Thursday, June 20, 2024


Troubling nursing home statistics: Deaths RISE after vaccination

The statistics below seem very firm but we should be careful about generalizing the finding to people in general. Most peole do have SOME adverse reaction to a COVID jab but survive it. People that are already in a nursing home will however quite probably have compromised immune systems so might die from reactions that younger people would survive. So the findings below are compatible with saying that the vaccines are not GENERALLY harmful.

But it also follows that elderly people were actually the LAST people who should have got the vaccines. As it was, however, elderly people were in fact prioritized to get the vaccine on the assumption that they were most in need of protecton from the virus. So what actually happened was the opposite of what was intended: For the elderly, the cure was worse than the disease.



Steve Kirsch

The single most stunning data point that nobody can explain;
the single most stunning piece of official US government data is the US Nursing home data. I first wrote about this nearly a year ago. Since then, there have been no investigations. Nobody wants to talk about it. Here’s why…

I was tipped off by an insider that her nursing home, Apple Valley Village Health Care Center, located in Apple Valley, MN started rolling out the injections on December 28, 2020. The insider also told me that shortly thereafter staff members were called back from their Christmas vacations to deal with all the deaths.

Nobody at Apple Valley Village will talk to me. Does the Chaplain think she is helping to save lives by keeping her mouth shut? Apparently. None of them would return my phone calls.

Let’s see what the official US Medicare records that anyone can download here say about COVID cases and deaths before the shots rolled out.

I went on the query page on that site and downloaded the records for Apple Valley Village, highlighted the two key columns in red, and saved them in an Excel spreadsheet here so you can see for yourself. It took me about 60 seconds to do that.

For the 32 week period ending 12/27/20 (right before the shots started being rolled out), there were 27 COVID cases, and 0 COVID deaths. There was an average of 1 death per week (there were 32 deaths in the 32 weeks listed).

Now let’s look at what happened in just a 3 week period right after the shots were administered (rows 35 to 37 in the spreadsheet): 90 COVID cases resulting in 28 COVID deaths. In that 3 week period after the shots, AVV averaged 8 all-cause deaths per week, which is 8X higher than normal.

This is not a statistical anomaly. That is impossible if the vaccine isn’t killing people. You can’t keep injecting people with something that you know is killing people like this unless you give them informed consent.

I’ve filed a criminal complaint with the Apple Valley Police Department.

Which means that the people at AVV are criminally negligent for not stopping the shots. So I’ve reported this

The COVID death rate at AVV suggests we should have seen at most 1.5 deaths in the 90 COVID cases, but we observed 28. The chance of that happening by pure random chance is 6.6e-26. In short, we are 99.999999999999999999999999% confident this didn’t happen by chance.

And this didn’t happen because they changed the criteria for dying from COVID, because the weekly all-cause death rate jumped from 1 to 8 for three weeks straight after the rollout. That can happen by chance, but it is nearly impossible (probability 2.6e-14). So it’s unlikely Apple Valley Village just got “unlucky.”

Something caused a lot of people to die from COVID right after the shot rollout.

If it wasn’t the shots, what was it? Nothing else can explain both the rise in COVID death rate (from 0% to 30%) as well as the 8X increase in all-cause mortality.

There is no possible explanation other than the deaths were caused by the “safe and effective” COVID vaccine.

This is why Apple Valley Village staff will never comment.

This is why the FDA and CDC won’t comment. This is why the New York Times will never cover this story. There is no place to hide on this data.

I’m not claiming this is happening everywhere. I’m only saying that the vaccine was supposed to significantly REDUCE all-cause mortality from COVID. If that were the case, this anecdote is statistically impossible. And yet it happened.

In science, if you can’t explain a data point, you don’t just write it off. You have to explain it or at least publicly admit that your hypothesis could be wrong until you can explain it.

And this wasn’t cherry picked either. In the entire time I’ve been a “misinformation spreader,” I’ve only gotten one insider call from someone in a nursing home who would reveal the date that the vaccine was rolled out in her facility. One.

And even if I scoured all 15,000 nursing homes for a case like this, it still can’t happen because the probabilities are too small.

So I had two independent ways at looking at this data: the tip from the insider and the data reported to the government. Both aligned.

Does this deserve investigation? Of course! But there will be no investigations. Ever.

Because that’s the way science works nowadays. It’s all about ignoring all credible evidence that doesn’t support the narrative. And that should be troubling for everyone.

Apple Valley isn’t talking, even when a MN State Representative calls! Shane Mekeland, House District 27A Minnesota, reached out to Apple Valley Village to ask them if they were investigating the excess deaths.

They said, “No comment” and immediately hung up the phone.

Why did they do that? It looks like they have something to hide.

Aggregate CFR data from all 15,000 nursing homes

Some people erroneously claim that anecdotes are meaningless. This is false because anecdotes are easy to 100% verify and a single anecdote, if statistically significant, can reveal serious flaws in a hypothesis that should cause further investigation as to whether the hypothesis is consistent with the data.

But I’m fine looking at all the US Nursing home data.

I spend a ton of time doing that. You can look at my GitHub repo for all the work I did (including the R code I wrote and all the results.

I summarized it all in my Substack article: The US nursing home data is devastating for the narrative: FINAL GRAPHS.

It shows that over 50% of nursing home residents were fully vaccinated by 2/7/2021. But as you can see, the case fatality rate (CFR) from COVID actually spiked up after 50% of the shots were delivered and then dropped down as we’d expect as the people with the weakest immune systems succumb to the virus early on leaving people with more robust immune systems. And look at the dramatic instant drop in CFR when Omicron rolled out. This is what should have happened after the vaccine rollout if it worked: it should never have spiked up like it did; it should have gone from the .17 baseline and dropped monotonically half of that amount; there shouldn’t have been any spike after the vaccine rollout if the variant didn’t change (which it didn’t).

The IFR in this chart is mislabelled; it should technically be CFR because we don’t know if there was 100% testing of everyone in the nursing homes.

The JAMA paper clearly shows no hospitalization benefit for the COVID or flu vaccines in the VA elderly

One of my personal favorite papers was a Research Letter published in JAMA on April 6, 2023 described in my Substack article entitled VA study published in JAMA shows that COVID *and* Flu shots don't reduce your risk of hospitalization.

The study looked at the official US government VA data.

Hidden in this Table was a gem that none of the authors noticed: extremely strong evidence that neither COVID nor flu vaccines reduced hospitalization. It showed the vaccination breakdown in both cohorts (hospitalized for flu vs. COVID) was nearly identical (in both raw and adjusted numbers).

Truly revolutionary. A paper in JAMA unintentionally demonstrating that the COVID and flu vaccines DO NOT work!

These are large numbers. If the vaccine worked, there would have been a significant difference between the two groups. But there wasn’t.

The Z-score for influenza group is over 24, and for the COVID shots it is over 47 (assuming a 50% reduction is expected). Which means the results are highly statistically significant (a Z-score of 1.96 is generally considered statistically significant).

I contacted the senior author of the research letter, Ziyad Al-Aly, who is a highly published epidemiologist with an h-index of 82 who works for the VA.

I asked him how, if the vaccines worked, you could get a result like this where it clearly shows the net hospitalization benefit is near ZERO for both vaccines.

He couldn’t explain it either.

I suggested to him that he write a follow up Letter to JAMA to point out this truly game-changing observation in his paper, but he said he didn’t have time.

But I thought this was pretty darn important. So I collaborated with Mark Mead and Paul Marik and we wrote a Letter to the Editor to JAMA to point out this stunning result.

JAMA rejected it as not important enough for their journal. Wow. You show that the COVID and flu vaccines are a complete scam and that isn’t good enough to make it into JAMA?!?!?

We have the rejection letter, but it is marked confidential at the request of Gregory Curfman, MD, Executive Editor, JAMA.

It’s been accepted by another journal and will be available soon.

Lack of a compelling positive anecdote in the US

I’m not aware of reading or hearing about any nursing home facility (which largely have stable populations so we can look at their statistics over time) which noticed a significant drop in CFR, and lower all-cause mortality after the shot rollout.

And apparently, the success examples are so rare that if you asked 5,000 people, they aren’t aware of one either.

If the vaccine worked as promised, nearly every single facility of the 15,000 US facilities would be a huge success story where the COVID CFR went down by at least a factor of 2 after the shots were given to most of the patients in that facility.

But apparently, after over 5,000 views now, nobody knows of one. How is THAT possible? Ask 5,000 people and nobody can cite a success case? Is it that rare?

If you look at the stats for nearly 15,000 nursing homes (which I did in the “ALL” analysis in the github code), you find that there are nearly 3 nursing homes where the CFR went up (i.e., worse) after the demarcation date (vax rollout) for every one that got better. This is simply impossible if the vaccine worked as advertised.

There is no possible way that anyone in their right mind could call that a success.

This is a huge failure since if we did nothing, the CFR naturally goes down over time. This strongly suggests that the vaccine made things worse.

And for those who think the tests are random
The CFR drops over time, exactly as expected. And when Omicron hit, the CFR nearly instantly ticked downward, exactly as expected.

So where is the evidence that the trends are random?

Summary

If the COVID shots worked, I wouldn’t be able to find any data points like this. Not in anecdotes, and also not in large databases like the VA and Medicare.

If the COVID shots worked, they’d be able to explain these data points. Instead, they ignore them and ghost me when I ask for explanations.

Nobody has ever explained how the all-cause mortality dropped from 1 death a week to 8 deaths a week over a 3 week period right after the shots at Apple Valley. They won’t answer any calls. Nor will they be held accountable by lawmakers in their state.

And we aren’t hearing a single success anecdote from any of the over 15,000 US Nursing homes how COVID mortality dropped like a rock after the shot rollout.

Come on. 15,000 nursing homes and they can’t find A SINGLE success anecdote that anyone knows about??? Are you kidding me????

So we have strong evidence that the shots didn’t protect people and we also have a lack of success anecdotes. And the numbers are damning with 3 nursing homes getting worse after the shots for every one that got better. That’s not a success. That’s a huge failure.

We were conned into believing these shots worked.

Over 21 million people are paying the price for this fraud and they are still perpetuating it.

The stories of harm caused by these shots are extremely sad and it is very troubling that our government is looking the other way when these people are trying to get the help they deserve.

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

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

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

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

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

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

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Wednesday, June 19, 2024


More Evidence Covid ‘Vaccines’ Cause Aggressive Cancers

Google may well take this post down. Their AI seems to be programmed to block any claims that the vaccines can be harmful. Rather childish

Written by Phillip Altman

I keep saying it, but it worth repeating……everything, I mean everything, we have been told about the so-called COVID-19 “vaccines” has been a lie

Among some of the most important lies was the lie about the lack of potential genotoxicity and cancer.

Our “health experts” continue to deny the genotoxicity risk and cancer risk despite any safety testing to support this claim.

The manufacturers even said when the injections were released that there was no data on genotoxicity and cancer potential – they said it in black and white in the officially approved Product Information.

Dr. Maryanne Demasi has now published a pertinent Substack in relation to dangerous DNA contamination contained in the shots. Apparently, Pfizer’s dirty shots have been cleaned up a little but Moderna’s shots had far less DNA contamination and they even patented the process to remove the DNA.

Part of the Moderna’s patent admits contaminating DNA is a cancer risk.

Now, cancers around the world have been on the increase since the Covid injection rollouts but our government refuse to admit this might have been caused by the injections themselves. Our government refuses to seriously investigate.

Shame on them all.

The Covid-19 “vaccines” were never tested for cancer potential when released but our health experts (who have been showered with Australian Honours ) claimed they were “safe”.

How did the experts know these injections were safe if the tests to prove them safe were never conducted?

Previous Victorian Premiere Daniel Andrews, who many say was directly responsible for some of the world’s worst pandemic policies including the longest lockdowns, loss of personal freedoms, loss of life, thrashing of the State economy, destruction of businesses, demonising of those choosing not to be jabbed and police brutality…..has now received Australia’s highest civilian honour, Companion of Australia, in part for his role in the pandemic.

This tells you everything you need to know about the King’s Birthday Honours List and those responsible for this nauseating tribute. There will be no apology…there will be no accountability…there will be no transparency…there will be no compensation… and, worst of all, history is bound to repeat itself.

The way the game will be played from here is that it will be up to damaged individuals or families of the dead to prove beyond reasonable doubt that their cancers were caused or exacerbated by the Covid injections – an almost impossible legal task which will be steadfastly refuted by the manufacturers and government.

While cancer deaths soar around the globe, our government will try and run out the clock, taking decades to reveal the truth while senior bureaucrats receive huge pensions, grab lucrative board positions and eventually die without remorse without facing justice.

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Closing schools for a year was a mistake admits Antony Fauci

Anthony Fauci, the former director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has admitted that it was a mistake to close schools for more than a year during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Dr Fauci, who was a top adviser to two presidential administrations during crisis, made the admission during an interview with CBS TV, in a dramatic U-turn over the draconian policy that forced millions of children into remote learning.

During the interview, aired to publicise his new memoir: On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, Dr Fauci argued the initial decision to close classrooms was correct.

“Keeping it for a year was not a good idea,” he said.

“So, that was a mistake in retrospect?” host Tony Dokoupil asked. “We will not repeat it?”

“Absolutely, yeah,” Dr Fauci responded.

Dr Fauci, 83, has previously stood by the recommendation that forced children out of classrooms and into learning from home, and has even claimed there should have been “much, much more stringent restrictions” in the early stages of the pandemic.

In the northern summer of 2020, when some US schools were considering reopening, Dr Fauci advised against the move, warning there might be some areas were the level of the virus was so high it “would not be prudent” to allow children back into school. Asked on PBS that same month whether “many months of virtual learning” would be the norm, he answered, “In some places, that may be the case,” The New York Post reports.

Former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer says Anthony Fauci had “made up” social distancing rules which became the norm in the US during the COVID pandemic. Dr Anthony Fauci has admitted there were no clinical trials to back up the recommended six feet social distancing guidelines during More
In January 2021, a CDC study showed “little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission’’ but schools remained closed until later that year.

However Dr Fauci refused to admit that the school closures had been an error, telling the ABC in 2022:. “I don’t want to use the word ‘mistake.’”

In his interview with CBS Dr Fauci said schools should have been shut down “immediately” then reopened “as quickly and safely as you can.”

However he refused to admit that children’s education had suffered due to remote learning.

“One clear area seems to be the school closures, which did enormous harm to kids on multiple levels and didn’t seem to save lives,” Doukoupil said. “And I wonder, can we say today that that is a mistake?”

“No,” Dr Fauci replied.

The New York Post reports that according to US Department of Education statistics released in September 2022, reading scores among nine-year-olds plummeted over the course of the pandemic to their lowest point in 30 years, while maths scores fell for the first time ever in a half-century of tracking.

In testimony at a Congressional hearing this year, Dr Fauci conceded the “six feet apart” rule, the intellectual underpinning of lockdowns, wasn’t based on science or even logic. “It just sort of appeared,” he said.

“Just an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data or even data that could be accomplished.

“It was felt that transmission was primarily through droplets, not aerosols, which is incorrect because we know now aerosol does play a role,” he said, pointing out that Covid-19 floats in the air, making a mockery of masks, and social distancing.

In a separate interview today (AEST) on MSNBC, Dr Fauci blamed “misinformation related to ideology” for deaths during Covid.

Defending his record and that of other public-health officials, who were accused of “flip-flopping” during the pandemic on issues such as the need to wear face masks and socially distance, he said: “What we needed to do better was to let people understand that we were dealing with a moving target.

“Science is self-correcting.”

As experts learned more about the virus, they were able to change their advice and recommendations, he noted.

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Scotland: An embarrassed silence

Politicians’ pandemic decisions changed – sometimes ruined – our lives, so why aren’t they part of the debate?

I’m not one for conspiracy theories. A surfeit of human incompetence leaves me believing cock-up theories far better explain the calamities that confront us. Even when conspiracies do exist they too are subject to cock-ups, such as the Prime Minister conspiring to catch his opponents on the hop by calling an earlier than expected election, only to be drenched in the rain as he announced it.

I say all of this for I believe there is today a conspiracy of sorts taking place before us in plain sight. We are halfway through a general election and yet the political parties have not sought to discuss their or their opponent’s record, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

It is a conspiracy of silence, an omertà between combatants that has not even required them to speak to each other to agree the code. Why should such a potential mass-scale existential event – the likes of which Hollywood horror movies are made about – not be a core issue?

Could it be that it suits them all, government and opposition alike, to not talk about their almost universally poor conduct during that time?

The government’s reaction to the pandemic resulted in us being under 24-7 supervision, often house bound, it caused early deaths, wrecked businesses, denied education, delayed healthcare, cost jobs, savings and ruined lives.

The Covid-19 pandemic was not that long ago. The last UK lockdown ended only three years ago in July 2021 – Scotland’s lasted longer. Yet while we hear our politicians talk about today’s consequences of the decisions taken then, such as the cost-of-living crisis, the enormous NHS waiting lists, the cancer treatment backlog, the education gaps, the rising mental health symptoms, they do not want to talk about the root cause of the challenges we face now.

Why is no-one asking questions about why our politicians closed the schools when other countries managed to keep them open – and still managed comparatively better outcomes?

Why is there not a demand to know why Nightingale hospitals were built at great expense only never to be used for their purpose of mass triage and treatment centres?

Where is the outrage at the way care home residents were treated or how “Do Not Resuscitate” protocols were put in place across many healthcare settings?

How could our governments adopt a conscious programme of Project Fear to scare us into obedience – to snitch on our neighbours for walking their dogs, to wear masks despite there being no evidence of benefits, to adopt entirely arbitrary social distancing so we could not see our dying loved ones or easily attend their funerals?

Well, I have not forgotten those times and I’m absolutely certain our politicians have not either.

The reality is that as the various public inquiries have held their evidence sessions, so we have become aware of how badly our politicians behaved, either in conducting their decision making, or in callously turning dreadful situations to their own advantage. They know we see this too.

Is it not strange Rishi Sunak only mentions his generous furlough scheme, but not his agreement to the massive pumping of money into the economy through quantitative easing that contributed to our inflation and subsequent higher taxes? Is it not stranger Keir Starmer does not seek to press Sunak on these weaknesses, or does he fear being shown to have wanted to do more that would have made the after-effects even worse?

Sunak dare not talk about Boris Johnson receiving a police fine for accepting a birthday cake he did not ask for, nor eat – because he too was fined for being in the room at the same time. But why does Starmer not raise the episode? Is it because of dubiety around his beer and pizza in Labour campaign offices?

Is it not odd the SNP campaign does not make more of Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s chief mammy at the time? Or does the SNP leadership now recognise her deletion of texts, her bouncing of the UK into mask wearing, her doing things differently in Scotland just for the sake of it, and her grandstanding at daily information sessions in advance of the Holyrood elections might bring back the sort of memories that will cost votes?

The international and domestic evidence has been gathering for months now. The lockdowns made no significant difference to the spread of Covid-19, but have cost our economies, our personal finances – even if it’s just the taxes we now face – our health and our kids’ education irreparable damage. Those like Sunak who introduced them and those like Starmer who clamoured for them to be sooner, harder and longer dare not talk about it.

Likewise those Labour politicians in Wales and SNP politicians in Scotland who made their lockdowns even more extensive dare not talk about it. Ironically it was Boris Johnson who fought to end the last lockdown early and Starmer who said we dare not.

Today our politicians want to talk about their offers of shiny things and free stuff – but cannot face the reckoning for the way they behaved.

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

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

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

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

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

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

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Tuesday, June 18, 2024



U.S. Federal Court Opens Up Litigation on the Question: Was it Really a Vaccine?

The week before last, a panel of three federal judges at the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco did something unusual – it called out a government agency for lying and, in the process, opened up for litigation one of the crucial questions of the pandemic response: when is a ‘vaccine’ not a vaccine?

What is so important about the decision is that it is the first time a court has even opened the door to deciding the question the efficacy of the ‘vaccine’ itself.

In other words, what it means is that whether or not the Covid shot was an actual traditional vaccine – one that stopped transmission and kept people from getting the illness at hand – could be litigated in court for the first time ever.

The lawsuit itself involves the dissembling – as usual – of the Los Angeles Unified School District and its on-again, off-again Covid shot mandate and its subsequent firing of hundreds of workers for refusing to get an experimental medical treatment.

Between March of 2021 and last autumn, LAUSD both instituted and dropped, and re-instituted and re-dropped its Covid shot mandate. And the district made these decisions for legal reasons only – the decisions had nothing to do with the actual shot itself, whether or not it worked, or what did it really do, or what are the side-effects, etc.

Essentially, each time the district changed its mind was because of either the filing of a lawsuit – dropped the mandate – or the dismissal of a lawsuit – re-instituted mandate. In fact, the LAUSD attorney even taunted the attorneys for the Health Freedom Defence Fund (HFDF), California Educators for Medical Freedom and the number of individual plaintiffs who brought the suit.

The Covid shot mandate resulted in the firing of hundreds of teachers and other district employees, turning lives upside down for people who were leery of getting an experimental medical treatment (the suit for monetary damages etc. against the district for those employees is a separate but parallel effort).

The ruling, said plaintiffs’ attorney Scott Street, does not automatically mean that a Government agency cannot impose public health mandates but it “better be right and be able to prove it” if and when it does. Additionally, the ruling does not specifically say the Covid shot is not a traditional vaccine, but – incredibly importantly – it does allow that issue to be litigated going forward.

Legal precedent holds that a Government may enforce mandatory public health laws. In 1905, the State of Massachusetts was sued over a mandate for the smallpox vaccine and the court found that “mandatory vaccinations were rationally related to preventing the spread of smallpox”, therefore the mandate was appropriate.

The case, known as Jacobson, has been cited across the nation when mandates were challenged previously. But what the Ninth Circuit panel did was “appropriately apply” for the first time the diktats of Jacobson, said plaintiffs’ attorney John Howard.

Briefly, a Government agency can ‘rationally’ act to protect the health of the general public, but only if said mandate actually protects the public, i.e., stops the transmission of the virus and stops people from getting the virus in the first place. The Covid shots neither stopped transmission nor conferred immunity, a fact that should have been clear from the very beginning of the vaccination craze. In fact, the shots were not even tested to see if they prevented transmission of the virus, only if they helped prevent infection or ease symptoms.

But Government agencies either ignored or hid those data in order to justify the mandates, to ‘get back to normal’ as so many politicians and ‘experts’ said.

What this all means is that while Jacobson has been used as a justification numerous times, it may not actually apply in the case of the Covid shot.

For unlike in Jacobson – in which the smallpox vaccine had been shown to stop the spread of the disease – the ruling states that the “plaintiffs allege that the vaccine does not effectively prevent spread but only mitigates symptoms for the recipient and therefore is akin to a medical treatment, not a ‘traditional’ vaccine. Taking plaintiffs’ allegations as true at this stage of litigation, plaintiffs plausibly alleged that the COVID-19 vaccine does not effectively ‘prevent the spread’ of COVID-19.”

To get to this point, the court also ruled that the lawsuit was not “moot”, as has been ruled in a number of other pandemic-related cases.

The problem for the district – which had basically argued the suit was moot because the pandemic was over – is that for something to be legally moot it has to be, in part, incapable of being repeated. In other words, it has to be clear the party – in this case the school district – could not or would not do it again, a fact clearly at odds with LAUSD’s actions. Add in that the mandate droppings were “recisions in the face of judicial review”, i.e., done solely to get a lawsuit thrown out, and it was not terribly difficult for the court to decide the suit is clearly not moot and can continue.

Just to emphasise – the district dropped its mandate for the second time days after the hearing in federal court; in fact, the wheels to get the decision in front of the board reportedly started turning literally that afternoon and you just can’t do that.

“What are you going to do when we drop the mandate?” sneered the district lawyer to plaintiff’s attorney, San Diego lawyer John Howard, after the oral arguments before the panel last fall.

During the course of the mandates, LAUSD fired hundreds of teacher and employees for refusing to comply with its order. In fact, considering the sketchy performance of the Covid shot, the mandate may not have been about Covid at all but was used as a tool to cull the district of employees who will do not blindly follow orders and may cause all sorts of the trouble in the future.

Note: this particular suit is not about the damages the employees suffered – being fired, loss of pension, etc. That issue is being addressed in a separate, but essentially parallel, legal action.

The ruling remands the case back to federal district court, leaving the LAUSD with pretty much four options.

The district can go back into the district court to re-litigate the matter; it could appeal to the United States Supreme Court; it could ask the Ninth Circuit to hold an en banc hearing which involves having a much large panel of judges review the issue; or it could settle the case.

The Supreme Court route is almost certainly too early for consideration, but the en banc request would at the very least delay – and possibly change – the results of the outcome from the Ninth Circuit.

As to settling: in one sense, that is highly unlikely. LA government institutions, as has been shown in the past (the freedom of speech case against Barbara Ferrer’s health department for example) are surprisingly arrogant (considering their track records,) especially when it comes to legal matters. The government institutions aren’t spending their own money so they tend to let the lawyers loose to litigate to their hearts content.

But there could be another aspect to that decision. It is also highly unlikely that the feds, the CDC, the Deep State, the ‘experts’, etc. – in other words, the entire pandemic response crowd that upended society and is still lying about it – wants the the question of whether or not the vaccine is an actually vaccine litigated in public, let alone in court.

A ruling to the contrary of what has been claimed could open a tsunami of litigation and political consequences for the powers that be, hence the pressure that could be brought to bear on the LAUSD to shut up and move on.

The district – which said it is reviewing the ruling and its options – is expected to make its choice in the next month or so.

The ruling was hailed by those who have been questioning the pandemic response strategy for years.

“At the beginning of Covid lockdowns, the courts themselves were closed, so there was no hope for legal relief. Even after the courts reopened, for about three years they largely displayed a closed-minded, deference to Government experts, even when their policies were demonstrably nonsensical from a medical standpoint,” said Dr. Clayton Baker, internist and former Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester. “This decision gives hope that the courts will finally reject a know-nothing attitude, and be willing to assess the scientific merit of plaintiffs’ arguments on a consistent basis.”

Though the mistrust sown by the draconian, nonsensical Covid response has only grown, whether or not this ruling – and the pretty much for certain appeals and legal back-and-forths to come – will help rebuild public confidence in the concept of public health is not yet clear.

Dr. Steven Kritz was cautious about that outcome

“In the end, it really doesn’t matter, since from a public trust and public health perspective, we ended up with an ‘original sin’ that is irreversible and unpardonable,” Kritz said. “Had the courts done their job, they had the tools to intervene early, and may have short-circuited this disaster before it began.”

Oh – one more thing: In Jacobson, the plaintiff – unlike the LAUSD teachers and countless other victims of the pandemic response – did not lose his livelihood, he wasn’t quarantined and he was not forced to take the vaccine.

He was fined five bucks ($161 today) and that was it.

Really.

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

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

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

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

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

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

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Sunday, June 16, 2024


Fun! Google have censored me again. My post of 10th has been deleted. But it was up for 5 days so most interested persons would already have seen it. As usual, you can read it on one of my backup sites: http://jonjayray.com/ or http://johnjayray.com/

Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaigns during Covid pandemic, whistleblowers reveal

There has been a phenomenal amount of propaganda surrounding Covid vaccines

The US military carried out secret campaigns to spread anti-vaccine sentiment and counter China's rising global influence.

The covert operation, which has never been previously reported, targeted people living in the Philippines to instill doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied to the island nation by China.

The misinformation campaign targeted millions across multiple countries and officials tailored the propaganda to audiences also across Central Asia and the Middle East to spread fear of China's vaccines among Muslims.

Through fake internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, and residents of several other countries, the US military's propaganda efforts were aimed at specifically slamming aid supplied by China, which was doing so to gain favorable public opinion and geopolitical leverage.

America's tactics also included calling into question the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China's Sinovac shot.

Officials who spoke of the concerted efforts said it's possible the US's actions led to unnecessary Covid infections and potential deaths, as well as spread anti-vax sentiments across the world regarding all available vaccines, including ones made in America.

A Reuters investigation identified at least 300 accounts on X that matched descriptions shared by former US military officials familiar with the Philippines operation.

Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan '#Chinaangvirus,' which translated to 'China is the virus' from the Philippine's Tagalog language.

'COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don't trust China!' a typical tweet from July 2020 said.

The words accompanied a photo of a syringe next to a Chinese flag and a chart of surging infections.

Another post read: 'From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.'

After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

In uncovering the operation, Reuters interviewed more than two dozen current and former US officials, military contractors, social media analysts and academic researchers.

Reporters also reviewed Facebook, X and Instagram posts, technical data and documents about a set of fake social media accounts used by the military. Some were active for more than five years.

The American military's anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined.

Tailoring the propaganda to audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China's vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day.

A key part of the strategy was to amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China's shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law, which prohibits the consumption of pork.

The military program was started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden's presidency – even after concerned social media executives warned the new administration the Pentagon had been promoting misinformation.

The Biden White House issued an order in spring 2021 banning the effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review.

The US military is prohibited from targeting Americans with propaganda, and the investigation found no evidence the Pentagon's influence operation did so.

Spokespeople for Trump and Biden did not respond to Reuter's requests for comment about the program.

A senior Defense Department official acknowledged the military engaged in secret propaganda to disparage China's vaccine in the developing world, but the official declined to provide details.

A Pentagon spokeswoman said the military 'uses a variety of platforms, including social media, to counter those malign influence attacks aimed at the US, allies, and partners.'

She also noted China had started a 'disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19.'

In an email, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it has long maintained the US government manipulates social media and spreads misinformation.

A spokesperson for the Philippines Department of Health, however, said the 'findings by Reuters deserve to be investigated and heard by the appropriate authorities of the involved countries.'

Additionally, some American public health experts who were made aware of the campaign also condemned the program, saying it put civilians in jeopardy for potential geopolitical gain.

'I don't think it's defensible,' said Dr Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine.

Lucey, a former military physician who assisted in the response to the 2001 anthrax attacks, added: 'I'm extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the US government would do that.'

The effort to stoke fear about Chinese inoculations risked undermining overall public trust in government health initiatives, including U.S.-made vaccines that became available later, Lucey and others said.

Although the Chinese vaccines were found to be less effective than the American-led shots by Pfizer and Moderna, all were approved by the World Health Organization.

Research published recently has shown when individuals develop skepticism toward a single vaccine, those doubts often lead to uncertainty about other inoculations.

Together, the phony accounts used by the military had tens of thousands of followers during the program. Reuters could not determine how widely the disinformation was viewed, or to what extent the posts may have caused Covid deaths by dissuading people from getting vaccinated.

Following the campaign's secret launch, however, then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte had grown so dismayed by how few Filipinos were willing to be vaccinated he threatened to arrest people who refused vaccinations.

When he addressed the vaccination issue, the Philippines had among the worst inoculation rates in Southeast Asia. Only 2.1million of its 114million citizens were fully vaccinated – far short of the government's target of 70 million.

By the time Duterte spoke, Covid cases exceeded 1.3million and nearly 24,000 Filipinos had died from the virus.

A spokesperson for Duterte did not make the former president available for an interview.

Some Filipino healthcare professionals and former officials contacted by Reuters were shocked by America's anti-vax effort, which they say exploited an already vulnerable population.

The campaign also reinforced what one former health secretary called an already longstanding suspicion of China.

Filipinos were unwilling to trust China's Sinovac, which first became available in the country in March 2021, said Esperanza Cabral, who served as health secretary under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

'I'm sure that there are lots of people who died from Covid who did not need to die from Covid,' she said.

To implement the anti-vax campaign, the DoD overrode strong objections from top US diplomats. Sources involved in its planning and execution told Reuters the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military's psychological warfare operations center in Florida, disregarded the impact the propaganda could have had.

Psychological warfare has played a role in US military operations for more than a hundred years, although it has changed in style and substance over time.

'We weren't looking at this from a public health perspective,' said a senior military officer involved in the program. 'We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.'

The Pentagon's anti-vax propaganda came in response to China's own efforts to spread false information about the origins of Covid, which emerged in China in late 2019.

But in March 2020, Chinese government officials claimed, without evidence, the virus may have been first brought to China by an American service member who participated in an international military sports competition in Wuhan the previous year.

Chinese officials also suggested the virus may have originated in a US Army research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland. There's no evidence for those claims.

Mirroring Beijing's public statements, Chinese intelligence operatives set up networks of fake social media accounts to promote the Fort Detrick conspiracy, according to a US Justice Department complaint.

Beijing didn't limit its influence efforts to propaganda. It announced an ambitious Covid assistance program, which included sending masks, ventilators and its own vaccines – still being tested at the time – to struggling countries.

In May 2020, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the vaccine China was developing would be made available as a 'global public good,' and would ensure 'vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries.'

Sinovac was the primary vaccine available in the Philippines for about a year until US-made vaccines became more widely available there in early 2022.

China's offers of assistance were tilting the geopolitical playing field across the developing world, including in the Philippines, which the US already had a tense relationship with.

Duterte said in a July 2020 speech he had made 'a plea' to Xi that the Philippines be at the front of the line as China rolled out vaccines.

He vowed the Philippines would no longer challenge Beijing's aggressive expansion in the South China Sea, upending a key security understanding Manila had long held with America.

Days later, China's foreign minister announced Beijing would grant Duterte's plea for priority access to the vaccine, as part of a 'new highlight in bilateral relations.'

China's growing influence fueled efforts by US military leaders to launch the secret propaganda operation, Reuters uncovered.

'We didn't do a good job sharing vaccines with partners. So what was left to us was to throw shade on China's,' a senior US military officer involved in the campaign told Reuters.

At least six senior State Department officials responsible for the Central Asian region objected to this approach to Pentagon officials and said a health crisis was the wrong time to instill fear or anger through a psychological operation, or psyop.

But in spring 2020, General Jonathan Braga, a senior US military commander responsible for Southeast Asia, turned to a small group of psychological-warfare soldiers and contractors in Tampa to counter Beijing's COVID efforts.

In trailers and buildings at a facility on Tampa's MacDill Air Force Base, US military personnel and contractors would use anonymous accounts on X, Facebook and other social media to spread what became an anti-vax message.

China's efforts to gain geopolitical clout from the pandemic gave General Braga justification to launch the propaganda campaign, sources said.

By summer 2020, the military's operation moved into new territory and darker messaging, eventually drawing the attention of social media executives.

In regions beyond Southeast Asia, senior officers in the US Central Command, which oversees military operations across the Middle East and Central Asia, launched their own version of the COVID psyop, three former military officials told Reuters.

The Pentagon also covertly spread its messages on Facebook and Instagram, alarming executives at parent company Meta who had long been tracking the military accounts, according to former military officials.

Facebook executives had first approached the Pentagon in the summer of 2020, warning the military that Facebook workers had easily identified the military's phony accounts, according to three former US officials and another person familiar with the matter.

The government, Facebook argued, was violating the social site's policies by operating the bogus accounts and by spreading Covid misinformation.

The military argued many of its fake accounts were being used for counterterrorism and asked Facebook not to take down the content, according to two people familiar with the exchange.

The Pentagon pledged to stop spreading Covid-related propaganda, but some of the accounts continued to remain active on Facebook and the anti-vax campaign continued into 2021 as Biden took office.

By spring 2021, the National Security Council ordered the military to stop all anti-vaccine messaging.

'We were told we needed to be pro-vaccine, pro all vaccines,' said a former senior military officer who helped oversee the program.

Even so, Reuters found some anti-vax posts that continued through April 2021 and other deceptive Covid-related messaging that extended into that summer in multiple countries.

Reuters could not determine why the campaign didn't end immediately with the NSC's order. In response to questions from Reuters, the NSC declined to comment.

The senior DoD official said those complaints led to an internal review in late 2021, which uncovered the anti-vaccine operation. The probe also turned up other social and political messaging that was 'many, many leagues away' from any acceptable military objective.

The official would not elaborate.

The review intensified in 2022, the official said, after a group of academic researchers at Stanford University flagged some of the same accounts as pro-Western bots in a public report.

The high-level Pentagon review was first reported by the Washington Post, which also reported that the military used fake social media accounts to counter China's message that Covid came from the United States. But the Post report did not reveal that the program evolved into the anti-vax propaganda campaign uncovered by Reuters.

The Pentagon's internal audit concluded the military's primary contractor handling the campaign, General Dynamics IT, had employed sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts, said a person with direct knowledge of the review.

The review also found military leaders didn't maintain enough control over its psyop contractors, the person said.

A spokesperson for General Dynamics IT declined to comment.

Nevertheless, the Pentagon's covert propaganda efforts are set to continue.

In an unclassified strategy document last year, top Pentagon generals wrote the US military could undermine adversaries such as China and Russia using 'disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities [to] weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.'

And in February, General Dynamics IT won a $493million contract with the mission to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military.

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

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

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

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

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

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

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