Farewell 2022: the year of vindication for Covid skeptics

If 2020 and 2021 were a living nightmare, 2022 was the beginning of the awakening. After two years of being labelled every name under the sun, the time has finally arrived when the dissidents can say that they were right, in large part due to information being released by Elon Musk.

On the Covid front, the initial criticisms about vaccines appear sound. Statistically, they are some of the most ineffective and inefficient vaccines released to market with side effects that many consider unacceptable, especially to children. The full extent of the health risk they pose is not yet known.

A recent study undertaken on over 260,000 individuals in the State of Indiana demonstrated that vaccinated individuals are 2-3 times more likely to be infected with Covid than unvaccinated individuals with natural immunity (from prior infection), a concern that was dismissed as conspiracy.

Natural immunity, initially discounted and laughed at, has won out against Covid vaccines for re-infection, particularly regarding new mutations. ‘Conspiracy theorists’ have been saying this all along, including those in the medical profession.

One of the starkest admissions of the year came from Pfizer executive Janine Small, president of international developed markets. It came in response to a question raised by Dutch Member of the European Parliament Rob Roos: ‘Was the Pfizer Covid vaccine tested on stopping the transmission of the virus before it entered the market?’

Small answered:

‘Did we know about stopping immunisation [sic: should read transmission] before it entered the market? No … we had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market.’

Her answer presented an admission that the vaccine Pfizer manufactured was initially never tested to see if it prevented transmission, yet prevention of transmission was the premise on which governments and unelected bureaucrats justified arbitrary Covid measures, including lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

Remember when medical authorities told us that we needed to get vaccinated to keep everyone else safe? Remember when they said that if we didn’t take the vaccine we were literally killing grandma? That was all based on (at best) debunked guesswork and (at worst) a fabrication. Our health representatives and government ministers did not know if the vaccine prevented transmission when drafting health directives. And, as it turns out, it never did.

While most mandates have since been dropped, some remain in place, despite being completely devoid of logic or reason. Those who were forced to take the vaccine have been left duped. Many have come to regret taking it, venting their frustration on the (now liberated) social media platform Twitter. Others who had their first two or three doses have sworn off getting any further doses, a declaration that is reflected in low fourth and fifth dose figures.

The vaccines have also been side-eyed in connection with an increase in heart conditions, including myocarditis. The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) knew this early on, and has quietly pulled the Moderna vaccine off the market in Australia months behind other countries. What was the reason for this delay?

Former MP and vaccine advocate Dr Kerryn Phelps recently revealed that she and her partner both suffered significant neurological side effects after taking the Pfizer vaccine. Phelps noted these adverse effects were reported to the TGA. Phelps subsequently claimed that her concerns were never followed up, although the TGA have not commented. She also raised concerns that doctors have been prevented from speaking up about adverse effects presenting in their patients due to fears of being reprimanded.

Failure to live up to transmission claims and ongoing investigations into the #DiedSuddenly medical phenomenon of statistically significant unexplained deaths, is only the beginning of what is increasingly being dubbed a scandal.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has traditionally sat slightly Left of politics, emerged as the unlikely unmasker of Big Pharma.

Some joke that Elon Musk paid $44 billion just to blow the whistle on the absolutely horrifying actions of Twitter under its previous management. Detailed were the complex entanglements with federal agencies that formed a web of genuine collusion to the detriment of free speech and undermined the sanctity of free and fair elections.

Over the past couple of months, Elon has enlisted several independent journalists to help release inside information from the Twitter archives. This has included the dissemination of private conversations between Twitter employees and government officials. Also released were email correspondence and evidence of conversations with federal agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and ‘Other Government Agencies’ (eg. the CIA), and evidence of conversations with the government.

These are known as The Twitter Files.

What has come to light thus far has demonstrated that Twitter was actively working with the government and federal agencies to potentially violate the First Amendment rights of Americans who chose to speak out against the accepted narrative. We have been shown, in considerable detail, how Twitter executives, including former head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth and former head of Legal and Policy Vijaya Gadde, made critical decisions that former CEO Jack Dorsey may not have even been aware of. The tools they used to censor and silence individuals, in particular Conservative accounts, have been confirmed as real despite former Twitter spokespeople denying their existence.

These revelations have highlighted a number of truths that were cast off as ‘conspiracy theories’.

Alex Berenson, who was skeptical of the Covid vaccine, was specifically targeted by the Biden administration, who put pressure on Twitter to take action on his account among other ‘anti-vaxxer accounts’. This ultimately led to his suspension. Only after bringing a lawsuit against Twitter did Berenson have his account restored.

According to the Atlantic:

This was not the end of the drama, though. Last week, Berenson published a Substack post that included screenshots of a conversation on Twitter’s internal Slack messaging system from April 2021, obtained during the course of the lawsuit. The images show employees discussing a recent White House meeting at which members of the Biden administration were said to have posed a “really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform,” as one Slack message put it. Another alleges that Andy Slavitt, who was at the time a senior adviser to Joe Biden on the administration’s COVID-19 response, specifically mentioned a “data viz that had showed [Berenson] was the epicenter of disinfo.”

Berenson has since declared that he will sue the Biden administration for infringing upon his free speech by compelling Twitter to take action against his account.

Once again, legal experts say that his case is unlikely to succeed. Berenson faces a “very high bar” in proving that a private company behaved as a state actor, Evelyn Douek, an Atlantic contributor and assistant professor at Stanford Law School, told me. According to both her and Goldman, the Slack messages that Berenson published don’t amount to proof that the government pressured Twitter to remove Berenson’s account. But Douek is generally perturbed by the evidence of informal pressure by government officials to constrain speech. “It does strike me as unusual,” she said. “It’s certainly unusual to get records of it.”

Other medical experts were targeted, including Harvard Medical School epidemiologist Dr Martin Kulldorff, who tweeted that vaccines should only be taken by those who were most at risk, including the elderly and their care-takers, and that children and those who had already been infected should not have it. His tweet was hit with a ‘misleading’ label.

Dr Andrew Rostom, a Rhode Island physician, was permanently suspended for ‘misinformation’, including a tweet referring to a peer-reviewed study on mRNA vaccines. Other accounts that pointed out the truth on the matter of Covid and vaccines were also hit with ‘misleading’ labels, even if they were merely tweeting findings released by the CDC.

As we move into 2023, more revelations will come to light and the ‘conspiracy theorists’ will likely continue to be proven right over and over again.

While it would be easy to look back on this year as one giant ‘I told you so’, it would be better to take heed of what we have learned and use it as justification to push back against those who would wish us to just move on with our lives as if none of it happened. Yes, these revelations are a good thing, but I cannot help but feel as if this conversation is not over yet.

We cannot become complacent about past abuses because the truth is finally coming out. We must continue to pursue that truth and ensure that it is spread far and wide, if only to ensure justice for all those who have been wronged.

2022 was the year of vindication. 2023 must be the year of accountability. The tangled web of darkness that has been constructed around The Science must be eradicated for good and never allowed to be rebuilt again.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/12/farewell-2022-the-year-of-vindication/

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The Cult of Masked Schoolchildren

There is still some pressure on kids to wear masks in school. Some private schools have gone beyond cloth-masking and mandated N95 (or equivalent) masks for children as young as 4. The Berkeley Unified School District in California recently began transitioning students to N95-level masking. This isn’t a matter of protecting children, their teachers, or their grandparents; it’s delusional and dangerous cultlike behavior.

The way to reduce scientific uncertainty when it comes to practices like masking young children is to conduct randomized studies. When it comes to masking kids in schools, the global scientific community has launched no such studies during the pandemic. The U.K. government commissioned a report on the efficacy of masks in school settings, which failed to identify any clear evidence in favor of this practice. Moreover, the authors write:

Wearing face coverings may have physical side effects and impair face identification, verbal and non-verbal communication between teacher and learner. This means there are downsides to face coverings for pupils and students, including detrimental impacts on communication in the classroom.

Let’s start with cloth masks, which have been the most common type of facial covering used to cover kids’ faces in school. In the only cluster randomized trial conducted during the pandemic among adults, cloth-masking failed to improve the primary outcome of COVID cases that were confirmed with a blood test. In an umbrella review I conducted with Jonathan Darrow of Harvard and Ian Liu of the University of Colorado, we concluded that cloth-masking simply doesn’t work. A month later, the former health commissioner of Baltimore told CNN the same:

The United States is uniquely aggressive in masking young kids. Contrary to scientific evidence, the Centers for Disease Control and the American Academy of Pediatrics advise that children as young as 2 should wear masks. Europe has always been more relaxed on this issue, and the World Health Organization advises against masks for kids under 6 and only selectively for kids under 11.

Data from Spain on masking kids is sobering. The figure below shows the R value—a measure of how fast the virus spreads—by age. Spain mandated masks at a specific age cutoff. If masks have a visible effect, we should see a step down in the graph at the age kids start to wear them (i.e., the spread should drop at the age masking begins). But as you can see, there is only a slow, deliberate, upward trend with no steps down. Based on the evidence only, it would be impossible to guess which age groups are wearing masks and which are not.

This simply means that masking was not associated with a large effect in slowing spread. (If you’re curious, kids started to wear masks in this study at age 6.)

Now let’s consider N95 or equivalent masks that are designed to filter a high percentage of particles. To achieve this goal, N95 masks require a snug fit and validation. Notably, there are no approved N95s for kids because these masks have not been subject to validation for young people. All masks sold with this moniker are merely “N95-style” masks thought to be equivalent, possibly. Berkeley and other school districts have mandated them anyway, even though no study suggests the policy can slow the spread of COVID.

What is the goal of masking policy? Does it at least help to “slow” the spread? Pre-vaccine, it made sense to try to delay infection until all those who wished could be vaccinated, the latter being an intervention that does have a demonstrable effect on rates of serious disease and death. While cloth-masking does little if anything to delay infection, universal N95-masking might have indeed been helpful. But does this goal still make sense after vaccines and omicron?

Omicron has shown it is able to infect even vaccinated people relatively easily (even though, yes, vaccines do still appear to protect from severe disease). The fact that omicron is widely spread by vaccinated people, coupled with its rapid rate of spread, means that sooner rather than later we will all be infected—a conclusion shared earlier by Anthony Fauci. But if infection is inevitable for everyone, then it no longer makes sense to wear a mask. Even the most effective mask can’t avert infection; it can only delay it while causing inconvenience, discomfort, and difficulty speaking, all of which are detrimental to the educational and emotional well-being of schoolchildren.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/cult-masked-schoolchildren

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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) Also here

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH) Also here

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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