PP NewsBrief: 2021-04-07
We need to begin to reclaim control over the institutions which have such oversized roles in our lives. As you read this people work tirelessly to see to it that you are dumb and docile. Let's stop them.
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Arkansas becomes first state to ban surgery, hormones and puberty blockers for transgender youths
"Lawmakers in Arkansas voted on Tuesday to override a veto from Gov. Asa Hutchinson on banning surgery and treatment for transgender minors.
The Republican-controlled House and Senate in the state approved the measure despite objections from the governor and activists. The measure bans doctors from providing surgery, hormonal treatment, or puberty blockers to transgender youths if they are below 18 years of age.
The override was pushed through with a 72-25 vote in the House and 25-8 vote in the Senate.
The Republican governor vetoed the legislation on Monday, saying it creates “new standards of legislative interference with physicians and parents as they deal with some of the most complex and sensitive matters involving young people.” He also said the bill does not “grandfather those young people who are currently under hormone treatment.”"
The Arkansas legislature will now be called a bunch of backcountry bigots and far worse by every mainstream outlet for weeks. But I say: Go Arkansas! They get it: Don't Drug Kids.
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Biden’s ‘gold’ name landed Hunter Biden $50K per month Burisma job, president’s son reveals in interview
"President Joe Biden’s son Hunter said that he got a well-paid job with Ukrainian gas company Burisma – despite having no experience in the energy industry – due to his father’s surname being “synonymous with democracy.”
Hunter Biden had joined the company’s board of directors in 2014 after Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich was ousted and exiled to Russia, with the Obama administration supporting the protesters. Joe Biden oversaw US policy in Ukraine during his time as vice president between January 2009 and 2017.
Despite accusations of nepotism and corruption, Hunter Biden said in an interview with the BBC on Tuesday that he received the position due to his last name being seen as “synonymous with democracy and transparency.”
“I think that they saw my name as gold,” Biden said, adding that “one of the reasons” they hired him was because Burisma “wanted to create a bulwark” against “Russian aggression.”
“They knew that they had to expand internationally and into other sectors in order to diversify and protect themselves... The Biden name is synonymous with democracy and transparency,” Biden concluded. “That’s why I said it was gold to them.”
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Biden also told the BBC that he “missed” the “perception” that taking such a role would create. In an interview with CBS News on Sunday, however, Biden said he did not think that taking the job was a mistake in itself, and instead only focused on the perception that taking the job made.
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...Hunter Biden admitted to CBS News this week that he had previously been struggling so much with his drug addiction that he wasn’t “keeping tabs on possessions” like his laptop. According to the New York Post, the laptop had been taken to a repair shop but Biden never returned to collect it."
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UK Government Has Planned For Vaccine Passports All Along
"Despite consistently denying it, the UK government has planned for the rollout of vaccine passports all along, prompting charges that the “Covid passes are shrouded in government cover ups, lies and shady contracts.”
Privacy Watchdog Big Brother Watch points to an article in the London Guardian today that details how the vaccine passport system was in advanced stages back in December at the same time as ministers were telling the public there were no plans for them.
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The plan was always to develop an app based system to integrate a QR code linking to a digital passport, which will be used to gain entry into clubs, venues, cinemas, basically anywhere in public.
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It is not too late to stop this nightmare future from unfolding.
UK Ministers are set to vote on the vaccine passport system, and could defeat it, killing off the system, at least in the short term.
Groups such as Big Brother Watch need support in their efforts to stave off a two tier society."
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Forbes privates video being used to debunk 60 Minutes’ DeSantis claims
"CBS is being accused of manipulatively editing a heated exchange between one of its reporters and Gov. Ron DeSantis over an alleged “pay for play” scheme involving supermarket chain Publix. The interview, from a press conference last month, featured in the episode of “60 Minutes.”
CBS News’ reporter Sharyn Alfonsi pressed the governor over allegations that he awarded Publix the opportunity to distribute COVID-19 vaccines in Palm Beach County after a sizable donation.
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CBS edited out several minutes of DeSantis explaining why he believes the claims were wrong.
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In the missing portion of the exchange, DeSantis said:
“First of all, the first pharmacies that had [the vaccine] were CVS and Walgreens and they had a long-term care mission, so they were going to the long-term care facilities. They got the vaccine in the middle of December, they started going to the long-term care facilities the third week in December to do LTCs. So that was their mission, that was very important and we trusted them to do that. As we got into January, we wanted to expand the distribution points.
“So yes, you had the counties, you had some drive-thru sites, you had hospitals that were doing a lot, but we wanted to get it into communities more. So we reached out to other retail pharmacies: Publix, Walmart, obviously CVS and Walgreens had to finish that mission and we said we’re going to use you as soon as you’re done with that.”
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Forbes hasn’t commented on why the video was debunking 60 Minutes’ narrative, that had been online for several weeks, was privatized after it started to gain traction following the airing of the episode."
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YouTube deletes Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s public health roundtable with Dr. Scott Atlas
"YouTube has censored a video of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s March 18 public health roundtable which featured former White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Scott Atlas and the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration – an anti-lockdown statement from Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff.
During the roundtable, the panelists advised against lockdowns, contact tracing, and mask mandates and warned that these measures were often harmful. They also called for schools to be reopened.
The video of the roundtable had accumulated more than 500,000 views and lots of positive feedback before it was taken down by YouTube for “violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”
The removal of the video is the latest of many examples of YouTube removing videos under its far-reaching rules that prohibit anything that goes against the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO)."
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“Fact-Checking Festival” with Stelter and Fauci is the $100 VIP experience you didn’t know you were missing
"Those in need of a little levity in their news during these trying times, might find it in the announcement of something called “United Facts of America – A Festival of Fact-Checking” – an upcoming online event that will feature none other than CNN’s Brian Stelter.
Stelter will be joined by Dr. Anthony Fauci as one of the guests of the four-day “festival,” – but not only that. Tickets sell for $25-50, while the “VIP experience” will cost you $100 – and it includes a private virtual happy hour with Stelter.
The whole thing is organized by PolitiFact, a fact-checking operation of the Poynter Institute, which is also responsible for launching the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). This group certifies fact-checkers that are then hired by Big Tech to produce some of the biggest controversies around the stifling of free speech that have plagued the internet in recent years."
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Bill Gates and His Empires. “Ushering In the Great Reset”
"We’re currently facing enormously powerful technocrats who are hell-bent on ushering in the Great Reset, which will complete the ongoing transfer of wealth and resource ownership from the poor and middle classes to the ultra-rich. Perhaps the most well-known of the individuals pushing for this is Bill Gates who, like John Rockefeller a century before him, rehabilitated his sorely tarnished image by turning to philanthropy.
However, Gates’ brand of philanthropy, so far, has helped few and harmed many. While his PR machine has managed to turn public opinion about him such that many now view him as a global savior who donates his wealth for the good of the planet, nothing could be further from the truth.
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When then-President Trump halted U.S. funding of the WHO in 2020, Gates became the biggest funder of the WHO. As explained in “WHO Insider Blows Whistle on Gates and GAVI,” the WHO has turned global health security into a dictatorship, where the director general has assumed sole power to make decisions that member states must abide by, but according to a long-term WHO insider, Gates’ vaccine alliance GAVI actually appears to be the directing power behind the WHO.
The two — Gates and the WHO — have been working hand in hand pushing for a global vaccination campaign, and Gates has a great deal of money invested in these vaccines. We’ve also seen extraordinary efforts to censor natural alternatives and inexpensive, readily available and clearly effective drugs, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, and it appears the reason for this is probably because they’re competitors to the vaccine.
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In 1910, Rockefeller and Carnegie produced The Flexner Report, which was the beginning of the end for natural medicine in the conventional medical school curriculum. They eliminated it because it saw natural medicine as a hugely competitive threat to the new pharmaceuticals that were primarily derived from the oil industry.
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Gates hails synthetic fertilizer is the greatest agricultural invention. “Doesn’t he realize synthetic nitrogen fertilizers are creating desertification, dead zones in the ocean, and nitric oxide, which is a greenhouse gas?” Shiva says. In short, he’s offering the problem as the solution. Gates also, apparently, does not understand that nitrogen-fixing plants can fix nitrogen. He incorrectly claims that plants cannot fix nitrogen.
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The answer to the environmental problems we face is not more of the very things that created the problems in the first place, which is what Gates proposes.
The answer is regenerative agriculture and real food.
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What does digital agriculture entail? For starters, it entails the introduction of a digital surveillance system. So far, Shiva’s organization has managed to prevent Gates from introducing a seed surveillance startup, where farmers would not be allowed to grow seeds unless approved by Gates surveillance system.
The data mining, Shiva says, is needed because they don’t actually know agriculture. This is why Gates finances the policing of farmers. He needs to mine their data to learn how farming is actually done. This knowledge is then repackaged and sold back to the farmers. It’s evil genius at its finest.
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"So, you finance the research. Then you finance the public institutions, whether they be national or international. You invest and force them down the path where they can only use what is your patented intellectual property. And, as he has said in an interview, his smartest investment was vaccines, because it is a 1-to-20 return. Put $1 in and make $20. How many billions of dollars have been put in? You can imagine how many trillions will be made."
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As it stands right now, ordinary people are forced to fight battles that are in actuality rooted in institutional, structural and societal crimes. These crimes really need to be addressed the way Rockefeller’s Standard Oil empire was addressed. In the case of Gates, his empire is actually multiple empires, and they all need to be dismantled...."
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Espionage Act banned me and now Daniel Hale from defending ourselves – Kiriakou on first whistleblower to be convicted under Biden
"The Biden administration is set to see its first conviction over a leak proclaimed to be a violation of the Espionage Act. Daniel Hale faces the same unfair system as others before him, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou told RT.
Hale, 33, pleaded guilty last week to one count of violating the archaic US Espionage Act. He is facing up to 10 years in prison after sentencing, which is scheduled for July 13. His alleged crime was leaking classified documents on US drone warfare programs to a journalist, identified by the media as an Intercept reporter. His likely conviction would be the first of its kind under President Joe Biden – but one of many similar cases in the US.
Kiriakou, a former CIA analyst who likewise was prosecuted under the Espionage Act for exposing US torture of terror suspects under George W. Bush, says the 1917 law is inherently unfair to whistleblowers like Hale or himself. It prohibits them from explaining their motives for leaking during trial – which means they cannot argue a public-interest defense.
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Kiriakou says he had little doubt that Joe Biden would continue to prosecute whistleblowers under the Espionage Act the same way other presidents did before him. A clear indicator was the continued attempt to extradite arguably the most famous target of such tactics – WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange."
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FBI Data Shows Knives Kill More People Than Rifles
"The most recent data from 2019 shows that although firearms do account for the majority of homicides – 10,258 – the number of homicides committed using a rifle – 364 – is much smaller, according to the Daily Caller.
Handguns were listed as the primary weapon in 6,368 cases, while shotguns accounted for an additional 200. 45 cases named “other gun” as the weapon and in 3,281 cases, the type of firearm was not listed.
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Meanwhile, a whopping 600 people were killed with what the FBI calls “personal weapons,” including hands, fists or feet.
Knives, evidently, accounted for 1,476 homicides.
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A “mass shooting” is defined as any scenario in which at least four people are killed. This means that numbers can be dramatically skewed by gang-related and drug-related activity."
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Russia’s Lavrov Warns of Surging Anti-White Racism in U.S.
"Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says there is surging “aggression against white people” in the United States and that it is harming efforts to fight racism.
Lavrov made the comments during an interview with political scientists that was broadcast on national television.
“We were pioneers of the movement promoting equal rights of people of any skin color,” said Lavrov, adding that “everyone wants to get rid of racism.”
However, he emphasized how it was important “not to switch to the other extreme which we saw during the ‘BLM’ (Black Lives Matter) events and the aggression against white people, white U.S. citizens.”
Lavrov also insisted that forces within the U.S. were trying to spread a “cultural revolution” around the world by forcing “diversity” down everyone’s throats.
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“I’ve seen Black people play in Shakespeare’s comedies. Only I don’t know when there will be a white Othello,” Lavrov said.
“You see this is absurd. Political correctness taken to the point of absurdity will not end well,” he concluded."
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Poll: Fewer than half of likely voters support vaccine passports
"A new poll indicated a majority of Americans do not believe vaccine passports are a good idea.
The survey released on Thursday from Rasmussen asked if requiring proof of COVID-19 vaccination to return to pre-pandemic activities was a good or bad idea. A mere 44 percent of likely voters said it was a good idea, with 57 percent of Democrats supporting vaccine passports and 33 percent of Republicans."
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The PCR False Positive Pseudo-Epidemic. Dr. Mike Yeadon
"In Spring 2020 a novel coronavirus swept across the world: novel, but related to other viruses. In the UK, unknown at the time, around 50% of the population were already immune. The evidence for this is unequivocal and arose due to prior infection by common cold-causing coronaviruses (of which four are endemic). This prior immunity has been confirmed around the world by top cellular immunologists. There is even a very recent paper from Public Health England on the topic of prior immunity and a wealth of other evidence from studies on memory T-cells, studies on household transmission and on antibodies.
Because of the extent of the prior immunity, and as a result of heterogeneity of contacts, once only a low percentage of the population, perhaps as low as 10-20% had been infected, “herd immunity” was established. This is why daily deaths, which were rising exponentially, turned abruptly and began to fall, uninterrupted by street protests, the return to work, the reopening of pubs and crowded beaches during the summer....
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Immunity to ordinary respiratory viruses occurs mainly through T-cells which ‘take a picture of the invader’ at a molecular level, ‘reproduce’ it on certain immune cells and essentially ‘never forget a face’. This T-cell immunity is robust and durable. Those exposed to the highly related SARS virus in 2003 still have this immunity 17 years later. In relation to SARS-CoV-2, the pattern of immunity to date is identical and after around 800 million infections across the world, there is no convincing evidence for significant levels of re-infection. Not only are those who’ve been infected and have now recovered immune (they cannot get ill again with the same virus), but importantly they do not participate in transmission....
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But due to extraordinary errors in modelling created by unaccountable academics at Imperial College, the country was told to expect over a half a million deaths. Three Nobel prize-winning scientists wrote to that modelling team in February correcting their errors. This was done confidentially. This expert, third-party estimate was remarkably accurate – it predicted that there would be a total of 40k deaths from COVID-19. I believe this is in fact correct and is what has happened. While I have no proficiency in modelling, I can distinguish predictions that are biological plausible from those which are literally incredible. When inputs to a model are wrong or missing, their outputs cannot be trusted. The Imperial model made the extreme assumption that there was zero prior immunity in the population or social contact heterogeneity.
It is now appreciated that this virus is less of a threat to those under 70 than seasonal flu...
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The ease with which humans develop immunity to this virus is striking. Incidentally, it is this immune adeptness which has probably played an important role in why, against prior pessimism, many vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 have apparently ‘worked’ (though there is much to criticise about how efficacy has been defined, because a reduction in the propensity to become PCR positive has not previously been regarded as a leading indicator of the degree to which a vaccine will protect a population against severe illness).
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In any other year, that would be the end of the tale. Neither the existence of prior immunity nor that herd immunity can be readily reached without us noticing are new.
What was new was the belief that forcing citizens to run and hide from a respiratory virus with greater contagiousness than ‘flu was other than a fool’s errand....
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...As an important aside, I’ve invited many to consider how long it takes for an influenza epidemic, which we experience most years, to criss-cross the country before apparently burning out, only to occur the next year, because it’s one of the few respiratory viruses which mutates so quickly that, by the time a year has gone by, it’s sufficiently different from what our immune systems have seen before that it can wreak brief havoc upon us once again. The answer to that time question is variously given as three to four months.
I ask readers to consider how long might it be expected to take for a more contagious respiratory virus like SARS-CoV-2 to thoroughly criss-cross the country. It seems hard to credit that with taking longer than four months. We know the virus was in the UK at least by February 2020 (potentially earlier) and so by June it’s not at all unlikely that it had travelled almost everywhere. It has been argued that perhaps lockdown was very effective and so many people will still be susceptible, as SAGE claims. We know that is not correct. Lockdown was started far too late to repress the spread of the virus, as even Professor Whitty agreed in giving testimony to a parliamentary select committee in the summer. As he said, the lockdown began after the peak of infection – the outbreak was already in retreat by Mar 23rd.
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Viruses don’t do waves (beyond the secondary ripple concept as outlined above). I have repeatedly asked to see the trove of scientific papers used to predict a ‘second wave’ and to build a model to compute its likely size and timing. They have never been forthcoming. It’s almost as if there is no such foundational literature. I’m sure SAGE can put us right on this.
The post-WW1 “Spanish flu” appears to be all there is where it comes to evidence of waves. Most scholars accept that what most likely happened was that more than one infectious agent was involved. It was 102 years ago and no molecular biological techniques indicate multiple waves of a single agent then or anywhere else. In any case, that was influenza. There have been no examples of multiple waves since and the most recent novel coronavirus with any real spread (SARS) performed one wave each in each geographical region affected. Why a model with a ‘second wave’ in it was even built, I cannot guess. It seems completely illogical to me. Worse, as far as the public can discern, the model fails to account for the unequivocally demonstrated population prior immunity, to which must be added the recently-acquired immunity arising from the spring wave. This is why I’m reasserting what I’ve been argued for months – a ‘second wave’ cannot happen and must, perforce, not be happening as described
Despite the absence of any evidence for a ‘second wave’ – and the evidence of absence of waves for this class of respiratory virus – there was an across-the-board, multi-media platform campaign designed to plant the idea of a ‘second wave’ in the minds of everyone. This ran continually for many weeks. It was successful: a poll of GPs showed almost 86% of them stated that they expected a ‘second wave’ this winter.
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PCR is a quite remarkable technique, which has unparalleled ability to find truly tiny quantities of a fragment of a genetic sequence, right down to the level of finding a single, broken fragment of a virus in a messy biological sample. There are notable limitations, well known to those who’ve personally used PCR in a research context. The most important one is its propensity to suffer from contamination, and the integrity of a PCR is very easily destroyed by invisible levels of contamination even in the hands of an expert, working alone and on a small handful of samples.
This is a good moment to mention that the PCR test protocol for SARS-CoV-2, which everyone in the world is now using, was invented in the lab of Prof Drosten in Berlin. The scientific paper in which the method was described was published in January 2020, two days after the manuscript was submitted. One of the authors of the paper is on the editorial board of the journal that published it. There is concern that this extremely important article, which contains a PCR test protocol that has been used to run hundreds of millions of PCR tests across the world, including the UK, was not peer-reviewed. No peer review report has been released, despite many requests to do so. Furthermore, as a method, it contains numerous technical weaknesses, some of which are serious and highly complex....
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There are deep concerns internationally about the reliability and selectivity of this PCR test protocol and this should be borne in mind through the rest of this article.
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...The only reason one might even consider mass testing of those without symptoms is if you were convinced that those without symptoms were significant sources of transmission. This has always seemed to me to be a very tenuous assumption. Specifically, respiratory viruses are spread by droplets of secretions and generally the expulsion of these is linked to the symptoms of infection – coughing in particular. Humans have evolved over millions of years to recognise threats to health by close observation of the health status of others. It works well. We’re familiar with avoiding those with flu-like symptoms in winter and behaving responsibly by staying away from work and vulnerable people when we are symptomatic. The burden of proof rests with those claiming something very different in the case of SARS-CoV-2 to show conclusively that asymptomatic people are indeed major sources of transmission. I don’t think that case has at all been made. The medical literature on this is contradictory but almost all the papers claiming such transmission originated in China.
Consequently, there is simply no need to get into the business of mass testing the population. Indeed, as we will see, such mass testing brings with it, when using PCR as the method, a severe risk of what we call a “PCR false positive pseudo-epidemic”. This could never happen if we were not using PCR mass testing of the mostly well. So, for whatever reason and against all historical precedent and immunological reasoning, a major initiative was launched with the goal of reaching 500,000 tests a day by year’s end. Again, unaccountably, the Government didn’t just get on and build these new labs, working in parallel with the available NHS capabilities. Instead, responsibility for testing was swept out from 44 NHS labs, with skilled and accredited staff who’d already been running SARS-CoV-2 PCR. In their place, new labs were created, outside the help and control network of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences. These Lighthouse Labs are still not all fully accredited under UKAS to ISO 15189, a quality management system accreditation relating to medical laboratories.
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At the end of October, the British Army was called in to help Liverpool City Council find the cases which the ONS PCR testing survey predicted should be there but which were no longer being found in the numbers expected. It was possible that people were no longer coming forward to be tested, though there is no way to be sure of this. Despite not having sought consent from the parents of school children and the absence before the survey began of proper protocols and ethics review, scores of thousands of people were tested using a lateral-flow test (LFT). (See here and here for more details on the LFT.) These look rather like the familiar pregnancy test kits you can purchase over the counter. They look similar, because they use related tried and trusted technology to detect virus proteins in the swab, not RNA. All tests have limits and weaknesses. However, the LFTs are not subject to the same flaws as PCR – specifically the risk of over-amplification and of cross-contamination before the test is actually run....
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In brief, the army found very few people with positive LFT results, only slightly higher than the background operational false positive rate: just over 0.3%, values expected when the tests are used in the real world. Since testing began, the positive rate has tended to a mean of 0.7% which might mean a few people were positive. My own experience of reading around this area is that this (around 0.7%) is almost certainly the true false positive rate when, in the real-world, careful but inexpert people administer the LFT. It meant that, in the city in the centre of the national hotspot for COVID-19, almost no one had the virus. This experiment has been repeated for 8,000 people in Merthyr Tydfil resulting in 0.77% testing positive. That these two test series have returned such similar values suggests that this is indeed the true, operational false positive rate for the LFT, though another test series will be helpful in refining that possible interpretation. Some leapt to criticise the LFT, as if it was its fault that it couldn’t find the expected cases. Of course, to many of us, the results were exactly what we’d expected, because we were by then sure that PCR was wildly over-reading. PCR has gone wrong before and Occam’s razor indicated that this was by far the most likely explanation for the otherwise inexplicable failure of PCR “cases” to correlate with symptomatic disease. These are the kind of results expected in populations protected by herd immunity. They’re completely inconsistent with a city and town in the grip of a highly-infectious respiratory virus.
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It’s important to appreciate while digesting this counter-narrative which, unlike the official line, is at least internally consistent, that the only data suggesting a ‘second wave’ is upon us are PCR results. Everything is dependent on this. A “case” is a positive PCR test. No symptoms are involved. A “COVID-19 admission” to a hospital is a person testing positive by PCR before, on entry or at any time during a hospital stay, no matter the reason for the admission or the symptoms the patient is presenting. A “COVID-19 death” is any death within 28 days of a positive PCR test. If there is any doubt about the reliability of the PCR test, all of this falls away at a single stroke.
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In brief: the pandemic was over by June and herd immunity was the main force which turned the pandemic and pressed it into retreat. In the autumn, the claimed “cases” are an artefact of a deranged testing system, which I explain in detail below. While there is some COVID-19 along the lines of the “secondary ripple” concept explained above, it has occurred primarily in regions, cities and districts that were less hard hit in the spring. Real COVID-19 is self-limiting and may already have peaked in some Northern towns. It will not return in force, and the example again is London. Even here, certain boroughs, e.g. Camden and Sutton, have had minimal positive test results. I’ve explained a number of times how this happened – the prominent role of prior immunity is often ignored or misunderstood. The extent of this was so large that, coupled with the uneven spread of infection, it needed only a low percentage of the population to be infected before herd immunity was reached.
That’s it. All the rest is a PCR false positive pseudo-epidemic. The cure, of course, as it has been in the past when PCR has replaced the pandemic itself as the menace in the land, is to stop PCR mass testing.
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It’s happened before, with whooping cough (caused by a bacterium, but the technique for diagnosing the disease was the same, PCR). Hundreds of apparent “cases” were diagnosed at a hospital in New Hampshire using PCR and physicians fitted the symptoms of various coughs and colds to what the “gold standard test” was telling them. In fact, not a single person had the disease. The positivity in the PCR test was around 15%, but no actual infection was found. 100% of the PCR positives were false. Unrealistically high positivity and no recent, independent confirmation of infection is now the situation in UK.
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There are a small group of large labs which were set up at speed to become “Lighthouse Labs” or “Superlabs”. A second one, the Randox facility in Antrim, Northern Ireland, has been the subject of a Channel 4 Dispatches program. This detailed documentary film centres on this very large, private contract lab testing over 100K COVID-19 samples per day using PCR. Watching this program with an eye of someone experienced in lab procedures related to mass testing (though not this technique) I observed: workers cutting open plastic bags containing swab samples in tubes, some of which had leaked. The scissors were then used to open the next bag and so on. Tubes were wiped externally using a wipe, but the same wipe was used to mop the outsides of several tubes in a row. The tubes were then placed on their sides in a tray, where they were free to roll around and touch other tubes. Workers kept on the same pair of disposable gloves while opening a large number of such bags, one after another. A worker commented that just under 10% of tubes with red caps leaked. Randox stated that it didn’t make the tubes and that a fix was in progress.
Firstly, using scissors or any sharp instruments shouldn’t be used with biohazardous samples in BSL2/3/4 facilities. The exposure of the biosample contents to the air-conditioned room environment, plus the sample fluid contaminating cardboard boxes, is a recipe for disaster and could lead to:
- Cross-contamination between samples
- Cross-contamination between samples and personnel
- Cross-contamination between sample and the room environment
- Exposure of personnel to contagion of unknown origin(s)
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Even if the Lighthouse Labs did work from a technical perspective, the Government has admitted that PCR’s characteristics as a test are literally out of control. Lord Bethel confirmed in a written answer that the UK Government does not know the operational false positive rate (OFPR). While the Government claimed it could adopt as an estimate a range from prior related tests (0.8-2.3%) this is tendentious. These earlier tests were done by highly experienced lab scientists working at relatively small scale. Each PCR test will have a unique false positive rate dependant on the design of the test and it cannot be deduced from other tests. The Lighthouse Labs are mostly staffed by young and inexperienced people, many of whom have never previously worked professionally in a lab. It is absurd to suggest the combination of inexperienced staff, coupled with an industrialized process of a technique so sensitive to cross-contamination that such cross-contamination is a routine problem in research labs performed by careful, knowledgeable scientists, could yield reliable, trustworthy results.
I maintain that lack of knowledge of the OFPR alone renders this PCR test in this configuration completely incapable of providing trustworthy results. If this was a diagnostic test in use in the NHS today, no physician would submit a patient sample to it, because it would be impossible to interpret a positive result. Of course, it is a diagnostic test in use today.
In summary, I argue that it is criminally dangerous to drive policy based in any way on this test (set up the way it is) and its results. No amount of argument or prevarication can alter these damning facts.
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The key sign of a PCR false positive pseudo-epidemic is the relative paucity of excess deaths equal to the deaths claimed to be occurring as a result of the lethal infective agent. This key sign is present.
The unprecedented “’second wave’ conundrum is solved. It’s of course not happening, but why a ‘second wave’ was talked up, months before unreliable PCR testing data was brought into service, demands deeper investigation. It’s not a science matter: not unless the team predicting the wave can produce the scientific literature upon which the prediction and modelling was based.
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Until we end the use of PCR mass testing, there is no chance that “cases” will reduce to very low levels. Lateral flow tests must become the gold standard test for COVID with PCR only used for confirmatory diagnosis. This will minimise the number of PCR tests that need to be performed allowing testing to return to competent NHS laboratories. Without such an intervention, even if the virus stopped circulating, I believe we’ll still hear of tens of thousands of “cases” every day, and several hundred deaths."
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Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t (Published 2007)
"Dr. Brooke Herndon, an internist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, could not stop coughing. For two weeks starting in mid-April last year, she coughed, seemingly nonstop, followed by another week when she coughed sporadically, annoying, she said, everyone who worked with her.
Before long, Dr. Kathryn Kirkland, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth, had a chilling thought: Could she be seeing the start of a whooping cough epidemic? By late April, other health care workers at the hospital were coughing, and severe, intractable coughing is a whooping cough hallmark. And if it was whooping cough, the epidemic had to be contained immediately because the disease could be deadly to babies in the hospital and could lead to pneumonia in the frail and vulnerable adult patients there.
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For months, nearly everyone involved thought the medical center had had a huge whooping cough outbreak, with extensive ramifications. Nearly 1,000 health care workers at the hospital in Lebanon, N.H., were given a preliminary test and furloughed from work until their results were in; 142 people, including Dr. Herndon, were told they appeared to have the disease; and thousands were given antibiotics and a vaccine for protection. Hospital beds were taken out of commission, including some in intensive care.
Then, about eight months later, health care workers were dumbfounded to receive an e-mail message from the hospital administration informing them that the whole thing was a false alarm.
Not a single case of whooping cough was confirmed with the definitive test, growing the bacterium, Bordetella pertussis, in the laboratory. Instead, it appears the health care workers probably were afflicted with ordinary respiratory diseases like the common cold.
Now, as they look back on the episode, epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists say the problem was that they placed too much faith in a quick and highly sensitive molecular test that led them astray.
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There are no national data on pseudo-epidemics caused by an overreliance on such molecular tests, said Dr. Trish M. Perl, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins and past president of the Society of Health Care Epidemiologists of America. But, she said, pseudo-epidemics happen all the time. The Dartmouth case may have been one the largest, but it was by no means an exception, she said.
There was a similar whooping cough scare at Children’s Hospital in Boston last fall that involved 36 adults and 2 children. Definitive tests, though, did not find pertussis.
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“You’re in a little bit of no man’s land,” with the new molecular tests, said Dr. Mark Perkins, an infectious disease specialist and chief scientific officer at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics, a nonprofit foundation supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “All bets are off on exact performance.”
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At Dartmouth the decision was to use a test, P.C.R., for polymerase chain reaction. It is a molecular test that, until recently, was confined to molecular biology laboratories.
“That’s kind of what’s happening,” said Dr. Kathryn Edwards, an infectious disease specialist and professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University. “That’s the reality out there. We are trying to figure out how to use methods that have been the purview of bench scientists.”
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Yet, epidemiologists say, one of the most troubling aspects of the pseudo-epidemic is that all the decisions seemed so sensible at the time.
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“The issue was not that they overreacted or did anything inappropriate at all,” Dr. Kretsinger said. Instead, it is that there is often is no way to decide early on whether an epidemic is under way.
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[Whooping cough] got its name from its most salient feature: Patients may cough and cough and cough until they have to gasp for breath, making a sound like a whoop...
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But neither coughing long and hard nor even whooping is unique to pertussis infections, and many people with whooping cough have symptoms that like those of common cold: a runny nose or an ordinary cough.
“Almost everything about the clinical presentation of pertussis, especially early pertussis, is not very specific,” Dr. Kirkland said.
That was the first problem in deciding whether there was an epidemic at Dartmouth.
The second was with P.C.R., the quick test to diagnose the disease, Dr. Kretsinger said.
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“Because we had cases we thought were pertussis and because we had vulnerable patients at the hospital, we lowered our threshold,” she said. Anyone who had a cough got a P.C.R. test, and so did anyone with a runny nose who worked with high-risk patients like infants.
“That’s how we ended up with 134 suspect cases,” Dr. Kirkland said. And that, she added, was why 1,445 health care workers ended up taking antibiotics and 4,524 health care workers at the hospital, or 72 percent of all the health care workers there, were immunized against whooping cough in a matter of days.
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But epidemiologists at the hospital and working for the States of New Hampshire and Vermont decided to take extra steps to confirm that what they were seeing really was pertussis.
The Dartmouth doctors sent samples from 27 patients they thought had pertussis to the state health departments and the Centers for Disease Control. There, scientists tried to grow the bacteria, a process that can take weeks. Finally, they had their answer: There was no pertussis in any of the samples.
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Dr. Cathy A. Petti, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Utah, said the story had one clear lesson.
“The big message is that every lab is vulnerable to having false positives,” Dr. Petti said. “No single test result is absolute and that is even more important with a test result based on P.C.R.”"
And oldie but a goodie.
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Psaki’s Alternative Facts: How The Georgia Election Law Became Part of Our Alternate Political Reality
"For years, the media shredded Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway for a statement on Meet The Press interview on January 22, 2017, in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on attendance numbers at the inauguration. Conway insisted that, while Chuck Todd was citing one set of numbers, Spicer was giving “alternative facts”. The statement produced a firestorm of ridicule that the Trump White House was constructing an alternate reality. That is not the response however to the repeated misrepresentations of the Georgia election law by President Joe Biden — false statements criticized even by the Washington Post. Likewise, there was little response this week when Press Secretary Jen Psaki defended the alternative facts presented the White House and some media outlets, even after another major newspaper called out the same false statements about the law.
During an interview on ESPN, Biden repeated his claim that the law is “Jim Crow on steroids” and added: “Imagine passing a law saying you cannot provide water or food for someone standing in line to vote, can’t do that? C’mon! Or you’re going to close a polling place at 5 o’clock when working people just get off?”
As we previously discussed, it is hard to “imagine” because it is not true and the White House knows that it is not true....
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Psaki was confronted by Fox News with Biden’s continued false statements about the law and she proceeded to double down. In a remarkably disingenuous moment, Psaki responded “It standardizes the ending of voting every day at five, right? It just gives options. It gives options to expand it, right, but it standardized it at five. It also makes it so that outside groups can’t provide water or food to people in line, right?”
The points are ridiculous and Psaki knew it. The law made mandatory the full day of voting to guarantee those hours while allowing the same option of other states to remain open until 7 pm. The change was meant to prevent shorter hours under a prior ambiguity in the law.
Yet, there was no hue and cry over “alternative facts.” Biden is supporting a boycott of a state based on false assertions about a law and most of the media is complicit in maintaining that false narrative. There are aspects to this law that may warrant such opposition by not the two primary reasons cited by Biden.
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...Schumer insists that in New York “we are working to make it easier, not harder, to vote.” However, New York has some harsher rules than those contained in Georgia. For example, there are fewer early voting days than Georgia and a restriction on passing out food and water over $1 in value to voters in line. New York also requires an excuse to request an absentee ballot.
So, if Georgia is “Jim Crow on steroids,” what is the New York law?
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...the silence on her defense of these false representations by the President is deafening. Trump made false claims about the size of his inauguration crowd. This is a false claim about a law being used to support a boycott of an entire state (and a major argument for federalizing state election rules). One would think that the call for accuracy would be even greater in this context."
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UK Police Chief Brags That COVID Patrols Aren’t Necessary Because There Are So Many Snitches
"Overnight stays in locations other than a person’s primary address are not permitted until April 12, but a recent mini-heat wave prompted crowds of beachgoers to enjoy some rare March sunshine, as well as others who made trips to visit second homes.
This didn’t go down well in Dorset, where locals took the opportunity to grass people up to the authorities for allegedly violating lockdown rules.
In fact, the snitches were so enthusiastic that according to James Vaughan, the chief constable of Dorset Police, they’re now basically acting as an auxiliary arm of the cops.
“We are still getting around 400 reports a week from the public, so we will respond to reports,” said Vaughan. “We won’t need to be doing hotspot patrols [around holiday parks] because people are very quick to pick the phone up and tell us.”"
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Texas Senate passes bill to reduce voter fraud
"The SB7 bill, which advanced to the House on Thursday, limits early voting hours, bans sending of absentee ballots to voters who did not request them and bans drive-though voting. All of these practices were rampant in Democrat-controlled districts last year.
The legislation is at the forefront of the Texas Republicans efforts to further restrict voting in the state following evidence of fraud in the 2020 election."
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Lessons from the Edge of Liberty
"It is considerably less painful to learn from the mistakes of others than from your own, and it is less costly to learn from the successes of others, versus your own trial and effort. As we consider how to resist the looming effort of the authoritarian Left to transform our system of republican self-governance into an autocratic unitary state, we should examine the experiences of other resistance movements. Two ongoing struggles with very different results are the independence movement in Catalonia and the pro-democracy movement in Myanmar.
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The 2017 Catalan struggle for independence was blunted, fragmented, and disrupted in a classic example of asymmetric political warfare. The independence movement was actually a broad coalition of various cultural identity groups, separatist groups, unions, and working class socialist political parties. The movement’s political actions were limited to protests, marches, strikes, and various propaganda efforts. None of the groups within the coalition had a significant history of armed or physical resistance, and they were, by and large, similar to our Twitter blue checks and classically liberal boomers.
Madrid countered through the strategic use of both overt and covert influence operations which drove a wedge between the hodgepodge of incongruent identity groups. Madrid used this seam to make a strong case to maintain the Spanish union and quickly divided the Catalan population. Once divided, the Spanish security services infiltrated the various independence groups, recruited informants, and catalogued their members. Next, they applied pressure to employers to fire dissident employees, arrested key leaders, and finally, used the national security services and their local partners in a brutal campaign of intimidation and violence, which included destroying polling stations as well as arresting and physically assaulting voters and independence movement supporters.
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Lessons Learned:
Know your enemy and know yourself (your people). The Catalan independence movement vastly underestimated Madrid’s will to retain control of Catalonia. They also overestimated the commitment of their own coalition to pursue the end-state of independence. When push literally came to shove, the movement folded. Yes, they wanted their independence, but only if Madrid would hand it to them. In the end, they were unwilling to fight for it and take it by whatever means necessary.
Use a multi-domain strategy of political action. The Catalan independence movement was not a multi-domain effort. The movement’s strategy was limited to protests, marches, strikes, and rousing speeches in front of the cameras. There was very little application of pain points using more aggressive disruptive strategies against Madrid’s vulnerable sectors (financial, transportation, information technology), and no underlying threat of a wider armed rebellion.
Do not prematurely commit to battle/conflict when the conditions for victory are uncertain. The independence movement’s October 27th declaration of independence was a premature step into a battle where the conditions for victory were not just uncertain, but highly unlikely. The movement’s leadership acted rashly and did so without a plan to counter Madrid’s inevitable response. In the end, the October 27th declaration of independence was the catalyst for the effective collapse of the movement.
Anticipate and account for dirty political warfare tactics. You may not be interested in violence and human rights violations, but they are interested in you. The side holding power is not going to voluntarily cede that power solely because of lofty ideas of democracy, human rights, and international condemnation. China is currently running concentration camps for its ethnic minority Uyghurs, where they are subjected to forced labor, mass rape, and organ harvesting. Nobody cares. American companies are still making billions of dollars on the backs of Uyghur forced labor. Don’t count on others to protect your human rights or fight against the undemocratic tactics of your enemy. Playing the victim is the low-return strategy of losers.
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The line between political warfare and civil war becomes difficult to discern when both parties wield significant power and are motivated to achieve their political end-states. This is the case of the Tatmadaw and the NLD. There are several takeaways from this situation that we in America can use to compare and contrast with our current situation and that of Catalonia.
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Lessons learned:
Organization allows a movement to take hits and keep on going. Having a network of supporters and a deep bench of capable leaders is critical to a movement’s resilience. Organization helps maintain a movement’s momentum in the face of undemocratic and dirty-war tactics of the enemy. A shadow or backup leadership cadre, like the CPRH, is a valuable asset.
A unified goal and agenda keep the movement true. When all elements of the movement support a unified goal, they are more resistant to the enemy’s information operations. When they understand a well laid-out agenda, they are capable of decentralized actions and maintaining the direction of the movement. This capability allowed the CPRH to function effectively as a proxy for the deposed elected NLD government.
Use a defense-in-depth and a multi-domain strategy to attack your enemy’s weaknesses. By leading with non-violent political actions, the CPRH forced the Tatmadaw to deploy forces and show its hand early. By then escalating to punishing general strikes and attacks on transportation infrastructure, the CPRH placed stress on critical supply chains and operational nodes. By using targeted direct action, such as the burning of Chinese manufacturing concerns, they damaged the reputation of the Tatmadaw and its ability to protect foreign investments.
Deploy arms only at specific points that support the greater overall political objective. By waiting until the Tatmadaw committed to a kinetic solution against the resistance movement, the CPRH’s call for armed rebellion was cast as legitimate self-defense. Furthermore, the CPRH’s shadow legislative actions authorizing the Myanmar people to arm and actively protect themselves created a collective political body to justify and support the people’s actions—making them credible freedom fighters instead of terrorists.
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“Train. Equip. Lead.” That is an effective mantra for managing a resistance movement.
Train the movement to collectively achieve a unified political goal/agenda. A movement built on a coalition that retains myriad competing political objectives is easily divided and destined to fail. Include workshops on how to properly conduct political actions, how to deal with mass surveillance, and what to do when members are detained, arrested, or facing state-sponsored violence.
Equip your people with the skills and resources to survive and navigate the struggle. If you do not build a support network to protect and care for your movement’s members, you are effectively using them as cannon fodder—and they will quickly see that. They then become vulnerable to the enemy’s blacklisting, information operations, and intelligence collection efforts.
Lead them, protect them, and appreciate their sacrifice. A political movement that is centered around a personality is a cult or a grift. A legitimate political movement should never be about the leader, it should always be about the people.
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Americans are searching for a path to victory over the coming authoritarian leviathan, but there are few, if any, individuals emerging in conservative and independent political circles to provide guidance or leadership. Soon, Americans will have to decide whether they are going to fight or submit to the will of the ruling elites. If they choose to fight, they would be wise to examine the history of other political movements and the resulting lessons learned at the edge of liberty and tyranny."
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A River of Doubt Runs Through Mail Voting in Montana
"A mountainous, 2,600-square-mile region with a population of approximately 119,600 does not seem like your typical setting for machine politics. Yet a recent audit of mail-in ballots cast there found irregularities characteristic of larger urban centers—on a level that could have easily swung local elections in 2020, and statewide elections in cycles past.
The Biden administration, the Democrat-controlled Congress, and the Democratic National Committee are collectively pressing to both nationalize, and make permanent, many of the extraordinary pandemic-driven voting measures implemented during the 2020 election —particularly mass mail-in voting.
Political leaders and prominent media outlets have dismissed concerns raised by critics that such measures invite voter fraud. But could the election in small-county Missoula call all that into question?
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...in October, several county residents with experience targeting election integrity issues formed a group to ensure the legitimacy of the 2020 vote. The members contended that Missoula County had shown anomalies in elections past.
In November, the group approached state Representative Brad Tschida, a Republican, to formally take up the issue. Tschida hired a lawyer involved in the group, Quentin Rhoades, to represent him in corresponding with Missoula County Elections Administrator Bradley Seaman, a Democratic appointee and a longtime supporter of progressive causes.
Seaman’s office complied with Tschida’s request for access to all of the county’s ballot envelopes, and on January 4 a team of volunteers, overseen by Rhoades, conducted an audit with the assistance of the Missoula County Elections Office. The audit consisted of both a count and review of all ballot envelopes and comparing that to the number of officially recorded votes during the November 3 general election.
Its conclusions were troubling: 4,592 out of the 72,491 mail-in ballots lacked envelopes—6.33 percent of all votes. Without an officially printed envelope with registration information, a voter’s signature, and a postmark indicating whether it was cast on time, election officials cannot verify that a ballot is legitimate. It is against the law to count such votes.
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Still another issue arose during the audit that aroused auditors’ suspicions: Dozens of ballot envelopes bore strikingly similar, distinctive handwriting styles in the signatures, suggesting that one or several persons may have filled out and submitted multiple ballots, an act of fraud.
One auditor asserted that of 28 envelopes reviewed from the same address, a nursing home, all 28 signatures looked “exactly the same” stylistically.
Another auditor reported that among the envelopes she reviewed, two very unique signatures appeared dozens of times, describing one such signature as starting out flat, moving to a peak, and tapering out, and another as consisting of numerous circles—a “bubble signature.”
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The magnitude of defective—and potentially fraudulently cast—ballots identified during the Missoula County ballot audit is particularly troubling given the small margins by which local 2020 elections were decided, and previous statewide elections have been decided.
The 2020 local House District 94 race was determined by 435 votes; that of local House District 96, a mere 190.
In 2012, Bullock won his gubernatorial race by just 7,571 votes. Montana’s then-superintendent of public instruction, also a Democrat, won her race by an even smaller margin of 2,231 votes. If Missoula County generated problem ballots on the level of those cast during 2020, they may well have swung these statewide elections."
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Who Is the Real Threat to Autonomy and Flourishing Online?
"Apparently, the self-styled visionary Tristan Harris and his organisation, the Center for Humane Technology (CHT), will ensure that governments and supranational bodies such as the European Union can properly regulate our digital future. In a striking dirigiste proclamation, the CHT says it is dedicated to radically reimagining our digital infrastructure: “Our mission is to drive a comprehensive shift toward humane technology that supports our well-being, democracy, and shared information environment.” In an article in the Financial Times, Harris adds: “For example, the EU wants a Green Deal—but how can it achieve that if a majority of YouTube climate change videos oppose the scientific consensus, as one 2019 study showed?”
My answer to the CHT is that the web is still a resource for the blooming of individuals through collaboration and expression, but only if we have free entry into the digital market. The global networking that the web unleashed still enables a sole voice to make a big difference. Whereas only several decades ago it would have cost you hundreds of thousands of pounds a month, and even today at least £50,000 per month, just to cover England and Wales by the old technology of radio, today you can transmit your hi-definition video podcast from your smartphone to the world for £50 per month. We are also misdirected by the idea that the web is a sort of democracy.
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...the really desirable potential of the web is the exact opposite of majoritarian rule: the non-rule of any section of the public, minority or majority.
Its genuine promise lies in the free entry of any expression that can be represented or hosted in the cybersphere: a belief, an argument, a debate, a proposal, a news-report, a work of visual art, music, a poem, or an ongoing cooperation of some kind. More than that, the web stands for a transformative and sometimes disruptive networked-social life, bringing about inventive ways of connecting and sharing....
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But are the tech giants going to distort our perception of the truth and install their ideological narrative and fake worldviews? Yuval Noah Harari seems to think so, or at least that possibility is implied by his view of people. Lesson number 17 of his book, 21 Lessons For The 21st Century, is entitled “Post-Truth: Some Fake News Lasts Forever”:
Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the Stone Age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives. Indeed, Homo sapiens conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions…
The truth is that truth was never high on the agenda of Homo sapiens. Many people assume that if a particular religion or ideology misrepresents reality, its adherents are bound to discover it sooner or later, because they will not be able to compete with more clear-sighted rivals. Well, that’s just another comforting myth.
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When we look at ideological movements, we see many people spreading certain ideas, perhaps zealously and dogmatically protesting in the streets with flags, banners, and sometimes violence. Some movements, peopled by thousands or millions, look like unstoppable, rock-solid juggernauts. But these intellectual “things” are in fact more fluid. If we look closely, we will notice a turnover of membership and, if we cast our gaze over a longer period of time, we witness within these “juggernauts” splits and other dramatic internal disagreements. For example, when we examine the Communist Parties in the West during the 1930s, we’re at first impressed by what looks like formidable discipline, strength, and staying power. But all the time, some Communist Party members were leaving and new people were joining. Typically, in such ideological bodies of adherents, there are a few stalwarts who remain at the helm through thick and thin, while the great body of members are continually being replaced.
A similar phenomenon affects religious movements. In her 1989 book New Religious Movements: A Practical Introduction, the sociologist Eileen Barker reported that at least 61 percent of those who joined the Unification Church during a four-month period in 1978 had left within two-and-a-half years. Others have found very similar defection rates in various minor religious sects.
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Imagine a large population of Bertrand Russells—a Bertrand Russell Island—each of whom will inspect every doctrine placed before them, and will infallibly consign each doctrine to its proper place: the error bin or the correct bin. However, in each case, it takes a week to decide. Even on this ideally rational island, all new bad ideas would propagate for a week or more. Bertrand Russell Island is like any normal population with birth and death. Because there’s always youthful Bertrand Russells who have yet to inspect the bad ideas, bogus ideas could, in principle, last forever. There would still be a disconnect between the system of ideas spreading and the rationality/cognitive power of the individuals in the population. You don’t have to think that some people are irrational or closed to argument to explain the prevalence of error or stupid ideas. Even Bertrand Russell Island would have fake news.
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With a small “night-watchmen” state, it might be feasible for the ordinary citizen to inspect the government’s business. However, the costs to any citizen of monitoring the thousands of programs emerging from the myriad ministries of our bloated governments is extremely high compared to the minuscule benefit or cost imposed on him by any one of those policies. Introducing state-licensing for a trade, for example, has typically meant that the established corporations with their accumulated capital, political connections, and specialism in their field get to “assist the state” in writing the rules that govern their niche. With all these forces mounted against the citizen, it’s not surprising that we then get stuck with politically stronger versions of the overbearing corporations which our “radically reimagined” and “comprehensive” policies were meant to curb.
There is a better way. Free entry to support the competition of ideas and the invention of new types of communicative platforms such as Clubhouse, Parler, and Signal is the way forward. Free entry is an escape from old-style crony capitalist democracy that lends itself to corruption and the closing off of new entrepreneurial start-ups by the established tech giants. The CHT has fallen for the old fallacy: If you are confronted by a leviathan, just invoke a larger leviathan."
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The Top Four Reasons Why Many People, Doctors and Scientists Refuse to Take the COVID Vaccine
"When you ask somebody why they are choosing to take the covid vaccine or why they are wearing a mask, they may respond, “because science.” The next question to ask is, how many of these people have actually gone through the science of vaccines and whether or not masks may be an effective tool for limiting the spread of COVID?
From what I see, the majority of people receive their information from mainstream media organizations, which are organizations that have strong ties to pharmaceutical corporations and governments, and are known for presenting one perspective that favours a particular agenda while completely ridiculing the other. They sometimes go as far as labelling another perspective as a “conspiracy theory” despite the fact that there is ample, credible evidence to support the claims of that perspective. Do people simply believe things because they feel that everybody else believes it too? What are the social and cultural implications of not being in alignment with the majority?
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"Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain. Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health. Politicians and industry are responsible for this opportunistic embezzlement. So too are scientists and health experts. The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency—a time when it is even more important to safeguard science."
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Why is it that such an alarming amount of respected experts who oppose the measures being taken to combat COVID, are being ridiculed, ignored, and unacknowledged, yet a political doctor, somebody like Anthony Fauci, can get all of the air time he pleases? Why aren’t all perspectives, science and data shared equally? Why have effective “alternative” treatments been ignored and the vaccine made out to be the only option?
Below are the top four reasons why COVID vaccine hesitancy is at an all time high among people of all backgrounds.
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1. A Lack of Trust In Government & Pharmaceutical Companies.
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"Critical criminology repeatedly has drawn attention to the state-corporate nexus as a site of corruption and other forms of criminality, a scenario exacerbated by the intensification of neoliberalism in areas such as health. The state-pharmaceutical relationship, which increasingly influences health policy, is no exception. That is especially so when pharmaceutical products such as vaccines, a burgeoning sector of the industry, are mandated in direct violation of the principle of informed consent. Such policies have provoked suspicion and dissent as critics question the integrity of the state-pharma alliance and its impact on vaccine safety. However, rather than encouraging open debate, draconian modes of governance have been implemented to repress and silence any form of criticism, thereby protecting the activities of the state and pharmaceutical industry from independent scrutiny...."
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Vaccine hesitancy among physicians and academics is nothing new. To illustrate this I often point to a conference held at the end of 2019 put on by the World Health Organization (WHO). At the conference, Dr. Heidi Larson a Professor of Anthropology and the Risk and Decision Scientist Director at the Vaccine Confidence Project Emphasized this point, having stated,
"The other thing that’s a trend, and an issue, is not just confidence in providers but confidence of health care providers. We have a very wobbly health professional frontline that is starting to question vaccines and the safety of vaccines. That’s a huge problem, because to this day any study I’ve seen…still, the most trusted person on any study I’ve seen globally is the health care provider."
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2. The Virus Has A 99.95 Survival Rate.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, from the Stanford University School of Medicine recently shared that the survival rate for people under 70 years of age is about 99.95 percent. He also said that COVID is less dangerous than the flu for children. This comes based on approximately 50 studies that have been published, and information showing that more children in the U.S. have died from the flu than COVID. This correlates with data from Sweden as well.
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There is a perception out there that COVID is no more dangerous that other severe respiratory illnesses, which are the second leading cause of death worldwide, and that covid is similar to already existing coronaviruses that have circled the global for decades affecting hundreds of millions of people a year and killing tens of millions.
Another issue raised by many, which is a matter of public record now, is the fact that it’s very unclear as to how many deaths marked as COVID are, and were, actually a result of COVID.
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3. Some People Don’t Know How Safe And Effective The Vaccine Is
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The vaccine is being heavily marketed as a saviour, which is the case with almost all vaccines despite many concerns being raised over the years. One great example is with regards to aluminum containing vaccines. Scientists have discovered that injected aluminum is very different from ingested aluminum. Injected aluminum doesn’t exit the body, and can be detected within the brain years after injection. Is this “anti-vax”? No, it’s just science, these are legitimate concerns.
When it comes to the COVID vaccine, there are concerns, especially since the mRNA technology used in many of the vaccines is new.
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...A study published in October of 2020 in the International Journal of Clinical Practice states:
"COVID-19 vaccines designed to elicit neutralising antibodies may sensitise vaccine recipients to more severe disease than if they were not vaccinated. Vaccines for SARS, MERS and RSV have never been approved, and the data generated in the development and testing of these vaccines suggest a serious mechanistic concern: that vaccines designed empirically using the traditional approach (consisting of the unmodified or minimally modified coronavirus viral spike to elicit neutralising antibodies), be they composed of protein, viral vector, DNA or RNA and irrespective of delivery method, may worsen COVID-19 disease via antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). This risk is sufficiently obscured in clinical trial protocols and consent forms for ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials that adequate patient comprehension of this risk is unlikely to occur, obviating truly informed consent by subjects in these trials."
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4. There May Be Protection From Infection
As with most viruses, the host gains immunity from infection. Take the measles virus. A child has a 0.01 chance of dying from the measles, yet if they survive the virus, they have lifetime protection against the virus, a strengthened and more evolved immune system, and may even have more possible protection from a select few cancers.
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Martin Kulldorff, a medical professor at Harvard university and vaccine safety expert recently tweeted,
"After having protecting themselves while working class were exposed to the virus, the vaccinated #Zoomers now want #VaccinePassports where immunity from prior infection does not count, despite stronger evidence for protection. One more assault on working people."
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At the end of the day, there are ample concerns about the COVID vaccine, its effectiveness, the safety of it in the short term and in the long term. Despite these concerns, the vaccine is heavily marketed as unquestionably safe and effective. A fifth category could have been added to this article, and that’s the ridicule and acknowledgments of other, cheap effective treatments that have shown to have a tremendous amount of success. It seems these treatments would have rendered the vaccine useless and unnecessary, but the vaccine is a multiple billion dollar product.
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Do we really want to live in a world where we give a small group of people the ability to mandate vaccines in order to have access to certain freedoms we enjoyed prior to COVID? Is this right? Is this ethical? If we allow them to do this, what else will we allow them to do in the future?"
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L.A. Times Journalist Says Vaccine Passports Are Good to “Break the Resistance Down”
"[Harry] Litman is a a former U.S. Attorney and Deputy Assistant Attorney General, having been appointed by Bill Clinton and now writes as a legal affairs columnist.
“Vaccine passports are a good idea,” tweeted Litman. “Among other things, it will single out the still large contingent of people who refuse vaccines, who will be foreclosed from doing a lot of things their peers can do. That should help break the resistance down.”
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The Vaccine Passport Propaganda Template
"1) Include some short expression that the idea of vaccine passports can be troubling, but make sure to only bring this up superficially....
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2) Frame the imposing of a vaccine passport mandate as something that is both inevitable and threatens only minimal, if any, harm....
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3) Bring on a guest who, despite his description making him sound like someone who would be looking out for the interests of people concerned about vaccine passports, pretty much says that vaccine passports are the best thing since sliced bread....
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4) Reiterate that vaccine passports are inevitable, and that people should support them....
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5) Declare that vaccine passports must be imposed on the American people because of coronavirus....
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6) Say that mandating vaccine passports is really no big deal because of some other supposedly very similar restriction to which some people are already subjected....
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7) Dismiss as insignificant people’s concerns about being required, in order to go about their daily activities, to present a vaccine passport and to take a vaccine, or, really, an experimental coronavirus vaccine that is not even a vaccine under the normal meaning of the term. Assert instead that the only danger to freedom could be something theoretical that could be additionally required in the future....
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8) Dismiss any concern that vaccine passports can in fact harm freedom. Instead, describe people as benefiting from and gaining freedom...
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9) Insist that the vaccine passport mandate is fine because it will be applied equally to all people....
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10) Declare that a vaccine passport mandate helps encourage people to take the shots...."