BBC Collaborates with Facebook to Purge Vaccine-Injured Groups Online
A major media member of the [Leftist] Trusted News Initiative (TNI) has warned a primary tech member about vaccine injury groups gaming the system to avoid algorithm detection and thus scrutiny.
In what could be described as a dangerous move, the BBC collaborates with Facebook to shut down vaccine injury support groups by universally referring to them as “anti-vaccine” or “anti-vaxxers” and calling out the ways that they use carrot emojis to hide from Facebook their true identity. Members of the TNI are collaborating to purge social media participants that are part of vaccine-injured groups. Even if some of them, or even many of them, are in fact vaccine injured, the policies of the BBC and Facebook, as well as other media and social tech companies assume that there are absolutely no vaccine-injured persons and that such persons have no rights whatsoever to share their stories.
The BBC reports that “several groups, one with hundreds of thousands of members, in which the emoji appears in place of the word ‘vaccine.’” The BBC’s Zoe Kleinman wrote that Facebook parent company Meta was alerted, and the groups were removed.
According to a statement from Facebook:
“We have removed this group for violating our harmful misinformation policies and will review any other similar content in line with this policy. We continue to work closely with public health experts and the UK government to further tackle Covid vaccine misinformation.”
Yet the BBC’s Kleinman reports that the groups are back even though they were taken down from Facebook. According to Kleinman, the groups the BBC and Facebook label as anti-vax groups sought to rebrand themselves as places where people can share vaccine stories, for example sharing “banter, bets and funny video.”
But behind the scenes, the groups were using code words for communication purposes. For example, “Do not use the c word, v word or b word ever” (covid, vaccine booster). The particular group has 250,000 members.
Marc Owen-Jones, a misinformation specialist at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, shared that instead of using words such as “Covid-19” or “Vaccine,” the group was instructed to use emojis of carrots as an example apparently to evade the fake news detection algorithms reports Ms. Kleinman.
In the BBC piece, it’s identified that an Online Safety Bill could come into law which would lead to “steep penalties for failing to identify removing harmful material on their platforms.”
What if there are actually vaccine-injured persons? Currently, the BBC doesn’t recognize that there are actually adverse events and some deaths, albeit rare, that occur with the COVID-19 vaccines. In fact, even at a rare rate of one-tenth of one percent hundreds, this would translate into hundreds of thousands of vaccines injured in the United States alone.
TrialSite has been chronicling dozens of deaths from COVID-19 vaccines involving governments making compensatory payouts. Is it not allowed by the Trusted News Initiative to speak the truth about this situation? In the United States, over 224 million people have received at least a primary series vaccine in the USA. Estimates of vaccine injury in the USA vary from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands and possibly even over one million.
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) 2022, 16,336 preliminary death reports have been recorded although just because such an incident is reported in VAERS doesn’t mean that the event is correlated to the vaccination.
TrialSite’s founder Daniel O’Connor went on the record, “Do individuals that are actually injured by COVID-19 vaccines have a right to share their situation, their stories on any social media? Of course, they should. There is something terribly off if such a reality is constantly being covered up.”
Of course, this kind of group is quite different from a truly anti-vaccine-focused activist group that stands opposed to all modern vaccines. TrialSite recently launched a suite of social features including authoring, Q&As, and groups. Separate from its media platform—which focuses on objective, unbiased news which includes articles that report on the benefits of the COVID-19 vaccines as well as challenges that may surface—features such as TrialSite Groups exist to allow people to communicate and engage on topics involving medical research, less the fear of censorship.
TrialSite’s O’Connor shared, “There are legitimate vaccine injured groups such as React19. They have lots of members that are really suffering and it's not fair that these groups are censored. That is why we have partnered with groups such as this one to ensure they receive objective, unbiased coverage from media and that alternatives to Facebook are in place—social tech platforms that won’t profile and censor people just because they represent an inconvenient truth for certain centers of power and authority.”
TrialSite connected with React19 https://react19.org/co-founder Brianne Dressen who informed the media that in their support groups with “well over 20 thousand Covid vaccine injuries have been systematically shut down leaving us no choice but to reboot and hope people find us. These groups are an essential source of support and for many they are a lifeline. These people are disabled and are not allowed to talk about what happened to them. If they do talk about it, they are punished. If they persist, they will be isolated from their community and eventually shut down all-together.”
But why would someone legitimately injured not be able to talk about their actual health condition or situation. TrialSite’s Daniel O’Connor shared “that’s because this pandemic has been thoroughly politicized. The confluence of government health and media industry powers have driven a paradigm for combatting Covid-19 which includes a universal vaccination scheme as a means of controlling the virus, however imperfect the strategy.
It’s like a war—in fact legally it is a sort of war given the contracts government established with industry fall under establish defense-like countermeasures against an invisible enemy—in this case an RNA virus.” So how the government has set up and executed this pandemic response has left little to no means for people injured by the vaccine—and there are recognized side effects, adverse events and actual injuries albeit rare, even deaths.” Like in any war the TrialSite founder continued “there will be innocent casualties.” He continued “and hence the unprecedented coordination between government, corporate media and big tech to systematically censor countervailing discussions that are quickly identified and labeled as misinformation.”
React19’s Dressen further pointed out the growing plight of the vaccine injured “Cutting off a sick person’s connection to others and not allowing them to talk about their disease, the outcome is catastrophic. This has led to permanent disability and in some cases death. It is truly barbaric that this has been done so deliberately on such a large scale with cooperation of governments, tech companies and the media. Not only is this permitted but it is encouraged and celebrated. This censorship is abuse and discrimination against the disabled. Until this changes, good people will remain sick, many will decline, and some will die. I wish that was an exaggeration, but that is the facts.”
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Australia’s disastrous ‘Zero Covid’ experiment
What if I told you that lockdowns and zero-Covid mania did far more harm than good to human life?
Unlike sharp lockdowns in Europe and the Americas, Australia’s early lockdown in March 2020 did reduce Covid cases to zero for a time. Flush with this success, Australia imposed sharp travel restrictions on Covid-ravaged countries around the world. Australian ex-pat citizens were barred from coming home, even if their visit was to care for elderly parents suffering from isolation.
Despite this extraordinary policy, Covid kept coming back to Australia. Over and over again, entire regions were locked down whenever a few cases were found. Through October of 2021, Melbourne’s residents had suffered through nearly 270 days of lockdown – the most in the world.
Schools closed and children suffered. Vital medical treatments were delayed or cancelled, including for cancer patients. The initial purpose of the lockdowns was to protect the Australian healthcare system, but even in 2021, when there was almost no Covid circulating, queues for care lengthened. Depression and anxiety levels skyrocketed, especially among young people. Thousands of small businesses shut down forever.
Australia’s initial zero-Covid ‘success’ created a trap. Official public health exaggerated the risk of death from Covid. This, despite the fact that studies found that Covid infection primarily poses a high 5 per cent+ mortality risk for unvaccinated elderly people. For the young, survival rates exceeded 99.9 per cent. For young and old Australians alike, the lockdowns imposed far more harm than Covid.
Public support for lockdown stayed high in Australia on the heels of public health propaganda that Covid infection posed a high risk of death for all, regardless of age or underlying health condition. And the government obliged, implicitly promising a zero-Covid future that it knew it would never be able to deliver.
The advent of a vaccine in December 2020 should have provided a way out of the zero-Covid trap. At great cost, the lockdown policy had ‘worked’, but there was no endpoint to it that did not involve isolation from the international community forever.
Perhaps complacent because of its zero-Covid ‘success’, the government delayed securing contracts with vaccine manufacturers. Since lockdown was popular, It did not feel the urgency to vaccinate that the rest of the world felt. At the beginning of August 2021, only 16 per cent of Australians were fully vaccinated.
And the public health officials used the vaccination campaign to chase an impossible goal – herd immunity through universal vaccination. Covid spread in many countries with high levels of vaccination, infecting vaccinated and unvaccinated people alike. The vaccine, effective in reducing mortality risk from Covid infection for the elderly, is ineffective at stopping disease spread. Nevertheless, government and public health officials demonised the unvaccinated, often rendering them second-class citizens.
When the Omicron wave arrived, the inevitable happened in Australia. Zero-Covid and lockdowns failed, and the disease spread everywhere. By May 2022, Australia passed America in total Covid cases per capita, and by August 2022, Australia passed the European Union. If Australian policy aimed to keep Australia free of Covid, it failed.
With two and a half years of hindsight, an evaluation of Australia’s lockdown-focused zero-Covid strategy is possible. On the plus side, Australia delayed the inevitable spread of Covid throughout the population to a time after the development, testing, and deployment of a vaccine. Despite having experienced more Covid cases per capita than the US, it has a fraction of the number of Covid-attributable deaths per capita.
On the negative side is the tremendous burden on the Australian population that has come from being isolated from the rest of the world for such a long time and from the intermittent lockdowns the government imposed on the people. All-cause excess deaths – below baseline levels in 2020 – were 3 per cent above baseline in 2021, despite zero-Covid, and are far above baseline thus far in 2022. Among the causes of this spike in excess deaths are the lockdowns themselves.
After the vaccine arrived, Australia’s decision to use it to free itself from its zero-Covid trap was smart. However, Australia failed to vaccinate its population with urgency, exposing its people to a full year of zero-Covid harms. If the government had adopted the strategy of vaccinating for focused protection of older and high-risk populations, Australia could have opened much earlier.
So, the best case for Australia’s Covid strategy is that it delayed the entry of Covid in-country until the development of effective vaccines. However, it’s not even clear whether the strategy saved lives, with cumulative all-cause excess mortality on par with Sweden’s focused protection strategy. And the harm done by disconnecting Australia and other developed economies from the rest of the world included millions of poor people thrown into poverty. Ultimately, Australia’s zero-Covid strategy was a grand, immoral, and incoherent failure.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/09/australias-disastrous-zero-covid-experiment/
****************************************************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)
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