in the current climate or even to take a more cautious clinical approach puts their employment at risk,’ she shared at a recent forum.
If there is any doubt that questioning ‘the narrative’ is dangerous for medical professionals, Spencer can set the record straight. Her experience of raising concerns within the organisation through the ‘proper channels’ has not gone well.
‘The process is to raise concerns internally (within an organisation) so that you’re doing it professionally and appropriately, rather than having to speak out. But when I pushed that to the maximum internally, it went very badly. So now I’m in the position of speaking out (publicly). The majority of child psychiatrists (are silent) for good reasons and self-preservation. The good reasons being wanting to be available to help people and to not be perceived as biased. But also, a lot of it is fear. And I don’t think my case has helped either, as I’m at risk for my employment and my (registration). It’s very serious. And so, I can’t blame them.’
But the costs of speaking out extend beyond the doctor involved. Patient care and service delivery stand to suffer too.
‘The danger of speaking out is that you lose the capacity to help more people,’ Spencer shares. ‘For example, a gender-questioning young person might be reluctant to see me now that I’ve spoken out, and that’s not something I want because I want young people to feel comfortable with me. My job is to listen and understand and to do what I can to help them.’
Now, this job is on hold indefinitely. However, Spencer is undeterred. Rather than quietly waiting for the ‘powers that be’ to hand down judgment, she demonstrates a commitment to her convictions by continuing to speak out. Loudly and often. To an outsider, it would appear Spencer has reached a point of reluctant acceptance of her situation and that she might as well go ‘all in’. Arriving at this point has come through painful reflection, ‘dark times’, and the realisation that the organisation Spencer has served faithfully for decades has apparently abandoned her.
‘It’s a really difficult employment situation,’ says Spencer. ‘Some people say, “Well, if your organisation is doing something that you disagree with, then the appropriate pathway is to resign.” But if you’ve been with an organisation for 20 years, you feel a part of that organisation. I feel like part of the family and part of changing the culture internally. It’s part of my job.’
‘People say “You need to resign or accept it.” But it’s also a responsibility to try and help your organisation do the right thing and… ‘speak up for safety.’
Listening to her speeches, presentations, and interviews, it is hard to argue that Spencer is motivated by anything other than safety. Child safety appears at the core of her message time and again.
‘It’s a really hard situation for child and adolescent psychiatrists… and for any mental health clinicians who work with children. Because there’s a lot of organisational and social pressure to affirm children,’ Spencer shares. ‘But when we start to look at the evidence base behind the affirmation model, we find the studies have major flaws, and they don’t show sufficient benefit to outweigh the risks and the harms.’
‘Previously, our discipline always took a developmental approach, which means that the years of childhood and adolescence were understood to be a period of incredible growth and change. We didn’t label children with long-term conditions, such as personality disorders, because we knew that a lot of conditions would ease with maturity, and indeed, the eleven studies that were conducted before the affirmation model was in use when they used a watchful waiting approach found that 60 to 90 per cent of children with gender dysphoria became comfortable in their own bodies with maturity.’
‘I assure you that this is not part of a culture war. This is a really serious child protection issue. We entered our field to try to assist children to thrive, but the gender clinics have been set up, and psychiatrists are being forced to affirm the social transition of all children and go along with the idea that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones will lead to benefit.’
Spencer’s words highlight the dangerous waters our children are in. Treatment pathways and models of care are being imposed while the evidence is unclear, pathways that have modalities with irreversible and devastating consequences for children in terms of fertility, sexual and long-term health. Anyone who would step into these waters without a cautious approach does not understand the potential ramifications.
One of the arguments used to justify support for the use of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers is mental distress and the risk of suicide in those experiencing gender dysphoria, as highlighted in a recent Four Corners report. However, Spencer paints a broader picture. ‘There’s no evidence to show that the social transition or the use of puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones reduces the death rate or improves psychological functioning.’
‘What we know from the eleven studies that were conducted before the affirmation model was in use – so that’s when they didn’t use puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones – is that the vast majority of (children with gender dysphoria) grew up to become comfortable with their body if they’re allowed to go through the full course of adolescence.’
‘My personal opinion is that we could disallow the prescription of puberty blockers… (and)… Australia aligned itself with all the European countries that have conducted systematic reviews of the evidence behind puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. From those systematic reviews, they realised that no child should be prescribed puberty blockers outside of a clinical research trial or in exceptional circumstances. And in the UK, they’ve even gone further in recommending caution around social transition.’
In voicing concerns at a recent rally, Spencer stumbled on another issue facing doctors who dare speak out. Soon after, the hospital told Spencer she allegedly broke the Queensland public services Code of Conduct through her public statements. It’s an allegation Spencer contests, saying she was speaking as a private citizen. In the speech, Spencer neither identifies herself as a doctor nor makes mention of her role or employer. The question is, where does a doctor’s autonomy begin and the employer’s jurisdiction end?
Have we already entered the era where the reach of our employers and regulatory authorities extends fully into our capacity to speak publicly anywhere?
The AHPRA Code of Conduct for medical professionals outlines several expectations of health professionals to question, examine and discuss the potential risks and benefits of treatment in addition to advocating for vulnerable communities, including children. It would seem, therefore, that Dr Spencer is simply doing her job.
‘We are not being allowed any professional discretion,’ she argues. ‘It is incredibly distressing to be forced into harming other people’s children, or otherwise face the potential loss of one’s career, livelihood or to be cast out of the workplace as has happened to me. But this is too important, so I will not be silenced.’
Dr Spencer is calling for an urgent Federal inquiry into the model of care for the treatment of children with gender dysphoria.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/protecting-children-takes-courage/
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University of Zurich COVID-19 Vax Adverse Effect Study
A team at the University of Zurich, Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute (EBPI) led a population-based cohort study involving 575 individuals who received a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, and as part of the study, were monitored and followed up over 12 weeks, with participants sharing commonly reported adverse effects, mostly local pain, fatigue, headache and fever. Not surprisingly, a majority of adverse effects were mild to moderate and resolved within three days. The findings here are comparable to other reported prevalence and severity of adverse effects in randomized controlled trials. Hospitalizations out of the cohort totaled 0.7%.
Context
The results of this Swiss study concerning the prevalence and severity of adverse effects are overall similar to previously reported data from randomized controlled trials and other observational studies as cited by the Swiss-based study authors.
The team provides an overview of other important safety surveillance studies for some perspective. For example, in one online survey among persons who received either the Pfizer (BNT162b2), Moderna (mRNA-1273) or J&J (JNJ-78436735), study team of Beatty et al. reported that 80.3% of participants experienced adverse effects, with comparable estimates for each vaccine type.
The proportion of adverse effects that were self-reported as severe or required hospitalization in the current study (14.7%) was well below that of Swiss and European governmental surveillance systems (37.9% in Swiss ElViS). These are actually high rates.
Furthermore, safety surveillance systems in America reveal higher estimates of serious adverse events based on hospitalization rates, serious illness and deaths (9.2% vs. our 0.7%). The Swiss authors propose: “These higher estimates from governmental reporting systems are likely related to the underreporting of mild symptoms and underscore the importance of real-world data.”
Reports on prevalence of anaphylaxis and severe allergic reactions vary from 0.03% to 3% based on differing definitions. In the current University of Zurich study, two (0.4%) participants reported allergic reactions, without the need to consult a medical professional.
The study
Data is derived from participants at a University of Zurich vaccination center. Individuals receiving BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 vaccines were recruited between March 10, 2021, and July 21, 2021, while participants receiving JNJ-78436735 were recruited between October 20, 2021, and January 27, 2022.
The findings
Out of the entire study population, 454 participants reported experiencing at least one adverse event up to three months post-vaccination equaling 79.0% of the total. The study showed a total of 2233 adverse events meaning on average there were 3.88 adverse events reported per study participant.
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Canadian Investigators Discovery Unique Blood Plasma Protein Patterns in Long COVID Patients
A Canadian research unit may come up with a way to treat at least some long COVID patients more effectively. The condition has emerged since the pandemic as a real problem. With anywhere from 10-20% of people that have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 susceptible to long COVID, some estimate north of 14 million people in America alone struggling with the condition, which can last for many months. Often impacting the quality of life, symptoms from brain fog and fatigue to breathing difficulties can be outright debilitating. Led by Dr. Douglas Faser, a professor in pediatrics at Schulich School of Medicine & Dentist, and physician at London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) a team of Canadians designed a study using artificial intelligence (AI) as part of advanced research to discover unique patterns of blood plasma proteins in patients with suspected long COVID, with an aim on improving patient outcomes. Enter the “plasma proteome,” as the research centers on proteins identified in blood plasma, released by cells often playing a vital role in pathogen immune response.
With study results recently published in the Journal of Translational Medicine this study team sought out to better understand how these plasma cells impact patients with long COVID, and why some patients struggle more than others.
Corresponding authors Dr. Douglas Faser and Cristiana Losef, both with Children’s Health Research Institute, Victoria Research Laboratories, and colleagues investigated possible mechanisms, and to inform the prognosis and treatment of long COVID.
This technology allowed researchers to determine unique patterns in the blood proteins. The team discovered that people with suspected long COVID have prolonged inflammation associated with changes in their immune cells and blood vessels. These changes may lead to problems in specific organs, like the brain and the heart, as reported by Western University.
Called “the plasma proteome,” the proteins are found in blood plasma and are released by cells that often play an important role in the body’s immune response to viruses. The research team is studying how those proteins adapt and change in long COVID.
The study
With a green light from the local Ethics Committee (Western University), the study team enrolled patients from London Health Sciences Center in London, Ontario, Canada and St. Joseph's including patients diagnosed with long COVID as well as acutely ill COVID-19 patients.
Upon diagnosis of long COVID, study patients were referred to a specialist clinic based on prolonged, diffuse symptoms according to the author's account in the Journal of Translational Medicine.
Conducting a series of tests including venous blood work, the study team analyzed patient plasma. COVID-19 patients were approached when they were admitted to the hospital or medical ward or intensive care unit. Healthy subjects were included—persons without disease, acute illness or any prescription medicine, but previously banked by the Translational Research Center in London, Ontario.
All samples in the study were matched by age and gender (e.g., long COVID patients to acutely ill patients to healthy controls).
Results
Unlike acutely ill COVID-19 patients as well as healthy subjects---both matched by age and sex—the long COVID outpatients evidenced natural killer cell redistribution with a dominant resting phenotype, opposite to active and neutrophils formed in extracellular traps.
The study team reports a possible “resetting of cell phenotypes” likely resulting from “prospective vascular events mediated by both angiopoietin (ANGPT1) and vascular endothelial growth factor-A (VEGFA).
Validating several biomarkers (ANGPT1, VEGFA, CCR7, CD56, citrullinated histone 3, elastase) the authors report also that “Signaling of transforming growth factor-?1 with probable connections to elevated EP/p300” pointed to both vascular inflammation as well as tumor necrosis factor- ? driven pathways. The authors suggested that the progression from acute COVID-19 to long COVID was “a vascular proliferative state associated with hypoxia-inducible factor 1 pathway.”
Fraser and Losef write that this “vascular-proliferative process predicted in Long-COVID might contribute to changes in the organ-specific proteome reflective of neurologic and cardiometabolic dysfunction.”
PI Point of View
Cristiana Losef, a research analyst at Children’s Health Research Institute (CHRI), a program of Lawson went on the record, “We used novel technologies for this study, allowing us to analyze more than 3,000 proteins in blood plasma at the same time with multiple patients.”
Losef continued:
“We used a novel bioinformatic pipeline, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), to analyze the proteins to determine the specific changes that occur in long COVID.”
Dr. Michael Nicholson, associate scientist at Lawson, and respirologist at St. Joseph’s Health Care London reports on the influence of this study, “Trying to understand this mechanism is quite important because it provides further insight into how patients are affected,” says Dr. Michael Nicholson. He continued, “This paper sheds further light on a possible mechanism that may provide insight into why some patients have certain symptoms.”
Michael Knauer, an associate scientist at Lawson shared for Western University, “The saved blood plasma samples we are using helped us determine the long-term responses to COVID-19; serial blood plasma samples from individuals that had a COVID-19 infection and now presumed long COVID will help us determine how proteins are changing over time.”
What’s the potential value from a therapeutic perspective?
Dr. Faser, a professor at Schulich Medicine, said the proteins discovered could act as a potential drug target. The team is now examining potential new drug therapies with the hopes of improving outcomes for these patients.
Fraser emphasized:
“When we identify these signaling patterns within the blood plasma, we can then take the information and screen drug databases to better understand which drugs would be best to target the changes we identified in long COVID patients.” Pointing to the potential of these findings, “With this understanding, the identified drugs may be used in future long COVID clinical trials.”
Key Point: This research, which used multiple state-of-the-art technologies, was enabled by existing expertise and infrastructure through Children’s Health Research Institute (CHRI). It reveals that the findings point to a “vascular-proliferative process in Long-COVID that is likely initiated either prior hypoxia (localized or systemic) and/or stimulatory factors (i.e., cytokines, chemokines, growth factors, angiotensin, etc.). Analyses of the plasma proteome, used as a surrogate for cellular signaling, unveiled potential organ-specific prognostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets.”
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12 July, 2923
Text Messages of Top Scientists Shed Light on COVID Origin Response
A new report released by Republican members of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic includes new evidence that a group of scientists who received funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), conspired to dismiss the origin of the pandemic in order to protect China.
The text messages were exchanged between authors of the Proximal Origin paper, initiated by then-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, which had the explicit purpose of dismissing the lab leak theory for the pandemic’s origin. The Proximal Origin paper, which declared that no “laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” became one of the most cited science papers of all time and was prominently used by Dr. Fauci as proof that the COVID-19 virus came from nature.
While Dr. Fauci’s role in directing the paper’s creation as well as the paper’s many scientific and logical flaws have been widely documented, the exact circumstances of the paper’s origin have remained unclear. Text messages released by the Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic now reveal that it was fear of upsetting international relations, and the Chinese regime in particular, that drove the inception of Proximal Origin.
According to emails obtained by the Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, concerns regarding COVID-19’s engineered-looking features were first discussed by Proximal Origin author Eddie Holmes of the University of Sydney and British pharmaceutical trust director Jeremy Farrar on Jan. 8, 2020. Mr. Farrar is now the World Health Organization’s chief scientist. Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), as well as unnamed Chinese officials were also included in these early, behind-the-scenes discussions.
It remains unknown why Mr. Farrar—who later co-organized with Dr. Fauci a Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference that resulted in the drafting of Proximal Origin—was deeply entangled in the effort to suppress the lab leak theory and instead elevate the natural origin narrative. Notably, Mr. Farrar is a close personal friend of Gao Fu, who was at the time the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control. Mr. Farrar later admitted in his book “Spike” that he was concerned at the time about Sino–U.S. relations.
While Mr. Holmes, Mr. Farrar, Dr. Collins, and the unnamed Chinese officials were discussing the virus’s unusual features, NIAID-funded scientist Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Institute contacted Mr. Holmes to share his own concerns about the new virus, in particular its unusual receptor binding domain and furin cleavage site. Mr. Andersen had also uncovered that the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), Shi Zhengli, had—together with Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, who is sometimes referred to as the godfather of gain-of-function experiments—inserted furin cleavage sites into SARS viruses. In other words, Mr. Andersen had detected a highly unusual furin cleavage site in COVID-19, a site that has to this day never been observed in naturally occurring viruses of this kind, and found direct evidence that the WIV had inserted such sites into coronaviruses. Mr. Holmes responded, “[expletive], this is bad” and “oh my god what worse words than that.”
On Jan. 31, 2020, Mr. Farrar talked to Dr. Fauci about the virus’s unusual features. At the same time, Mr. Andersen contacted Dr. Fauci by email, saying that the virus’s features looked potentially engineered and that its genetic makeup was “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
It was at this point that Dr. Fauci and Mr. Farrar organized the teleconference, which was held the next day, on Feb. 1, 2020. The ostensible purpose of the teleconference was to develop the Proximal Origin paper to counter the lab leak theory. Mr. Andersen became the paper’s lead author and was joined by fellow teleconference participants Mr. Holmes, Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh, and Robert Garry of Tulane University as co-authors.
A fifth co-author, Ian Lipkin of Columbia University, was brought on board later in February 2020. Mr. Lipkin did not participate in the teleconference and has since distanced himself from the natural origin narrative. Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) has stated that Mr. Lipkin is cooperating with congressional investigators.
The new text messages released by Mr. Wenstrup’s Committee reveal for the first time that the four Proximal Origin authors who attended Dr. Fauci’s teleconference started a Slack group to discuss the paper. In a message sent in the morning of Feb. 2, 2020, the day after the teleconference, Mr. Rambaut told co-authors Mr. Andersen, Mr. Holmes, and Mr. Garry:
“Given the [expletive] show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural process.”
Within three minutes, Mr. Andersen replied:
“Yup, I totally agree that that’s a very reasonable conclusion. Although I hate when politics is injected into science – but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances. We should be sensitive to that.”
These messages contradict the public claims by Mr. Andersen that he was not concerned with politics and that it was others who politicized the question of COVID-19’s origin.
The exchange between Mr. Rambaut and Mr. Andersen indicate that the efforts of Dr. Fauci’s group to elevate the natural origin theory had nothing to do with science and were driven from the start by a desire to protect China. Mr. Rambaut’s admission that it is not possible to distinguish between natural evolution and lab creation and that the Proximal Origin group should therefore simply blame natural processes is tantamount to a smoking gun. It suggests the authors never had the intention of writing a scientific paper—instead, they were focused on covering up the pandemic’s true origin.
Mr. Andersen went even further, telling his co-authors that given the political concerns, the preprint site bioRxiv should “start screening submissions – it’s a slippery slope, but it’s justified at this stage.” A preprint site is a site where scientists can upload their research prior to peer review. Mr. Andersen was essentially proposing to censor scientists who did not toe the political line on COVID-19’s origin.
The political motivations of the origins cover-up are further corroborated by a previously released message from Ron Fouchier, who also attended the teleconference. At the same time that the Proximal Origin authors were having their discussion on Slack on Feb. 2, Mr. Fouchier wrote an email to the teleconference group stating that “further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.”
Mr. Fouchier is a Dutch virologist whose controversial gain-of-function experiments, whereby he created airborne viruses, led the Obama administration to impose its 2014 moratorium on such experiments. The moratorium was later lifted by Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins during the Trump administration.
In response, NIH head Dr. Collins chimed in, telling the group, “the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.”
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Is CDC Manipulating ICD Codes Involving COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects on Death Certificates?
A review of Minnesota death certificates from an embedded source in that state reveals that of all the death certificates in Minnesota between 2015-Q1 2023, ten CoDs clearly identify a vaccine as a Cause of Death (CoD), including nine identifying a covid vaccine.
Surprisingly, our group discovered that on seven of these nine death certificates, the CDC had failed to apply an appropriate ICD-10 diagnostic code for vaccine side effects (either T88.1 or Y59.0).
I authored an article delineating the details that was republished in Brownstone. As a result of that investigation, multiple reporters contacted the CDC requesting a response to our allegations that the CDC had inappropriately omitted these ICD codes. The CDC issued the following statement to a reporter from Just The News:
“Thanks for reaching out to CDC. The claim in this post is incorrect. The ICD-10 codes in question pertain to adverse effects of vaccines, not vaccination. Vaccination is not a disease or cause of death, so simple mention of the vaccine or vaccination without mention of adverse effects will not get coded. The examples in the article for which the adverse effects codes are included are those that mention adverse or side effects of the vaccine. The examples for which the codes are not included do not contain such language.
COVID-19 vaccines are undergoing the most intense safety monitoring in U.S. history. To date, CDC has not detected any unusual or unexpected patterns for deaths following immunization that would indicate that COVID vaccines are causing or contributing to deaths, outside of the nine confirmed TTS deaths following the Janssen vaccine.
When an adverse event, including death, is reported to CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, it is classified as serious or non-serious. The code of Federal Regulation defines “serious” as: death, life-threatening illness, hospitalization or prolongation of hospitalization, permanent disability, congenital anomalies or birth defects. For reports classified as serious, CDC requests and reviews the available medical records, examines death certificates and autopsy reports. The determination of the cause of death is done by the certifying official who completes the death certificate or the pathologist who conducts the autopsy.”
The CDC’s response induces considerable concern. Far from resolving this important public health-related issue, the agency’s statement, in fact, raises critical questions about the intentions and integrity of at least some aspects of the large, sprawling public health agency.
The CDC claims that they only apply ICD codes for vaccine side effects where the death certificate documents a vaccine as a CoD using language materially similar to “side effects of vaccination”--semantics that explicitly attributes the CoD to side effects from the vaccine as opposed to the act or fact of vaccination itself.
So, the CDC stipulates that a coroner who writes language such as “vaccinated 10 hours before death” as a Cause of Death means to convey that the decedent did NOT experience any adverse effects from the vaccine and that the vaccine did NOT contribute to the demise of the decedent.
But it seems implausible that a coroner or medical professional filling out a death certificate would choose to convey clinically irrelevant and misleading information about the decedent’s vaccination by writing it as a Cause of Death on the death certificate. This is all the more so regarding the Covid vaccines, where there was and still is intense professional, social, and political pressure to avoid doing or saying anything that can promote “vaccine hesitancy”.
Additionally, the standard articulated by the CDC presumes that medical professionals would be aware that in order to document a vaccine as a CoD, they must use language that explicitly describes “side effects of” a vaccine. Considering the extreme rarity of vaccines being documented on a death certificate – there was only ONE such instance in Minnesota from 2015-2019, out of >230,000 death certificates – it is highly unlikely that medical professionals would be aware of such a requirement.
The conceptual basis of the distinction drawn by the CDC’s standard likewise seems deficient. It is axiomatic that vaccine side effects must be caused by the vaccine. Thus, any medical sequelae precipitated or initiated by vaccine side effects by definition, are attributable to the vaccine itself. Furthermore, the CDC does not draw any such distinctions regarding any other medical product or substance when listed as a CoD, even though a similar argument can be made that “the ICD-10 codes in question pertain to adverse effects of [the medical product or substance]”, “not the [medical product or substance itself]” which “is not a disease or cause of death.”
It is critical to note that the CDC does not dispute our characterization of the CDC’s role of assigning and adjudicating ICD codes for death certificates and admits the decision to omit ICD codes for vaccine side effects on the death certificates we identified was a conscious and deliberate choice.
Another troubling assertion from the CDC’s statement is their claim that “to date, CDC has not detected any unusual or unexpected patterns for deaths following immunization that would indicate that COVID vaccines are causing or contributing to deaths, outside of the nine confirmed TTS deaths following the Janssen vaccine.”
There are numerous case report studies documenting autopsies of deaths that occurred shortly after vaccination with one of the mRNA vaccines in the scientific literature, many of which have already passed peer review.
A recent meta-review of these studies found that “a total of 240 deaths (73.9%) were independently adjudicated as directly due to or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination.” The study concludes, “The consistency seen among cases in this review with known COVID-19 vaccine adverse events, their mechanisms, and related excess death, coupled with autopsy confirmation and physician-led death adjudication, suggests there is a high likelihood of a causal link between COVID-19 vaccines and death in most cases. Further urgent investigation is required for the purpose of clarifying our findings.”
It is inconceivable that anyone could still claim that there have been ZERO deaths linked to the mRNA vaccines. TrialSite has chronicled deaths recognized by government health agencies around the world, such as Taiwan, Vietnam and the UK. The CDC’s insistence to contradict in defiance of numerous published studies is puzzling and possibly indicative that the CDC, or at least some factions within, lacks honesty in its appraisal of overall mRNA vaccine safety.
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11 July, 2023
Researcher’s Latest Stats Suggest Strong Influence of COVID Vax on Excess All-Cause Mortality
In a recent paper uploaded to ResearchGate, author Hervé Seligmann argues that data associated with 2021 excess all-cause mortality is most likely attributable to what he describes as the “secondary effects of COVID-19 injections.” While his paper is not peer-reviewed, and thus no claims should be made based on the findings, generally, governments are avoiding their responsibility to systematically look into the topic of excess death causation between 2020, and 2023. Consequently, civil society drives research and media investigations.
Seligmann’s CV shows he earned both his B.Sc. Biology and MSc in Plant Physiology from Hebrew University of Jerusalem; his Ph.D. earned in 1995 also from the same Israeli university focused on “lizard microevolution.” Seligmann doesn’t appear to be a frequent outspoken activist, which caught this media’s attention. We increasingly distrust academics and activists that exclusively make a living off of COVID-related crises, as the risk of interest-induced subjectivity and bias becomes an ever more uncomfortable dynamic.
Most of Seligmann’s publications uploaded to the open-source research repository involve mainly investigations into his core interest of cellular molecular machinery origins, with an emphasis on genetic code.
The author used data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National for Health Statistics as well as a 2019 National Vital Statistics Report to access and attempt to analyze deaths and death rates on a state-by-state basis across America. Claiming that when comparing the year 2021 to 2019 there was a total of 613,779 deaths, the academic points out 114,336 deaths comparing 2021 to 2020. See the mortality table from NIH for 2016-2020 and 2020.
The author presents a graph based on the data inputs that need to be peer-reviewed for validation, showing “excess 2021 state-wise all-cause mortality increases proportionally to state-wise VAERS death rates." This is based on the number of COVID-19 vaccination-associated VAERS reports per 100,000 individuals who received at least one dose in that specific state.
In 2021, Seligmann and Spiro Pantazatos uploaded a non-peer-reviewed paper titled “COVID Vaccination and age-stratified all-cause mortality risk” that used regional variation in vaccination rates as a basis to predict all-cause mortality and non-COVID deaths in ensuing periods based on two independent, publicly available datasets. In that paper, they said that “Vaccination correlated negatively with mortality 6-20 weeks post-injection, while vaccination predicted all-cause mortality 0-5 weeks post-injection in almost all age groups and with an age-related temporal pattern consistent with the US vaccine rollout.”
Seligman now has an update on that assessment based on the latest numbers. He posits now that based on a series of his calculations (which again need to be vetted by multiple independent reviewers) increase in all-cause death rates based on CDC VAERS data “shows that excess death rates increase 19 times faster than the VAERS death rate.” According to the author, this calculated rate “is very close to 21 times” the estimation done by himself and Pantazatos in 2021.
One challenge using the VAERS database is that the deaths cannot be automatically attributable to the vaccine, even though that’s why the system was established in the first place—safety signal detection/surveillance. But each case must be verified. Some research uses timing as an indicator of the likelihood of causation.
While no evidentiary claims can be made from this latest Seligmann paper as it is, this could change with multiple independent peer reviews by credible academic research sources. This media has tracked reports of excess mortality figures around the world. The most prominent explanation involves the pandemic, and the residual impacts of the crisis, in this case, a pandemic and its direct, secondary and tertiary effects. The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a horrific toll on the world.
Some media have shown an interest in probing this matter. For example, the Economist used machine learning algorithms to estimate that anywhere from 16.8 to 28.1 million excess deaths occurred due to all causes since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. All sorts of problems can be derived from the pandemic including the ripple effects of myriad health concerns, put off by the pandemic, which have spiraled since then. Other factors include the widening wealth gap—the social determinants of health in many cases intensified due to pandemic conditions from 2020 to 2023.
But this media has found it quite fascinating how mainstream media and fact-checkers refuse to even consider the obvious possible impacts of the mass emergency countermeasure programs as a potential contributing force to excess deaths. The mainstream summarily dismisses any such questions as merely anti-vax hyperbole.
TrialSite is unapologetically pro-vax and is one of the few if perhaps, the only media that has consistently reported on study data evidencing both the positive and negative elements of the COVID-19 vaccines. This is just called journalism, with a biomedical research focus.
While the reality is that no pathbreaking studies have produced conclusive evidence as to what’s behind all-cause deaths since the pandemic this is in part, due to the fact that governments are generally avoiding any substantial investment to research the matter from the perspective of causation. Itself an interesting, and disturbing trend.
Hence, the importance of such research supported by civil society, that is, the community of citizens linked by common interests and shared activity for the betterment of humankind.
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Time to Regulate mRNA Vaccines as Gene Therapies: French Biomedical Scholar
Published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, independent French researcher Helene Banoun, Ph.D. asks the question: Why are the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines not regulated as gene therapies? TrialSite has reported that technically, at least according to the vaccine manufacturers’ investor disclosures, the products are in fact, a form of gene therapy.
But these investigational products—now licensed, were developed in an unprecedented manner under heretofore not considered regulatory, environmental and political conditions given the state and nature of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Banoun, a Ph.D. at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research/INSERM recently raised profound regulatory issues involving the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in “mRNA: Vaccine or Gene Therapy? The Safety Regulatory Issues.” The French researcher frames the real challenge in the context that at the time of the release of these products “no specific regulations existed.” But now with the passing of the COVID-19 emergency, isn’t it time to reconsider not only the regulations of this class of product but also the true safety considerations?
According to various stances from apex research institutes, regulators and public health authorities, the mRNA vaccines are not gene therapies as biased fact checker after fact checker “busts the myth” that the mRNA products are gene therapies. The argument goes that with the mRNA vaccines, because the mRNA itself doesn’t enter the cell nucleus or for that matter, interact with the DNA whatsoever, these products fail to meet the gene therapy test.
However, as TrialSite has reported, in fact, the mRNA vaccines are very much considered gene therapies when reviewing Moderna’s own investor disclosures to the Securities and Exchange Commission, for example. See “Are mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines a Form of Gene Therapy? Yes, According to a Bayer Pharma Exec & Moderna.”
Dr. Banoun also concurs, declaring in her latest paper, “The mode of action of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines should classify them as gene therapy products (GTPs), but they have been excluded by regulatory agencies.”
But the French scholar’s concerns with the vaccines rise well above baseline concerns of definition, as she points to a regulatory track record of “non-compliant results in terms of purity, quality and batch homogeneity.”
It’s as if every validation talking point from the vaccine companies themselves, to regulators poses an ideal story of what the vaccines are supposed to be, yet the reality on the ground portends a troubling direction. Did the spike protein remain stable and localized like industry and authorities declared they would do? No, as persistent biodistribution of mRNAs and their protein products, like the spike protein, turn out to travel to every organ and cell in the body, often many months after the vaccination event.
Does this wandering spike protein threaten human health? While industry, regulators and public health agencies declare a resounding no. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. TrialSite has accumulated dozens of studies in peer-review journals evidencing a spike protein capable of inducing inflammation and more, and likely at least somehow a factor in post-COVID-19 vaccine adverse events. Of course, more research and data are necessary for conclusive understanding, but who and what will finance the research needed? What happens if the very entities that are supposed to police and regulate need policing and monitoring themselves?
Dr. Banoun’s concerns are not necessarily conclusively proven, but nonetheless valid. “Post-marketing studies have shown that mRNA passes into breast milk and could have adverse effects on breastfed babies. Long-term expression, integration into the genome, transmission to the germline, passage into sperm, embryo/fetal and perinatal toxicity, genotoxicity and tumorigenicity should be studied in light of the adverse events reported in pharmacovigilance databases.”
While a collection of anti-vaxxers, medical freedom fighters and libertarian types pounce on COVID-19 as a cause immediately promote the scary concept of vaccine shedding, and TrialSite has, on a handful of occasions, scanned the literature for any scientific validity, Banoun raises the specter that such a phenomenon must be evaluated. As well, she argues, “in-depth vaccinovigliance” all as part of a series of expectations civil society will demand of the industry, regulators and public health agencies for any future mRNA-based products.
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10 July, 2923
The Media’s Hypocrisy on Vaccines
Since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tossed his hat into the 2024 presidential ring, his detractors have repeatedly pointed to one issue as evidence that he’s unfit to be president: his skepticism of the COVID-19 vaccines. The reality, however, is that the same media institutions depicting Kennedy as a wingnut spreading fringe conspiracy theories played a key role in popularizing vaccine resistance.
The sheer volume of sudden reversals in public health policy makes it difficult to recall what anyone was claiming a few years ago, but there is a simple formula to understand why “the science” keeps changing: It’s often about who benefits politically. In the months before the 2020 election, the Trump administration seemed close to hitting its stated goal of delivering a COVID vaccine by the end of the year. That would have been a clear boost to the president’s electoral chances.
Evidently alarmed by this prospect, the mainstream media, led by The New York Times, hit on the novel tactic of claiming that Big Pharma had used its financial might to corrupt government oversight of their development. The storyline had the distinct benefit of being a direct offshoot of the media’s larger narrative about Trump’s thoroughgoing and relentless corruption.
One of the first, most detailed and fleshed-out versions of the Big Pharma-COVID vaccine theory can be found in the early days of The New York Times’ COVID-19 reporting. On May 20, 2020, the Times launched its first broadside in this effort. The headline of the article, “Trump’s Vaccine Chief Has Vast Ties to Drug Industry, Posing Possible Conflicts,” painted a picture of lurking corruption, invoking a network of malfeasance reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
??The first paragraph underscored this point, alleging that Trump’s new virus “czar,” Moncef Slaoui, former head of vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline, had “intricate ties to big pharmaceutical interests.” The Times went on to enumerate the $12.4 million worth of Slaoui’s shares in Moderna—even though Slaoui had sold those shares as he stepped into his government role. The Times also repeatedly implied that administration officials involved in the development of the vaccines possessed vast conflicts of interest, writing that Health Secretary Alex Azar “is a former Eli Lilly executive” and former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb “has moved in and out of government twice.”
The paper’s later stance on the integrity of the vaccine development process aside, this all would have been worthy reporting, important for the American public to know. But the Times went far beyond showing the ties of officials to the pharmaceutical industry and—months before a single vaccine had been produced—began insinuating that any vaccine produced could carry major risks. “[Moderna’s vaccine] technology, which uses genetic material from the virus called mRNA, is relatively new and unproven. And many vaccine candidates fail after showing preliminary promise, or cause serious side effects in later human trials,” the Times wrote in its May 2020 piece (emphasis added).
Just two weeks later the paper went much further, implying in a June 3, 2020 article that COVID vaccine corruption was systematic and political. “Operation Warp Speed amounts to a sprawling, on-the-fly experiment in industrial policy by a Republican administration that has been otherwise dedicated to giving private industry a free hand,” two Times reporters asserted.
There is a simple formula to understand why ‘the science’ keeps changing: It’s often about who benefits politically.
There were, to be sure, irregularities and conflicts of interest in the emergency authorization to produce the COVID vaccines (not surprising given that pharma is the largest and most powerful lobby in the United States). But the media coverage of the issue, which reached a fever pitch in the Trump years but fell mostly silent on the topic once Trump was out of power, ignored nuances to score political points. The unintended consequence was that, imbued with more than a grain of truth, the story about Big Pharma putting profit ahead of prudence took on a life of its own. Now that the political winds have shifted, the media is essentially fighting a narrative of its own creation.
By late summer 2020, this narrative was braided with another about vaccine malfeasance, simultaneously slamming Trump for rushing the vaccine development process and for allegedly lying about the rollout date. In May 2020, after Trump said he was “confident” vaccines would be available by the end of the year, it triggered a barrage of snark from supposedly neutral fact-checkers attempting to refute the president’s claim. NBC’s fact-check offers an example of the genre: “experts say [Trump] needs a ‘miracle’ to be right.” Trump was simultaneously painted as an unreliable fibber who would never be able to follow through on his promises while being accused of rushing to get the vaccines ready ahead of the November election.
But the gut punch came when the Times again questioned the safety of the vaccines being produced. “Under constant pressure from a White House anxious for good news and a public desperate for a silver bullet to end the crisis, the government’s researchers are fearful of political intervention in the coming months and are struggling to ensure that the government maintains the right balance between speed and rigorous regulation,” the Times reported in an August 2020 piece.
By that month, the media’s effort began to pay dividends. A week after the Times claimed the Trump administration was “desperate for a silver bullet,” news broke that House Democrats had opened an investigation into Slaoui on the basis of the Times’ unfounded allegations. NBC News, citing the Times’ claims, reported that Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn had called financial arrangements involving Operation Warp Speed “opaque.”
In September, the Times ran an op-ed by American historian Rick Perlstein that cast the government’s plan to use emergency authorization for the COVID vaccine as Trump’s “most reckless obsession yet.” This bid, the Times op-ed blared in alarm, could end with the vaccines being distributed “before some scientists believe it would be safe to do so” and in a way that could “further erode public confidence in vaccines—and possibly kill.”
Those tropes in fact were and are similar to those advanced by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—tropes that, as if by magic, are now roundly condemned by the media that lent them credibility and seeded them into the public consciousness.
By the time of the 2020 election, the notion that Big Pharma had unduly influenced the COVID vaccines for profit was media gospel. The accepted narrative was that, with a nod from Trump, Big Pharma had rushed out potentially dangerous experimental vaccines with a bevy of unknown side effects. With so much momentum behind it, this idea continued to gather steam. And now it’s more like an out-of-control freight train than the power-corridor Acela it was supposed to be. The media is reaching for the brakes but the public, long since convinced, is racing full steam ahead.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-hypocrisy-on-vaccines
*****************************************************Research Review at Univ. of Patras: COVID-19 Vax Can Induce Liver Injury
An internist and infection expert, and colleagues at University of Patras in Greece’s third largest city and regional capital of Western Greece, in the northern Peloponnese approximately 130 miles west of Athens, investigated whether the COVID-19 vaccines associated with the occurrence of autoimmune phenomena involving the liver.
Karolina Akinosoglou and colleagues find that while rare, several studies indicate an increase in the incidence of vaccine-induced live injury pointing to specific instances of hepatocellular injury that involve immune-mediated pathways. Professor Akinosoglou, and colleagues from University of Patras conduct a mini review, looking into the underlying pathophysiology involving immune-mediated liver injury post COVID-19 vaccination. The team located in Western Greece also investigated the most widely distributed vaccine formulations’ autoimmune and hepatotoxic potential.
Recent findings from a Patras led investigation were published in the World Journal of Virology.
Background: rare but real--liver injuries
A rare injury secondary to COVID-19 vaccine administration, the incidence of such injuries became a topic of research given the continuous pharmacovigilance post the mass immunization program across much of the world including Greece.
The Greek medical internists represented by the corresponding author Dr. Akinosoglou declare on absolute terms that the three most commonly used COVID-19 vaccines (other than in China and parts of Asia) including the two mRNA -based products (Pfizer-BioNTech—BNT162b2 and Modena—mRNA-1273) plus the AstraZeneca/Oxford jab (ChAdOx1-S) “can induce liver injury that may involve immune-mediated pathways and result in autoimmune hepatitis-like presentation that may require therapeutic intervention in the form of corticosteroid administration.”
But what is causing these rare, but real injuries?
Review of the research
Various investigations have sought to establish vaccine and liver injury causality involving attempts to highlight immune checkpoint inhibition. Moreover, when vaccine-induced liver injuries are established, researchers search for underlying vaccine mechanisms across the different platforms.
To date, the Greek team points to evidence that both mRNA-containing lipid nanoparticles and adenoviral vector platforms “contribute to the inflammatory background that leads to an exaggerated immune response, while patterns of molecular mimicry between the spike (S) protein and prominent liver antigens may account for the autoimmune presentation.”
What is proposed vaccine-induced immune mediators?
Akinosoglou and team point to unfolding research that suggests that the combination of ingredients in the COVID-19 vaccines, plus autoreactive antibodies, cytokines as well as cytotoxic T-cell populations are possible culprits behind hepatocellular damage via well-established pathways.
Concluding thoughts
Overall, COVID-19 vaccine injuries are rare, and liver injury as a result of some immune-mediated process remains an even rarer incidence. Thus, the authors declare “Immune-mediated liver injury remains an elusive, but rare entity following COVID-19 vaccination.” They encourage investigators and scientists around the world to keep an eye out for these and other injuries, no matter how rare. Yet the study authors remind all that at least according to their logic, the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh the higher risks associated with the disease itself.
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9 July, 2023
COVID-19 Vaccines Linked to Kidney Disease Safety Signal—Fujita Health University Investigation
Clinical investigators across disciplines affiliated with Fujita Health University in Toyoake, Japan, south and west of Tokyo, review the large national pharmacovigilance database capturing real-world spontaneous adverse event (AE) reports to identify any signals involving the most common form of glomerular injury post-COVID-19 vaccination known as IgA nephropathy (IgAN).
Represented by corresponding author Mizuno Tomohiro in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy at Fujita Health University, the team sought to investigate the frequency of IgAN post-COVID-19 vaccination based on a designed study of the Japanese Adverse Drug Event Report (JADER) database. Reviewing a total of 697,885 cases, Tomohiro and colleagues detected safety signals for IgAN (ROR: 6.49, 95% CI: 4.38–9.61; IC: 2.27, 95% CI: 1.70–2.83). Identifying a total of 30 COVID-19 vaccine-associated IgAN cases, 16 of these had information about the cases at the time of onset.
Of these, 11 of the cases occurred 2 days after vaccination, and two occurred >28 days after vaccination. Safety issues are raised by these findings as the Japanese clinical investigators write “These results suggest that compared with other drugs, COVID-19 vaccination is associated with a higher frequency of IgAN. Monitoring of gross hematuria following COVID-19 vaccination should be needed.”
The recent results of the study titled “COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination is associated with IgA nephropathy: an analysis of the Japanese adverse drug event report database” were published in the Journal of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences.
Before delving into study findings, a brief overview of the condition—IgAN.
What is IgAN?
Also known as IgAN or Berger’s disease, IgA nephropathy is a chronic kidney disease characterized by the deposition of immunoglobulin A (IgA) antibodies in the glomeruli, which are the filtering units of the kidneys. It is the most common form of glomerulonephritis worldwide.
With this disease, there is an abnormal immune response where IgA antibodies, which are part of the immune system and normally help protect against infections, become deposited in the glomeruli instead of being cleared from the body. This deposition triggers an inflammatory response and can lead to kidney damage over time.
The study
This study team analyzed data on drug-associated AEs reported between April 2004, and May 2022, via the JADER database on the Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency website. The team calculated reporting odds ratios (RORs), information components (ICs), and their 95% confidence intervals (CIs) using two-by-two contingency tables in the study team’s quest to evaluate the safety signals for the targeted AEs.
Findings
The authors report, “A total of 697,885 cases were included in the analysis. Safety signals were detected for IgAN (ROR: 6.49, 95% CI: 4.38–9.61; IC: 2.27, 95% CI: 1.70–2.83). Of 30 cases of IgAN associated with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, 16 had information available on time to onset. Of the 16 cases, 11 occurred ?2 days after vaccination, and two occurred >28 days after vaccination.” Note, 11 cases never recovered, at least not to date.
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Canadian Investigators Discovery Unique Blood Plasma Protein Patterns in Long COVID Patients
A Canadian research unit may come up with a way to treat at least some long COVID patients more effectively. The condition has emerged since the pandemic as a real problem. With anywhere from 10-20% of people that have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 susceptible to long COVID, some estimate north of 14 million people in America alone struggling with the condition, which can last for many months. Often impacting the quality of life, symptoms from brain fog and fatigue to breathing difficulties can be outright debilitating.
Led by Dr. Douglas Faser, a professor in pediatrics at Schulich School of Medicine & Dentist, and physician at London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) a team of Canadians designed a study using artificial intelligence (AI) as part of advanced research to discover unique patterns of blood plasma proteins in patients with suspected long COVID, with an aim on improving patient outcomes. Enter the “plasma proteome,” as the research centers on proteins identified in blood plasma, released by cells often playing a vital role in pathogen immune response.
With study results recently published in the Journal of Translational Medicine this study team sought out to better understand how these plasma cells impact patients with long COVID, and why some patients struggle more than others.
Corresponding authors Dr. Douglas Faser and Cristiana Losef, both with Children’s Health Research Institute, Victoria Research Laboratories, and colleagues investigated possible mechanisms, and to inform the prognosis and treatment of long COVID.
This technology allowed researchers to determine unique patterns in the blood proteins. The team discovered that people with suspected long COVID have prolonged inflammation associated with changes in their immune cells and blood vessels. These changes may lead to problems in specific organs, like the brain and the heart, as reported by Western University.
Called “the plasma proteome,” the proteins are found in blood plasma and are released by cells that often play an important role in the body’s immune response to viruses. The research team is studying how those proteins adapt and change in long COVID.
The study
With a green light from the local Ethics Committee (Western University), the study team enrolled patients from London Health Sciences Center in London, Ontario, Canada and St. Joseph's including patients diagnosed with long COVID as well as acutely ill COVID-19 patients.
Upon diagnosis of long COVID, study patients were referred to a specialist clinic based on prolonged, diffuse symptoms according to the author's account in the Journal of Translational Medicine.
Conducting a series of tests including venous blood work, the study team analyzed patient plasma. COVID-19 patients were approached when they were admitted to the hospital or medical ward or intensive care unit. Healthy subjects were included—persons without disease, acute illness or any prescription medicine, but previously banked by the Translational Research Center in London, Ontario.
All samples in the study were matched by age and gender (e.g., long COVID patients to acutely ill patients to healthy controls).
Results
Unlike acutely ill COVID-19 patients as well as healthy subjects---both matched by age and sex—the long COVID outpatients evidenced natural killer cell redistribution with a dominant resting phenotype, opposite to active and neutrophils formed in extracellular traps.
The study team reports a possible “resetting of cell phenotypes” likely resulting from “prospective vascular events mediated by both angiopoietin (ANGPT1) and vascular endothelial growth factor-A (VEGFA).
Validating several biomarkers (ANGPT1, VEGFA, CCR7, CD56, citrullinated histone 3, elastase) the authors report also that “Signaling of transforming growth factor-?1 with probable connections to elevated EP/p300” pointed to both vascular inflammation as well as tumor necrosis factor- ? driven pathways. The authors suggested that the progression from acute COVID-19 to long COVID was “a vascular proliferative state associated with hypoxia-inducible factor 1 pathway.”
Fraser and Losef write that this “vascular-proliferative process predicted in Long-COVID might contribute to changes in the organ-specific proteome reflective of neurologic and cardiometabolic dysfunction.”
PI Point of View
Cristiana Losef, a research analyst at Children’s Health Research Institute (CHRI), a program of Lawson went on the record, “We used novel technologies for this study, allowing us to analyze more than 3,000 proteins in blood plasma at the same time with multiple patients.”
Losef continued:
“We used a novel bioinformatic pipeline, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), to analyze the proteins to determine the specific changes that occur in long COVID.”
Dr. Michael Nicholson, associate scientist at Lawson, and respirologist at St. Joseph’s Health Care London reports on the influence of this study, “Trying to understand this mechanism is quite important because it provides further insight into how patients are affected,” says Dr. Michael Nicholson. He continued, “This paper sheds further light on a possible mechanism that may provide insight into why some patients have certain symptoms.”
Michael Knauer, an associate scientist at Lawson shared for Western University, “The saved blood plasma samples we are using helped us determine the long-term responses to COVID-19; serial blood plasma samples from individuals that had a COVID-19 infection and now presumed long COVID will help us determine how proteins are changing over time.”
What’s the potential value from a therapeutic perspective?
Dr. Faser, a professor at Schulich Medicine, said the proteins discovered could act as a potential drug target. The team is now examining potential new drug therapies with the hopes of improving outcomes for these patients.
Fraser emphasized:
“When we identify these signaling patterns within the blood plasma, we can then take the information and screen drug databases to better understand which drugs would be best to target the changes we identified in long COVID patients.” Pointing to the potential of these findings, “With this understanding, the identified drugs may be used in future long COVID clinical trials.”
Key Point: This research, which used multiple state-of-the-art technologies, was enabled by existing expertise and infrastructure through Children’s Health Research Institute (CHRI). It reveals that the findings point to a “vascular-proliferative process in Long-COVID that is likely initiated either prior hypoxia (localized or systemic) and/or stimulatory factors (i.e., cytokines, chemokines, growth factors, angiotensin, etc.). Analyses of the plasma proteome, used as a surrogate for cellular signaling, unveiled potential organ-specific prognostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets.”
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7 July, 2023
Possible Link Between Coronavirus Vaccines & Symptoms of Long Covid
Since the rush to develop serums as a preventative against SARS-CoV-2, the issue of vaccine injury ensued almost immediately. Instances of post-jab effects from the AstraZeneca and Janssen occurred, and the latter’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) was eventually revoked by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Some patients got hurt by the AstraZeneca vaccine, originally developed at University of Oxford, and the FDA never accepted that serum in the U.S., not even on an emergency basis.
Eventually, the mRNA vaccine by both Pfizer and Moderna was introduced and distributed initially as the solution to the Covid problem. Unfortunately these vaccines also triggered injuries to a point where a hearing was conducted in the United States Senate to spotlight what has been labeled an “ignored” problem. But the problem is gaining acceptance and can no longer be ignored.
Long vax
For the second time now an article in Science points to troubles with the COVID-19 vaccines. This time the prominent publication looks into a rare link between coronavirus vaccines and Long Covid like illnesses. Such a point of view during the national public health emergency was heavily scrutinized, but now such a vantage gains acceptance.
Gretchen Vogel and Jennifer Couzin-Frankel point out in the latest Science piece that Covid vaccines “saved millions of lives” but like other vaccines, there are side effects. Issues like rare cases of abnormal blood clotting and heart inflammation that can certainly cause real trouble, albeit in rare instances.
But now there is another complication attributed to vaccine injury, and this is a debilitating group of symptoms resembling Long Covid which is “elusive.” Its link to the vaccine is unclear, and its diagnosis is ill defined, but it is now being referred to as “Long Vax.” It is gaining wider acceptance among scientists and doctors.
“You see one or two patients and you wonder if it’s a coincidence,” says Anne Louise Oaklander, MD, PhD a neurologist and researcher at Harvard Medical School. “But by the time you’ve seen 10, 20,” she continues. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
Cases appear to be rare with symptoms like persistent headaches, severe fatigue, and abnormal heart rate and blood pressure. They appear hours, days, or weeks after vaccination and are difficult to study. This is not the first instance where symptoms of Long Covid have surfaced after administration of the Covid vaccine. Some of the symptoms include brain fog as well as other clotting concerns such as deep vein thrombosis.
More symptoms
The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein which is used in the Covid vaccines can be one possible cause of the Long Covid symptoms post vaccination. Some people appear more vulnerable after both vaccination and infection with Covid.
Another symptom of vaccine injury is POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome) which has also occurred post Covid vaccination. A study of the syndrome found within 90 days after a shot, the rate of POTS-related symptoms was about 33% higher than in the 3 months before; 2581 people were diagnosed with POTS-related symptoms after vaccination, compared with 1945 beforehand.
“Even last year, I was a little bit cautious” about the link between POTS and vaccination, says Tae Chung, MD a neuromuscular physiatrist who runs the POTS clinic at Johns Hopkins University. “I didn’t have quantitative data to back it up, but now I feel like I do.” Still, Chung stresses that this paper and other data also suggest Covid-19 vaccines protect against POTS and other Long Covid symptoms, and he remains a strong advocate for vaccination.
As the world moves towards the next round of Covid vaccines, people who have not suffered from vaccine injury are probably safe. However, there is a need to help those who have endured damage from Covid vaccines.
Based on the tracking of studies and reports of COVID-19 vaccine injuries worldwide TrialSite estimates that anywhere from 0.0018 to 0.008 of a population receiving Covid vaccines struggles with some persisting vaccine-related side effects. Ones that impact quality of life severely enough to be considered a form of injury.
In the U.S. where at least 270 million people received at least one dose of the Covid serum, this means that just using this baseline anywhere from 486,000 to over 2 million people continue to struggle with some form of Covid vaccine-related condition. In some cases, it’s become debilitating and these patients are in desperate need of comprehensive care.
While most U.S. doctors still are not aware of the Covid serum-based contagion, many are now coming around. For example, a prominent Yale cardiologist, Harlan Krumholz, told the Science reporters that initially he was concerned that any anti-vaccine news would certainly fuel an anti-vaxx movement, one that becomes more vocal, and emboldened by the month.
Yet he and Akiko Iwasaki, a Yale immunologist, started to accept the reality that this condition, albeit rare, was occurring frequently enough that it required study. Hence just a year ago the two invited post vaccination patients into the LISTEN study, one that also includes long COVID patients.
But why don’t more doctors know about the vaccine injury situation? TrialSite’s founder Daniel O’Connor shared:
“During the national emergency in the U.S., as well as in other nations under the WHO led global emergency, health authorities seemed ultra-paranoid about vaccine hesitancy and thus, in many cases purposely sought to minimize any concerns arising out of Covid vaccination out of fear that they would not hit their targeted immunization numbers. This was a 70% fully vaccinated rate established initially by the WHO. The vaccines were to be a tool to help governments achieve herd immunity during the Covid pandemic but it turned out that while the countermeasures helped reduce morbidity and mortality in surges, they were not however, of the sterilizing type, meaning they could not control viral transmission.”
Of course, during Covid widespread censorship of both media and social networks now is commonplace knowledge for anyone that bothers to review the matter. Independent media platforms such as TrialSite reported on Covid vaccine injuries, and when sharing such articles on platforms like Facebook or Twitter, they would be summarily removed. It’s as if any criticism, even if true, were automatically categorized as anti-vaxx propaganda and abruptly rejected, terminated, and often individuals involved with the message, cancelled. So, in this way due to a confluence of forces during the national emergency, a free press, so vital in any vibrant democracy, was essentially severely disabled.
So, ask why more doctors aren’t that aware of the various conditions associated with the Covid serum, and well, the answer is in plain sight.
Worldwide Recognition
TrialSite has chronicled the Covid vaccine injury challenge in nations worldwide. Some countries have decent track records of fair and impartial reviews of vaccine injury compensation claims. Examples that come to mind include Taiwan and Singapore.
In Germany we reported that the European nation’s Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach recently acknowledged that while rare, injuries associated with Covid vaccines represented a mounting problem.
A large class action lawsuit was launched in Germany as well, with other comparable litigation occurring in English speaking countries, from the UK, to Australia and Canada.
Some Lingering Considerations
How many long Covid cases are actually long Vax? What’s the actual count of Covid vaccine injured in the U.S? With an all but useless emergency countermeasure vaccine compensation scheme (Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program) what will it take to bring the Covid vaccine injured into the standard vaccine compensation program called the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program?
Some broader issues are raised by all of this. Few are aware that a 1986 law under President Ronald Regan the U.S. government essentially waived all liability for vaccine injuries under the premise that otherwise the companies wouldn’t be incentivized to develop vaccines.
Are these universal protections for what is often large multinational corporations still as relevant as the number of annual vaccines on the childhood schedule have surged?
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Chinese Review of the Evidence—Long COVID Emerging as a Real Concern for Brain Health & Memory
Hanjun Zhao a microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong, School of Clinical Medicine and Qiulu Ding, at Shanghai Normal University review the state of the evidence associated with long COVID and impact on the brain and memory.
The prospect isn’t good. TrialSite has chronicled anywhere from 10% to 20% of SARS-CoV-2 infections may advance into long COVID, a condition increasingly places a heavy burden on not only health systems but also human society. There is a sufficient amount of research now providing the evidence that now should impact medical establishments and government—and the latter’s willingness to invest in necessary research.
The Hong Kong and Mainland China based authors’ piece, recently published in the journal Nature, reveal the very real risk of “brain damages” associated with COVID-19 including direct vial infection in the brain, immune disfunction and persistent viral infection all potentially impacting both brain and memory.
But much about what happens in the form of damage to the brain is still not well understood in the context of COVID-19 and long COVID. Specifically additional research is required to further understand long COVID pathogenesis.
And what about prevention strategies for reducing the risk of the impact of SARS-CoV-2 infection on longer term brain health, especially in children, with their additional vulnerabilities. They include:
Vaccination
Antivirals
Symptomatic treatment
Masking
Exercises
Good consistent sleep
Balanced, nutritious diet
The literature, according to the duo, raises particular concern about long COVID and the implications for children. Given the still developing brain, impact on study efficiency and disruption to self-confidence in the maturation process. How can human societies bolster their protection against SARS-CoV-2, particularly aiming to reduce the probability of long COVID in children?
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6 July, 2023
A much acclaimed speech about Covid
Australia: Newly-elected Member of the NSW Legislative Council, the Hon. John Ruddick, has given his maiden speech. It has been censored by YouTube but is widely available elsewhere, e.g. on Bitchute. I put up a critique of it yesterday so here is a Transcript:
Mr President, there was another occasion I was to speak … and the strict convention then (as now) was I be heard without interjection. That was my inaugural speech at the Young Liberal Council, a few blocks from here, in 1994. This was just before your time at that forum Mr President … but despite being a newbie, I launched into the most bitterly contentious factional brawl of the day. That ‘no interjection thing’ was wantonly discarded.
Thus began … 27 years of a highly dysfunctional relationship between the NSW Liberal Party and John Ruddick. This involved:
Multiple candidacies for the Young Liberal presidency.
Multiple candidacies for state and federal party president.
Endless violations of that party’s prohibition against talking to the media
Dozens of unsolicited emails to the entire membership about one righteous cause after another.
Multiple expulsion attempts (all deftly dodged).
Two constitutional reform crusades that went on for years … climaxing in apparent triumph … only to see the factions soon devise ways to skirt the new rules.
And to top it all off Mr President, in 2018 I wrote a book explaining how everything the Liberal Party organisation did was completely wrong.
But I do sincerely thank colleagues here … from my former party … for their warm welcome to this place … there is no surer way to mend years of factional strife than … quitting for good and joining a better party! I feel like Switzerland – peace with all.
I first heard of the Liberal Democrats in 2012 when Clinton Mead (here tonight) was elected mayor. I devoured the website … and said ‘Hallelujah!’ I was tempted to defect a few times but didn’t quite bite the bullet … still betting, the best bet for small government was reform of the Liberal Party.
Mid-2021 was the final straw. State and federal Liberal governments did four things that made me throw in the towel:
The authoritarian Covid police state … all over a bad flu. Bad flus are bad. Bad flus happen from time to time … but we treated Covid as though it was Ebola. The Covid fatality rate in NSW was 0.13 per cent … at the upper end of what we expect each winter, maybe a little bit more … but to call Covid a pandemic is an insult to pandemics. The average age of a Covid fatality in Australia is higher than average life expectancy. The NSW government locked citizens in quarantine just for being near a Covid positive person.
Many want to move on from Covid … I don’t. Elements in the media tell us, ‘There is another pandemic around the corner – it’ll be worse than Covid!’ I’m sceptical but if true … surely we need a Royal Commission into the last time a pandemic was declared … so we can learn.
Sweden alone resisted the hysteria … masks, lockdowns, and vaccines were recommended but not compelled … Sweden trusted its citizens … and Sweden has had Europe’s lowest increase in excess deaths over the past three years. I have respected Peter Costello and Tony Abbott most of my life – both have now spoken out forcefully about the madness of Covid … but the Liberal Party’s best … only found the courage to do so after the crisis had passed.
The police … and even the army and helicopters… forbade us to leave our homes to get sunshine, fresh air, and exercise … but that radical right-wing newspaper, the New York Times told us in July 2021 that not one person in the world has caught Covid in outdoor environment.
The second disappointment was … vaccine extremism. On June 26, 2021 the Liberal Premier of NSW announced a ‘two-week lockdown’… Two weeks morphed into many months and a diabolical catch was added – ‘we won’t let you out until you take multiple injections of not only a rushed vaccine but of an entirely new class of vaccine’.
Most relented … but everyone got Covid anyway. Last year, the NSW Health published weekly data showing, the fewer vaccines you had, the less likely you went to hospital or ICU. The fatality rate was similar for the vaxxed and the unvaxxed.
Since the vaccine rollout there has been a 15-20 per cent increase in excess deaths in nations like Australia that had mass mRNA injections. Is it the vaccine or is it the bitter hangover from locking people up for so long? We don’t know … but either way, it’s almost certainly the result of poor governance … yet another reason for a Royal Commission.
Much more here:
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/make-australian-politics-great-again/
***************************************************Judge rules Joe Biden administration trampled on free speech on social media
A US judge has issued an explosive ruling that accuses the Biden administration of “blatantly” breaching Americans’ First Amendment free speech rights, ordering a dramatic curtailment of communications between government and the social media giants.
A district court in Louisiana ordered the FBI, the White House, the department of health, and a slew of other agencies to cease all communication with social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
“If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” wrote Judge Terry Doughty in a 155 page judgement that observers expect the Biden administration to appeal.
A group of public health academics and the states of Missouri and Louisiana brought the case last year, claiming various arms of the US government had pressured Facebook and Twitter to censor or shadow ban posts about Covid19.
Posts of the plaintiffs that were removed included claims Covid19 came from a lab in Wuhan, that masks were ineffective, that lockdowns were excessively costly, that vaccine mandates were wrong, that Covid19 vaccines didn’t stop transmission and led to health risks for young people.
“The right to free speech is not a member of any political party and does not hold any political ideology. It is the purpose of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolisation of the market, whether it be by government itself or private licensee,” the judge wrote.
He said the plaintiffs “have presented substantial evidence in support of their claims that they were the victims of a far-reaching and widespread censorship campaign.”
“[T]he evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario … During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterised by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”
A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.
John Vecchione, senior litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a pro bono Washington law firm that brought the case on behalf of academics who said they had been censored, said the ruling was “unprecedented”.
“It’s pretty darn good; I’ve never seen anything like it, I expect the government to appeal it, but I think this thing will hold up given how detailed and specific the judge’s findings have been,” he told The Australian.
“The judge has crafted the injunction so the government can still do its national security stuff, such as alerting social media platforms to criminal speech”.
The decision follows a series of legal setbacks for the Biden administration by the Supreme Court and lower courts, including last week’s striking down of race-based affirmative action at universities and the administration’s policy to cancel some student loans.
In January last year the Supreme Court overturned the Biden administration’s order for all employers of large businesses to be vaccinated against Covid19. In August last year a Florida court quashed a separate mandate to wear masks on planes and trains.
“The judge obviously set this up to come out on the 4th July, he could be out BBQing but he’s still done it,” Mr Vecchione said, noting July 4th is a federal holiday in the US.
The verdict comes as governments in Australia and the UK introduce legislation to boost government’s power to compel social media companies to censor viewpoints deemed misinformation and disinformation
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COVID-19 Vaccine Injury Lawsuits Commence in Canada: Pfizer Vax Victim Seeks $10.5M
It was just a matter of time before more lawsuits would be filed in Canada against what many have labeled a coercive, draconian overreach by both the national Canadian government as well as by provincial governments.
Most recently out of Lethbridge, Alberta, a 47-year-old Vaccine Injured Mother filed a $10.5 Million Lawsuit against the Government and the CBC for Misinformation and Negligence about COVID-19 Vaccines. The plaintiff, a healthy young woman, experienced severe adverse events after receiving her second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA COVID-19 vaccine (BNT162b2).
TrialSite covered the COVID-19 vaccine-injured woman’s story first chronicled in local media including Western Standard, when she was vindicated with at least, some compensation by the Canadian government.
But the meager sum by no means compensates Carrie Sakamoto for the injuries sustained due to a novel vaccine product, rushed to market and promoted in what the plaintiff argues in an inappropriate manner. Sakamoto and the nonprofits supporting her want to take a stand in response to the pandemic response.
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5 July, 2023
YouTube Censors Maiden Political Speech in Australia—Why? Challenge to the COVID-19 Narrative
An Australian’s politician’s maiden speech to Parliament was quickly taken down by YouTube, but the content has gone viral via Twitter and can be found on LinkedIn and other social media such as Rumble.
While on YouTube all sorts of content that could be considered censorable for violence, adult content and the like circulates with ease, newbie Liberal Democrat John Ruddick just found out what many in the media have known for quite a while now: speak out about COVID-19 and you will pay, one way or another.
Australia’s libertarians just got a healthy reminder as to why such a party even exists in the first place. The party paid in this case by having their member’s maiden speech removed from YouTube, but the great irony is that they’ll benefit with even more popularity because of YouTube’s decision.
Based out of New South Wales, Ruddick had been a member of the Australian Liberal party, which are center right in political positions, but he departed that mainstream party in 2021, in protest to that party’s position on COVID-19. Opting for a libertarian-minded party (Liberal Democrat), Ruddick, who launched a mortgage brokerage in 2020 called JR Mortgages, just learned how YouTube censorship works in the age of COVID-19.
In the speech, the libertarian-leaning politician blasted his government for extreme overreach, and although he raised four major critiques of his current governing class, it was his critique of COVID-19 that triggered the YouTube “rules” involving alleged misinformation.
Backed by an unfolding, dynamic and often irrational set of policies, instructions and guidelines, just one wrong word may trigger a YouTube algorithmic review. Based on what we have learned from the Twitter files (government agencies for example had and likely still do have backdoor access to flag certain content, for example), social media is anything but social, and for that matter, neutral.
So, what did Ruddick say that warrants such draconian action?
It all comes down to COVID-19 and the politician’s gall to express what more people by the day are thinking about but for the most part, dare not say.
With a death rate of 0.13% according to the politician, Ruddick committed a blasphemy by calling SARS-CoV-2 a bad flu. It’s not the flu, so technically, that’s misinformation.
The SARS-CoV-2 pathogen, although the case fatality rates now fall down to flu levels (or even lower in some cases), triggered the worst pandemic in a century. With nearly seven million deaths associated with this virus, we cannot conveniently put this pathogen in the influenza category. To start, these viruses are quite different.
This author suggests that for SARS-CoV-2, the evidence points to a human engineered pathogen that more than likely escaped inadvertently, via human error in the lab at Wuhan Institute of Virology. In a memo sent to us with the seal of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a US Marine Corps Major and Commandant of the Marine Corps Fellows DARPA wrote that SARS-CoV-2 is an American developed pathogen. But was it a forgery? It was sent to us via the controversial Project Veritas. We had serious doubts. So, I personally sent an email to DARPA, asking them to please verify the artifact was a forgery.
The DoD’s research agency Chief of Communications could not confirm nor deny the authenticity of the memo’s origins. Frankly, these agencies have policies in place to now share any information. So, why did the DARPA communications lead write back to us “The agency has never funded EcoHealth Alliance directly, nor indirectly as a subcontractor”?
The DARPA communication lead went out of her way with a startup media venture (TSN) to disassociate the DOD research unit from EcoHealth Alliance--known for its focus on coronavirus research; its relationship with Dr. Anthony Fauci and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID); along with the evidence suggesting that the nonprofit served as an intermediary to outsource gain-of-function research halted temporarily in the United States, over to the Wuhan lab.
Of course, we have known for a long while now that there is likely some form of cover up associated with SARS-CoV-2. We cannot be 100% certain. Hence, we cannot claim for certain, and this is why this piece is categorized as an opinion.
Ruddick does forcefully announce he has no intention of forgetting about COVID-19. Noting that other public health emergencies may follow, he calls for a Royal Commission to investigate government performance during COVID-19.
No, Ruddick does not just want to forget about COVID-19, sweeping this part of our history under the carpet, especially not in the case of Australia, a nation with a particularly authoritarian-leaning response. Australia’s response fell under the more extreme of categories, especially among Western cultures—leaning toward the zero-tolerance COVID policy invented in the People’s Republic of China.
The World Health Organization and China were quite cozy at the start of the pandemic, likely one reason why former President Donald Trump pulled American membership. This author didn’t agree at all with Trump’s approach, especially not at the onset of a pandemic, but maybe he knew something.
Reminding Australians that police and even their helicopters were used to enforce rigid pandemic lockdowns—for example, stopping people from going out and getting sunshine, exercise and the like--the evidence points to a significant overreach of government in Australia during COVID-19. Ruddick points to Sweden as a more rational place, where COVID-19 era policies were recommended but not enforced. Ruddick claimed that the Nordic country’s excess death rate is among the lowest. They listened to their people.
On mass COVID-19 vaccination, Ruddick claimed that the one-two pandemic punch Down Under included first, the lockdowns and second, the promise to lift those draconian measures with jabs from what the politician classifies as a rushed and novel class of product. It’s hard to disagree.
TrialSite was the first media to publish articles backed by various evidence suggesting that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine products were in fact, rushed---how could they not be, as they were accelerated under emergency conditions, as countermeasures in the first declared pandemic in a century.
Various potential shortcuts were taken, such as bypassing traditional pre-IND enabling studies as we discovered from European Medicines Agency documents. See “Did Pfizer Fail to Perform Industry Standard Animal Testing Prior to Initiation of mRNA Clinical Trials.”
And then there were the email leaks at EMA revealing concern of some key people there that the vaccines were being rushed. This author personally reviewed information in association with Brook Jackson’s lawsuit against Pfizer and the trial site network Ventavia—such quality mishaps would have shut down any normal study. And in fact, similar mishaps did spur a pause recently during Pfizer’s Phase 3 Lyme disease study.
Reviews of much of the academic and government data (with many selections published in TrialSite) point to the reality that the vaccine products did in fact, help reduce severe infection and death.
Unfortunately, readers and audiences have become incredibly polarized, with one major group not wanting to hear any criticism of the COVID-19 vaccines, and the other not believing that these products have helped at all. In this author’s opinion, both are wrong. Rarely in life are such complex matters so easily reduced to one or the other. It is a false dilemma, led by emotion, material interests and at this point, even ideology.
Regardless, the durability and breadth of the COVID-19 vaccines raised serious concern, meaning the overall effectiveness of these products became questionable to us by early 2021.
That’s why we are up to the fifth dose (third booster) in 2.5 years. No, it’s not correct to blame it on the dynamically mutating pathogen. Top virologists already were aware the virus would mutate like influenza mutates. The vaccines were not of the sterilizing type, meaning they could not effectively stop infection, and thus, forcefully control the spread, especially with the onset of Omicron which had evolved to more easily evade both vaccine and infection-induced antibodies.
The Australian politician pointed out in his now censored speech that most of his fellow Australians have had enough of the vaccines, and that mostly everyone knows someone that has experienced some kind of side effect. Pointing out that the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), Australia’s drug and vaccine regulatory body, has received 137,000 adverse event reports, he emphasized that that is likely a severe undercount and that traditionally, only 137 adverse event reports could trigger a product recall, or at least a warning.
At TrialSite, we estimate that between half a million and a couple million people in the United States experienced some kind of material problem with the COVID-19 vaccines, leading to quality-of-life impact. With 270 million fully vaccinated with the two-dose series, that comes out to an injury rate of 0.185% to 0.74%. Regardless, this represents a lot of people that need help. This is why I formed a partnership with React19. I felt we had a duty to help. The vaccines in Australia and in the United States were in many cases, mandated as part of employment requirements, even if the vaccine didn’t stop the viral transmission. This represents an overreach of government, and Ruddick is correct to call for a Royal Commission to investigate the whole affair.
Regarding the TGA, Ruddick raised the specter of regulatory capture, charging that 97% of the agency’s budget comes from the pharmaceutical industry. A review of the TGA Cost Recovery and trade press suggests this claim is likely in the ballpark.
An Australian industry lobby, Medicines Australia, pushes for more direct government funding of TGA, given 93% is funded by industry, which isn’t happy about TGA price increases. Calling out conditions ripe for conflict of interest, how can we disagree: with at least 93% of that regulatory agency’s costs covered by industry.
Ruddick went on to the ultimate of taboo topics: Ivermectin. TrialSite methodically tracked ivermectin studies at the start of the pandemic, starting with the now famous article pointing to how the antiparasitic drug zapped SARS-CoV-2 in a cell culture in a lab environment. In fact, I can assure all that TSN is likely the reason why so many people learned about this drug so fast. At one point during the pandemic before we introduced the paywall, we had hundreds of thousands of people per day on some days reading about the unfolding ivermectin research that wasn’t covered anywhere else. Since then, lots of media, especially right-wing leading media and various Substack authors continuously evangelize the drug.
I personally interviewed physician-scientists all over the world, and even funded a documentary about the adoption of the drug early on in the pandemic in Peru. In Pierre Koy’s “The War on Ivermectin,” the co-founder of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) Alliance cites the TSN documentary but doesn’t spend much time about how he learned about the drug’s use around the world in the early parts of the pandemic. That of course, was TSN.
Back to Ruddick, who referred to the “wonder drug” that led to an ultimate Nobel Prize in 2015. Pointing to the fact that the drug has been prescribed 4 billion times, the Australian Liberal Democrat charged that industry seeking to monetize the pandemic shrewdly and methodically went to work pushing governments to denounce the product; branding it as only a horse dewormer and the like. We at TSN know a whole lot about this topic, producing hundreds of articles tracking studies while covering industry and government-led initiatives to discredit the drug, and the like.
We know that the World Health Organization directly censored out the ivermectin contribution to the Uttar Pradesh public health success the agency celebrated in their press release, “Uttar Pradesh Going the Last Mile to Stop COVID-19.”
Is ivermectin a miracle drug in the context of COVID-19? No, it is not. It is not a cure, nor can it consistently produce clinical results in the real world. But did it help a lot of people according to many studies and off label real world use? We have data suggesting that it most certainly did. It has been shown in the lab context to inhibit the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen, and many dozens of studies demonstrate positive impact (of course some large prominent studies also evidence a lack of effect).
In Bangladesh, doctors such as Dr. Tarek Alom referred to the regimen of ivermectin, doxycycline and zinc as the “people’s drug.” But this was part of a specific regimen at a specific point in time. Evidence suggests that the ivermectin regimen struggled with the mutating SARS-CoV-2 pathogen, going from earlier strains to Delta and then to Omicron. Many reports reveal a mixed to negative track record with the drug’s use. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t worked from time to time.
In the rich, developed world, targeted vaccines and engineered pharmaceuticals would be the answer—and that’s essentially what happened. But TSN documented what essentially amounted to a coordinated, orchestrated attempt by industry and government to smear the drug.
In Australia, as we reported, the TGA blocked general practitioners from even accessing the drug. This ironically, was recently lifted with the end of the public health emergency.
John Ruddick’s maiden speech may have been censored on YouTube, but the content is available elsewhere including Twitter. Listen to it for yourself. Whether you agree with part of it, all of it or none of it, is the answer to censor the material?
Is that how a society advances, by censoring, cancelling and erasing all opposition? What if a particular position is 80% correct? 50%, correct? 25%, correct? The biggest news media make mistakes all the time, and during COVID-19, as we called out on in responses to flagrant hit pieces, the most prominent media became convenient channels for government and industry—they directed the emergency countermeasure narratives for the masses.
Ironically, the act of censoring others leads to more curiosity, or fear, uncertainty and even anger, thus fueling more polarization and potentially, even forms of extremism. We observe this blossoming in places like Substack, where a complete lack of any standards and accountability essentially allows for a free-for-all that only further accelerates the mass dissemination of misinformation.
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4 July, 2023
Witnesses Recount Large Surge of COVID-19 Deaths in Their Hometowns Across China Last December
Several Chinese immigrants who recently arrived in the United States can now describe what they witnessed last December when a severe wave of the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in China.
The sudden lifting of the stringent lockdowns on Dec. 7 is believed to have prompted a nationwide infection of COVID from the end of last year to the first quarter of this year due to a lack of preparedness, medical resources, and, most importantly, necessary information to the public.
There have been reports about long queues in and out of funeral homes and crematories across China. Crematories operated around the clock and recruited more staffers. Families had to pay higher expenses or go to rural regions to have their deceased loved ones cremated more quickly.
Hospitals were overwhelmed, and many patients reportedly developed white lungs, with white patches showing in a CT scan indicating areas of inflammation.
Now several new immigrants coming from different regions of China are free to speak out about COVID deaths they saw in their hometowns, revealing a sad scenario at the time and exposing a situation that the communist regime has been covering up.
Corpses Piled Up in Rental Residence: Chengdu City
A former Chinese lawyer who now lives in the United States told the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times that a landlord in Chengdu, a major populous city in China’s southwestern Sichuan Province, leaked to his relatives that he had eight corpses in one of his rental residences.
“The neighbors were scared to know about the corpses and asked him to dispose of them immediately,” the lawyer told The Epoch Times on June 21.
The lawyer wanted to stay anonymous for safety. He arrived in the United States in early 2023.
The rental residence is near Lotus Pool Wholesale Market, the seventh largest of its kind in China, and there are two crematories in the adjacency of the market. So neighbors told the elderly landlord to send the corpses to the crematories.
“Both crematories were full,” the old man told his neighbors.
Neighbors had to complain to the local police and civil affairs administration, and the old man finally transferred the corpses out of the rental residence to a place that the neighbors knew nothing of.
The lawyer said that several people he knew passed away at the end of December last year.
One of them was a man in his late thirties whose wife woke up to find that her husband passed away in the evening abruptly. The wife also had a severe cough at the time.
Two relatives living in a local village also passed away in late December, the lawyer said.
“Too many people died in late December last year,” the lawyer said.
‘Horrific and Scary:’ Xi’an City
Hu Yang, a former employee of a Chinese state-owned company in Xi’an, an ancient capital city in China’s northwest, came to the United States in March this year.
Hu said it was “horrific and scary” in Xi’an City after the municipal government relaxed its zero-COVID lockdowns in early December.
“Immediately following the lifting of the lockdowns, many people tested positive for COVID, and many with underlying conditions died,” Hu told The Epoch Times on June 21.
According to Hu, seven residents in his residential compound died soon after the relaxation of the lockdowns.
He said he couldn’t get any antipyretics from any of the pharmacies in the city. “It was very horrific and scary, and we had no idea why there was no medication available in the pharmacies.”
Overseas Chinese reportedly bought medicines to send to China from their residence country.
Worried as he was, Hu’s grandfather was infected by COVID in December and developed white lung syndrome. The old man passed away within a week after he was hospitalized.
Hu’s uncle handled the cremation of the grandfather. He told Hu: “The crematorium was so crowded that people had to wait for days for cremation.” Hu’s uncle paid an extra $4,000 to have the body burned without having to wait for a long period.
Overwhelmed crematories across China reportedly had to work around the clock to cope with the influx of bodies and actively recruited more staffers amid the largest-scale pandemic outbreak in December.
Coffins Sold Out of Stock: Jiuquan City
He Yu was a water deliveryman in Jiuquan, a city of barely one million people in China’s northwestern Gansu Province before he came to the United States in April this year.
He had to travel to multiple residential compounds to deliver drinking water to his clients.
“There was an obvious increase of funerals in almost all the residential compounds in December,” He told The Epoch Times in an interview on June 21.
“I bumped into funerals in my compound every day, and I saw many funerals in rural areas as well,” He said, adding that local coffin shops were out of stock.
“People had to queue up for cremation of their beloved ones who passed away,” He said.
Commoners Had No Access to ICUs: Nanning City
“Ordinary people such as retired teachers in Nanning were left to die without getting proper treatment,” Mr. Zhang (pseudonym) told The Epoch Times on June 21.
Zhang was from Nanning, the capital city of China’s southwestern Guangxi region. He arrived in the United States early in 2023.
“Once infected [by COVID], elderly people with underlying conditions had nowhere to go but to stay at home. The majority would literally wait for their death; only a few lucky people could survive the pandemic,” Zhang added that ICUs were a place ordinary people wouldn’t even dream of.
“Local people in Nanning know that ICUs are not available to ordinary people because there are not enough ICUs even for the powerful and wealthy people. But the media never report on this,” Zhang said.
“Ordinary people are not eligible to be included in the death toll,” Zhang said, blasting the communist regime for ignoring the life of ordinary Chinese people.
“As long as the CCP is still in power, all kinds of tragedies will bound to break out,” said Zhang.
‘Deaths Heavily Underreported’: WHO Official
The Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs ceased to release cremation data for the fourth quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2023, and the publication of the fourth quarter data last year was postponed to June 9 this year, just days earlier before the publication of this year’s first quarter data.
The CCP’s civil affairs watchdog had been releasing cremation data on a quarterly basis since 2007. The missing of such information from the previous two quarterly reports triggers public speculation that the actual death tolls have been high.
“WHO still believes that deaths are heavily underreported from China,” said Dr. Michael Ryan, Executive Director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, on Jan. 11, 2023.
Yuhong Dong, a former senior medical scientific expert and pharmacovigilance leader at Novartis Headquarters in Switzerland and a senior medical columnist for The Epoch Times, wrote on Dec. 29, 2022, that the pandemic outbreak last December in China “has three distinct features: unprecedented speed, an unprecedentedly high number of infected people, and unprecedented severity.”
A leaked memo from China’s National Health Commission revealed that the regime estimated 250 million infections in the first 20 days of December 2022.
Peter Zhang, a researcher on political economy in China and East Asia, said China’s COVID death toll is a “myth.”
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Applying Set Theory & Evidence-Based Medicine Shatters Paper Suggesting COVID-19 Vaccines Saved 14m Lives
Evaluation of effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccination: Set Theory, rigorous statistical methods and actual evidence-based medicine demonstrates that the paper published in The Lancet claiming that COVID-19 vaccines saved 14 million lives is incorrect, based on completely flawed methods and data.
From the perspective of set theory, the world population can be understood as a set of A with N elements. With COVID-19 vaccination, set A was divided into two subsets: subset vaccinated and subset unvaccinated. When evaluating the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination the entire set A has to be put under the evaluation. If one evaluates only the subset vaccinated, this is a fatal mistake that generates erroneous results.
Our study team inspected several articles which claimed that COVID-19 vaccines saved lives, and all are proving the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination only on the subset of vaccinated.
A huge part of unvaccinated elements N of set A are ignored, and not taken into consideration as it would not exist. This is an unacceptable methodological error, leading to flawed output.
The most rigorous statistical methodology involves the calculation of the mortality rate of the subset vaccinated, then comparing that data with the subset unvaccinated. If COVID-19 vaccines saved lives, the vaccinated subset should have a lower mortality rate than the unvaccinated subset. Why all research on COVID-19 vaccines’ effectiveness has not used this most appropriate statistical methodology remains an open question.
The average mortality worldwide between 2015-2019 equals 56,87 million persons. In 2020, 63,16 million persons died which equals 6,30 million persons higher than the average in 2015-19. In 2021 69,25 million persons died which is 12,28 million more than the average in 2015-19.
In 2020, there were no COVID-19 vaccines, and the COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) represented the primary cause of excess mortality. In 2021 governments implemented the mass COVID-19 vaccination drive.
However, our data reveals that 6 million more died in 2021 than in 2020. One could expect that in 2021, fewer people would die than in 2020. This is also a conclusion of The Lancet article “Global impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination: a mathematical modeling study”
The authors in that report claimed that 14.4 million lives were saved in 2021, thanks to COVID-19 vaccination. Considering that the main reason for excess mortality in 2020 was the COVID-19 virus, this would mean that in 2021, 14.4 fewer people would die than in 2020.
The logic implies that in 2021, 55 million people would die, which is close to the average mortality from 2015-2019. But unfortunately, the opposite is, in fact, the reality; in 2021, about 6 million more people actually died than in 2020. The discrepancy between the mathematical evaluation in The Lancet piece and the real-world statistical data equals approximately 20 million persons.
This represents a fundamental problem that no academic scholars seem to want to address. Why? Because when mathematical evaluation is not fitting with the statistical data that are an essential element of evidence-based medicine it points to an error in the mathematical modeling.
To satisfy the scientific credibility of this article the authors should re-evaluate their mathematical model and reviewers should maintain rigorous peer review which always places primary importance on the validity of statistical data.
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3 July, 2023
The Right Way to Talk About Vaccines: Or we could just go on calling each other Hitler forever
The article below does highlight a huge problem: Dubious appeals to "science" in connection with Covid and much else have discredited real science. I regularly go to bed with an anti-vaxxer and I am at a loss to make ANY scientific claim to her. She dismisses all science as corrupt. And since I myself often write critically about various scientific claims, I am lost for a retort. Making the case that most of what parades as science is rubbish but some is not is just too difficult a case to make
My lifelong project has been to distinguish valid scientific proposals from invalid ones. And there is so much bad science in the academic journals themselves that these days I find more to criticize -- on orthodox scientific grounds -- than ever. I have been putting up critiques of apparently scientific claims in the academic journals since 1970 but the prevalence of bad science has got worse rather than better over that time. Some of my papers are still widely read after many years so I may have had some impact but I have been swimming against the tide.
So the corruption of science that we have seen during the Covid events has undermined acceptance of science generally and there seems to be no easy way back from that
You know who asks questions about vaccines? Students. Teachers. Researchers. Anyone who’s learning about biology asks questions about vaccines. We’re all born with immune systems, but we’re not born knowing how they work.
You know who else asks questions about vaccines? Nazis, supposedly. Some of the people opposing open debate on vaccines claim that discussing the evidentiary justification for mandatory injections is comparable to denying the Holocaust.
Though it’s not like vaccine opponents are uniformly more moderate in their rhetoric. Because you know who is also being called a Nazi? The medical professionals who believe in vaccines. Some of the people opposing vaccines compare doctors with needles to Josef Mengele.
This is the quality of much contemporary discourse around vaccines. It’s low quality. But rather than argumentum ad Hitlerum ad infinitum, let’s take a deep breath, calm down, and think about a constructive path forward.
For now, COVID is over. But people are still arguing about it. Perhaps they should, because the censorship meant they couldn’t really argue during it.
The latest round of politicized tribal skirmishing kicked off earlier this month after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared on the influential Joe Rogan podcast and repeated some of his oft-made claims about the adverse health effects of vaccines. In response, the vaccine scientist Peter Hotez, himself a former guest on Rogan’s podcast, lamented the “awful” appearance and endorsed an article criticizing Spotify, the platform that hosts the show, for failing “to stem Joe Rogan’s vaccine misinformation.”
That’s how the battle lines were drawn by Hotez and his supporters: The good, responsible people are those who support censorship while the bad guys go around spreading “misinformation.”
Rogan had been stung by previous attempts to cancel his Spotify deal, so he responded assertively, offering to donate $100,000 to charity if Hotez would come on his show and debate RFK Jr. His donation was matched by dozens of people, including hedge fund magnate Bill Ackman, tech founder Jae Kwon, and venture capitalist Jason Calacanis, till the purse reached a total of $2.6 million—demonstrating a surprising level of counterelite support for public debate on this topic.
However, despite starting this fight, and despite his past appearance on Rogan, Hotez declined to engage. Instead, he retreated to MSNBC to give soundbites on how bad soundbites are. His backers in legacy media outlets likewise wrote pieces discussing how bad it was for nonexperts to discuss vaccines outside the confines of a peer-reviewed publication … oblivious to the irony that they themselves were nonexperts discussing vaccines outside the confines of a peer-reviewed publication.
So that’s where we’ve landed. Two tribes that just yell at each other from their own redoubts. As I’ve written elsewhere, I’m skeptical that this impasse gets resolved; I think it just gets worse. But let me nevertheless sketch out a way that it could be resolved, if we have the political will to pursue a better path forward.
First, I’m as pro-biotech as it gets. If you want legacy credentials, I have them. I hate listing this stuff, but here goes: I’m a Ph.D. who taught bioinformatics at Stanford, was named to MIT’s TR35, published 20-plus papers in genomics, co-founded a successful diagnostics company, and have profitably backed a wide variety of biotech companies from tiny startups to multibillion dollar unicorns.
Moreover, I was sticking my neck out to raise the alarm on COVID back in early 2020 when establishment journalists were appealing to authority and calling anyone who even mentioned it paranoid racists. I was calling for funding vaccines before most people even saw the coronavirus as a problem. And I believe that the mRNA vaccines used for COVID are an incredible technical achievement.
But after three years of official misinformation, I completely understand why people are distrustful of the U.S. establishment on the pandemic. We’ve just seen too many Orwellian U-turns—from insisting that masks don’t work to making them mandatory, from claiming the lab leak theory was crazy to admitting it’s possible—to take any assertion on faith at this point.
In God we trust; all others must bring data. Otherwise we’re in thrall to the other big thing Eisenhower warned about—not just the military-industrial complex, but the scientific-technological elite:
In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
After all, most people aren’t card-carrying scientists, but they are now very directly downstream of scientists making decisions on their behalf. It’s completely reasonable to ask questions before taking a mandatory injection—what happened to my body, my choice? And if you can’t question the decisions of professors that you didn’t elect, who have career tenure, and who can’t be fired … is that really a democracy?
Thing is, contrary to the caricature, much vaccine resistance in the U.S. came from ordinary people. For example, many of the vaccine-hesitant early on were African Americans, who have long criticized the health system, and who saw the shadow of Tuskegee in the COVID shot. And almost 50% of civil servants were hesitant to take the vaccine at one point. This shows how deep the skepticism was. Whatever the establishment did left millions of people unconvinced.
Again, I think this is an irreparable cleavage that has more to do with tribes than vaccines, but let’s pretend it’s a scientific issue. How could we address it?
There are at least three approaches.
The first is to just do whatever the establishment says. To call anyone with questions a conspiracy theorist. To refuse debate. To demonize them as individuals. This is called “trusting the science.”
The second approach is to do the opposite of whatever the establishment says. If they say that a virus causes disease, well, by tarnation, you’re against the germ theory of disease itself. This is Carl Sagan’s demon-haunted world: where people conclude that because so many establishment scientists have been corrupted, that we must distrust science itself.
The third approach isn’t to blindly “trust the science” nor to distrust science, but to replicate the science. Here’s what an imaginary vaccine debate might look like, between a vaccine proponent and skeptic, from the perspective of a proponent.
First, review the so-called observational studies. These are population-level studies where you compare the health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated people across different cohorts (by age, gender, ethnicity, vaccine type, virus strain, and the like) and see what the graphs look like. The data should show better outcomes for vaccinated people relative to the nonvaccinated. It should be explained in the simplest possible language. And all raw data should be made publicly available for reanalysis, perhaps with suitable anonymization which is actually supposed to already be scientific convention.
Then, if people still disagree, maybe you can conduct what’s called a challenge trial, where group A opts in to being exposed to live virus and group B to getting the vaccine. Of course, this involves risk, but (a) this is actually what science is [namely controlled experiments] and (b) this is already being done de facto at the level of society as a whole, with millions of people exposing themselves to a live virus. So for those who truly believe that exposure to the vaccine is worse than exposure to COVID itself, this would be the experiment to resolve it. Just as military volunteers take calculated risks for society’s defense, the people volunteering for a challenge trial would take a risk for the benefit of society’s health.
Finally, it’s a bit sci-fi, but maybe you can eventually do something with what are called “organoids,” where you don’t need to expose an individual to either live virus or vaccine right away. The idea is that you take a tissue sample, use it to establish a patient-derived organoid, and test your drugs on that—like taking a microscopic bit of skin and using it as a proxy for the patient themselves.
I know this is getting technical, but that’s good. It starts putting us into the realm of scientific discussion, as befits a serious matter of public health. Of course, others might propose a different debate structure and that’s fine, too.
So, why don’t we try an approach like this? Don’t let anyone tell you it’s because of science, as if denouncing Joe Rogan for clicks was more scientific than running experiments. Rather, it’s because everything is tribal warfare now and every issue is politicized. Even if it should be positive-sum, like a dispassionate matter of public health, the issue is made negative-sum. Yet the genuinely scientific option is still on the table—the respectful discussion and the reproducible experiment.
Or, you know, everyone can just call each other Hitler forever.
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2 July, 2023
A ‘World Gone Mad’—The Cost of COVID Lockdowns
The days of COVID lockdowns may be behind us for the time being, but a multinational academic team has conducted a broad analysis of government pandemic actions and found them to be “a global policy failure of gigantic proportions,” often driven by state and media-sponsored fear campaigns.
Their findings, published in a book titled “Did Lockdowns Work? The Verdict on Covid Restrictions,” are based on a worldwide meta-analysis that screened nearly 20,000 studies to determine the benefits and harms from health diktats, including lockdowns, school closures, and mask mandates. According to economist Steve Hanke, one of the co-authors, one of the things that drove countries into a state of panic and draconian policies was reliance on mortality models from sources like the Imperial College of London (ICL) that generated “fantasy numbers” showing that millions of deaths could be averted by instituting crippling society-wide lockdowns.
Prior to the COVID outbreak, “most countries did have a plan to deal with pandemics,” Hanke told The Epoch Times, “but after the Imperial College of London’s ‘numbers’ were published, those plans were, in a panic, thrown out the window.
“In each case, the same pattern was followed: flawed modeling, hair-raising predictions of disaster that missed the mark, and no lessons learned,” he said. “The same mistakes were repeated over and over again and were never challenged.”
Hanke is an economics professor and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise. The other co-authors of the study are Jonas Herby, special adviser at the Center for Political Studies in Copenhagen, and Lars Jonung, an economics professor at Lund University in Sweden.
While the meta-analysis surveyed thousands of studies, it found that only 22 of them contained useful data for the study. The report focused on mortality rates and lockdown policies during 2020.
“This study is the first all-encompassing evaluation of the research on the effectiveness of mandatory restrictions on mortality,” Jonung stated. “It demonstrates that lockdowns were a failed promise. They had negligible health effects but disastrous economic, social and political costs to society.”
According to Hanke, the ICL models predicted that lockdowns would prevent between 1.7 million and 2.2 million deaths in the United States. The meta-analysis, however, indicates that lockdowns prevented between 4,345 and 15,586 deaths in the United States. This fits a pattern of overstated predictions from the ICL, which health officials either didn’t know about or overlooked, he said.
A ‘Long History of Fantasy Numbers’
“There is a long history of fantasy numbers generated by the epidemiological models used by the Imperial College of London,” Hanke said. “Its dreadful record started with the UK foot-and-mouth disease epidemic in 2001, during which the Imperial College models predicted that daily case incidences would peak at 420. But, at the time, the number of incidences had already peaked at just over 50 and was falling.”
In 2002, the ICL predicted that up to 150,000 people in the UK would die from mad cow disease; in 2019, the BBC reported that the number of UK deaths from mad cow disease was 177. In 2005, Neil Ferguson, who led the ICL, predicted up to 200 million deaths from the H5N1 bird flu, which had at that time killed 65 people in Asia; according to the World Health Organization (WHO), between 2003 and 2023, 458 people died from H5N1 worldwide.
The ICL’s habit of “crying wolf” did not prevent the BBC, once COVID-19 struck, from relying on its data to broadcast dire weekly warnings to its 468 million listeners, in 42 languages worldwide.
“Maybe the Imperial College models are ideal fear-generating machines for politicians and governments that crave more power,” Hanke said. “H.L. Mencken put his finger on this phenomenon long ago when he wrote that ‘the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins.’”
While there were some U.S. states that never issued lockdown orders, including Wyoming, Utah, South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Arkansas, Sweden was the rare national exception that refrained from forcing people into lockdowns. American governors who refused to lock down their states were harshly criticized in the media, which predicted that this would cause mass deaths.
A ‘National Stay-at-Home Order’
In April 2020, under the Trump administration, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had lifted lockdowns in his state, telling NBC’s “Today” show that federal guidelines should be taken as “a national stay-at-home order.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN at the time that, regarding lockdowns, “the tension between federally mandated versus states’ rights to do what they want is something I don’t want to get into. But if you look at what’s going on in this country, I just don’t understand why we’re not doing that.”
Left-leaning states like California and New York kept draconian regulations in place longer than most, with New York City even setting up a system of vaccine passports that prevented the unvaccinated from entering public places like restaurants, bars, theaters, and museums. While America’s federal system, which vested health authority with states, prevented the U.S. government from forcing lockdowns on the entire country, President Joe Biden issued vaccine and mask mandates once he took office that were ultimately ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court.
For Sweden, however, the protections from these types of health mandates were written into their constitution, called the Regeringsform.
This document reads: “Everyone shall be protected in their relations with the public institutions against deprivations of personal liberty. All Swedish citizens shall also in other respects be guaranteed freedom of movement within the Realm and freedom to depart the Realm.” This law permits exceptions only for convicts and military conscripts; in addition, Swedish law does not allow the government to declare a state of emergency during peacetime.
“Also important in the Swedish Covid case was the lead public health official, Dr. Anders Tegnell,” Hanke said. “His views on public health were the antipode of those held by the Covid Czar in the U.S., Dr. Anthony Fauci.”
In a September 2020 interview, Tegnell described lockdowns as “using a hammer to kill a fly,” and said of the rush among virtually every other country to impose them, “it was as if the world had gone mad.”
Sweden also did not impose mask mandates, while at the other extreme, Australia arrested citizens who went maskless or congregated outside, and Austria made it a criminal offense to refuse the COVID vaccine. At the time, the New York Times called Sweden a “pariah state” and “the world’s cautionary tale.”
Some of the differences between modeled and actual results come down to what Hanke calls the “hot stove effect.”
“When someone is warned that a stove is hot, they voluntarily keep their hands off the stove,” he said, citing evidence that, if credibly warned, people tend to take precautions without being forced.
A Move to Centralize Authority
And yet, rather than allowing citizens to make their own health decisions, most governments were united in forcing populations to follow behaviors that had not been recommended during pandemics up to that point. This year, 194 nations have come together to negotiate a global pandemic accord and amendments to International Health Regulations (IHR) that would centralize pandemic response within the WHO.
There is little in the pandemic accord or the IHR amendments regarding civil liberties and the personal protections against state abuses contained in the Swedish Regeringsform, such as the right to free speech, travel, and association, and nothing regarding the right to refuse experimental drugs. Instead, the negotiations focus on concentrating power and policy in the hands of a finite number of health officials in Geneva.
This includes centralization of medical supply chains, pandemic response policies, and a coordinated suppression of “misinformation.” As the countries of the world, including the United States, proceed down this path, some are questioning the wisdom of centralizing control when the states and countries that reacted to COVID in the least damaging way were the exception rather than the rule.
“Central planning is based on what Nobelist Friedrich Hayek identified as the ‘pretense of knowledge,’” Hanke said. “The results usually end up in a river of tears. It’s most often prudent to proceed via decentralized experimentation rather than with a global plan.”
In addition, government policies often are unidimensional; they typically enforce a single-minded goal, such as attempting to stop the spread of a virus, while ignoring side effects and collateral damage. The response to COVID is a textbook case of that.
“The record of public health officials is pretty dismal,” Hanke said. “Covid policies represent one of the greatest policy blunders in the modern era.”
The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
The book does recognize some benefits from COVID lockdowns.
“Lockdowns, as reported in studies based on stringency indices in the spring of 2020, reduced mortality by 3.2% when compared to less strict lockdown policies adopted by the likes of Sweden,” the authors state. “This means lockdowns prevented 1,700 deaths in England and Wales, 6,000 deaths across Europe, and 4,000 deaths in the United States.”
By comparison, the authors write, a typical flu season leads to 18,500–24,800 deaths in England and Wales, 72,000 flu deaths throughout Europe, and 38,000 deaths in the United States.
Meanwhile, negative effects from lockdowns included: damage to mental health, loss of jobs, company bankruptcies, an increase in crime, loss of freedom and other infringement on civil liberties, inflation, an increase in public debt, and harm to children’s education and well-being.
A 2022 psychology report on “The Impact of School Closure on Children’s Well-being During the COVID-19 Pandemic” found that “those children exposed to COVID-19 related measures, such as mandatory school closure, are more likely to manifest symptoms of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), stress, insomnia, emotional disturbance, irritability, sleep and appetite disturbance, negative eating habits, and impairment in social interactions.”
The Congressional Budget Office calculated that real GDP fell 11.3 percent in the second quarter of 2020 and was still down 5.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2021, relative to CBO’s pre-pandemic January 2020 projections.
The authors of “Did Lockdowns Work?” recommend that in future pandemics, “lockdowns should be rejected out of hand.”
Asked if he expected that leaders around the globe would consider studies like his and learn from the COVID experience, Hanke replied, “If the history of public health policy serves as a guide, my answer is ‘no.’”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/analysis-a-world-gone-mad-the-cost-of-covid-lockdowns_5368628.html
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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